Steampunk Galactica 1 spoilers

[Mark S. Ogilvie]

It's funny when I was a kid growing up watching BSG and Buck Rogers I didn't realize at the time that Buck Rogers was in a sense a reboot. Same premise as the old one really, man out of time, but updated with special effects and attitudes. Dated looking now, for that matter dated then, but I didn't think about reboots back then. Perhaps because I was too young and there didn't seem to be that many. Star Wars, Battle Star Galactica, Star Trek... they were all in their first runs and I was too young to realize that they'd most like be as re-invented as Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon sooner or later. Is that a sign of age? That you recognize that anything can be re-imagined in another form? Never did I think while watching Battlestar Galactice at the time that it would be redone in later years. I did guess at the time that it -like just about any science fiction show I liked- wouldn't last more than a season or two. That just seemed to be the way things were. Steam Punk Galactica 1880 is like that but instead of moving forward everything moves backward and then sideways. I can see the appeal of steam punk, when I look at the old Flash Gordon strips just about all the planets Flash landed on had a European feel to them. Steam punk Galactica has all the characters but with new designs and relationships. And the characters themselves have been tweaked somewhat. Adama is sterner, more aristocratic than he ever was in the original show. Baltar is still the villain, but he created the cylons to win a war against a race of ovids and when he was refused the right to rule over Caprica (a city not a planet this time), he used the cylons to blow it up. Capturing Apollo in the process causing Athena to go find an exiled Starbuck to get him back and running into pirate queens Sheeba and Cassiopea. (Personally I would have loved to have seen Jane Seymour as a pirate queen back then). Like I said the characters are here, the situation is a bit different and I hope they don't put Starbuck into the roll of Han Solo permanently. It's all intriguing enough to make me come back for the next issue anyway.