By your command

O Galactica, my Galactica...

They did it again — the brilliant minds behind the best show on television upped the ante for the long, long, long-awaited final season (now scheduled for March?!). If you caught the 2-hour special Razor last Saturday on Sci-Fi, and you're any kind of fan of the show (and especially if you're a fan of the original series), then like me, you're probably still glowing.

If nothing else, Galactica's grand run (3½ seasons, a miniseries, a TV movie, and a handful of “webisodes” spread liberally over a period of nearly 5 years) should go down in history as the best thing to happen to science fiction since Next Generation. And like TNG, Galactica proves once again that it's all about the writing. (Go WGA!)

A short list of what Razor managed to accomplish in only 2 hours:

• We finally got to see some scenes from the original Cylon War, including a young Adama. Is it too much to hope that there might be the seeds of a spinoff “prequel” here?
  


• We learned the origins of the Cylon-human hybrids, which turned out to be a lot more ghastly than I had imagined. Was anyone else reminded of the grotesque “Hall of Ripleys” from Alien Resurrection?
  


• We discovered some interesting things about the end of the Cylon War and the motivations behind the so-called Armistice: the Cylons, the moment they perfected their first hybrid, promptly pulled up stakes, sued for peace, and withdrew to their own quiet corner of space, where they presumably began developing their 12 hybrid models and drawing up their long-term plans for humanity. Oh yeah, and somehow they found religion in the process. (Possibly from the half-mad ramblings of the first strain of hybrids? Wouldn't that be just too perfect?)
  


• We learned how the Pegasus managed to escape the Cylon attack. The Galactica, after all, was (thought to be) the only Battlestar to survive because Adama refused to allow any networked systems on his ship, which protected the Galactica from the Cylon viruses that shut down the rest of the Colonial defenses. Turns out, by a twist of sheer luck, the networks aboard Pegasus were shut down for an upgrade at the time of the attack. That, and Admiral Cain's hail-Mary “jump to anywhere,” are the only reasons she survived. One of those small twists that changes everything — like the American carriers being at sea when the Japanese hit Pearl Harbor.
  


• We got to see the three apocryphal stories about Admiral Cain: the execution of her first XO, the massacre of civilian survivors, and best of all, the backstory of the Six (“Gina”*) aboard Pegasus. Makes me want to rewatch those Season 2 episodes where Pegasus first appears — the treatment of Gina, and her final confrontation with Cain, take on a whole new light now.
  


• We were even treated to a very cleverly inserted tie-in to the Season 3 cliffhanger (where Kara says she's going to show them the way to Earth) and the Season 4 previews (which shows a straightjacketed Kara lying in a cell screaming “We're going the wrong way!”). In Razor, the first Cylon hybrid warns Kendra that Kara Thrace will lead humanity to ruin. Cylon trick? Religious dementia? I'll tell you what it is — it's another huge brick in the wall of What's Going On that Season 4 has to hurdle. And unlike Lost, which deals with its own walls of mystery by building new walls to try and distract us, I have a feeling Battlestar is going to crash us headlong into that One Big Wall. Which is exactly why Season 4 is, and probably has to be, the last season.
  


• Finally, and best of all, we got to see some classic 1978 Cylons. The disc-shaped Raiders, the shiny synth-voiced Centurions (for all American males my age, the gold standard of cool robots), and oh yes, they even gave us the line “By your command.” With relish. It was a love letter to those of us so geekily enamored of that show that we can still remember the correct 7-switch sequence required to launch a Colonial Viper.*

OK, I'm ready for Season 4 now. Let the frak begin.

* I've read that the name “Gina” is a wink at the fanboys so fanatically devoted to the original series that they totally discount the new series out of hand, referring to it amongst themselves as “Gino” (Galactica In Name Only). Like them, I was skeptical when I first read about this “re-imagining” of the original, but now I find it almost incomprehensible that there could be any holdouts left. This show has so thoroughly transcended the original, that to still be miffed over the gender of Starbuck seems like the zenith of petty quibbling. They're only cheating themselves.

After all, if you're going to pick up a series 20 years after the original was canceled, you have to bring the show forward (again, see Next Generation).