Well, I just finished watching it.
Not
quite as good as I had been hoping, but then my expectations were so high that I'm not sure what WOULD have been good enough.
I forced my whole family to watch it, at least at the beginning. Mom left at 9pm to go take her bath and watch "Medical Investigations" on the little TV. Dad left about the same time to go to bed. My sister left about 9:30 to do the few dishes from our dinner of delivery pizza (which is quite good here in Chicago, of course).
Philistines. Hmmmph.
Mom and Dad were both in bed asleep when I left to go upstairs, so I didn't get their reactions. My sister allowed as how "It didn't suck", but didn't think it was as good as Babylon 5.
I was a tad disappointed by the following;
1.) Not much space battles, and what there was included a bit more re-used footage from the miniseries than I was expecting. Granted, this is BSG, which practically perfected the art of re-using old SFX shots, but I was hoping for a tad more. One problem with treating space-fighter battles with fairly realistic physics is that the battles are too fast and confusing to be easily followed. On the other hand, I'd rather have realistic battles than unrealistic ones.
2.) I was expecting more on the Helo/Caprica storyline. Are any of the later episodes Caprica-centric, or is this just something we see in snippets that takes forever to develop?
I was very impressed by:
1.) Adama and Roslin have
gravitas out the wazoo. I'd like a bit more gallows humor from both.
2.) I find Tigh's voice annoying, reminds me too strongly of the character played by the same actor on Andromeda a couple of years ago. But Tigh is so cool I find I don't care any more.
3.) I loved the bit where Starbuck gives Apollo a lesson in leadership. I thought Bamber's Apollo was the weakest performance in the miniseries, followed closely by Sackhoff's Starbuck. Starbuck is no longer near the bottom of the heap for me, but Apollo is still down there. His part is much better-written than in the original series, but he's still pretty weak in my opinion.
4.) I have mixed feelings about Galactica-Boomer's internal conflict, but am interested to see where they go with this.
And a couple of nitpicks that already leap to mind...
1.) If the Olympic Carrier was really taken over by Cylons, they were real idiots for not talking. Even a few more seconds or minutes of uncertainty and confusion among the colonial leadership about what was going on might have let them get close enough or distracted them enough to let the Cylons do whatever they were planning to do. Unless they DID whatever they were planning to do, but I can't figure that out yet.
2.) Why couldn't the fleet do a few jumps in a row at 30 minutes or something, see if that shook the Cylons? Or did they try that somewhere in the first 200 jumps and we didn't get a chance to see it? Why'd it take them so long to try the ruse of splitting then reforming the fleet after a couple of separated jumps? Or even jumping to two locations barely within sensor/communications range of each other, see if the Cylons appeared at one side or the other?
3.) Our own solar system is LOUSY with water. Geez, people, any solar system is probably surrounded by a cometary halo, grab a mile-long chunk of ice from any of them and you have more water than you can ever use! And then there's no hassles with going into a planetary gravity well and burning fuel to get back out again.
