Another great episode, this show is like one big reward for me watching it. I love that they’ve weighed into stuff on the practical difficulties of the situation early, and are acknowledging what can go wrong. I wonder if they have considered that they seem to use a lot of dot matrix printers, and presumably have limited supplies of ink. I love the way this show looks, and what could have been a throw-away point early in the pilot about how the ship was designed to be ‘retro’ in order to prevent the Cylon’s doing nasty things to it remotely, has been extended into a design concept.
I often criticise Sci-Fi shows about what I perceive as technical issues. I remember early on in the pilot complaining that the scout ship thing (I need to start reading up on my BSG tech) reacted as if it had been hit by a pressure wave. And I still desperately want to see a TV show where space battles are completely silent unless you’re seeing them from inside a ship. How hard is it to remember that space is a vacuum? My friends tell me that I am being needlessly picky, and that since it’s Sci-Fi it doesn’t need to pay too close attention to things like this. After all I can accept faster than light travel and human form android things so why worry about minor details. The problem isn’t with realism, if you tell me that FTL travel is ok fair enough (and BSG has been quite clever to avoid explaining exactly how it works), but what I do demand is consistency. I need to know that whatever the rules of the universe we are in the show is not going to break them. I know that Star Trek had a full time science advisor (which sounds like the most awesome job ever – especially as he went on to write the odd episode). Trek was notorious for just inventing complete rubbish as technobabble whenever it was felt necessary, but with some notable exceptions, it was pretty good at remaining consistent to its own scientific principles.
Character wise I love what they’re doing with Boomer. I can’t work out if she doesn’t know she’s a Cylon, or if she only knows sometimes, or if she’s beginning to break her programming, but I am completely hooked. I’ve been burned before, as I mentioned, on believing too much about what the show’s creators already have planned in terms of a shows back-story and narrative development. But dammit if BSG hasn’t suckered me in to doing it again. The frustrating thing is that generally by the time I realise that I’ve been fooled I’m too addicted to a show to leave again. However, it worked out with Lost in the end, and I think the X-Files debacle has shown the TV industry that there’s a need to be a little clearer about their plans in the long run. I’ve heard both Lost and BSG have very clear ideas about exactly how long they’ll run before ending, and in fact I think BSG may already have had its final episode, which makes me optimistic. Too often shows are cancelled before their time or left to run too long, so I’m going to cross my fingers and hope for a goldilocks effect, and that this time we’ve got a show that’s just right.