So Scifi aired it's new bayby - an outrageous remake of the old classic "Battlestar Galactica." What can I say... I have mixed feelings about this one. Visually it's really pleasing - eye candy all the way. It seems that they had quite a budget there. I guess now we know where the money for Farscape season 5 went...
Storywise it is not as bad as I expected it to be either. I was actually mildly interested in the whole thing, and that's a good sign. One has to admitt that they did do a decent work on that miniseries. But, Galactica it isn't.
I still can't understand the logic behind making Starbuck a woman. I did not get it when I first heard it back in the day, and I still don't get it. I'm not even sure what their official excuse is - but come on! I bet many female Galactica fans who had a childhood crush on starbuck are VERY dissapointed right now... I said it before, an I'll say it again - it was a dumb idea. How can you not want to cash in on the Legolas effect???
Let's face it - if you are in Scifi business you want to get women interested. If you get the girls to watch you have a hit on your hands. If you were living in a cave for the last few years let me remind you: Orlando Bloom drives fan girls INSANE! They could have easily achieve a similar effect here - especially since Starbuck already had a following.
Who are they targetting with the, short haired tom boy starbuck here? They are not winning the guys over with her - if you want an eye candy female lead you go for skimpy clothes, sexy makup, and all that stuff hehe. This starbuck might be appealing to the feminists groups who always complain about the mistreatement of female characters on TV. But then again this is not Scifi's target audience, is it? It seems more like filling in quota requirements - they were told to have a female lead, so they gave Starbuck a sex change.
The classic show's storylines are taken as a backdrop here. Many liberities are taken with the story and the setting, and the universe is moulded to fit the new image. If you are classic Galactica fan, spare yourself the frustration and skip this one. I'll stick around just to see how badly they will butcher the story...
To tell you the truth I lost the faith in Scifi's ability to produce and air anything decent a long time ago. Bonnie Hammer and co. seem to have their heads so far up their arses that they cannot even see that they are running a chanell that is not what most people would consider mainstream. They can either cater to their primary audience, or fight with windmills trying to steal viewers from mainstream networks with their new chain of crappy reality shows...
Seriously - they managed to piss off every single fandom on the planet, cancel or screw up every decent show they had, and air ungodly amount of painfull to watch, incredibly crappy shows like Lexx, Tremors, John Edward and etc.. Now they are riding on a wave of reality shows and miniseries - but that's just not gonna cut it. The station needs a workhorse series - one constant that will draw viewers in every week. Farscape used to be just that... But that's a topic for a whole another rant...