Battlestar Galactica (Season 1)

Battlestar Galactica (2003) is a sci-fi miniseries you can watch online on iFILM — the event that relaunched one of genre television's most ambitious franchises. Director Michael Rymer's two-part pilot reimagines the 1978 classic: the Cylons, a race of machines built by humanity, have spent forty years in silence and return with a coordinated nuclear strike that wipes out most of the Twelve Colonies.

A ragtag fleet of civilian ships is all that remains. Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell), Secretary of Education turned president by default, takes the oath of office on a cramped passenger liner. Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) rouses what's left of the military and points every surviving vessel toward a mythical planet called Earth. The catch: Cylons can now pass as human, and some may already be aboard.

The miniseries aired on Sci Fi Channel and laid the groundwork for the critically acclaimed series that ran from 2004 to 2009, with Katee Sackhoff, Jamie Bamber, and James Callis among the ensemble. Dark, tense, and built on moral ambiguity rather than space opera spectacle. Stream Battlestar Galactica online on iFILM.