Hope for the Future in the Penny Press?

You've no doubt already seen the issue: Entertainment Weekly's cover-story about the new Star Trek movie coming out this spring ... the new director is interviewed, the cast and crew are interviewed, Leonard Nimoy is interviewed, and EW drops various hints about whether or not the new movie is a warp-fueled piece of tribble-crap. The magazine seems prepared to like the movie. Star Trek fans should be prepared to hate it.

A Hollywood contact sends along a small, rough clip, something for which she could certainly lose her job, but she knows I'm one of the biggest fans of the original Star Trek alive, so her heart was in the right place. No way to know if this clip will even be in the finished movie (judging by its content, I'm guessing it will), but even its brief duration glaringly demonstrates two things:

1. The performance given by general-casting nobody Chris Pine as James T. Kirk is amazing, as daring a re-invention of the character made famous (or infamous) by William Shatner as Zachary Quinto's embodiment of Spock is a slavish imitation of Nimoy. Pine's comment in EW - that he went to boarding school, lives in the Valley, and is basically a preppy douchebag ("I wouldn't follow me into battle," he says), is undercut by the fairly adoring comments of his cast-mates and blown out of the water by his performance.

2. This movie is so far outside of the precious continuity rabid Star Trek fans so treasure that even a Medusan navigator couldn't find the way back to the old Paramount 'bible' for the movies. Even the little snippet I saw gigantically contradicted some pretty big items in that continuity; if this movie is a hit, about half the episodes of the original series will be violently undermined.

If the movie is a hit ... that's the big question. Can a Star Trek movie be a hit if it pisses off the majority of Star Trek fans? Aren't Star Trek fans the audience for such movies? Director J. J. Abrams says he's making a movie not for fans of Star Trek but for fans of movies, and although virtually all his quotes on the subject sound encouraging (especially his mention of wanting to "make optimism cool again"), I have to question the wisdom of the studio letting him do whatever the Hell he wants to Star Trek's past in order to try to give it a future. What about those of us who've watched and loved the show from the beginning? Who've maybe loved the way its lore grew more and more complex with each new set of hands, like a weird, ever-expanding tapestry? The two episodes of the original series most badly violated by this new movie (invalidated by it, really: if the movie 'really' happened, they couldn't have, and vice versa) are two of the best episodes ... was it really impossible to make a new Star Trek movie without effectively telling Star Trek fans those episodes weren't good enough to stand unaltered?

In the world of Star Trek, no detail is "real" unless it's been filmed. No amount of fiction, fan fiction, or speculation outweighs something done for the TV screen, and movies tend to outweigh even that (the exception being Star Trek V, which fans tend to hate and ostracize from the 'canon,' even though it wasn't all that bad a movie). Looked at only from that perspective, there are things we don't 'know': the precise details of how Kirk took command of the U.S.S. Enterprise, the precise details of his first meetings with his legendary crew: Spock, Scotty, McCoy, Chekhov, Sulu, and Uhura, etc. It was an obvious and excellent idea for Abrams to center his movie on that early period (somebody has been insisting that this was the way to go for about, oh, twenty years ... sigh ... studios never listen ...) - after all, this is the essential myth that started it all, the first and best crew of the Enterprise (not to mention the template for all later crews of all the various Trek incarnations). The story of how it all began has enormous potential.



And Star Trek fans have to be prepared to make sacrifices. The last two movies tanked at the box office, and the last TV incarnation was cancelled - the first series to suffer such a fate since the original back in the 60s. If the franchise is ever going to be popular again, it seems obvious some things will need to change. For instance, fans might have to swallow some retro-fitting of character timelines. In current Trek continuity, that legendary crew don't share much of a common past before the Enterprise. We get the sense that Kirk and McCoy are old friends, but McCoy doesn't seem to know much about the ways of Starfleet Academy and certainly doesn't seem to have known Kirk there. Both Scotty and McCoy seem older than Kirk, and Scotty has served on a wide variety of vessels. Spock served with Captain Pike on board the Enterprise for a decade, for Pete's sake, and given the previous billets for Spock, Kirk, McCoy, and Scotty (nothing for sure about Uhura), the most likely inference is that Chekhov and Sulu were still midshipmen at the Academy when the others were out and about serving in the Fleet.

