|
 |
 |
First the bad news: fans of this imperious drama will now have to wait four excruciating months for the start of the final series in April (the expected launch date was in January). Plus, the US writers' strike has flung the climactic episodes into jeopardy. Frack!
On the daylight side of the planet, we now have Razor (18 December, 9:00pm, Sky One), an ambitious, feature-length episode to tide addicts over till spring.
Instead of elaborating, as you might hope, on the jaw-slackening revelation at the end of the last series that four high-profile members of Galactica's personnel are Cylons, Razor bungees back in time to show us crucial incidents - previously only mentioned in passing - aboard the now vaporised Battlestar Pegasus.
And so we drop in on the bridge at the time of the homeworld holocaust to witness the onset of Admiral Cain's lunacy, and again later on when the ship is under Apollo's command and he appoints a cock-sure new XO, Kendra Shaw (superb newcomer Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen). It's Shaw's tale that binds all the disparate plot strands together.
As Brian Butterfield would say, "And that's not all!" We also get to see battlestars in dry-dock being picked off by the enemy; Bill Adama as a rookie stumbling upon a critical Cylon experiment; and a couple of those affecting father-and-son/Bill-and-Lee exchanges that are the beating heart of this wonder-show.
In the debit column, the narrative flow takes quite a battering: over nearly two hours, the frequent flashbacks make Razor somewhat splintered. Plus, maybe there are a few too many robots and tanks of goo; the only times Battlestar occasionally comes unstuck are when it becomes a bit too "sci-fi". Although the show is usually billed as science fiction, regular viewers know that it's just magnificent drama that happens to have an extraterrestrial setting.
So, in the Galactican pantheon, does Razor really cut it? Well, there's an argument that, sometimes, the imagination should be left to get on with its work. In this case, the visualising of events that only existed in the form of dialogue has diluted their power. To make a comparison, Sherlock Holmes in one of his adventures made oblique reference to "the giant rat of Sumatra", but his creator never expanded upon it. A wise decision: the phrase was potent enough to linger in readers' minds as a rather nasty image.
In other words, then, Razor isn't strictly necessary.
BUT!
It's a typically hard-as-nails study of war and its erosion of reason and humanity. Full of surprises and marvellous moments, it also tees things up neatly for the fugitives' continuing search for Earth.
Plus it's not hard to see why Razor has been screened in American cinemas; the big, detail-rich effects - from the Cylon strafing of the sitting-duck battlestars to Starbuck's distinctly non-textbook dogfight on a hangar bay - are simply staggering.
Next stop: season four. Bring it on!
Mark Braxton
**
Now take a look at our full Battlestar Galactica guide.
|
|
