What makes Starbuck so hot? Sometimes a girl dressed like a boy is sexier than any boy or girl in the "proper" outfit can be. According to Garber, this type of figure -- she calls it "the changeling boy," a theatrical staple from the Renaissance to "Peter Pan" -- is like a mirage, someone who hovers impossibly between genders. No one can possess Cesario, the boy that Shakespeare's Viola disguises herself as in "Twelfth Night," because Cesario doesn't really exist. Considering how most people feel about what they can't have, it's no surprise that Cesario is irresistible. Sackhoff's Starbuck has some of the same allure, which is why she looks so much better swaggering around in her T-shirt than she does in a dress.

The show's creators like to fool around with Starbuck's androgynous glamour. Last season, when she crash-landed on a barren planet and had to hot-wire a cylon raider to get back to Galactica, it turned out that the enemy's ships are as much animal as they are machine. Starbuck crawled inside to find a gooey cavity lined with weird tissues, sinews and organs, all of which she was able to sort out and operate, Boy Scout-style, by keeping in mind the principle that "every flying machine has four basic controls: power, pitch, yaw and roll." When she got the raider back to Galactica, she told Apollo that the plane was a "she"; then in the next episode, she starting calling it a "he." At any rate, she's the only one who can fly it.

Starbuck does have her problems, but so does everyone else on this show, which brings us to another strength of the new "Battlestar Galactica," the sort of thing that makes viewers want to stick around after being drawn in by the flashy and new. This is a character-based drama, not something you often see on a spaceship. In a way, once you get past the trappings (which aren't very high-tech to begin with -- Galactica is an outdated model that escaped the cylon's crippling computer virus because it wasn't networked), the series has more in common with "The West Wing" than it does with "Star Trek." Granted, trying to lead a small group of fugitive survivors on a flight across the universe differs a bit from running a stable terrestrial superpower, but as Machiavelli would probably point out if he were still around, the dilemmas of power are surprisingly consistent.

The remnants of humanity are led by two individuals: Cmdr. William Adama, captain of the Galactica (and father of Apollo) and President Laura Roslin, the former secretary of education and 30-somethingth in line for the presidency before the cylons attacked and killed everyone ahead of her. Edward James Olmos' Adama is in most ways your basic fictional military hero, what we imagine we want our leaders to be in the dream world of American popular entertainment: a tough, decisive straight-shooter, the proverbial man who does what has to be done. But, as tradition dictates, Adama's emotions are never entirely submerged and are sometimes allowed to overwhelm his judgment ("This time it's personal!") because, as in our real lives, we want to be shown that our leaders are both better than us and the same as us.

Roslin is something else, something you rarely see on television, a consummate politician who is nevertheless treated sympathetically. As played by Mary McDonnell (the performance is similar to another great McDonnell role, the mother in "Donnie Darko"), she is a woman whose composure almost never ruffles, whose strength lies her ability to dissemble expertly and act expediently when necessary. In the first season, when a vice presidential election was forced by a dangerous political opponent, she switched her backing from the more qualified candidate (who was also a good friend) to the weak and inexperienced but more popular Dr. Gaius Baltar. She knew this was one battle she couldn't afford to lose.

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