Sci-Fi to begin airing new ‘Galactica’ series
A year after “Star Wars” smashed box-office records with its dazzling special effects, the original “Battlestar Galactica” TV series launched with lasers blasting.
While the show’s then cutting-edge special effects lured viewers, they weren’t enough to make up for its campy stories and even cornier writing. After a single season, ABC dropped “Galactica,” and it lingered largely in syndication.
That is until 2003, when writer-producer Ron Moore of “Star Trek” fame and NBC-Universal executive David Eick brought “Galactica” out of dry dock and onto TV screens as a four-hour miniseries on cable’s Sci-Fi Channel.
Their grittier, more thought-provoking reinterpretation of the original was a ratings smash. Word that it might be the pilot for a new “Galactica” series percolated among fans.
However, Eick recalls, “The budgets had come in and the answer was that a show would be too expensive for basic cable.”
That didn’t stop him. With the help of a colleague at Universal, Eick secured financing from Britain’s Sky Network, which had seen ratings explode after it aired the miniseries overseas.
Then Eick convinced the Sci-Fi Channel to produce a 13-episode season. The first two episodes air Friday from 9 to 11 p.m. (cable channel 59 in Spokane, 36 in Coeur d’Alene).
The series picks up right where the miniseries ends, reprising the story of a group of displaced humans struggling to stay ahead of a mysterious enemy.
The new “Galactica” loosely follows the premise of the original in which a surviving battleship must lead a civilian fleet to a new home after a devastating attack by an enemy known as the Cylons, rogue robots. But the resemblance ends there because Eick says he and Moore “wanted to go at the (science fiction) genre in a unique way” and re-envisioned “Galactica” as the “antithesis of contemporary sci-fi.”
The pair began recrafting the show in 2001 with two themes in mind.
“We were just on the heels of 9/11,” Eick says. “There was a great deal of talk of the enemy. We found ourselves compelled by the nature of an enemy that believed it was doing the right thing by God. We wanted the show to be an effective way to reflect our culture’s modern concerns, and we wanted the conflict to emanate from a place where both sides have their own legitimate points of view.”
So the Cylons were re-created not as alien robots but as synthetic beings that look, act and feel completely human. These doppelgangers come in a variety of models, and numerous copies of each model can operate at once. The Cylons, who are quick to point out human flaws such as power, greed and lust, have turned to God looking for answers.
Eick says he and Moore also wanted to “cut against the sweeping grandiosity of contemporary sci-fi” from a visual standpoint. They liked the documentary style of “Black Hawk Down” and decided to adapt it for “Galactica.”
The cast from the 2003 miniseries reprise their roles, including Edward James Olmos as the gritty Cmdr. Adama, Mary McDonnell as President Roslin and Katee Sackhoff as the irreverent Lt. Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. Richard Hatch, Apollo from the original series, joins the crew in a guest-starring role in week two.