One of the reasons I love science fiction is because, when its done well, it shows me things I hadn't seen before. And I'm not just talking spaceships and lasers and homicidal sex-bunny robots — though I'm all for a good laser. Good sci-fi can summon forth ideas, and ideals, never before committed to paper, or celluloid, or bytes.

My devotion to Battlestar Galactica was cemented early on in the miniseries, when Caprica Six leaned into that crib and snapped a baby's neck. I'd never seen a show willing to do that before. I thought to myself, ''If these guys are starting here, where else are we going to go? What else are we gonna see?''

And as we come to the end, Battlestar Galactica shows me something new once again, something of which we'd really only seen glimpses and heard tell: Caprica City ''Before the Fall.'' As the opening credits came to an end — and I'm gonna miss those credits, especially that haunting music — we pushed through the cosmos, into that gleaming metropolis, full of life...and cars.

Into a glimpse of William Adama, being coaxed to devote an hour of his time to...what? Into Gaius Baltar and Caprica Six, cruising in a limo like they're off to prom. Or better yet, on their first date. Into Laura Roslin in full bloom, tittering with her baby sisters at a baby shower — the girliest we've ever seen her. Maybe even the happiest we've ever seen her. Into Kara Thrace fretting over cooking the perfect dinner over which she'll meet Zak Adama's brother, Lee, for the first time.

We push into the lives we never saw...lives that our characters were living years before the Cylon Holocaust. (Since the show established that Zak died two years prior to C-Day, we're at least that far out...maybe more, as Laura hadn't yet become a member of President Adar's cabinet.) Some of those lives were happy, and filled with promise, while others — like Gaius Baltar's — were more complicated. Turns out his pre-Galactica life wasn't all talk shows and designer suits and wanton indulgence of his sexual appetites. All of that was an escape from the trappings of his childhood, from the clutches of his needy, rural, cantankerous father. ''This be the new one you be banging, eh?'' says dear old dad when he gets a look at Caprica Six, and this wee look at Mr. Baltar speaks volumes as to why Gaius did everything in his power to remake himself in his own image.

For Gaius Baltar, Caprica City was like a well-appointed prison...until his platinum blonde savioress made all the badness go away. But more on that later.

Roslin's bucolic familial idyll is shattered when the CapCity police inform her — while she's sitting among the vestiges of the baby shower, that ceremony heralding a new life — that her sisters, and her father, were killed by a drunk driver. And as she somnambulates to a park fountain to baptize herself in pain, we bounce back to the world we know: Laura in a sick bed in sick bay, watching her life drip away.

NEXT: The Chief's wisdom

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