If I were to list my favorite shows on television, Battlestar Galactica would share the top spot with 24 (The Jack Bauer Power Hour). The new Battlestar series has done what other sci-fi shows have tried and failed to do for the last twenty years. It made sci-fi popular with more than just fanboys.

When the original series debuted in 1978, critics and fans alike saw it for what it wasn't, a cheap rip off of Star Wars. At first glance it does seem like another case of Hollywood trying to capitalize on the success of Star Wars, but true fans made Battlestar into a success story and looked past the finger pointing and Star Wars Comparisons.

Both the original and the new series share the same basic premise: human beings existing in a far corner of the galaxy inhabit twelve colony worlds, each named after a different star constellation. In the original series the antagonists were the Cylons, chrome covered robotic warriors who used a ceasefire with humanity as a pretext to annihilate the majority of the colony worlds. Those who survived fled their home worlds in a rag tag fleet of ships protected by the very last of the colonial warships, the Battlestar Galactica. The problem with the original was that it ended up becoming another campy sci-fi show.

The new series takes the basic idea from the original, but never lets us forget that humanity is finite and even makes it a point to show the exact number of survivors in the opening credits of each episode, which as of today stands at 41,402. The Cylons are now products of man (The Terminator?) who rebelled against their masters in a war that ended 40 years prior to the start of the new series. Like the original series, they sign a peace treaty only to disappear and return so advanced that they can infiltrate all walks of human life without being detected.

Some issues that the original didn't address were simple things like, how much food, water and basic living supplies could the ships and their inhabitants have taken when running for their lives? The Cylons have an almost infinite number of ships and fighters that they use to attack the human fleet, while the crew of the Galactica has to scrounge for every thing they have. The people that serve on the Galactica aren't the best of the best, they just happen to be the ones left. They could quit at any time, but stay because it's the right thing to do.

The new episodes focus moore on the human condition than epic space battles, and these are the reasons that it's not just fanboys tuning in every week, and it's also the reason the new Galactica won the Peabody Award. The new series toys with the idea that even with the threat of extinction looming over humanity, human beings would still do whatever it takes to survive despite the sins that they take with them. A speech made by Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) sums this up perfectly:

" You know, when we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question, why? Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed, spite, Jealousy. And we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept the responsibility for anything that we've done."

Sadly humanity as a whole is exactly like this, and if we don't change we are destined to fall, but until then Galactica rules!