“Battlestar Galactica” must self-destruct?
In our rush to get ready for the fourth and final season of Battlestar Galactica, Renae and I have been plowing through Season 3 on DVD, and have been enjoying it quite a bit—not as much as Season 2, but it’s still one heck of a show. Unfortunately, we weren’t finished before Season 4 kicked off—but that’s where our DVR came in and saved our pop culture-devouring butts.
Which brings me to the oddly titled “Scott Brown on Why Battlestar Galactica Must Self-Destruct”. Oddly titled because it doesn’t really explain why, exactly, BSG must self-destruct, unless that’s an oblique reference to the fact that BSG is a product of our times—and those times are a-changin’.
After all, this is a show that has touched on all manner of issues that are torn directly from the headlines: political corruption, election rigging, torture, the confluence of religion and politics, and so on. So perhaps Brown is making a point that some critics have posited: that BSG‘s popularity is a result of the Bush administration and its policies. And with Bush on the way out, BSG is bound to become archaic and deprecated in just a few months’ time.
That’s a somewhat suspect claim if you ask me and yet, when you’ve got a prominent storyline involving a military force invading and attempting to set up a new society, which causes the invaded to respond with suicide bombings and guerilla attacks on their occupiers—well, it does cause one to wonder. If September 11, Iraq, and/or the “war on terror” hadn’t happened, would there even be a Battlestar Galactica? Or if there was, would it even bear any similarity to the series that we all know and love?
As I’ve written before, I believe the real reason behind BSG‘s popularity lies in its frightening immediacy and relevancy. As is the case with all great science-fiction, it functions primarily as parable and prophecy—not of some glorious, utopian future but of the “here and now” in all of its grit, grime, gloom, and glory. It touches on powerful current issues and explores them using story and myth, and it does so—and this is the important point—without an obvious agenda, as evidenced by its characters’ oftentimes very murky morality and motivations.
Or, as Brown puts it:
BSG is, at first glance, an unlikely vessel for serious sociopolitical critique. While science fiction may be the genre of Big Ideas, it’s fair to say no one expected Howard Zinn-level watchdoggery from the “reimagining” of a chintzy ‘70s TV series starring Dirk Benedict by the basic cable network that also gave us Mansquito. BSG enters its fourth and final season in April, and none of its fans expect encomiums on par with The Sopranos. Yet BSG has done for the post-Roddenberry space western what Tony and Co. did for the post-Coppola mob tale: exhumed a mummified subgenre and reanimated it with all the relevant eschatological dread and martial hysteria of millennial America. BSG was, for a while there, the most important show on television.
I still think it’s a pretty important show, and we’ll see how that bears out during the fourth season.
Personally, I’m hoping that the show sticks to its guns, that even as the credits are rolling on the series finale, there are plenty of scars, wounds, and smoking craters to go around. That there are plenty of questions left unanswered. Heck, I don’t think I’d feel too disappointed if the fleet never actually makes it to Earth, if good ol’ Terra Firma turns out to be more of a MacGuffin than anything else. But we’ll see, and I can hardly wait.
Comments
M. Leary
April 7, 2008 8:32amYeah, I am interested to see what direction they point the religious angle the show as taken. Are we going to see some sort of metaphorical smackdown between the gods and The One God? Are the cylons really just islamo-fascists? Is “earth” just something that is inside all of us?
All in all, I was a bit let down by the first episode of this new season. A lot of the characters seemed like caricatures of themselves, which doesn’t bode well. The “Stranger in a Strange Land” turn for Baltar is promising though.
Jason
April 7, 2008 10:05amRe: the religious aspect, I’m really intrigued by what Starbuck meant when she said “they’re waiting for me” before her “death” in Season 3. Is that referring to the gods, or some other party, or perhaps some sort of references/reimagination of the “Seraphs” of the original series.
And yeah, some of the characters are starting to seem rather caricature-like. For example, Tigh. I really hope they do something interesting with his character, because it’s become pretty one-note.
Groucho Castaneda
April 7, 2008 2:31pmFrom what my friends in the industry tell me, after the initial success of BSG, Ron Moore became convinced that he’s always been right and the producers of “Star Trek”, who often made him compromise his creative vision, were always wrong.
To an extent he was right, as the early seasons of BSG benefitted greatly from Moore being able to give his unique style - a great sense of tone and atmosphere, prioritizing character drama over the science fiction elements, a focus on intense emotional scenes versus elaborate overarching plots, a generally realistic (if at times overly pessimistic) view of human nature - full expression.
Unfortunately, as the show has progressed, it has become as reflective of Moore’s weaknesses as his strengths. As was the case with the X-Files, as BSG has progressed it’s become clear that the writers didn’t work out a coherent backstory or plot arc beforehand, and have simply been dropping mysteries and clues for dramatic effect without worrying about how they’d ultimately fit together. While there’s something to be said for this approach, as it leaves things as mysterious for the writers as for the viewers (compare the awesome vagueness of Twin Peaks’ first season, the plot of which was entirely improvised with no particular resolution in mind, versus the tedium of the Star Wars prequels, wherein everyone already knew where everything was headed, no mystery whatsoever, and the screenplay feels more like a checklist), after three or four seasons it’s reasonable for the audience to expect some resolution, at which point the writers are often at a loss for how to tie it all together and (like the X-Files) usually resort to something really lame and anticlimactic.
It’d be cool if Ron Moore could team up with J Michael Straczynski, as their gifts seem to complement each other perfectly. J Michael is strong on coming up with detailed worlds, engaging plot development, and science fiction concepts (aliens, ships, etc.) but weak on characters, dialogue, and drama, while Ron Moore is exactly the opposite. Of course, the two of them collaborating would probably be like a pair of male fighting fish dropped in the same tank.