TV GUIDE: The Weekend Playlist: Grammys Sing Live vs. Walking Dead, Guy Meets Girls
Feb 8, 2013
by Matt Roush
SUNDAY, FEBRUARY 10, 2013 ... For a sign of how far Syfy has strayed from the world of outer space-opera, check out the shabby treatment of Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome (8/7c), which has the bad luck to go up against the zombies in its long-delayed premiere. A movie-length busted pilot for what would have been a wartime prequel, bridging the inert Caprica with the renowned BSG reboot, the tarnished Chrome sat on the shelf for more than a year before being distributed in bite-size installments on a YouTube channel, finally making it to TV with some extra footage added. Set 10 years into the first Cylon War, this is basically the story of how a young "Bill" Adama (Luke Pasqualino, a dead ringer for MTV's Teen Wolf lead) earns his wings: "How I Got My Viper."
A cocky rookie yearning for the glory and valor of war, Adama is about to be schooled in the gritty, fatalistic realities of treachery and sacrifice that we're accustomed to from the earlier, bolder BSG series. His coming of age takes the form of a mysterious mission overseen by a seductive civilian (Lila Bordan) whose purpose is unclear — although as her shrouded orders take their clunky bus-like Raptor closer and closer to the edge of Cylon space, Adama begins to share the apprehensions of his irascible co-pilot Coker (scene stealer Ben Cotton). As an action movie, Chrome has its virtues, although its earnestness and our awareness of who Adama will become saps it of the unflinching unpredictability of classic BSG. Syfy might be right that a straightforward combat series version of BSG would never have flown, but it still deserved better than this...
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