20 Things We Love About Battlestar Galactica

It was the series Time magazine called the “best show on television”. It was the reboot that showed you could update an old format and improve it beyond all recognition. It was so addictive it should have come with a warning like the ones you get on cigarette packets (“Beware! This show will frak you up!”). Most of all, however, it was science fiction that crossed over into the mainstream, giving our genre a good name and proving that, sometimes, evil killer robots are more than they seem. Time for SFX to take a look at 20 reasons why Battlestar Galactica is worthy of our love… (Spoilers ahead, obviously)

1 The Red Dress

Think of Battlestar Galactica and one image comes to mind: the devastatingly sexy Tricia Helfer, aka Number Six, wearing that dress. There are few images in science fiction – or, indeed, recent popular culture – that stand out quite as much as that figure-hugging drape of scarlet cloth, so integral to both the character and this new, defiantly sexed-up Battlestar Galactica. It’s no wonder the dress sold for $23,000 in a charity auction when the series ended. It was worth a million.

2 The Thrill Of

The Chase

The first season (and, to a lesser extent, the later ones) did something rather clever with its week-to-week format: it turned the action into a stretched-out game of cat and mouse. In their ragtag flotilla, the humans hopped from solar system to solar system while being tailed by the Cylons, who would occasionally catch up with them, to often disastrous effect. The tension of this drawn out, nail-biting hunt gave the series an edge; the colonists couldn’t ever relax, so neither could you…

3 It’s About Humanity (Even When It’s Not)

Boiled down to its very basics, BSG was about a bunch of humans fleeing from a bunch of robots. But because BSG was anything but basic, it wasn’t really. It was about humanity. It was about how the human race, in all its flawed, painful, beautiful glory, wanted to continue surviving despite insurmountable odds. And it was about how their persecutors, heartless, soulless, half-flesh, half-machine Cylons, wanted to be human more than anything else in the universe, even though being human is anathema to them. How’s that for ironic?

4 The Box Sets

The final episode of BSG drew in a seemingly tiny 2.4 million viewers for Syfy in the US. So why is it that it’s considered a success? Because it did so well on DVD. The vast majority of BSG viewers seem to have found the show via DVD, which meant that it was possible for them to mainline entire seasons in a few days. Many box set-owners found themselves acting as BSG lending libraries for their pals. All of this gave watching BSG a “community” feel that rivalled watching it live on TV, although avoiding spoilers was a nightmare…

5 Sharon Valerii/Number Eight

The innocent Boomer from the show’s first season (like Starbuck, recast from the original series as a woman) turned out to be a deadly Cylon sleeper agent. Elsewhere, another Sharon knew she was a Cylon but fell in love with human Helo regardless. More Sharons, in the guise of Number Eight, populated the Cylon basestars. So many different facets; just one actress – and Grace Park rocked them all.