Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!

“We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex,” quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night’s Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed “walking toasters” from the original TV series are succeeded by — well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom. —Xeni Jardin —Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!  (Wired)

The original Battlestar Galactica, corny and 8pm family-friendly as it was, managed to push a few barriers by making one of the leads, Cassiopia, a prostitute (er…. that is, a “sociolator”). All that added a layer of adult subject matter that (when the writers bothered to address it) complicated the relationship between the womanizing Starbuck and the professionally detached Cassie; but the complexity goes right over the head of my five-year-old when we watch the reruns together. I’m pretty sure I don’t want to snuggle down on the futon with my son to watch “a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare.”

OK, he’d love the “blast-tacular deep-space warfare.” And it certainly sounds like this miniseries has something going for it.

I don’t want to sound like the whiners who, when the Batman movies started coming out, lamented the absence of the “Biff” “Pow!” “Blam!” animation that censored out all the fistfights and thus made the TV series acceptable for the kiddies. And this is all pretty much immaterial — I don’t have cable TV and thus won’t watch the new show anyway.