I am going out of town tomorrow and want to download something to my Video Ipod.
I have decided on Battlestar Galactica. The question I have is what comes first, the miniseries or the First Season?
I assume the miniseries, but I want to make sure before I shell out the bucks.
The miniseries.
Thanks. It is downloading as I type.
I watched the first season without seeing the miniseries, and that was a mistake. The first 4-5 episodes really made very little sense.
(Ironically, by the time I did get around to seeing the miniseries, I didn’t even watch the whole thing because I got bored with it. I knew the whole plot already.)
I’m about to start getting a friend into Galactica, and I’m going to start with the miniseries.
Here’s the thing, though. The miniseries sets up all the characters and plot, but not everything in it works. It looks and feels like a first draft of what the series would eventually be. Don’t get me wrong, it’s very good. I’d give it a B, B+.
But it’s clear that they learned a helluva lot from the miniseries and the audience’s reaction to it, and they knew what they should keep (or emphasize) and what they should drop (or de-emphasize). For example, there’s a skin-of-the-teeth escape about midway through, followed by a bit of explanatory technobabble that wouldn’t be out-of-place on “Star Trek.” It sticks out like a glowing daggit dong. And, thankfully, that kind of thing is virtually nonexistent in the series.
Speaking of daggits, the character of Boxey is featured in the miniseries, but after a brief appearance early in season one, he’s a total non-entity. Another lesson learned.
So: Check out the miniseries, stick with it through the slow bits, and then watch the first episode of the first season. You’ll see what I mean. 
The miniseries. Don’t get me wrong, the series is fantastic. But the miniseries is just plain better. Sorry, Cervaise…
I just recently saw the miniseries on DVD. I would have started the series, but the local Blockbuster doesn’t have it. In the commentary, they explain that that scene was supposed to be a joke at Star Trek and the like, but it didn’t work well and was rather a mistake to have it.
Did you watch the deleted scenes from the first season? He had a much bigger role originally, and Oh. My. Fucking. God. It’s one of the worst performances by a child actor I’ve ever seen. The show dodged a bullet when they decided to excise the character. Hell, they dodged a ballistic intercontinental thermo-nuclear missile.
That aside, I thought the miniseries was fantastic. They pulled no punches in depicting the annihilation of an entire space-faring civilization, and it really sets the tone for the rest of the series. Brutal, gut-wrenching stuff that focuses more on the human dimension than the mindless techno-crap. It’s the anti-Trek in almost every way.
They’re replaying some of last season (or half season, or whatever it was that ended in Sept.) tomorrow. So for those of us that missed some episodes, a good chance to find out who’s a Cylon and who aint before the new episodes begin.
It was exactly midway, straddling the “To be continued” break between the two halves of the miniseries. And at least they made it a point to point out the random whatzit that lead to the Treknosolution before it was used. Not sure why Apollo was so danged fascinated by it earlier in the episode though (the device is introduced by having Apollo standing there staring at it, and someone else walking up behind him asking him what it is).
As I found out unfortunately this morning when I got “Season 1 disk 1” from Netflix, stuck it into my DVD player, and heard “Previously on Battlestar Galactica…”
I was a bit annoyed. They should warn people. (Or I should have started this thread earlier).
I made the same mistake. I watched “33” (I think that’s the first one) without having seen the miniseries first. It’s a good episode, but I was a little lost about who everyone was and what was happening. So then I had to watch the miniseries before watching any more of season 1. Eventually it all made sense.
Heh. I’m sort of obsessive about Galactica now, the way I was with Firefly at first, so yeah, I watched 'em, a couple of times on a few eps. And you’re right, Boxey was (1) poorly written, (2) poorly cast, (3) poorly directed, and (4) brilliantly deleted. They clearly threw him in there as a nod to the original and as a possible hook to hang a future storyline if they came up with something good, but as soon as they realized they had nothing, they did exactly the right thing and dumped him without comment. I suspect they cast the actor because he did the glum-and-morose thing really well, which was what they needed for his bit in the miniseries, but quickly saw that he didn’t have anything else. No fault of the kid, really; just a misstep by the producers.
(Oh, and for the record, the deleted scenes on the season 2.0 DVD are pretty great, too. The flashback stuff between Tigh and Adama in the opening two-parter, showing their history, is amazing, though it makes sense why they chose to edit it down the way they did for the final show. Also, the Starbuck-in-the-hospital episode, “The Farm,” ran almost ten minutes long, so there’s a wealth of stuff there that fleshes out the story a lot, and makes a middling episode quite a bit more interesting. Check it out if you haven’t yet.)
I’d agree with that, and I’m a longtime Trek fan. Stuck with Enterprise all the way to the bitter end. Galactica reveals latter-day Trek as the children’s entertainment it became.
That’s one of the only hazards of Netflix. The Season 1 box set actually has the miniseries as disk 1.
Netflix may have got it right, in a strange way. In the box set, isn’t the first disc just labeled “Miniseries” and the second disc, where the hour-long episodes begin, labeled “Season One Disc One”? Of course, it’s a bit misleading, but if he asked for “Disc One”, in a way he got precisely what he asked for.
How many hours was the mini-series. People are talking about it like a lot happened, but I only remember it being a couple hours long. Am I mistaken?
On television, with commercial breaks, it was four hours. On DVD it’s three hours. Yes, a lot happened. You really should watch it.
OK. Four hours. I buy that. But, that seems awfully short for a “mini-series”. Usually they are 8 - 12 hours at least, right? I’m thinking Shogun.
I’m sure I’ve seen all of the miniseries then.
“She”
And while yes, I got what I asked for; I just didn’t get what I wanted.
I had this nagging scratch at the back of my mind, but I went with “he” anyway. Sorry about that.
As for the miniseries: NBC aired it in a much-abbreviated form. I think it was shown in a three-hour block, which, when cut for commercials, would make it about 2:10 or so in length. I watched that, then later caught the complete miniseries when it aired on SciFi. Sooo much better with the extra stuff in there.