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Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion by David Bassom
01/04/2006 . Source: Tomas L. Martin 
pub: Titan Books. 157 page illustrated softcover. Price: £14.95 (UK), $14.95 (US). ISBN: 1-84576-097-2. Buy from Amazon US - Buy from Amazon UK
nb: US titles may only be available from Amazon US, and UK titles from Amazon UK. check out websites: www.titanbooks.com
As the superlative Science Fiction TV series 'Battlestar Galactica' starts filming its third season, a number of tie-ins have begun to emerge following the success of the SciFi channel show.
'Battlestar Galactica' was remade in 2003 loosely based on a 1970s show of the same name but has surpassed everyone's expectations with a gritty, realism approach where character and suspense are more important than flashy and ridiculous pseudo-science.
David Bassom's Official Companion to the show covers all of Season One and the preceding mini-series. It's a pretty standard format, an introduction to the show and how it came to be, an episode guide following the minutia of the series and a guide to the characters and the actors that play them. At the end, there's a short part on the production design and visual effects. All of this information is interspersed with plenty of colour and black and white photos from the show.
The really appealing thing about 'Battlestar Galactica' is its realism. The fact that the society on board the Battlestar and the ragtag fleet is as fleshed out as the politics of 'The West Wing' and the thriller intrigue of '24'. The physics and science is more industrial than flashy, trying its best to keep out of the way of the most important part: the story and the characters that create story.
Deus ex machina involving future tech are kept to a bare minimum. A great relief from shows like 'Star Trek' where the story problem is solved often by someone twizzling a knob and spouting some technobabble. The central issues in this series are instead based around a character's decision, the careful balance of characters neither all good or all evil, but all somewhere in the human space in between.
The Companion really shows the level of commitment Ron Moore and his team put into creating this fine balance and there's a fair amount of honest insights into the creative process, including a large amount of interesting tit-bits on why an episode was written in the way it was.
This book is interesting for the fan, but like most tie-ins not really essential. Personally, I'll be saving my money for the release of the Season 2 DVD box set instead so I can relive the action of 'Battlestar Galactica' by watching it again.
Tomas L. Martin
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