Season 1, Episode 1 - '33'
DISCLAIMER: This episode was viewed by John and Aaron before the Covid-19 Pandemic.
Back in 2003 or 2004 , after the brilliant job Ronald D Moore and his team did with the mini-series I welcomed the news that it had been commissioned as a full TV series. It was respectful to the original and felt ‘current’ and ‘relevant’ without losing the core of the original (last of Humanity/rag-tag fleet on the run from ‘robots’ while looking for Earth).
The mini-series was shown in the U.S. first in December 2003. Obviously, they couldn’t make the series to air straight after. Unexpectedly, the series was first broadcast in the U.K. on satellite channel Sky One, thanks to them co-funding the series with the Sci-Fi Channel. This was unusual back in 2004 and I thought it was a great ‘frak you’ to the U.S. because the series premiered in this country, as usually U.K. broadcasters used to show American TV shows months or even YEARS after their US screenings (a similar thing happened back in the 1990’s with Channel 4 showing the last few episodes of Babylon 5 Season 2 months before the U.S.) Thankfully, these days it’s either the day after or the same week. I remember reading at the time that Ronald D Moore had asked U.S. fans to be patient and not torrent the U.K. screenings! We got it in October 2004 and the States saw it in January 2005.
So there I was, in front of my TV ready and hoping the series could keep up the quality of the mini-series…
As Aaron and I sat down with our bowl of popcorn and beverage of choice (him: Irn Bru, me: Pepsi Max) to watch the first episode of the series proper of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica. I had to warn him of a ‘for those wanting to avoid the football score – look away now’ moment at the beginning of each episode in a ‘This Episode’ homage to Space: 1999 (probably the only good thing about that series!). Aaron dutifully covered his eyes until the ‘dum-dumily-dum’ music ran over this montage of exciting clips. I think that they are mild spoilers, but when I originally watched the first season on Sky 1 I remember doing the same, after a few episodes and had to ask my Mum to tell me when it was over.
As the DVD loads, we are confronted with one of the WORST screen menus either of us have seen. Badly photoshopped together characters, with the logo and a random explosion. It’s just a still image and there isn’t even any music. It’s obvious that Playback weren’t that interested or aware of BSG’s popularity when they put together Season 1. This reminds me of an infamous DVD menu for the series Space: Above and Beyond that has an image of the Babylon 5 space station! At least it’s a ‘special feature’ having a menu, there are still DVDs/Blu-rays to this day without any form of menu!
Best moments:
· JOHN: Seeing that close up of Helo’s radiation drugs reminded me of a similar case of anti-radiation drugs from the Doctor Who story ‘The Daleks,.’ when William Hartnell fluffs his line and calls them “Anti-radiation gloves.”
· Tigh: “Yes, we're tired. Yes, there is no relief. Yes, the Cylons keep coming after us time after time after time. And yes, we are still expected to do our jobs!”
We both enjoyed the tension and the anguish from Lee and Kara when they have to ‘shoot down’ the Olympic Carrier. One problem we had with it, and maybe it’s us being picky, but we never see if anyone is still onboard. We, the viewer see the ship, and it’s windows but no one’s there. The dialogue from Lee and Kara implies they’ve seen faces at the windows. After reading up on this episode, it turns out the producers decided to edit out shots of the innocent passengers to give some ambiguity to Lee’s decision.
· Aaron likes Roslin’s whiteboard with the number of survivors, but feels it a bit ‘low-tech.’
Thoughts:
· Aaron thinks that Head-Six is a figment of Baltar’s imagination.
· Why does Helo accept so easily that ‘Boomer’ came back for him?
· It’s great to see Helo again – but he wasn’t supposed to last beyond the Miniseries, so he gets his own mini-adventure on Caprica. Aaron hopes he gets to catch-up with the Fleet at some point soon.
· JOHN: One thing that hadn’t occurred to me until re-watching this episode was that the Colonials have hours and minutes that are exactly like those of Earth. The clock showing the minutes 5 to 60 instead of 1 to 12 could just be because it’s a clock on a military vessel and clocks on Caprica (and other Colony’s show 1 to 12?) The clock with a hand-written label with ‘33’ written on it is a great idea.
JOHN: Using ‘Earth minutes’ fits perfectly with Ronald D Moore’s aim to make the series more down-to-Earth and accessible to casual viewers. As much I liked the world-building of the original series of them calling things like ‘Yarens’ ‘Centons’ etc it’d just be laughable in a modern series and would take the viewer out of the drama.
With that in mind, does this mean that Caprica (as the Capitol Planet) has a rotation of 24 hours a day?
AARON: I guess Moore’s decision to use days, hours and minutes like on Earth is to add to the prophecy of Earth being the 13th Colony. It makes sense that the 13th Colony would find a planet similar to the 12 Colonies.
Cylon-Occupied Caprica: In the spirit of a drinking game, we noticed that the caption appeared on screen stating this is ‘Cylon-Occupied Caprica’ every time we had a scene with Helo, (starting on his 6th day on Caprica) we decided to keep a count of them.
So for this episode we counted the number of ‘CoC’s’ as: 1
Total in the series so far: 1
NEXT TIME: ‘Water’
Thanks to Kevin Hiley for the Captrica Experiment logo and Amy Isles for drawing the C.o.C. tally.