The plot scenario this naturally suggests - a brash young Captain Kirk taking command of the Enterprise from burned-out Captain Pike and 'inheriting' a crew of old comrades already in place (taking with him his best friend Gary Mitchell and calling McCoy as soon as Enterprise's old surgeon Dr. Boyce retires) - has been written up memorably in the endless volumes of Trek fiction (anybody care to name the book?), and it has lots of dramatic potential. Problem is, all that potential is fairly subtle - the resultant movie could be made to be extremely good (Mister Roberts, anyone?), but hoo-boy, it's not the movie J. J. Abrams has made, and if Star Trek fans can't accept that and embrace it anyway, how on Earth can the movie succeed?

Star Trek Excelsior: Forged in Fire

Our book today is Star Trek Excelsior: Forged in Fire by Michael Martin and Andy Mangels, and it's devilish hard going, truth be told.

Star Trek fiction has fallen on hard times just in general, and there's little can be done to remedy it. Paramount is gearing up for a rervivification of the entire franchise through a new movie (plans are already afoot for a new ongoing TV series, starring pretty much everbody it should never star but promising guest-appearances by what is now a sizeable population of Star Trek veterans), and so sanitization efforts are at a near-Lucas level of least-common-denominatoring.

Which is probably as good a reason as any why novels as relentlessly dumb as Forged in Fire so regularly appear. The fault can't lie elsewhere: the material - that unexplored era between the retirement of Captain James T. Kirk and the heyday of the Enterprise-B under the lily-livered command of Captain Baldy and his wimpy crew - is first-rate, essentially one protracted treatise on the lingering after-effects of the Age of Kirk. And at least part of the writing itself can't be faulted - Michael Martin is a stranger to us, but Andy Mangels we know from of old, and a smarter and more capable writer you could hardly find. The restrictions placed on the writing team by the corporate powers that be cannot be known but must be reckoned severe, if only because otherwise a writer like Andy Mangels wouldn't write a boring word to save his life.

As it is, Forged in Fire is an impossibly wooden affair, so ridiculously dependent on Trekker insider knowledge that no non-Star Trek fan could possibly derive a scintilla of enjoyment from it. And lest there be any non-Trekkers out there wondering about that sentence, let us assure you: there was once a time when Star Trek novels were written not only for fans but for general science fiction readers as well.

That time, in a book like Forged in Fire, seems very distant indeed. This book not only makes heavy-handed references to major and miniscule events in dozens of episodes of four different incarnations of Star Trek, it does so without contextualizing them at all (we defy a non-Trekker to read this book and have the first idea who 'Emony' is, for instance - we know, and Star Trek fans will know, but if nobody else knows, what kind of book can this possibly be?), and it goes even further: it also makes heavy-handed and uncontextualized references to Star Trek books. In other words, unless you've been assidulously keeping up with all things Star Trek, you don't have a targ's chance in Sto-Vo-Kor of understanding this novel.

Perhaps it's an awareness of this state of affairs that's led our two authors to endlessly explain and re-explain literally everything their characters say or do or are, as if to apologize for how egregiously they've left those readers out in the dark. But as a result, the average reader will find himself shuttling between saying 'I don't have any idea what you're talking about' and 'you've already told me that, many times.' It's like our authors - or their corporate overseers -don't think the average reader can retain any information at all for more than five or six pages. When Vulcan ambassador Sarek is first introduced, we're told all those things: he's Vulcan, he's an ambassador, and his name is Sarek. Even non-Trekkers who don't know that this is the Sarek, father of Mr. Spock, still have brains - and yet despite this, every single time Sarek reappears, we're helpfully told that he's a) the Vulcan b) ambassador c) Sarek. Every single time.

And what about Captain Sulu, that entirely spotlight-worthy figure who must necessarily be at the heart of any 'Star Trek - Lost Years' venture? Well, there's a scene in the book where he's wished a Happy New Year. Here's the finisher:

Sulu smiled gently. 'Ganjitsu,' he said, using the Japanese word for 'New Year's Day,' which never failed to make him think of the namesake border world he and his parents had lived for a few short years during his childhood.

Which might sound charming and picturesque, except that by the time that passage happens, we've already been told all of its ingredients - Ganjitsu, its Japanese meaning, the fact that it was the name of a colony world on which Sulu and his parents lived - five times. Let's clarify: Every time we're told anything about the childhood of Captain Sulu, we're told everything about the childhood of Captain Sulu. It's an impossibly tedious bind in which to put a reader, but then, our authors have a complicated story to tell.

