BSGwatch: Hacks In Space!

SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal

Not nearly as much to comment on in this week's Galactica, though, after all, you can't expect them to kill off (or pseudo-kill off) a major character every week. While I was glad they got back to the fascinating character of Baltar, I was less interested in the legal machinations, especially the business with Space Ramsey Clark, or whoever it was they got to handle Baltar's case. It always throws me a little when BSG has plots that center around media sensations, trials of the century and other such stuff--not because they're unrealistic, per se, but because it doesn't seem like a decimated civilization struggling for survival would have the psychic energy or simple infrastructure for media circuses like that.

Case in point: whenever President Roslyn has an issue to address, she's always speaking to a healthy-sized White-House-gaggle of reporters. Please correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the human population of the fleet down to around the size of a county seat in the Midwest? In America, that size community would be lucky to have a weekly paper that wasn't full of wire copy. But BSG seems to contain its own media universe. Proportionally, journalism must be the biggest civilian employer inside the fleet.

Don't get me wrong, though: It's always nice to think that, in the event of a potentially species-eradicating catastrophe, I'd still have a job. How many TV critics you think there are in the Galactica-verse?