TVSquad

(Webisode 1) The first Battlestar Galactica webisode premiered at midnight, Tuesday September 5, 2006 on Sci-Fi.com. The next one will be on at midnight Thursday September 7,2006 (so that really means you'll want to stay up later tomorrow night -- Wednesday).

Confused yet? Well, if you miss it, you'll probably be able to catch it on YouTube the next day. or Sci Fi itself. So far, I've seen it both places.

I am out of my mind excited for the return of Battlestar Galactica, so I will eagerly watch any little webisode snippets they want to give us. These usually run for under three minutes -- if you've caught them for The Office, you know the drill. We get these little morsels until we are drooling and have attached ourselves to our televisions with suction cups for the premiere (Friday October 6, check your local listings for the time in your area of the country).

In this little morsel, we meet three little-known characters: An attractive, blonde young couple who are trying to conceive a baby, and a single young man (who was a tech on Battlestar, and teamed with Apollo to go after the cylons when they boarded the Galactica). They have been hanging out with Chief, Cally, their new baby, and Tigh. Chief and Tigh want the single young man to see how Duck, the young blonde guy, feels about a resistance movement against the cylons. So, between the title and this snippet, we can surmise that now, 67 days into Cylon-occupied New Caprica, people are getting fed up and want to fight back.

I have mixed feelings about the introduction of these three, little-seen before characters. Okay, granted, the main characters probably don't have enough man-power to overtake the Cylons. There will have to be new characters to help, and the show's creators are going to want us to care about these characters. Cally and Chief have a baby now -- the stakes are higher. Our folks are truly living in a world in which repopulating the species is going to be important. Am I the only one bothered by the Aryan appearance of this young couple? It just kind of creeps me out when blonde people talk about reproducing because I saw Europa, Europa at an impressionable age. (Full disclosure: I am the blonde-blue-eyed mother to blonde-blue-eyed children).

But Battlestar's darkness is one of the reasons I find it so compelling. We get more snippets -- Adama saying he needs to go back, Dualla yelling at Apollo, Kara behind bars, her husband saying that Adama isn't coming back -- and Roslin explaining that it is important to show the children that somebody fought back.

I just hope the show maintains its complicated character relationships and doesn't dissolve into a darkly lit battlezone and nothing but strategies. I don't know about you, but I find the tension between Kara and Lee, the wacko romance between Gaius and Six, and Sharon's ambiguity toward humanity (compared to Boomer's undying loyalty) to be, by far, the most compelling elements of the show.

I would like to see more of that. Soon.