The first matter of vital importance on which readers need to be briefed is Klingon knobs (hello Beepy! Thanks for joining us, but alas, it's not what you were hoping for). You see, in the original Star Trek series back in the '60s, the Klingons were for the most part made to look like a suburban bigot's caricature of Chinese Communists - they all dressed the same, and they were swarthy with bushy eyebrows. In the original series, Captain Kirk crossed swords with three main Klingons: Koloth, played by William Campbell, Kang, played by Michael Ansara, and Kor, played with malevolent fun by the great John Colicos.

OK, so far so good. The original series gets cancelled (despite some vigorous letter-writing campaigns), bleak times pass, and lo, 'Star Trek - The Motion Picture' debuted in theaters and opened with a scene featuring Klingons - only hold the phone! These Klingon had long manes of hair and knobs all over their foreheads! In taking advantage of the lavish special effects budget Paramount provided to make the Klingons look like aliens, the creators of the first Star Trek movie opened up a shit-can of problems for all the nerds to follow. Because, nerds being what they are, their first question would of course be: why did the first batch of Klingons we saw look different from the second? What happened in their society, or their genetics, to account for the change? The answer 'because the movie had a huge budget and the TV series didn't' is beyond the pale even to mention to such people - you must provide answers.

For a blissful period, the official world of Star Trek - that is, the movies and the TV shows - just blithely refused to do this. The third (and greatest) of the Star Trek movies, 'The Search for Spock,' featured loads of Klingons, including a very droll performance as the villain of the piece by Christopher Lloyd. The sixth movie also feature loads of Klingons, including a bonny villain-turn by Christopher Plummer ... but still no mention of the knobs. And by that point there was a Klingon showing up every week on the bridge of the Enterprise, no less (Lieutenant Worf, redoubtably played by Michael Dorn), all with no words spent on knobs.

But when knobgate broke, it was nerdishly bound to break big, and so it did: on 'Deep Space Nine,' Worf confronted the question directly, when the classic episode 'Trials and Tribble-lations' brought him and his comrades literally (well, digitally anyway) face to face with those old-style Klingons with their bushy eyebrows and sweaty faces. When faced with the confusions of his comrades, Worf clammed up, so fans had to wait a bit. Star Trek Voyager, in the meantime, made things ever so much worse.

In a very good episode called "Flashback," Voyager's security officer, 100-something-year old Vulcan Tuvok begins experiencing, you guessed it, flashbacks to his days as a callow youth serving aboard - to come full circle - the Excelsior of Captain Sulu. The show's producers scored a casting coup by getting the wonderful George Takei to reprise his role as Sulu, and as an added bonus, they got Michael Ansara, who played the Klingon Kang in the original series, to reprise that role as well. So there the two Star Trek veterans were, face to face again after all these years. Fan heaven, you'd think.

But you'd be wrong! And why? Because right there on Kang's head were knobs! So now not only did nerdy fans have to explain why post-original Klingons had knobs on their heads, they had to explain how it could be that one of those knobless Klingons subsequently managed to acquire them.

Early Star Trek novels had come up with a perfectly simple explanation: the Klingon Empire was large and encompassed many worlds - and many species. It made sense that soldiers would be volunteer - or be drafted - from many of those worlds - hence the difference in appearance. But that explanation goes right out the nearest airlock if the same guy first doesn't have knobs and then later does.

In other words, somebody now had a ripe, redolent job of explaining to do. And that task was made three times harder when the Star Trek series Deep Space Nine came out with a first-rate episode called 'Blood Oath.' The premise of the episode was pure gold: one of the crew of Deep Space Nine was Jadzia Dax (played with wooden incompetence by the unbelievably gorgeous Terry Farrell), a Trill whose sentient internal parasite (like everything else Star Trek, it's a long story) had been alive a century ago and shared a blood oath with - full circle again - Kang, Kor, and Koloth. The show's producers scored another casting coup - they got all three actors to reprise their Klingon roles (Colicos in particular is having a whale of time and acting everybody else under the table in the process) - all with knobs. So now it wasn't just Kang, it was everybody, and something needed to be done.



The writers of Star Trek Enterprise finally stepped into the breach; they fielded a two-part episode that struck the question head-on (so to speak): something about a genetic retro-virus, biological terrorism, et-cetera, et-cetera. As is customary in extended melodramas like this one, the eventual solution was tedium itself compared to the ruckus that originally caused it.

That was the root explanation Star Trek Enterprise came up with: somebody had created a retro-virus in a lab that had smoothed the knobs of every Klingon exposed to it (and of course, as is the way with retro-viruses, their children). That would account for why Kang, Kor, and Koloth would have looked the way they did when Captain Kirk first encountered them. The only question it would leave unanswered was how the dickens Klingons like Kor, Kang and Koloth got their knobs back.

