Why Battlestar Kicks Trek's Ass Half Way to the Crab Nebula

[television]

Time again for me to wax poetic on Battlestar Galactica. Top ten reasons it's better than Star Trek. Some very small spoilers here, mainly from the first season.

10. The technology - the mixture of low-tech and high-tech is a nice touch; it makes the machines on Battlestar look real and "used."

9. Specialist Cally - played by Nicki Clyne. Hey! I don't care what you say. Battlestar has her; Trek didn't. Score one for BSG.

8. No technobabble - Related to point 10, Battlestar doesn't allow itself to get bogged down by pseudo-science in a misguided effort to explain its technology.

7. Long story arc - Each episode practically picks up where the last one left off, and virtually all plot lines are ongoing. For drop-in viewers, this is murder, but I love it.

6. Politics - Dissent, factions; cultures, religions; media, propaganda: real down-and-dirty politics, which was almost completely absent from Trek.

5. Ethical dilemmas - An ethical or moral dilemma in Trek is when the correct moral choice is very difficult to follow; in Battlestar, it's when you have no frackin' idea what the correct moral choice is in the first place.

4. Characters with problems and secrets - In Trek, nobody seemed to have any major problems or secrets, on the level of, for example, Tigh's alcoholism or Kara's role in Zack's death - or if they did, they came out and were mostly solved before the episode ended.

3. Dynamics of power, authority, and leadership - For a leader to take real power, the followers must give their support. I don't think this complex dynamic between leaders and followers was ever fully understood in Trek.

2. Decisions with consequences - Battlestar episodes don't all end with a "resetting" of the characters and their relationships.

1. No contrived problems and solutions - Trek had a bad habit of setting up artificial problems that would be solved, by the end of the episode, with some pseudo-scientific hack, or a parlour trick. Battlestar avoids the easy and pat solutions because, as in real life, they don't usually exist (and when they do, they're not usually stories worth telling).