[Lyrical]

FYI, they are showing the most recent season of Battlestar Galactica today (Thursday on Sci-Fi).

Is anyone else pumped that the new season of SG-1, Atlantis and Galactica starts this Friday night? Beside football, this is the only tv I watch all week. If you all will remember how the season ended:

SG-1: The SG-1 faces a new menace now that they have defeated their old foes. Their new foe is called the Orroi (sp?). They are religious zealots that demand that those they come into contact follow the Orroi or be judged (usually through incurable plagues). Their priests look like some of the depictions that Moses has been given in some movies (cloak, crook and book). But their robes and skin are a bleached white. The priests have shown to be able to ignore bullet blasts and kill people in the order of thousands with the wave of a hand through wasting diseases.

Towards the end of the season, it is looking bad for Earth in that many of its allies and enemies are now blindly following the Orroi. The Orroi repeatedly bring judgement to wherever they go - they either have blind servants or kill you with plague. It starts to look like they might have powers on an old-testament biblical proportion (incurable plagues, etc.) and that they are unbeatable.

But it is found out later that they are just like the Ascendants, and that they are faking it. They aren't gods but have evolved. They gain power from those that worship them. And those that follow the Orroi are not being set free, but leached of their life energy. Supposedly all that will be left of their followers will be lifeless zombies. The SG team is warned by an Ascendant that the Orroi will be unbeatable if they keep gaining more people as power batteries. They must be stopped now if they ever will be stopped.

The season ends with Earth under a plague. And the trailers for this season hint at Earth being occupied and controlled by the Orroi in 2006.

Before the last two seasons, I used to hate this show. I thought it was boring. I only watched it as a warm-up to SG-1 and Galactica. But with the team changes and coming occupation of Earth, it looks like they are being a bit more dynamic.

This is now my second favorite show on Fridays now (to Battlestar Galactica).

Atlantis: This used to be my favorite show, but now I can barely stand it. When they first crossed through the portal, it was cool because they were hopelessly outnumbered, had very weapons and spent most of the first season trying to find a power source. To me, the second season floundered for direction a bit. Earth figured out how to open a portal, and now they have a ton of resources again. I liked this show when they were cut off from Earth, and boldly going where no man was going. Now it is starting to feel like the early years of Deep Space Nine (zzzzzzz). All they need to do is add in some Ferengi.

Anyway, the show ends up with the team trapped in a Wraith hive ship and under interrogation. Pretty boring in my opinion. For some reason, if they all died, and I really wouldn't care much. The show needs to find some direction, imho.

Galactica; My favorite show, as I watched the original when I was 7 or 8. In this last season, just like in the original series, the Battlestar Galactica and Battlestar Pegasus meet up. In the original series, Adama and Cain clashed for several episodes. I really doubt that the Adama/Cain story arc will be over in one episode. In the original, Adama was Cain's superior, but in the re-write, Cain is Adama's superior. So will Adama blindly send Galactica into battle with the Pegasus, since he is lower in the chain of command? He already has followed her orders by allowing her to split up his command staff. Even Starbuck and Apollo are being moved to the Pegasus.

The show ends with Cain saying that two of Galactica's men will be put to death. She has the two of them brought to her ship. In a tense moment, Adama says that they should be tried by a jury of her peers. She refuses, and he sends the fleet to get them back. Cain scrambles her fighters, and all of the sudden we have a Mexican standoff.

The show has been interesting, but I wonder where they will take the story now that the remake has gone longer than the original did. The original only went 22 episodes. It was cancelled not due to ratings (it was in the top 20 of all shows on tv at the time), but the price of each show. Before computer graphics, the special effects were costly, and the network said the show was not as profitable as its peers because of this.

When they ended the show, they tried to make a Battlestar Galactica: Earth version. This show was a total flop, as the fans didn't really care what happened once they got to Earth. Most of the books written after the show ended (alot of them written by the original Apollo) ignore the fact that they went to Earth. As I understand it, some of them depict that the fleet is still searching for Earth, decades later.

Will the shows writers continue to have them roam the stars for years and years, knowing that it is probably certain death for them to actually reach Earth? When will they start bringing in charachters like Lucifer? And how will they develop the point that the cylons are more interested in having sex with the humans than thay are in killing them? And will Sharon (the cylon) turn on the fleet eventually (as her programming kickc in)? When will we get to see what a cylon/human baby looks like?

These are my favorite shows on tv. It is too bad that they only time they have great programming is on Friday nights, and the other nights of the week we have to be subjected to cheesy b movies like "Chupacabra." Maybe one day they will start producing other regular shows for other nights.