That's where Forged in Fire comes in, and that's why it ought to work so much better than it does. This book tells the detailed story of the taking of that blood oath - by young Curzon Dax and the three Klingon commanders, Kang, Kor, and Koloth, in the heyday of Captain Sulu of the Excelsior.

Three great Klingon captains, a timeless blood-oath, a piecemeal-immortal Starfleet officer, one of Captain Kirk's legendary crew, the topicality of biological weapons and cosmetic bioengineering ... all the ingredients were assembled for great drama. And the really frustrating part of all this is that somebody like Andy Mangels, if given time and a free hand, could have made a great Star Trek novel out of this raw material (this isn't to put blame on Michel Martin at all, who might, for all we know, be just as clever as Mangels).

We believe what got in the way was corporate influence, probably with a touch of nerdy fan anality thrown in. Every single thing in the book is explained at length, which is fine if you're talking about warp-core dynamics but infuriating if you're talking about, say, the act of eating, or walking. Sulu is made to be the soul of geniality because Takei is the soul of geniality - but with the possible exception of Tom Jones, souls of geniality seldom make compelling central heroes. An older and wiser Doctor Christine Chapel provides some ersatz sass as a kind of Doctor McCoy stand-in (the Excelsior's own medical officer, Doctor Klass, is tantalizingly unrealized). We're told that Sulu's old comrade Pavel Chekhov will be joining the crew, but he doesn't show up for this novel (nor does Tuvok himself, also promised for later). Most of the new characters are water-weak cardboard-cutouts who couldn't maintain the interest of a small child. No, the salvation of the book, given its central plot, would have to be the three Klingons and Curzon Dax, a character so often mentioned on Deep Space Nine as a memorable curmudgeon that the reader of Forged in Fire might hope his presence would enliven proceedings. But no - despite a couple of verbal posturings, he's as wooden as the rest.

Here's a case in point: there's one scene two-thirds of the way through Forged in Fire where Curzon Dax is alone with these three great Klingon captains whose respect - even friendship - he's only just begun to win. While all four of them were being tortured by the bad guy (in a deliciously vicious scene we think was entirely the creation of Mangels), these big, gruff Klingons learned that the young man they were coming to like was a walking host to a sentient parasite centuries old. In this scene where they're all alone again for the first time, the Klingons reluctantly and awkwardly raise the question, and Kurzon tries to explain, and the scene falls flat. The scene falls flat. Give us a cup of dry red wine and one hour, and we could craft that scene in a way that would make it a song of embarrassment and culture clash and dry humor. And not just us alone: hundreds of Star Trek fans could write that scene with equal aplomb; Hell, Mangels could do it with ease. The fact that it doesn't happen - and that none of its counterpart scenes ever happen - is the singular strangulation of fanboy novels such as this. They not only rely entirely on nerdy minutiae, on virginal computer-dwellers who just want pieces of information there on the page, not drama, but they're also hampered by corporate 'suits' who've never read a science fiction novel and are only protecting a franchise.

There can't be any other explanation for why Star Trek fiction stinks so bad these days, why it's so wooden and self-referential. Forged in Fire feels very much like a trial balloon: it's possible there'll be other installments in the adventures of Captain Sulu. We can only hope they'll shake off their explanatory duties and breathe free, but the prospects are slim.

SteveSees! Life-sucking fiends of sci-fi!

Yes, gentle sentients, you read that right: SteveSEES!

Call it a little experiment, nothing more. If I enjoy this sort of thing half so much as I do the other, perhaps I'll do it more regularly.

Certainly there are fewer groundrules than obtain at Stevereads! There, I am an all-knowing, even saintly overlord both feared and beloved, incapable of error or contradiction.

No so here! As some of you may know, I watch a great deal of TV - shows, repeats, VCR tapes, DVDs. And it's not mere background noise for writing or reading - I'm a full-throated enthusiast of TV, have a very high regard for the very large number of very talented people who do work in the medium (I came close to JOINING such people, a long time ago, when a friend of mine invited me to join the writing staff of a now-forgotten show called "Parker Lewis Can't Lose" - I quite sensibly declined, since in addition to deeply disliking the climate of LA, I'm also not that funny).

