I like it.

I didn’t think I would. I even tried not to, out of loyalty to the series that I grew up with and still enjoy. But in the end (and to my surprise), I find that I actually do like the new Battlestar Galactica. It’s a good series on its own terms, and it’s also the rare example of a remake that improves on the original by taking it seriously.

That’s not to say, however, that I like it without reservation. There are aspects of it that don’t quite work for me, and, as I’ve already mentioned a couple of times, I’m not at all comfortable with the fact that this show is on track to replace the original in our collective pop-cultural memories. Nevertheless, I can’t deny that Ron Moore, the driving force behind the remake, has created something that is honestly worthy of the attention the show is receiving.

As I said a while back, the new Galactica‘s greatest strength is that it’s much better thought out than the old one was. From the most global aspects of the premise and backstory down to the smallest details of what Colonial technology can and can’t do, everything in the new show makes sense. The original series, by way of contrast, often expected the viewer to accept things just because, and there were always obvious signs that the show’s creators were making things up as they went along.

For instance, in an original-series episode called “The Gun on Ice Planet Zero,” heroes Apollo and Starbuck lead a commando team made up of convicts from the fleet’s prison barge. Left unanswered in this story are such obvious questions as, why would a refugee fleet carrying the last survivors of the human race dedicate the carrying capacity of an entire starship to a handful of dangerous prisoners? Wouldn’t the overcrowded survivors on other ships resent their scarce resources being expended to house and feed prisoners? Were the prisoners airlifted (spacelifted?) off the destroyed homeworlds, and, if so, why would the Colonials have bothered with them instead of trying to save as many law-abiding citizens as possible? Or was the prison barge instituted later, after the fleet began to develop the same problems as any society and needed a place to segregate the harmful types from the rest of the populace? But if that was the case, wouldn’t it have been more expedient to keep the prisoners aboard their ships of origin? Or, for that matter, why not simply execute the troublemakers? Perhaps the moral values of the Colonials forbid such a thing, but what did the viewer really know about Colonial values, since much of their society remained stubbornly undeveloped? My hunch is that the fleet had a prison barge because the writers of this episode couldn’t very well steal the premise from The Dirty Dozen without some prisoners and some kind of prison to retrieve them from. Simple as that.

The fleet in Neo-Galactica also includes a prison barge but in this case there is a plausible backstory for how and why it got there, namely this: the ship was transporting criminals from one Colony world to another when the Cylons attacked. It managed to reach the fleet’s rendezvous point and was allowed to come along because there were so few humans left that even convicts were seen as valuable. Simple and satisfying, something the original producers easily could have come up with, but due to their own carelessness or incompetence did not.

The prison barge is only one example of how the new show trumps the old one by seriously examining the realities of its refugee scenario. I’ve said for years that the biggest error made by Glen Larson and company was to basically ignore this fundamental premise of the original series. Instead of grappling with the demands of the situation and giving us stories about how the refugees deal with privation or what kind of new society they’re starting to build inside the confines of their slow-moving starships, the writers of Paleo-G instead chose to recycle scripts from old war-movies and Gunsmoke episodes. (In case you don’t know your classic Battlestar, the latter remark refers to “The Lost Warrior,” in which Apollo has a High Noon-style duel with a robotic Cylon while men in aluminum cowboy hats cower behind silver horse troughs. Oy. Even as an unwavering fan of the old show, that one’s pretty hard to take in.)

The plots of Neo-G, on the other hand, are strongly driven by the refugee scenario, at least in the episodes I’ve seen. (I should probably explain that as of this writing, I have seen only five out of the thirteen regular production episodes. I don’t get the Sci-Fi Channel, so I have to rely on the kindness of others to make recordings for me. Thus, I’m watching this first season a little bit at a time.) I particularly liked a plotline in which the fleet’s main supply of drinking water was sabotaged. A water shortage is a seemingly banal issue on which to hang a story, but given the established circumstances, it made for compelling viewing. I also like the unfolding sub-plot involving a Galactica pilot who was left behind on “Cylon-Occupied Caprica” after the rest of the survivors were evacuated. The old show never addressed what happened to those left behind on the Colony worlds after the survivor fleet departed or what the Cylons did with those worlds, and I think it’s a fascinating angle to explore.

