Picture the following: a world controlled by the Empire with thousands of Rebel Alliance prisoners under their grip for months. After extensive planning the Rebel fleet attempts a rescue of these prisoners - a rebel cruiser jumps out of hyperspace inside the atmosphere of the world and then begins plummeting towards the ground in a state of freefall. In the scant seconds it has before hitting the ground it launches X-Wings, Y-Wings, and a few A-Wings from its hangar bay to immediately intercept the TIE-Fighters preventing the Rebel prisoners from stealing ships and leaving the planet. Moments before hitting the ground, the rebel carrier re-enters Hyperspace and vanishes entirely - reappearing soon after to engage Imperial Star Destroyers in orbit.

Now just replace "Rebel Alliance" with "Human Survivors", "The Empire" with "Cylons", and "a rebel cruiser" with "the Battlestar Galactica" and you have the latest episode of BSG in a nutshell. Oh, and "Sultry Robot Girl" with "Darth Vader"

Wanna See? (even if the tiny YouTube window doesn't really do it justice)
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"Woah"

I'm not really a man to respond audibly to television or movies. Even if I find something extremely funny I'm not likely to let out much more than a chuckle (I hate laugh tracks on sitcoms for that reason). Thus why my actually saying "woah" twice during this week's episode of Battlestar is near earth-shattering.

Or... Maybe I'm being a bit overly dramatic

But it was a very, very, very good episode.

If you really don't care about spoilers, here was the second "woah" moment.
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((Here we go with the meat of the entry, feel free to skip to the next Divider Line if you don't care about my opinion on crafting a TV show... but why are you reading blogs if you don't care about crazy, rambling opinions? ))

Now - rather than speak to the few (at least I suspect so... please comment if you do) people here who actively follow Battlestar Galactica about how frakin' cool this episode was - I'm going to talk about this little story arc Battlestar has been doing for the past month in terms of the future of Star Wars - The Star Wars TV Series.

Ah yes, that mysterious little series that we know nothing about. So what are we discussing today?

Earning a Moment

If you watched that little YouTube clip linked above or read my little opening paragraph and don't watch Battlestar you probably though "Huh... Neat" or "Cool!" or - far more likely - "What's going on? I can't see a thing! Frak you, Rive! I'm going to read a blog about Mace Windu's lightsaber!". In any case, you didn't - couldn't - pick up on much of the context for the moment or the significance of it. It was a fancy little light show. In the same way, imagine if you saw the assault on the Death Star, but not Alderaan's destruction. You'd have no sense of purpose and importance - the moment wouldn't be earned.

Every moment in Exodus Part II (the episode of Battlestar being discussed - try to keep up folks!) was earned in the previous three episodes (and the season finale of season 2 and the online webisodes). My primary concern with Star Wars TV has always been "will it be done well?". I love Jedi and explosions (note to BSG fans: Pegasus! Noooooo!) as much as the next guy or gal, but if you just fill up every episode with lightsaber fights and fighter dogfights you don't have a good TV show, you have a lightshow (thus why most Star Wars fan films have the "ooo cool!" factor, rather than the "woah" factor). I like lightshows, but if you've seen one; you've seen them all. Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation fall into this hole - every episode is a seperate adventure and for that reason most of them fall into a select number of storylines (big bad alien, time warp, nebula that does weird stuff, etc). Later series attempted to create ongoing storylines of a sorts, but these often fell flat (which is what I fear from Star Wars TV - who cares if the Death Star has some supply difficulties? We know it gets finished).

There were plenty of earned moments in the Prequel Trilogy. Anakin's duel with Obi-Wan being the most obvious. We saw them build a partnership in Episode II and the beginning of III and then saw it beak apart. They didn't just start slicing at each other for 9 minutes of screen time without any real depth behind it (Maul, I'm looking at you). It's arguable whether Padme and Anakin's relationship was earned. Some argue for the whole "love at first sight" thing... which may be weakened due to Anakin being played by two different actors - it breaks our ties to the foundation of the relationship. In contrast, Han and Leia's relationship was almost doubtlessly earned. (Note to Battlestar fans - Billy and Dualla was earned and worked off a "love at first sight" principle).

So what does this all boil down to? In my opinion (whose else would it be?) it comes down to patience. If you aren't willing to watch Luke be established as the farm boy on a desert world then his later adventures and self-awakening into a hero is contrived and less satisfying. Oh dear, I'm about to go into a tangent about how Mos Eisley should be boring... again - so I'll cut off here.
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Long story short: Exodus Part II was awesome and I can only hope that Star Wars TV is half as good.
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