Halfway through the pristine miniseries that precedes the most incisive show about post-9/11 America you realize this is your Battlestar Galactica now. Not the bubblegum, brightly lit ’70s classic, but this, the gritty, claustrophobic, white-knuckle reboot that looks nothing like the original boot.

The core idea is the same. The last remaining human survivors of an unimaginable tragedy race to find a new home while staying a hair’s breadth away from their Cylon pursuers, a race of sentient, self-aware machines who are unrecognizable from their fellow man. On each step of the journey, they’re forced to make the kind of decisions you only make in wartime. None of the options is good, and the creator Ronald D. Moore never lets any of his characters off the hook. The trauma of the choices they make stays with them for the run of the series. The question beating at the heart of every episode was this: Can a group of flawed people save mankind without sacrificing their own humanity?

The action is intense, and the special effects are great, but what separates it from its peers is the grounding of the characters. They’re not all heroes. Some are cowards, some are drunks, some are undercover Cylons who don’t even know it. Watching them figure out who they are and what roles they play in this new reality is the great joy of the show.