bsg

I think I may have been getting a little obsessed with Battlestar Galactica.

This is BSG the remake/re-imagining, btw, not the original series. I have vague memories of the original BSG, mainly centring around the dogfights in space and also people holding blasters and shooting the Cylons.

At the time I wasn't aware of it, but looking back it's easy to see how it was a bandwagon-jumping exercise for Star Wars. Indeed, looking back at it they seem to have gotten awful close to copyright infringements on more than a few occasions.

I mean the Cylon centurions look like Storm troopers who have been painted silver and the viper fighters that the good guys use look a lot like miniature X-wing fighters. But still, even then it had something - it wasn't a complete dearth of interesting ideas.

As I say, I don't remember it too well, but I do remember enjoying the episodes I watched.

I was therefore a little sceptical about the remake. I, like many I'm sure, am generally sceptical about remakes anyway, but I'd heard very good things, so I bought the DVDs. It also helped that I heard the show would end with a definite end - I like series that have a definite end, rather than the whole rubbish American system of trigger-happy cancellations.

Anyway, as I think I mentioned last week, it's a real belter of a show. Indeed, in some ways I think now that I'm almost through season 2 I'd say this second season was the best of the lot. That's quite rare that a show gets better with each season.

The only thing I can't really get my head around is the episode count. The miniseries as I noted was shown as a single thing on he DVD, and then the 1st series was a fairly standard 13 episodes. But then it all goes a bit weird.

Season 2 is 20 episodes long. Season 3 is also 20 episodes long. Then Season 4 goes very odd - halfway through there's a sort of separate 'film' like entity called Razor, but then it got walloped by the writer's strike so it stops. There's then what they're calling Season 5 in the UK, but is really the rest of Season 3.

It's all a bit odd - I'm more used to 22, 24 or 26 as the longer series lengths for American shows.

It doesn't affect the quality, though - indeed, I think you could argue that less episodes would lend itself to better quality. I do confess I was actually afraid it would end up looking a little Mickey Mouse and it would be a case of praising the story over the visual side of things.

I couldn't have been more wrong - as well as excellent writing, the show really looks great as well. Especially the CG - the CG is verging on movie-level goodness, witch is remarkable for a TV series.