That is mercifully not the case with the Razor flashbacks, which instead largely use material from Razor itself. Still, it would be fair to expect something half between preview scenes and trailers. But here’s the really surprising fact – the material works far better as a webisode than in the show itself.
After landing, the surprisingly good young Adama finds a House of a 1000 Corpses style testing lab of human prisoners. And then he runs away, hearing a few ‘noises’. Yup, that’s right: Adama is an incompetent yellow-belly.
First things first: young Adama, a role that could easily turn into a cheap charade of Edward James Olmos, is nicely down as a game but lucky soldier by Cortez. Despite the fact that these flashbacks are laden with references to what happens 41 years after it is set, it is generally not inferred that the viewer should be basing the entire personality of Adama on these 15 minutes of time-passing content. Considering the probable temptation to do that in order to imbue this side-alley of Battlestar with meaning, then congratulations to the writers for resisting the urge.
In Razor itself this stuff is embarrassing, taking Battlestar into just the sort of space battle nonsense that it typically does so well to avoid. But it works in this fragmentary state, building suspense before the programme and effectively making nods to both the original and the remake. Watch Adama’s descent to the planet, just like Starbuck’s before she dies; the way he growls like the Old Man; and the nice way it bridges the old Cylon model, to the newly-built biological basestar.
The important thing is that this isn’t exactly like Battlestar proper; they have tried to do something else with it, and the creators found a suitable plot for the platform. Perhaps ‘webisode’ is no longer the dirty word it once was.
