There’s a classic Portlandia sketch where Fred and Carrie are getting ready to head to a friend’s birthday party, but Fred says they should try out a TV show he’s heard great things about. Carrie reluctantly agrees to try one episode before they leave, but then they have to go to the party. They’ll at least make it there for dessert, right? They do not.
The show is Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore’s beloved sci-fi series that ran for four seasons from 2004 to 2009. Once Fred and Carrie start watching, they cannot stop. One episode becomes another and another, until watching Battlestar Galactica completely consumes — and destroys — their lives. The sketch aired in 2012, when binge-watching was still a novel thing that made for a good punchline.
I steered clear of the show altogether for a long time after a few of my friends experienced something similar to Fred and Carrie (though we were in college, so they didn’t lose their jobs or houses). The name “Battlestar Galactica” alone sounded impossibly nerdy, and I had an unfair prejudice against the kind of cheap-looking sci-fi television I assumed it was. Then, the summer after graduation, I randomly gave it a shot with a friend from home, and I came to understand why Battlestar Galactica in many ways defined binge-watching culture at large. We started with the 2003 miniseries that functions as a feature-length pilot. Watching more and more became a nightly ritual: anywhere between two and four episodes with snacks, pizzas, and beer. We wound up sharing a Netflix account for years.
More than two decades after Battlestar Galactica premiered, the show remains dangerously well-engineered for exactly this kind of behavior. And with the entire series streaming for free on Pluto TV, it’s remarkably easy for anyone to become Fred and Carrie, or Corey and Kevin.
Battlestar Galactica is built for binging
Battlestar Galactica radically reimagines the campy 1978 series of the same name. Humanity has created a race of artificial beings called Cylons, the robots have rebelled, and they’ve returned after decades of peace to wipe out the human race. A tiny fleet of survivors escapes under the protection of the aging Battlestar Galactica, led by Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos), and sets off in search of the mythical planet Earth.
But Battlestar Galactica immediately reveals its best gimmick: Some Cylons look exactly like humans.
Regular Cylons are Terminator-looking metal “toasters” that chase humans with laser guns. But a very limited number of them can pose as just about anyone. Friends, lovers, soldiers, political leaders — even people who don’t know they’re Cylons themselves. This gives Battlestar Galactica a persistent feeling of paranoia that serves as an incredible narrative engine. Not only are the last survivors of the human race trapped aboard cramped, old spaceships while being chased by robots across the galaxy, but they know they’re stuck in this situation with sleeper agents just waiting for the right moment to strike. That pressure cooker makes for some downright delicious television.
What makes it so difficult to stop watching, however, isn’t just the desire to know what happens next after another cliffhanger. It’s how quickly these characters become your people. Their fear becomes your fear. And you cannot bear to see one of them in danger.
The series demonstrates how relentless it can be with “33,” the very first regular episode after the miniseries. The surviving human fleet gets attacked by the Cylons every 33 minutes, with almost supernatural precision. Everyone is exhausted. Nobody has slept. The military barely has time to fend off one attack before the clock starts ticking toward the next. It’s a fantastic hour of television, but it also feels like a threat: This is what watching Battlestar Galactica feels like. You cannot stop. Because if you do, everyone could die.
The show rarely lets its characters breathe, and when it does, they usually use the opportunity to drink, fight, have sex, or make a really bad personal decision. That’s another thing that can get lost when Battlestar Galactica is remembered as one of the “Serious Important Television Shows” of the 2000s: This show is incredibly sexy.
Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is a brilliant scientist who is as cowardly as he is charming and narcissistic. He spends most of the show haunted by visions of a statuesque humanoid Cylon known as Six (Tricia Helfer), famously clad in a form-fitting red dress. Six is ostensibly presented as the show’s mascot, which immediately communicates that despite the gritty sci-fi premise, Battlestar Galactica as a whole is a deeply sexualized affair. Meanwhile, hotshot pilot Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) and Adama’s son Lee “Apollo” Adama (Jamie Bamber) spend years generating enough romantic and sexual tension to power a small spacecraft. One of Moore’s more brilliant decisions is to gender-bend Starbuck into a woman (in the original series, Starbuck was a man).
Everybody is angry and sweaty and jealous and drinking too much. They often fall in love with (and even marry) the wrong people. They also betray one another often and occasionally beat the absolute hell out of one another. Moore and his team treat this hot mess with utter sincerity.
That’s important, because Battlestar Galactica could so easily have been embarrassed by itself. This is a show called Battlestar Galactica about killer robots nicknamed “toasters,” and it’s based on a cheesy sci-fi series from the late 1970s. But there’s not a damn thing that’s silly about it. When one of the old-fashioned metal Cylons appears, it can feel like The Terminator. When President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) and Adama clash over the survival of democracy during an existential military crisis, Battlestar becomes a political drama. And when Starbuck and Apollo get into a boxing ring in season 3’s phenomenal “Unfinished Business,” years of friendship, lust, anger, guilt, and resentment transform a boxing match into something so emotionally brutal that eventually everybody turns and walks away out of embarrassment.
The sci-fi premise makes all of those different genres possible, but the characters make them matter.
Eventually, the Battlestar Galactica crew becomes your family
There are people aboard Galactica that I love dearly, and others who still annoy me so much that I would gladly push the button that ejects them out of an airlock myself. (Looking at you Gaeta.) That’s part of the magic. Spend enough episodes cramped inside this warship, and even the characters you don’t particularly like become part of the family. You know their relationships. You know their grudges. You know who drinks together and who hates each other and who would risk everything for someone they supposedly can’t stand.
Eventually, it feels less like you’re watching this massive dysfunctional family than you’ve somehow been absorbed into it. One of my favorite moments comes early in season 1, after Starbuck goes missing. The President forces Commander Adama to abandon the search since resources are already short. Lee debriefs with his father, frustrated. These two have a famously strained relationship that, at times, feels like utter hatred. Yet mixed with all that resentment is a profound amount of mutual respect and love. What would happen, Lee asks, if he were the one missing?
Adama doesn’t hesitate.
“If it were you, we’d never leave.”
That’s Battlestar Galactica.
It’s messy and earnest in a truly human way that very few television shows can achieve. The series itself goes on to make some enormous swings, particularly when it comes to its Cylon mythology and stranger sci-fi ideas. The ending also remains divisive (for what it’s worth, I’ve always liked it). But even when Battlestar Galactica gets messy, there’s so much rich character depth that it’s forgivable.
The good news for anyone who’s never experienced that particular problem of needing to watch one more episode — only for it to become three or four a night — is that Pluto TV now has the 2003 Battlestar Galactica miniseries and all four seasons available to stream for free. And yes, start with the miniseries. Don’t accidentally begin with “33.” But even if you do, you’ll probably still get hooked anyway.
