Razor Thick

There was a point in my life - from the start of high school until perhaps midway through college - when I lived a life in perpetual denial of my origins, embarrassed, fearful that other kids would find me strange or hateful. I was, you see, a closet geek. I stopped visiting comic book stores, I hid all my old "Star Wars" novels in my family's dark labyrinthine storage closet, I tried fill up my brain with indie-popular music. To no avail. It gives me tingles when I buy a hardbound comic book collection. Epic fantasy novels set me free. ComicCon is my Mecca. George R. R. Marten is my god.

And last night was one of the best nights of my life. I got to watch a new "Battlestar Galactica" on a real-life movie screen. "Razor," a double-episode movie event that the show's producers hammered together to bide time before season 4 debuts in April, brings together everything great and wonderful about the show into a neat little standalone package. Like "Lost," the show excels at combining pop-SF scenarios with highbrow speculative themes - space battles and moral ambiguity never mixed so smoothly.

The main character in "Razor" is Kendra Shaw - a newbie to the series, played by Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen, a halfie actress born in Hong Kong and raised in Australia. She says "frak" like she means it and takes no shit from nobody, not when she's delivering commands, not when she's slipping off to the bowels of the ship to inject a little happy juice into her neck. Drug abuse is treated casually by the show, as are two characters' heretofore unrevealed lesbianism - and there are also throwaway references to abortion (it's been outlawed) and genetic experimentation (think stem cell research with grown-up human people instead of leftover baby matter).

The plot flashes back to follow the story of the "Pegasus," running concurrent to the timeline of the series proper but presenting a Bizarro-world version where the characters' choices lead them beyond damnation. It's reminiscent of the second season "Lost" episode that followed the trials and travails of the Tail-end survivors - more evidence that these two shows belong together in a new pantheon science-fiction storytelling, playing with viewers' perception and suggesting, "Rashomon" style, a world without good and evil, beyond any normal strain of morality. Like most episodes of "Lost," "Razor" is all about the search for redemption - Kendra has some demons in her past - and somehow, the "Battlestar" geniuses weave plenty of background mythology into an essentially standalone piece.