Ladies and gentleman, I hate to admit it, but I have an obsession.  Now, I know that as a card-carrying geek, obsession is a familiar thing so this news may not come as a surprise to you, but it has surprised me.  Ok, first I will just say that my obsession is with Battlestar Galactica. The re-imagined version, that is, starring Edward James Olmos and many, many more fantastic actors.  You may be saying to yourself, “what’s the big deal, lots of people are hooked on this show.”  You would be correct, but this is a new obsession for me. 

See, I have another confession to make.  I don’t have cable nor do I have an antenna on my TV.  I got fed up with all the crap that is on the tube about eight years ago and just shut it all off.  I watch only movies now.  I rent, subscribe to Netflix and borrow from the library and I admit to having an insatiable taste for movies.  All movies.  My queue is rarely below 450 movies at a time and just last night I took it back up to the 500 limit.  I do this quite often.  You may not think there are 500 movies you want to watch in your lifetime, but I regularly watch 350 to 400 movies a year.  Every year.  Because of my taste for movies and my disdain of TV I have missed some good stuff, but I’m catching up.

Some of our regular fans may know that I injured my knee recently and have been down and out for recovery.  It isn’t until times like this that someone like me realizes just how empty life can be without TV.  I can only get my movies so fast in the mail and now I can’t drive to rent or borrow movies from the library.  What is a couch potato to do?  Enter, fellow Game-Journal.com editor and pal Reggie to the rescue.  He provided me with lots of DVDs of TV shows that I have missed out on and some that I was nostalgic for.  In the past two months I have plowed through Twin Peaks, Deadwood and Heroes.  I loved them all, but then I started watching Battlestar and my entire world changed.

I will say up front that the show didn’t grab me at first.  I liked the mini-series but thought the first season started out a bit dull.  But then the end of season one came and I was ravenous for the next season and the next and the next.  I am now a junky.  In the span of a week and a half I have watched up to season 4 and I am starting it today.  Don’t give anything away to me, I’ve already read my share of spoilers on-line and want to keep a little bit of suspense.  Yesterday, all I did was read stuff about the show on-line.  I hovered back and forth from Imdb.com to Wikipedia searching for little tidbits about the show and the creators and actors.  I was happy to find some webisodes I missed on Hulu.com, although I haven’t seen them yet, and thrilled to learn there are more movies on the way plus a new series spinning off set 50 years in the past from the Cylon attack.  I feel like a new man.  My faith in TV has been restored and I have been routinely blown away by the cinematic quality of the series, especially the two part season 3 finale. I was in nerd heaven!

I’ve even gotten nostalgic for the past and thrown the entire original series and all the many attempts to revive it into my queue. See, I remember watching Battlestar when I was a little kid, which means I was glued to the set at about the age of 3 or 4, anxious to watch the exploits of Starbuck and crew.  I have always been a nerd.  I used to come home from elementary school to watch Star Trek re-runs, the original series that is.  I even got super-nostalgic and threw Buck Rogers into the mix.  I also was glued to the set watching this show as a kid and while my expectations are not high, I can’t wait to relive some of these childhood shows.  Where would I be without science fiction and fantasy?  I would be a sad, lonely kid . . . er adult.

Now, folks, if you will forgive me, I have some shows to watch.  I’m hungry for some more Battlestar and saddened to know that my joy will be over soon.  I’ve already reserved the current season on DVD so I can watch it on my nice, big TV.  If you are one of the tiny number of folks who haven’t seen the show, like I was until a week ago, than run as fast as you can to your TV or computer and catch up! You will not be disappointed.  Can I become a Cylon?  I’d like to download into another body with a good knee right about now . . . and there are some sexy ladies amongst that Cylon crew I wouldn’t mind meeting.  “So say we all.”