I hate the snobbery of 'Kill Your TV' bumper-stickers in Cambridge. I hate the knee-jerk snobbery so many people show toward the medium. I can understand if people more pressed for time than I am (I sleep freakishly little) rule it out of their lives for practical reasons. I'd argue that these people ought to train themselves to concentrate on more than one thing simultaneously - it's not a hard trick to learn (or I couldn't have mastered it myself), and it can double the amount of things you get DONE in an evening. But still, I understand if people want to cut it out of their lives just so they'll have time for homework and socializing and, in the case of the pretty people, even sex.

As with books, so with TV: I sift and sniff all the time for good stuff. TV doesn't have any MORE crap than any other medium - at least, that's my steadfast belief - and it's not the fault of anybody working in the industry that their overlords are venal and stupid. Most of us have venal and stupid overlords, after all - it doesn't make US venal and stupid. Good people everywhere are always trying to do good work. I like to look for their work on TV.

Fair warning: I also like crap, for its own sake.

Unlike over at Stevereads, here I'm not infallible. True, I've watched a very large amount of TV. And true, I put faith in the tenets of my own aesthetics (as everybody does). And true, I'll very tenaciously make my case for anything I like. But there's no authority here, only gamesome debate.

There's a good reason for this. The best TV critic I've ever read (the best pop culture critic just in general, and oh my, far and away the best movie critic) is currently silent, fed up with the litigious cynicism of the age.
In the meantime, here I am! Fallible, contentious, and happy to be both!

Our opening fair dates from last Sunday and is very comfortingly situated in the realm of science fiction, which suits me right down to the ground.

The extreme old-school science fiction (I trust none of you will commence a-quibbling about what constitutes science fiction! Listen carefully: if the AXIAL PREMISES on which your fiction depends are a) internally consistent and b) in any way different from the laws of observable reality, you're writing science fiction - and yet, I'm aware of the fact that under that definition, there's no difference between science fiction and fantasy... that's because there ISN'T any difference between the two) and the extreme new-school science fiction, head-to-head!

First up was 'Masterpiece Theater's new production of 'Dracula.'

As many of you will know, I deeply love Bram Stoker's novel, and I'm always eager to see it get adapted, especially with a special effects budget.

Although, even without one, Bela Lugosi managed to be the quintessential Count, urbane yet threatening, his malevolent face plastered on the covers of all the BEST editions of the novel.

'Masterpiece Theater' is to be commended for the idea of embracing science fiction, especially since their track record is so different. These are the people, after all, who gave us 'The First Churchills' and 'Upstairs Downstairs' and 'Brideshead Revisited' and 'I, Claudius.'

Their 'Dracula' is a curious affair. An almost complete dramatic failure, but a curious affair.

With a work as frequently dramaticized as 'Dracula,' you have to ask how many points there are in favor or against any new rendition. You gradually accustom yourself to the fact that your beloved work will NEVER be fully realized on any kind of video-screen, and you start counting casualties from that moment.

(Oh! The high hopes I had for Francis Ford Coppola's 'Dracula'! A strong, unconventional cast - by anybody's reckoning, Gary Oldman is an interesting choice to play the Count - a director capable of greatness, a comparatively unlimited special effects budget ... and when I saw it in the theater, I was bitterly disappointed. The directing is awful, the acting is mostly awful - of course leading the pack is Keenu "I know where the BASTUD sleeps!" Reeves, but there's also Anthony Hopkins, hearing and completely missing every cue he's offered, and Winona Rider, trying - and failing - to act like somebody who HASN'T been having sex since she was 8 - and the special effects were, well, weirdly used. But every subsequent viewing has made me like it more, so maybe Coppola knew what he was doing after all)

In Bram Stoker's perpetually underrated novel, the truth of the matter is PLENTY dramatic enough: an undying Carpathian count has set his eyes on England and is (legally, Stoker's little masterstroke) buying up derelict properties all over London, places that will serve as nesting-spots to house an increasing brood of undead.

You'll scarcely find any of that in the Masterpiece Theater production. Instead, there's a Count who's the focus of some kind of evil religion, and there's a Lord Holmwood who agrees to finance the Count's move to London because he's been lead to believe a blood transfusion from the Count will cure him of his syphilis - because as long as he's infected, he refuses to sleep with his new wife.

Stoker's plot is of course much better than this nonsense. In the original, Dracula's wants are elemental: he wants a new hunting-ground, one he can eventually come to rule as absolutely as he did Castle Dracula.

