BATTLESTAR

“Battlestar Galactica” (the “new” one, not the 1970s version) was a fantastic journey which, for us, sadly ended last Friday after a three-month marathon triggered by a reckless (and, at the time, unpopular) purchase during the January sales of the complete series box set because “I’d heard good things about it and wondered what all the fuss was about” and, most of all, because it was going for a price which was relatively cheap…

Anyway, after the quick postscript of pulling the follow-up TV movie “The Plan” out of my little big of hidden treats, there it was, gone… and we found ourselves feeling quite bereft. Almost, in fact, as bereft as when we finished our marathon run of “The West Wing” a few years ago, because, when you really get into a show like that, especially in such a concentrated form, you really start to invest in the characters after a while and worry about how things are going to turn out for them

(It’s easy, really… They’re all actors, so they just grow their hair, style it in a different way and turn up on another show and spout the usual bollocks about how great that show is on the DVD commentaries…)

No more new episodes to watch, no more previously hidden Cylons to be uncovered, and a satisfying conclusion to an epic journey that somehow managed to tell real human stories despite being set in an environment full of spaceships and cyborgs.

Really, after you’ve committed yourself, all that you really want is a satisfying conclusion to the story and to not be left hanging out high and dry and thinking “WTF…?” after it’s all over. Whilst I lost interest in “Lost” after the first year, I believe that there was some disappointment amongst its fans at how it ended, and I’m not going to begin to tell you how appalled some of the “Enterprise” fans were with its finale.

The most satisfying conclusion that I’ve seen in recent years was that of “Ashes to Ashes” which, somehow, just seemed so right in the end, although my personal favourite ending still remains the feature-length conclusion of “M*A*S*H” which still manages to move me thirty years on.

“Battlestar Galactica” ran for four full seasons between 2004 and 2008 after  the success of a mini-series in 2003 which I did actually see at the time, so my own particular journey on the Battlestar could, I suppose, be said to have been a tad longer.

However, the fact that I didn’t have access to the channels on which it got its broadcast over here, and the fact that I never quite got around to watching the tapes of the first year which I was lent (and which, due to losing contact with their owner due to unforeseen circumstances, I still appear to have… oops!) I somehow lost track of it, despite all the various good words I had heard about the quality of the show.

You could, of course, argue that my journey actually began back in the 1970s with the original show which managed to be both phenomenally popular in the wake of the release of “Star Wars” but managed to get itself cancelled after just a season and a slightly disappointing revamp.

That show was cheesy in a way that only 1970s television can be, but remained well-remembered and well-loved enough for someone to come along a quarter of a century later and see how it could be redone properly and so the new show was born.

So after sitting through seventy-odd episodes which told stories about what it is to be human, and what it is to be at war, and so many other tales so skilfully woven and told, all of which were written and produced in that “Post-9/11” decade in the American cultural landscape, I just wanted to tell you that it really is worth a look, if you fancy that sort of thing, even if I’m telling you this five years after the fact and I’m probably the last person on earth who didn’t know it already.