The Common Room

The groundbreaking show Battlestar Galactica returns for a new season this Friday night at 8:00 p.m. on the Sci-Fi Channel (61 on NYU Campus Cable). The show is a brilliant remake of the late 1970s series starring Lorne Greene about a race of robots called Cylons who destroy all of humankind’s colonies, forcing the few surviviors to embark on a quest to find their mythical home planet — Earth.

The new series is a gritty update that is one of the smartest “political” shows on the air today. Full of Biblical overtones with its lost tribes searching for a promised land, the series is also about the ancient struggle between the Greeks and the Persians — between a polytheist culture and a monotheist culture — with the added twist here that it’s the humans who are the polytheists. (“Praise the Gods!”) In addition, the new show offers a further twist: the robots have evolved so that many of them look identical to humans (that there is a robot at the right), and they believe that they’re on a mission to do God’s will in cleansing the galaxy of humanity. My wife and fellow faculty fellow Deborah Williams is no fan of sci-fi, but she loves the show!

Sci-Fi is running a marathon of old episodes each day this week from 8:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. You can get caught up on the storyline with a seven-minute video clip called “What the Frak’s Going On?” that’s available at http://www.scifi.com/battlestar. Full episodes are available for viewing online at scifi.com, and to celebrate the new season we’ve put a couple of copies of this winter’s Battlestar Galactica movie, Razor, down at the front desk. The movie treats a portion of the storyline that’s omitted in the regular series, and it stands on its own as a compelling drama.