I know we're all in mourning for the end of the Sopranos. My son is worried about me I think. Anyway he wants me to get invested in Battlestar Gallactica. Any fans out there? Is it as good (or reasonably close) to the Sopranos? Thoughts?

dad1153 has been raving about it and somehow extracted a promise from me in chat to watch the first four hours. I will probably do that sometime next month. He says it's the next best thing to the Sopranos on television.

Hmm, will have to check it out. In the meantime, I watched the premier of Meadowlands tonight and it was bizare, but good. Kind of David Lynch-esque.

I love Battlestar Galactica to a point. My wife hates sci-fi and actively resisted me trying to get her into the show. However, I explained that the fact that they're in space with robots is practically secondary to the sociological, political and religious debacles the last survivors of humanity have to face in the wake of the end of the world (or worlds). There are times you actually forget you're watching a sci-fi show. So yeah, she actually ended up really enjoying the first half of the series.

The miniseries and the first season are excellent. The second season has a hiccup or two in the back half, but still very much worth it. The beginning of the third season is probably the last batch of really good episodes; after that, they had no idea what they were doing. You can actually see the loose plot threads dangling as the show went on, and rather than try to tie any of them up, they just kept adding more. Then, in the last season, they tried way too hard to provide answers for everything, in the meantime exposing how little thought they had given to the dozens of storylines floating around by the careless way they were resolved or forgotten. As I said, I loved it up until the beginning of the third season and I'd recommend it to anyone looking for an intelligent sci-fi show, but if you're looking for a satisfying conclusion, look elsewhere. *SPOILERS* If you thought the ending of the Sopranos was controversial, then holy shit, because at least every single character didn't suddenly turn into a complete moron in the last twenty minutes of the show like on BSG. *END SPOILERS*

Maybe the best show ever besides...'you-know-what'. All '70s/childhood-nostalgia aside but all due respect to Glen A Larson just the same, this revived version headed by Ronald D Moore and David Eich is what the original version SHOULD HAVE been, and THEN SOME (x 10). Character-developments, strong actors (Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnel to name a couple), multi-plotlines....it's all there! And a controversial ending in the finale to boot! You DO NOT have to be at all into sci-fi in order to fully appreciate. It hardly is the typical sci-fi offering mainly prediacted on spaceship/laser-fights but when it DOES come time for space-battle-scenes to be in the plot it is done rather well; and it's mainly BULLETS and MISSILES instead of the typical 'lasers' and the special effects are quite realistic and much more down-to-earth than the highly-computer-generated over-the-top effects you see too often today. Moore/Eich show that not every aspect of a science-fiction piece has to be presented as...'out-of-this-world', outrageously high-tech-looking, etc. Just like Sopranos' filming base was Long Island, importing many of its actors from in and around that general area (LI/NYC/NJ), BSG based out of Vancouver imported many of their actors out of British Columbia/northwest USA. Also like Sopranos, BSG was provided a 'safe haven' from network TV that allowed the series to justifiably run its ENTIRE course - that particular haven being.....The Sci-Fi Network. Connecting the past to the present series, Richard Hatch who played 'Apollo' in the original series plays a totally different character in the revived one; appearing in 24 episodes - the SAME amount of episodes that were in the original series, he of course appearing in each of them.


also, John Heard who played Tony's crooked-cop friend Season 1 can be seen as a guest in a BSG episode, 'The Captain's Hand'.