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1. It’s Science Fiction. You can say “it’s just a drama that happens to take place in space,” but the main conflict/plot — and most of the inter-/intra-personal conflict — comes right out of a Science Fiction premise. If describing it this way brings an audience to Science Fiction who normally wouldn’t chance it, then great, but this show is asking Big Questions About Humanity and what it means to be human, the kinds of questions Science Fiction poses all the time.

2. Starbuck, in all her frakked-up craziness.

3. Jamie Bamber’s perfectly amazing fake American accent.

4. It portrays a polytheistic society, and doesn’t try to make the case that this kind of religion led to their destruction. The Colonials didn’t create the Cylon “toasters” because they’re polytheistic, they created them because humans make mistakes all the time. It’s easy to see how our own largely monotheistic society could create the same technology and seeing that comparison is part of the show’s Big Question About Humanity.

5. Starbuck, in all her frakked-up craziness.

6. The multicultural crew of the Galactica: We get to see characters portrayed by such diverse actors as Grace Park, Edward James Olmos, Kandyse McClure, Alessandro Juliani, Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, and Rekha Sharma.

7. Jamie Bamber’s guns. (Does this mean I have to make this a Gaze post as well?)

8. All the strong female characters in the show playing every role from president to fighter pilot and press secretary to mother and priestess. I was ready to get indignant at the last episode’s development with Rekha Sharma’s character Tory Foster — that the other three male Cylons expected her to sleep with Baltar to get information from him — but then Baltar had a real human moment and created a great story reversal. I’d still rather see a female character at the helm of that kind of reversal though, and hope I get it with Starbuck at some point.

9. Waiting to see who else is suddenly going to pop up in Baltar’s demented head.

10. Starbuck, in all her frakked-up craziness.

11. For Science Fiction, it’s actually pretty low-tech.

12. Dogfighting in space has no sound because there is no atmosphere in which sound waves can travel. Doh. (Take that, Lucas.)

13. The writers just plain rock. I want to be one when I grow up. They “re-imagined” one of my favorite childhood shows into the dark, edgy drama I knew it had at its heart once stripped of the cheese-factor.

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