Note: Yes, I’m aware that
this piece is over a month late from the real anniversary. Yes, the show
technically started with the miniseries in 2003. No, I don’t care,
because I couldn’t resist the chance to write about this wonderful
series.
The Sopranos.
Breaking Bad.
The Wire.
Mad Men.
Lost.
These five shows are frequently recurring talking points in the
conversation about our “Golden Age of Television” in the new millennium
for various reasons. Whether it is for
Breaking Bad’s lead performance,
The Sopranos’ impact on television, or
Lost’s
science fiction elusiveness, these shows have remained in the zeitgeist
to varying degrees. It’s that last one that springs to my mind, because
the same year that gave us
Lost also brought the premiere of another sci-fi series: the
Battlestar Galactica remake. Yet for whatever reason
Battlestar never caught the same degree of cultural attention that
Lost got when it deserved to receive just as much and even more.
The miniseries began the story on a high note the year before, but it
was the 2004 series proper premiere, “33,” that really showed what
creator Ronald D. Moore (he of
Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and currently
Outlander) and his crew were capable of. While the original
Galactica show from Glen A. Larson (who recently passed away on November 14. RIP) was mostly content with aping
Star Wars,
Moore took the basic premise of Larson’s creation and reimagined it
with severely flawed characters and gritty realism, as well as a heavy
helping of social commentary. “33” finds its characters exhausted and on
the run from the Cylons, a race of robots that rebelled against the
humans and nuked their home planet Caprica in the miniseries, leaving
only the Galactica ship to stand against the relentless threat.
With episodes such as this and many others, the writers were willing
to push this band of soldiers to the edge of their abilities and
unafraid to take them to many psychologically uncomfortable places.
Well-loved characters like Starbuck and General Adama delved into
morally murky waters while generally unlikable ones such as Colonel Tigh
and Gaius Baltar pulled off heroic feats. Sympathies were ever evolving
and sometimes it only took an episode or two to change your opinion on a
character, and never was this more apparent than in Gaius Baltar,
arguably the most fascinating character in a show full of them (and some
not so, like Helo and Anders). His slippery ways make the role an
incredibly difficult one to get a read on, and although Katee Sackhoff
and Edward James Olmos are more frequently lauded for their
performances, it’s James Callis’ work that stands out as the most
multi-layered in the grand scheme of things.
It helps that Baltar is often at the root of many of the show’s big
storylines such as the nuclear holocaust that begins the story, as well
as New Caprica and the ensuing trial. On top of the gripping
storytelling that fused action with character development, Moore and his
writers continued the science fiction tradition of rooting these
stories in an allegory that reflects the state of our world. More than
any other show on television in the last decade,
Galactica is a
work of entertainment that is as much based in science fiction as it is
in post-9/11 America. With the planet Caprica standing in place for the
World Trade Center, the show dives headlong into the xenophobia towards
Cylons as well as the fear of sleeper agents. The enemy could be one of
our closest friends and we wouldn’t know it until it was too late.
Teasing out the hidden Cylon identities meant that the underlying
tension of the show rarely subsided as we waited for the next one to
“snap” and see the repercussions ripple throughout the story.
This didn’t shield the show and its creators from criticism over the
direction of their vision. Among the more common points made by
detractors was that the writers were essentially making it all up as
they went along (what show isn’t?) and that certain developments weren’t
well thought out in regards to prior events. Never did this argument
become more prolific than with the three-part finale “Daybreak,” which
remains among the more controversial and debated television finales to
this day. There’s no middle ground when it came to audience reactions;
either it was brilliant and altered how we view the series or it was a
lousy copout that made the series look worse in retrospect.
IF YOU HAVEN’T SEEN THE SHOW YET THEN DO SO AT THE FASTEST NOTICE BECAUSE MAJOR SPOILERS ARE TO FOLLOW
As someone who didn’t get to watch the show during its original
broadcast and instead caught up with it on Netflix years later, I fall
decidedly into the former camp. Viewing the show (or any show for that
matter) through streaming is a decidedly different experience than
spacing it out over weeks and years. Many ideas/themes that a show
explores can become highlighted by back-to-back viewing, and one angle
that caught my attention while watching
Battlestar was the religious component woven into the plot and character ideologies. Over the course of its four seasons,
Battlestar
proved to be one of the few times where I encountered science fiction
and religious themes coalescing together in harmony. The end game reveal
that God really exists and has been nudging the pieces along rubbed
many the wrong way, but for myself it actually strengthened the overall
intent of the show.
Religion doesn’t often mesh well with science fiction because of its
more fantastical qualities that go against scientific fact. But
Battlestar Galactica
never passed itself off as “hard” science fiction. In spite of its
emphasis on realism (relatively speaking, given the killer robots), the
show had always been more concerned with how an idea feels rather than
how it works. To draw a comparison to
Star Wars, the Force was
much more mysterious and thought provoking as an energy force “that
binds the galaxy together” rather than as midichlorians in the blood
stream. Incurring divine intervention to bring our heroes to (our) Earth
ultimately allowed Moore and his writers to make their most biting
comment on humanity their last.
Both the humans and Cylons are inherently doomed races. The show’s
propulsive yet grim tone sets this straight, where both sides rarely
catch a clean break, usually because of their own faults. But the higher
God of this universe, finding a messenger in Starbuck, finds
forgiveness and gives (mostly) everyone a second chance to find peace on
the new Earth. The story then takes an unexpected leap forward into the
present time, revealing that this entire story took place hundreds of
thousands of years ago. The concluding newsreel footage of real world
robotic advancements makes the ultimate sobering point: humanity is
doomed to repeat the past even as it seemingly moves forward. Fittingly,
the last characters we see are the angelic forms of Caprica Six and
Baltar, the two people who set the Galactica crew’s story in motion.
The wonders of this finale are in its ability to merge all of these
threads together in a way that emphasizes their impact on each other. It
manages to give the characters that we’ve grown deeply attached to
through pain and heartbreak a well-deserved happy ending while still
reflecting the darkness of our modern society. And it also manages to
make that pointedly dark commentary through the combination of science
fiction and religious themes that interwove and pushed against each
other for four seasons and a miniseries. Whether Moore planned this
conclusion from the beginning or not is irrelevant. Despite some hazy
plot points, few shows were as thrilling, provocative, and compulsively
watchable from moment to moment as
Battlestar Galactica was. So say we all, ten years later.
