I finally got around to watching some Battlestar Galactica, or BSG, as the supergeeks call it. I watched the miniseries and the first two regular season episodes, and while it was horrifically bad, the only conclusion I can come to is that SF geeks are starved for sci-fi to the point where they will embrace whatever mediocre SF happens to be on TV. There are no new Star Trek shows being produced, for the first time in decades, and I guess BSG just sort of slipped into that void.

Now, compared to the original Battlestar, the new one is a masterpiece, but that's not really saying a whole lot. The old one wallowed in its own cheesiness, but the new one is a weird mix of cheese and faux gravitas. We get lots of parallels to modern day wars and suicide bombings. We get a swearing-in ceremony of the new president that is set up to look at awful lot like the aftermath of the Kennedy assassination. And this is juxtaposed with cheeseball scenes of a female Starbuck chomping on a cigar.

And the whole "human" cylon thing is just dumb. They're indistinguishable from humans, so how exactly are they cylons? And they can perfectly replicate human anatomy, but they can only make 12 models? What, they can't tweak facial structure and eye color? And the whole business with Baltar seeing his cylon ex-lover is lame.

I won't be watching any more, which is a shame, because I'd heard it was so awesome. But it's really not. I'm certainly hungry for some good SF entertainment, but I guess I'm not starved quite enough.