Battlestar Erotica: Alien Sex! Bombs! Robots! Pathos!

I filed this story for Wired News about the new Battlestar Galactica miniseries:

"We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex," quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night's Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed "walking toasters" from the original TV series are succeeded by — well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom.

One of the newly humanized enemy androids, Number Six, is played by former Victoria's Secret model Tricia Helfer (so that's Victoria's big secret! — we always knew there was a sinister purpose behind those ubiquitous catalogs). While in the throes of sex, her spine glows a luminescent, otherworldly, X-ray crimson.

Episode No. 1 of the two-part miniseries, which debuts Dec. 8, explodes with a jaw dropper of a scene that blends Cylon eroticism with equal parts pants-wetting apocalyptic terror and blast-tacular deep-space warfare. None of this should work, but under the nuanced direction of Michael Rymer, it does, spectacularly, and the rest of the episode never disappoints.

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