Any form of television requires you to suspend your disbelief on some level, even if it’s something as simple as Eastenders or Coronation Street asking you to believe that they are filming inside a house when it’s actually just a couple of walls of a set, but sometimes it asks just a little bit too much.

I have a habit of coming in late to the party with various television shows, so it’s only natural that I’ve recently started watching the reboot of Battlestar Galactica, a critically acclaimed space opera that plays on themes highly relevant to the age of the war on terrorism.  It is worth noting that it is well deserving of this praise and is absolutely fantastic television.  There is just one bit at the begninning of season two that has caused me to perform a quick double take.

Battlestar Galactica has an odd chronology if you’re not familiar with it.  People beginning with season one may be confused that it appears to be season two, as the first episodes are really a four hour miniseries that was commissioned in which the setting was established.  This isn’t just the sci fi channel being awkward, this was a risky venture for them and they didn’t know if it would work.  The mini series was to see if it made them any money and if it was any good.  Battlestar Galactica was originally a much loved classic (70s) sci fi series and the fan backlash to them remaking it could have cost them a lot, so they were cautious.  Essentially, that mini series should be thought of as a very ambitious pilot episode, and like pilot episodes, it is subtly different from the first series.

The only difference I could really see without assistance was that one of the characters, an officer who kind of hung around in the background, quietly barked out status updates to other officers and at one point wandered through a hall of dead bodies laid out looking remorseful and melancholy (as you would) was not present in the first series following the mini series.  I didn’t notice straight away, but I did notice eventually.  It was a bit of a shame, but he wasn’t really a key character so no major loss.

The thing that got me was that he suddenly turns up again at the beginning of season two.  Not a reintroduction of any kind, or any explanation for why he hadn’t been around, he just suddenly starts asking questions and giving status updates again as if he’d been there all along.

This is the weird thing:  I can deal with space ships.  I can deal with robots that look like humans.  I can even deal with the idea that the world ends and leadership still has to deal with the press (it’s absurd but I think maybe integral to the point they’re trying to make in the show) but what I don’t seem to be able to deal with is them slipping a character back in and hoping we won’t notice!

On the other hand, I quite like that he’s been written back in.  He seems like a nice guy, and it’s good to have the old band back together.  Maybe he fell to pieces early on in season one and has been hiding under the table in CIC panicking until that first episode of season two where he suddenly jumps back out again and hopes everyone else will roll with it.

Obviously, this has been done out of sheer necessity, and complications with either funding or casting or anything.  Yes, they didn’t need go into deep back story for this otherwise up until now minor character, nor did they need to waste precious minutes of a script explaining him away, but it was pretty audacious all the same.  Perhaps it was just my complete lack of conviction that made me go back to season one and check that he wasn’t hiding away in there after all.

Additional Notes:

If anyone is looking for a decent TV series and like me is not quite on the pulse when it comes to these things, this is a fantastic show, even if you’re not particularly into your science fiction.  There’s enough interesting hooks to keep anyone interested.  Of course, that’s a complete assumption.  It has enough hooks to keep me interested, and having a chaotic attention span, that’s quite an achievement.