Looks like the new Battlestar Galactica series is well on its way to avoiding the usual technobabble that runs nonfans away from scifi.
The first episode’s plotline showed the battlestar crew and political leaders dealing with some five straight days of unending attack. Inexplicably, these attacks happened every 33 minutes, at which point the fleet would retreat from certain destruction yet again. Exhaustion sets in, and the number of survivors of the Cylon genocide drops below 50,000.
Writer Ron Moore has this to say about the 33 minute gap between attacks:
A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could’ve come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would’ve made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier’s nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama?
Thank you, Ron. If scifi is ever going to be “respectable,” it needs shows with writing worthy of an HBO series and none of the unironic camp that’s so common to scifi. Kudos to this series’ creators for getting it off on good footing.
(Plus, both Boomer and Starbuck are hot. That didn’t hurt either.)
I just happened to read a post on BoingBoing maybe ten minutes before the premiere and luckily caught the whole thing. I like the writing too, and it’s especially nice reading the quote from Ron Moore—hopefully this augurs well for the whole series.
I have to disagree about Boomer and Starbuck though… Madame President is more my type. Er, if I weren’t married and had just survived a cataclysmic invasion and subsequent evacuation. ;-)
My real question, though, is whether the new series maintains the original’s distinctive interest in Mormon theology — an aspect of the show that definitely appealed to my Utah Mormon childhood self. (More here.)
Good post and you’re right. The old Galactica series was, in my mind, rendered nearly worthless by all the fake and fake-sounding tech terms that burped unnaturally out of the throats of it’s various cast-members.