In this new 'adaptation,' it's extremely hard to know exactly WHAT Count Dracula wants. He detains Jonathan Harker at his dilipidated keep in Transylvania (this production has no idea what to do with Harker, so he dies early), but all he talks about is how Englishmen don't really believe in God anymore.

There's no good acting in this production (a shame, since David Suchet - who gets the here thankless role of Van Helsing - is entirely wasted), and that's curious in and of itself. Tom Burke turns in the most reliable (though still mediocre) performance as a thoroughly heroic John Seward (although since this production lacks Renfield entirely, it would have a hard time accounting for Seward's presence - if it bothered to try, that is) Dan Stevens shows a precocious predilection to chew scenery as Lord Holmwood.

And the biggest curiosity of all is in the center role: Marc Warren as Count Dracula.

Some of you will remember Warren as Private Blithe, from the great, the epic 'Band of Brothers.' Blithe lost his ability to see, temporarily, because he couldn't stand the things he was seeing. Blithe was a perfect 'wise fool' for the 'Band of Brothers' universe (at least, as long as such a simplistic contrivance could last in that universe), and Warren is wonderful in the role.

He's not wonderful as Dracula. This is no doubt the fault of the material, but nevertheless: this is a Count you're never either afraid of or sympathetic with. During the show's setpiece scene, where the Count erupts from Lucy Westerna's bed to, um, pleasure her right next to her sleeping, fully clothed new husband, the viewer has NO idea what's going on or what to think ... sad for her? Happy for him? Sad for both? Happy for both? Icky for watching?

It doesn't matter anyway, because there's no drama in the production. You're never for a moment compelled to watch. And sure enough, in due time and without much effort, Dracula dies (along with a requisite and clunky 'or DOES he?' final scene that's easily the worst thing in 'Masterpiece Theater's history). There's never any of the best parts of the novel - the ineluctable sense of growing doom, the gradual, seduction-like process by which Dracula infects his female prey, and most of all, the growing sense of comraderie between Van Helsing and his young friends against an evil neither they nor the world has ever seen before.

But fortunately, this tepid Dracula wasn't the only consumer of men's lives and souls on offer last Sunday, because as all of you should know, Sunday night is when 'Battlestar Galactica' airs.

Ah, I can hear the groans from here! All you Cantabridgian TV-snobs out there, matched in your legions by all the science fiction snobs out there!
Nevertheless, that's exactly what I'm talking about: 'Battlestar Galactica,' the best show currently airing on TV.

In last Sunday's episode, the Fleet takes on large number of refugees, including a great many Sagitarrons, who don't believe in modern medicine.

The refugees start falling seriously ill, and in their midst is a Caprican doctor played (with customary aplomb) by Bruce Davison, a doctor on a personal vendetta against Sagitarrons, although it requires our heroic Lt. Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) to detect it and root it out.

Far be it for me to criticize a true-blue (well, true-maple) Canadian actor who embraces science fiction (ulp ... where would ANY of us be without Captain Kirk?) (and certainly he has big - literally, they're enormous - shoes to fill in the whole Canuck-on-board-Galactica contest, after our late long-lost Billy was killed off, Billy played by goofy Canadian stoner Paul Campbell, who's currently enjoying the benefits of Youtube - snippets from his new pilot "Nobody's Watching" can be seen there and led - unprecedentedly, I believe, to the show's being given a shot at the fall lineup) but it bears pointing out that Penikett can't really hold his own with Davison, Edward James Olmos as Admiral Adama, and the indomitable Donnelly Rhodes as Doc Cottle.

No matter, though - the episode is great enough on its own to swallow any such quibbles. As usual, Davison brings depth and plausibility to a role that could, in other hands (coughDeanStockwellcough), have been one-dimensional ethnic-cleansing, with a little mustache-twirling thrown in. And Richard Hatch continues to surprise and delight as Tom Varek - in this case worrying about the effect on the Fleet if Baltar is given a high-profile trial.

At the mention of such a trial - which, we're told, will be followed by hanging the guilty man - viewers can't help but hear a deliberate echo of Saddam Hussein's sham-trial and scandalous execution. That's the glory of this new revamped 'Battlestar Galactica' - it tackles big, real-world issues with exactly the wit and terrier intensity that's a hallmark of the very best science ficiton.

Come to think of it, that might have been what the folks at Masterpiece Theater were thinking, when they imported the whole foreign-religious-fundamentalism theme into their new 'Dracula' ... if so, they, like everybody else, could have benefitted from a close viewing of 'Battlestar Galactica.'