Like most geeks, I hopped on board the 2004 Battlestar Galactica sensation. Like fewer, I was still a stalwart fan of the original series. And perhaps on my own, I still prefer the original to the reboot. The original series was what it was and it did what it was very well. The reboot showed a whole bunch of promise early on and then puttered out before limping to a conclusion. I only made it a few episodes into season three and while I've tried repeatedly to finish the series--starting at the beginning, starting at season three, choosing those episodes people tell me are the best--it never holds my interest. It had great potential but that isn't enough, in my opinion.
Today I was rewatching some episodes of the original series while I worked and a thought popped into my head. In the original series, the cylons were not the folly of man but of a reptilian race that had died out and the cylons were now their own expansionistic empire, a more classic invading "other" like the Mongols. In the new series, the whole "sins of the father" premise features heavily in the seasons I watched. I really liked that notion. It was one of the things that really drew me in early on. But at the same time, the longer the series went, the more the cylons came across as whiny (until the story diverged with the skinjobs and things go weird.)
A trip to Wikipedia to see the rest of the series that I never watched reveals that Earth was populated by a different cylon race thousands of years before that had created their own cylon servant class and the resulting war wiped out the planet. WTF? Man is destined to create cylons? Is that the theme we're going for here? Because how do planets separated by so much distance suffer the same fate?
This kind of bums me out because the purpose of this post began as my own notion of how I would do BSG, which now is too similar to the reboot to be worthwhile to pursue as fan fiction. In my version, the cylons are still the invading other, but they weren't created by a reptilian species, they were created by humans on Earth. Rather than Earth being the 13th colony, it is the origin of the human species and the 12 colonies are just that, 12 colonies. Through the confusion of time, Earth has become a lost colony rather than a homeworld and when the cylons discover and attack the humans, the refugees flee to the lost colony. But when they get there, they discover that it is the origin of not only their species, but of the cylons as well.
Because the reboot did something similar, I don't know if I'd have Earth be wiped out in the resultant war or maybe it would be the cylon homeworld. I won't develop it any further than this post, I think. I love BSG, and I love the potential of the world (fiction-wise) that it's created. I'd love to tell stories there, in my own way. Neither series fully realizes the setting as I'd like to see it. But as soon as you start talking about the final five, I will stop listening because I really don't care. Even so, how earth plays into the setting could be interesting. (Certainly better than a cast off of cylon vs cylon apocalypse or arriving at a planet in the early '80s and knowing all the customs and how to ride a motorcycle.)