Just a heads up, the frackin' toasters at Prime Video inexplicably left out the excellent Razor movie, which came out between seasons 3 and 4. Also missing the Resistance webisodes from between seasons 2 and 3. Looks like Razor is rentable on Google for a fee, and The Resistance might be on Youtube, not sure of quality or completeness though.
Aside from those omissions, they do have the mini-series (as one long stream), 4 main seasons, and the Plan movie, all free with Prime Video, at least in the US.
The Blood & Chrome prequel movie can be streamed for a fee, and ditto for the single-season Caprica spin-off series.
I love BSG2K, but I‘d still give that title to Babylon 5. it doesn‘t have the modern political references, but its got a coherent vision and incredible world building.
Prepare to work for it. Series were longer back then, and all of season 1 is slow. Later season 2 starts to reward this effort. There are a couple of episodes in S3 & S4 that aren't great. Otherwise - S3 and S4 are absolute top notch. They blow the shit out of any TV made before or after, on every level and in every way. Be prepared for B5 to set a standard everything else fails to meet by a very, very, very long way. Try to avoid spoilers.
The deconstruction of falling stars.. the jailbreak plot device was implausible to me when I was younger, somewhat plausible when I was introduced to VMs, and now with LLMs we're probably already there.
S1 isn’t great, it’s more adventure of the week to get used to the characters, life on the ship etc. is not bad but it’s pretty dated. But it sets the backdrop for 3 seasons that changed TV reaching out even today - planned multi season story arcs.
I was enjoying The Expanse until the Marco Inaros arc started. From that point onwards the show felt rushed, mostly repeating the formula of so many other shows, and sidestepped all the alien bits that could have been interesting.
I much preferred BSG, even though it had plenty of boring "west wing in space" episodes.
I thought the political episodes were some of the most interesting ones. I love how Apollo grew up to challenge the attempted coup and ultimately became President as the series wound down. Also loved Richard Hatch's Tom Zarek character and the religious cult formed around Gaius Baltar.
All in all, I really enjoy all the moral greys in the series.
That is rather of of how I think the books as well. Alien space magic exists. Every once and a while a researcher discovers some mini Cthulhu, how do the humans respond?
It is a book about human drama. If you lean too heavily on space magic, the human component becomes uninteresting because there can always be some unknowable deus ex machina that flips the world on its head.
I imagine this is how contact with abandoned alien technology would play out. Chances are it’s totally incomprehensible to humans and if you are unlucky enough to turn it on, it’ll bite you in unpredictable ways.
Both were indeed great. It is a shame that B5 is so terribly underrated. Michael O’Hare as the commander was its one big negative - he was so wooden it was painful. Then Bruce Boxleitner came on board and he was amazing.
BSG2K still gets the nod from me though. It was next level.
Hm. I actually can’t bring myself to watch the series through again because I know I won’t enjoy the end.
I remember I was living with my roommate at the time and we’d watch the show religiously as episodes came out. At the end we both couldn’t help but laugh at how bad it became, haha. We really didn’t want it to be true, but… It was cheesy as hell. I won’t watch it again.
