Keith Palmer's Multi-Purpose Journal

It started, I suppose, with the feeling I wasn't as engaged with "live-action" movies and television as I "ought" to be. I knew enough about the original Battlestar Galactica to be interested in the thought of a "modern remake," but that awareness was abstract enough that I couldn't see myself being worried over this new version not being the "original." (Nowadays, too, it's somehow amusing to remember back to the days when the differences seemed the most notable thing about the new version...) Too, perhaps, the new version becoming a show sometime after its original "mini-series" seemed to give me a second chance to get into it, and I may well be more concerned than I need to be about constantly missing the chance to take an initial description and commit to a broadcast series that "has" to be seen from the very first episode or you won't understand anything. (For that matter, too, I had to see the initial episodes via "disapproved methods" before finally subscribing to the next cable tier and getting the science fiction channel...)

The very first regular-length episode of Battlestar Galactica made a strong impression on me; I might even have been briefly worried it was going to displace everything else from my affections... although as time passed, just following the discussions of others began to strengthen my unfortunate impression that certain people nowadays get one really good season out of a television show, and then what the creators really want to show diverges from what they first became interested in. Maybe that impression has soothed my previous feelings of having "missed out" on other shows. Still, I stuck with Battlestar Galactica... I'm aware of how it seemed to drift away from "tackling contemporary issues," but was able to adjust. There were certainly some twists in the final episode, but also time enough, it seemed, to get used to the final major developments. I'm not quite sure if I'm stuck with a "so what do I do now?" feeling; perhaps that has to do with having managed to start watching "Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles" (as with the new Doctor Who, deciding to commit to it seemed somehow less of a major commitment than starting out with Battlestar Galactica), which is still running on Fridays for however many more episodes it has left. Even so, it may be that I'm still not as engaged with "live-action" movies and television as I "ought" to be... but now that doesn't seem to bother me as much as it did before.

I watched the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica last night with my usual measured interest. This morning, though, I made a connection about one small point in it, and all of a sudden felt compelled to do something unusual and share it with the world...
( Nobody is named, but I'll keep this concealed anyway. )

I had been keeping a close eye on when Battlestar Galactica would return to the Space channel, but in the process I was perhaps almost surprised (but pleasantly) to see that a new season of Doctor Who would begin just days later on CBC. Beyond, of course, that they're the two live-action science fiction television shows I'm watching these days, there's a sort of special connection between them for me.

I was perhaps just a little too young to become really interested in the original Battlestar Galactica; the late-1970s Star Wars "ripoff" I was more interested in was Disney's The Black Hole movie (if mostly for its robots and other mechanical designs). When I heard the show was being remade and reimagined, I was simply curious, but when I heard its miniseries beginning was being expanded into a series, I perhaps felt almost compelled to start in on it from the beginning. With too many other science fiction television shows, from Babylon 5 to Farscape to Firefly (cruelly, in that case I bothered to watch the first few minutes of the first televised episode, thought, "Huh, space western," and then decided I didn't have the time to follow it), I found myself in retrospect with the odd sense that I had missed out. This time, things would be different... and while my overwhelmed sense of "This is the greatest thing ever!" I was left with by the first series episode of Battlestar Galactica did fade to a more measured appreciation of the series, I was still glad I'd made the effort this time around. Then, though, when the talk of a revival of Doctor Who materialised into a broadcast on CBC, I was able to start watching it, and that was that.
( Battlestar Galactica )( Doctor Who )