Additionally, I’m liking how Ron Moore and his writers are telling their story. While each episode is more-or-less self-contained, there are many sub-plots that are advancing a notch or two at a time, such as the afore-mentioned occupied-Caprica story. Truths are being revealed slowly, and, even though the show isn’t truly serialized like, say, 24, there is lots of incentive to tune in regularly and to view the series as a novel instead of an assortment of loosely connected short stories. I have to admit, I find this a much more satisfying approach than trying to wrap everything up at the end of a single hour.

(To be fair, the original Galactica was made before serialized nighttime dramas became common and thus was bound by the necessity to put everything “back to normal” at the end of each episode. This phenomenon, known in fanboy circles as “hitting the Reset Button,” wasn’t the fault of the old show’s producers or writers; it’s just the way most weekly TV shows were done in the 1970s because, I believe, of the requirements of syndication. Nothing much could be allowed to change from one episode to the next because it was assumed episodes wouldn’t be shown in order during their syndication run, and it wouldn’t do to have the viewer wondering what they’d missed. It is worth noting that the original show did experiment with some cross-episode continuity — characters occasionally referred to things that had happened in previous episodes — but these attempts were fairly cursory and had little impact on the current episode’s storyline.)

As good as Neo-G is, however, it’s got its share of problems, the most bothersome of which to this old-school Galactica fan are places where Moore has gone too far away from the original premise. Oddly enough, I am not bothered by the most controversial change in the show’s premise, namely the transformation of Starbuck and Boomer from male characters into female ones. I’ll admit I was extremely skeptical of this little gender reassignment when I first heard about it — I didn’t see that there was much purpose to it, other than to generate some fanboy buzz (which it certainly accomplished) and make a token gesture toward political correctness (the old show was pretty light on female characters). As it turns out, however, the female Starbuck and Boomer are the most interesting and (so far) the most likable of all the cast, so I’ve decided I have no problem with this change.

Far more troublesome in my mind is Moore’s tinkering with the nature of the Cylons. In the 1978 Galactica, they were robotic soldiers created by an alien race; they turned on their masters and wiped them out before coming into conflict with humans and other species around them. In the 21st Century version, there are no aliens in sight. Instead, the Cylons were created by us silly humans; they rebelled and, following the inevitable conflict, fled into space. They’ve since evolved new models that look human, right down to bleeding when they’re “injured.” The only thing that gives these humanoid Cylons away is a glowing red spine when they have sex, which they seem to do far more often than any of the human characters. Horny little tinheads.

While the humanoid Cylon infiltrators actually have opened up some interesting story possibilities, the change in their origin bothers me deeply. I believe that remakes ought to be a balancing act in which you change enough things to create a distinct identity for the new version — otherwise, why bother to do one? — but don’t change so much that you lose the spirit of the original. As irrational as it may sound, making the Cylons into human creations simply feels wrong to me, as if this particular change is just a couple of grams too heavy for the scales to reach equilibrium.

(Part of my problem with the new Cylons may be disappointment that the remake didn’t return to Glen Larson’s original Cylon concept, which was organic, vaguely reptilian creatures inside armored suits. These living Cylons were nixed by the Network Suits because Galactica ’78 was, after all, a children’s show, and therefore we couldn’t have too much actual violence, even if the heroes were just killing alien lizard cyborgs. Never mind that the old show featured human death all the time. Idiots…)

As I think about it, however, I guess the human-built Cylons are only a symptom of my biggest problem with the new Galactica, which is that it has such a vastly different spirit from the original. I’m not talking about the tongue-in-cheek line readings or the Saturday-matinee flavor of the old scripts; I said in my earlier entries on this subject that I wanted a new Galactica to be gritty and realistic, and I certainly got my wishes in that regard.

