I sat down last night to watch the whole first episode (disc) of “Battlestar Galactica.” Here are my impressions — warning, this post contains spoilers.
It was very good, though not excellent, for a pilot episode. In my opinion the running time was a bit too long, and I found myself getting ahead of the plot points during a few moments when the scenes just drag on a tiny bit much.
Examples in spoiler boxes:
[spoiler]The little girl in the arboretum was a nice chilling scene, where the newly sworn-in President smiles and has nothing to say to the girl, but later it just takes too long waiting for the girl to get shot down. Yes, yes, we know what’s going to happen.
There are too many scenes with #6 appearing beside Baltar. Every time there’s a long, turning, sweeping camera move you can expect her to show up. I get it. She’s his personal demon. Get on with the scene.[/spoiler]
I really do like most of the departures that the pilot has taken from the original (which, honestly, I don’t remember all that well.) That the Cylons look like humans, and were
made by humansis a nice touch. That gives so much more potential for soul-searching storylines than the original generic robot aliens.
That Starbuck and Boomer are female: yeah, I can dig it. Adama Hispanic, that’s very cool. Tigh is now a white male with an alcohol problem, that’s a good angle. In fact, I’m rather pleased that they didn’t feel the need to wedge in a Token Black Male simply for the sake of diversity.
It seems very dark, though. There weren’t very many uplifting moments in the pilot at all — I still have to say, I prefer Firefly’s pilot. I don’t want to be down on the series, but it seems like if the entire series is going to be this bleak and hopeless, it’s going to be somewhat of a slog. I hope it isn’t all like this.