As I noted earlier I'm rewatching the modern Battlestar Galactica episodes preparing for the coming airing of season 4.5. This is the second half of the fourth season and is due to be the climactic ending of an awesome series. I just finished rewatching the first season and have some thoughts.

Battlestar Galactica is coming, really, perhaps sooner than some had thought -- in the latest Galactica Quorum was some surprise about how soon the final part of the final season will be. I started rewatching the entire series a while back and am in the middle of the first season. And on scifi.com you can now find 10 webisodes they'll be publishing until the middle of January. The 'webisode' is something they (scifi.com) have done in earlier inter-season gaps and I suppose it's meant to get people back into the swing of clanging hatches and fraking and cylon attacks.

On the planet Telos, an archeological expedition uncovers a hidden entrance in the side of a mountain. When a member of the expedition touches the doors, he is electrocuted. The TARDIS lands nearby, and the expedition is joined by the Doctor, Jamie and Victoria. Parry, the expeditions leader, explains that they are here to find the remains of the Cybermen, who apparently died out centuries before. The expedition is funded by Kaftan, who is accompanied by her giant manservant Toberman and her colleague Klieg. Hmm says the Doctor...

What do you do when you're the Doctor and you see your TARDIS being hauled away on a truck. Why, you give chase, but when you can't chase down the truck you return to the vicinity and do your best Sherlock Holmes impression. In this story we have the Doctor and Jamie still in Gatwick Airport, the TARDIS has been stolen, and for a couple episodes the Doctor is playing Sherlock Holmes looking at minute clues that lead him on a trail which ends in his capture. Seems someone has set a snare for the Doctor, and they wish him to go back in time to 1866 and to do a little experiment.

Back to Tibet we go except it was probably really the Scottish Highlands in disguise. We have here a most interesting adventure about myth. The Doctor, Jamie and Victoria land in Tibet and its too cold even for Jamie's bravery and he ends up wearing a jacket despite his Highlander blood. The wimp. The adventure involves an anthropologist / explorer hunting the elusive Yeti, a monastery full of Tibetan Monks, and space aliens bent on destruction. Oh, and the Doctor gets to return a holy relic, a Ghanta, to this monastery which he had visited 300+ years before.

What happens when a police box materializes on the runway of Gatwick Airport? Why the police come over and retrieve it. The Doctor and Companions arrive in 'modern' Gatwick Airport, leading Jamie to believe they're being attacked by flying beasties. As they're running around Polly discovers a murder. As the story progresses it gets weirder and weirder. The murder was conducted using a weapon which electrocuted the victim, leaving burn marks and scorched fabric, and why was an unused Spanish postage stamp in his pocket? Curiouser and curiouser my dear Commandant.

The Doctor and Companions land on the Moon. It's fun times flying around in low gravity. But the situation soon becomes very grave. On the moon is a moonbase housing a weather control station. They are using a kind of gravity control device to control weather, but the station is having problems and the people on earth are bitching up a storm. To make matters worse some of the crew is coming down with a strange sickness. And by coincidence the Doctor and Companions arrived at the same time so it must be them who caused it, though there's no proof.

The Doctor and Companions land on an unnamed planet in Earth's colonial future and find a man being attacked by a huge clawed insect monster. They are greeted by Medok, a half-crazed colonist, who is promptly arrested by Ola, the Chief of Police. It seems everybody who professes to see these monsters are made out to be crazy paranoids and are sent to the hospital for readjustment of their thinking, and if they do not conform they're sent into the gas mines where they tend to die.

In Jamie's inaugural voyage in the TARDIS we travel to Atlantis. It is not an Atlantis of ancient times, but one which has been buried beneath the ocean until modern times. A modern day mad scientist, Professor Zaroff, has made his way to Atlantis and has a crackpot crazy scheme. He's told the Atlantean's that he can raise their city from beneath the ocean, and to these people who have been buried for centuries having their city above the ocean again is appealing. However Zaroff has a different plan, one which will involve destruction of the planet.

Hey, who's that guy and what has he done with the Doctor? That's what Ben and Polly are asking themselves having witnessed the first Regeneration. It's nigh on impossible for the Doctors face to change like that, so it has to be somebody else, some usurper. But they quickly discover it really is the Doctor, somehow changed form, as they remember his words just before about his body being worn out. In the meantime they've landed on a strange planet, which they learn is Vulcan. The TARDIS has landed them in the midst of "mercury swamps".