But I do think the new version should have tried to capture more of the original’s epic, larger-than-life quality. Galactica was inspired, in part, by Glen Larson’s religious beliefs and it isn’t hard to see the old show in Biblical terms: the ragtag, fugitive fleet searching for the lost colony called Earth is analogous to the Jews wandering the Sinai with Moses, fleeing from their persecutors in search of a place to call home. This, along with the references to Greek and Egyptian mythology, and even the Chariots of the Gods silliness, generated a fairly high “sense-of-wonder” quotient. The creators of the old show were consciously trying to make it feel like mythology. (Whether or not they succeeded is up for debate; I personally believe they got it right more often than not.)

In addition, the old show always delivered a strong sense that our heroes were traveling through a rich and interesting universe with a long history. The fleet was constantly encountering forgotten outposts of humanity, and the pilot film made it clear that the Colonials had once been explorers, but the long war with the Cylons had resulted in a lot of lost knowledge. There were hints of vast mysteries lurking out there, and that humans and Cylons alike were merely pawns in a game of good and evil between beings far beyond our perception. There were occasional encounters with non-human, non-Cylon aliens, too. And even the Galactica itself, the title spacecraft, was a vast and ancient vessel that was supposedly generations, if not centuries, old; I can think of a couple of episodes that referred to forgotten corners of the ship that hadn’t been used in ages. These are the elements of the show that really got to me when I was young, the ideas that resonated so strongly with me.

Neo-Galactica feels much smaller in scope. Its universe is barren. There are no aliens, no lost outposts or mysterious civilizations (at least not so far) and even the Cylons themselves were made by our hand instead of someone else’s. The human-Cylon war hasn’t raged for a thousand years, as it did in the original; in fact, as the mini-series begins, no one has even seen a Cylon in 40 years. If the Colonials were ever galactic explorers in this new version, they haven’t mentioned it yet. Even the spacecraft appear to be smaller, somehow, and less “space-opera-y,” right down to the fact that Neo-G warriors fight with bullets and nukes instead of energy weapons. And all of that bothers me.

I think I know why Ron Moore made these choices, creatively speaking — he’s trying to make his Galactica more realistic than Glen Larson’s, and a lot of people these days think aliens and rayguns are pretty far-fetched. (The lowered sights of the popular imagination is a thorn in my side that I’ll rant about another time.) But I personally have a hard time completely accepting this new show as something that can be called “Battlestar Galactica” when it’s lacking so many of the space-opera conventions that define “Battlestar Galactica” in my mind. Neo-G may be more realistic, but it doesn’t feel like “Galactica” to me, at least not in certain respects.

I have other complaints, too, mostly nit-picky issues that are nothing more or less than my personal tastes asserting themselves. For example, I hate all the handheld camerawork, the constant zooming and panning, the generally shaky visual look of the show. God, I’ll be glad when the shaky-cam fad finally ends and directors start giving us good old-fashioned tracking shots again! And why are the civilian leaders of a culture from the other side of the galaxy walking around in perfectly ordinary Brooks Brothers business suits? (I can guess the real-world answer to that one, which is that Ron Moore wanted to draw parallels between modern-day America and the politics of the Colonial survivors, social commentary a la Star Trek, but surely that could’ve been done through dialogue and plot without making the obvious visual connections. Also, I think the parallel stuff is coming off as a little too heavy much of the time, especially the post-9/11 references. But that’s just me.)

As I said at the outset, however, I generally like the new show. It isn’t the remake I would’ve done, but it’s much, much better than I anticipated, and, to my relief, it’s not predicated on trashing the original (it’s not a comedy, in other words). Even better, with each passing episode, I see more and more ideas from the original finding their way into Moore’s narrative, which I think vindicates my belief that remakes are better when they respect their predecessors.

As for the question of Galactica ’05 replacing Galactica ’78 in the minds of the majority, I guess I’m just going to have to come to terms with that. But I myself will always remember which came first, and I know which will remain first in my heart.