Battlestar

This one's for Alicia, Jaime, Lesley, and Shannon -- Here's a blurb about Battlestar Galactica from Entertainment Weekly. They ranked it the 2nd best Science Fiction show/movie of the past 25 years (The Matrix got #!).

BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
Developed by Ronald D. Moore

You remember the show, right? Lorne Greene in a shiny cape leading a band of well-coiffed thirtysomethings as they flee from extras in shiny suits? Glen A. Larson's original '70s Battlestar Galactica: not the worst by-product of the Star Wars juggernaut, but close. So one could view the unmitigated brilliance that is Sci Fi Channel's reimagined Battlestar Galactica series two ways: (1) They had no place to go but up or (2) it's amazing they did so much with so little.

The core of the Galactica plot — the last human survivors of a catastrophic genocide are on the run from their attackers, the Cylons — carried a new resonance in the wake of 9/11. And in keeping with science fiction's grandest tradition, BSG tapped into the power of allegory to enrich its outer-space dogfights and military pomp with the gravity of issues like abortion, terrorism, stem-cell research, racism, even the war in Iraq. The dysfunctionally awesome cast gives it all the ring of authenticity: from Edward James Olmos' crusty warhorse Admiral Adama and Mary McDonnell's tender-as-nails President Roslin to Katee Sackhoff's bedeviled pilot Kara Thrace and Tricia Helfer's glacially threatening Cylon known only as Number Six. But the real MVPs of the ensemble are Michael Hogan, who plays Adama's boozy right-hand man Saul Tigh, and James Callis, who makes you feel for Gaius Baltar, the best, most conflicted villain on TV.

POP CULTURE LEGACY The damned thing won a Peabody award for its second season. It's proving what sci-fi fans have known for decades: Science fiction is as legitimate a vehicle for human drama as any other genre.

THE BEST BIT While any given episode of Galacticais better than 90 percent of what's on the air, the thrill of discovery makes the first season (including the miniseries) the way to go.

—Marc Bernardin
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ANTARCTICA FUN FACTS -- Conspiracy theorists for years have connected the Nazis to everything from UFO sightings to anti-gravity technology. One particularly persistent myth -- that the Nazis established a secret base in Antarctica -- is now the subject of a peer reviewed scientific paper...to debunk the entire idea. The myth goes like this -- Nazis established a secret base in Antarctica to which they spirited Hitler at the war’s end, fought off British special forces and an American military task force, partly by shooting down US planes using flying saucers. The Americans eventually destroyed the base with nuclear weapons in the 1950s. Since then, various governments have striven to conceal this.

To give just a few points from the new article: the Germans' pre-war visit to Antarctica, concerned mainly with establishing a whaling base, was fleeting, never spending more than a day on the ice shelf. The wartime British force in Antarctica was tiny, and concerned mainly with observation and securing territorial claims to the islands around the Falklands. The U-boats were in the southern ocean during the Antarctic winter, when the pack ice would have made it impossible for them to reach the coast. The US atomic tests in the 1950s took place around Tristan da Cunha, thousands of kilometres from Antarctica. (Source: Wired.com and Cynical-C Blog)