What pleases about BSG, for a mainstream audience not necessarily inclined to freak out over spaceships, is the careful way the show's creators David Eick and Ronald Moore have created an entire political system for the characters to inhabit. We aren't just motoring from battle to battle. Instead, we watch as the human president fights with political pretenders and the military for power over the few thousand people left after the Cylon attack. There are press conferences and elections, worker strikes and Cylon sympathizers. The humans even become suicide bombers at one point.

This isn't a show that gives us a simple, Star Wars-style good vs. evil fairy tale. Everyone, even the steely Cylon, are ambivalent and ethically fungible. With next season concluding the epic tale of the human and Cylon battle to reach Earth and colonize it first, the action is sure to be intense. But don't expect the meaty political allegory to fall by the wayside. Things are just starting to get interesting.

We'll be watching characters dealing with a legal battle over who is to blame for last season's witchhunts, where accused Cylon collaborators were summarily executed without trial. And the Cylons have started having children with humans, raising the question of whether the us vs. them, human vs. machine binary really makes sense at all.

It's possible that what allows BSG to be so overtly political, complete with subplots about suicide bombing, is precisely the fact that it's set in a science fictional world. There is a narrative comfort zone for audiences: We don't have to worry that what we're watching is about ourselves because it takes place in a fantasy world. And yet there's no mistaking the fact that the characters in BSG are us. And I don't just mean the humans. We are the Cylon too.

The new season of BSG starts airing Friday, April 4 on the Sci Fi Channel.

• New production photos of Reposession Mambo tell us absolutely nothing about the more serious of the two organ-repo movies coming next year. You can see allegedly "futuristic" cars and some buildings. Yawn. [ShockTillYouDrop.com]
• The new Justice League movie is being "cast as cheaply as possible," says New York Magazine. It's semi-official that total unknown Armie Hammer will play Batman in the League. That's in addition to the previously leaked cast: Scott Porter as Superman, Megan Gale as Wonder Woman, Common as Green Lantern and Adam Brody as Flash. "In other words, a D-list cast is set to portray the world's oldest, most iconic superhero team," Matthew Perpetua kvetches. [NYMag]
• Newly released clips from I Am Legend reveal no spoilers, but prove the film will live or die depending on how much you enjoy Will Smith talking to himself. [IESB]

• Battlestar Galactica co-creator Ronald D. Moore has two new TV series in development: one that he's developing for NBC/Universal, and one that he's supervising for Fox Broadcasting. He's also writing a sequel to iRobot, and a new version of The Thing for Universal. The new Thing will be linked to the 1982 version somehow. [Eclipse Magazine]
• Fans who want to see more of George Takei's Sulu as a starship captain in his own right had better not blink during the new Star Trek movie. The older Captain Sulu will appear in a brief scene with Leonard Nimoy's Spock. [TrekWeb]
• Brian Aldiss spent ten years trying to convince Stanley Kubrick not to turn AI into a dumb PInnochio story. "But you might as well try to persuade this table to be a chair as persuade Stanley of anything," he complains. In the end, Kubrick died and Spielberg turned AI into non-sensical "crap," says Aldiss. [London Times]

Famous names: Avery Brooks, Nana Visitor, Avery Brooks, Alexander Siddig, Ronald Moore, Ira Stephen Behr, Michael Piller, Avery Brooks, Rene Auberjonois, Michael Dorn, Avery Brooks.

Crunchy goodness: 4

Sights you'll never unsee: A remake of Tootsie, starring the Ferengi. It's actually much worse than that makes it sound.

The shit: The long-running storyline of Odo the uptight shapeshifter's desperate love for Kira, the former resistance fighter, is one of the few science-fiction romances that you actually give a crap about.

Most prescient allegory: The hunt for shapeshifters among the humans becomes a piercing metaphor for our rush to dismantle civil liberties in the face of a terrorist threat.

Star Trek Deep Space Nine Guide