A List Of Things Thrown Five Minutes Ago

HOLY FRACK, I THOUGHT I HAD TO WAIT ANOTHER YARON! Second season of Battlestar Galactica starts Friday.

I don't pretend to understand the analysis from this bizarro Salon article that what makes the new BSG good is some post-feminist gender mumbo. That's crap. Katee Sackhoff is hot. But inherently so, not because one should write term papers about her for a Reed College feminist studies program.

BSG is good because it's good science fiction. The writers set up rules for how the universe operates -- and now lives by them -- there is no Lt. Data to use the sensor array to create a phase-shield positronic crucible to protect the threatened planet from a series of novae. Early in season one, the fleet -- some of which had not faster-than-light (FTL) capability -- had to make a choice between standing and fighting (the Galactica was elsewhere) or leaving a third of the fleet at the nuclear-tipped hands of the Cylons. Certain doom awaited those who stayed behind. So, save 2/3 of the fleet, or die as one?

In Star Trek, they'd have figured out a way to save everyone through emergency transporters or something. The physics and engineering of the society could not do a thing about it, any more than a fleet of news helicopters could have stopped the collapse of the World Trade Center. The ships that could jump to FTL did so. The rest died: 10,000 or so people in one of the more simple and disturbing images in movie or TV science fiction. A long shot, with a few enemy ships popping out of jump-space. A few missiles fly toward the remaining fleet and all are snuffed out.

It's dark. It's well-written. It's smart. And it's the best television science fiction since we learned that To Serve Man was a cookbook.