The premise of Glen A. Larson's 1978 sci-fi series "Battlestar Galactica" was high-concept and complex. It took place far from Earth, at the end of humanity's millennium-long war with a species of robots called the Cylons. The Cylons themselves were built by a long-extinct race of humanoid reptiles, and they seem poised to offer the same fate to humankind. Feeling that the writing was on the wall, a human named Count Baltar (John Colicos) betrayed humanity and sided with the Cylons, putting the robots hot on the trail of the Battlestar Galactica, a massive starship carrying most of the galaxy's last-known humans. Their goal is to find a long-lost "thirteenth tribe," a human colony that was said to have settled on a distant planet called Earth. 

The assumption for viewers was that "Battlestar Galactica" was set in the distant future, but at the end of the 24th episode of its only season,...