The reimagined Battlesta Galactica aired beginning in 2003 with a miniseries and continuing for four season. In this series, the Cylons (a race of sentient robots, originally designed and constructed by humans) attack the human race after a 40-year armistice between the Cylons and the humans. The Cylons, using nuclear weapons and devious tactics, destroy the Twelve Colonies and chase after any fleeing humans in an attempt to utterly destroy the human race. The namesake of the series, the Battlestar Galactica (a military carrier and relic of the Cylon War), evades the attacks in the midst of its decommisioning ceremony and puts together a haphazard fleet of survivors and spend the rest of the series running for their lives from the Cylons.
This show takes an interesting look at what it would be like to survive an apocalyptic event both on a post-nuclear holocaust world as well as fleeing through space. While most of the show focuses on who is and isn’t a Cylon and spirals further into this whirlpool as the show progresses, it actually addresses some of the issues that would be encountered in these situations.
There’s a whole episode that focuses on how essential water is to survival and how finding it in space would be like trying to find a needle in an infinite haystack. The President of the Colonies keeps a white board in her office with an up to date tally of the population of the fleet and it really hits home how desperate the situation is for them every time that number goes down. Eventually, the counter starts to go back up and you feel like they’ve finally arrived. They aren’t grasping the proverbial precipice for dear life anymore and they might actually re-establish human civilization.
Throughout most of the first season, one of the Galactica’s pilots is stranded on Caprica – one of the nuked colonies – and we follow him as he evades Cylon patrols, radiation sickness, and tries to survive long enough to figure out how the hell he’s going to survive. Basically, the ultimate survival story.
As they transition from the initial survival stage into a maintenance and rebuild stage, they address the issue of what you do to keep things working without specialists or proper resources. How do you replenish a squadron of pilots when all the trained military pilots are already flying in said squadron? What do you do with prisoners that commited crimes under a government that no longer exists? How do you deal with overcrowding? What happens when your highly efficient spaceships start to run out of their seemingly endless supply of fuel?
All in all it’s a good series, and it gives a good perspective on what life in the P.A.W. would be like. Just don’t get disappointed when the show goes bat-sh*@ crazy in the last couple seasons.