Reflections on Battlestar Galactica

The BSG era has come to a close. There might be subsequent spin-offs, but BSG in its essence has ended.

I only started getting into the series last September or so. For a long time I was inclined to lump Battlestar Galactica in with the rest of the drek on the Sci-Fi channel (or the SyFy channel as it is soon to be known, which goes to show how very little the channel's executives actually care about science fiction). Oh, a remake of that sucky Star-Wars-coattail-riding Battlestar Galactica show I saw as a kid? Yeah, let me get right on that. It can't be any worse than the Stargate spinoffs. I'll definitely schedule my Friday evenings around the watching of such a show.

Hell, I thought the original BSG was stupid when I was five. And I was a lot more forgiving of stupidity when I was five, as long as it was stupidity with space ships and robots and lasers.

But last fall, after hearing good things about it from people whose opinion I respect, I began looking more into the show. I noticed that it had scored emmys for writing; for *writing*, of all things. That's not something I'd expect from a show that was of the caliber of the Star Gates or any of the more recent Star Treks.

You see, gentle reader, when science fiction and fantasy and horror are at their best, they are some of the best fictions we have. People with small imaginations--the kind of people who use phrases like "truth is stranger than fiction" or "you can't make this stuff up" or "I was disappointed to find out that it didn't actually happen like it did in the movie" or "with so much interesting stuff going on in the world, why would you want to make anything up?"--refuse the validity of that which strays too far from their perceived reality. If it doesn't speak to their own particular reality--that of being a liberal middle-class caucasian around thirty years of age and living in 21st centurty Southern California or WHATEVER--it has no meaning for them.

And you know, I think those people are not entirely unjustified in dismissing speculative fiction. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror *does not* speak to any kind of reality. Certainly, there are the fantastic elements, but more critically, these forms usually do not speak to the realities of personal experience and personality and psychology. The speculative fictions indulge in a fetishistic worship of the conventions of genre, forgetting that stories--in whatever form--are supposed to be about people. Not about gods or emotionless monsters or sword fights or giant ships crusing between the stars. If the people in a story are not interesting and conflicted and complicated and complex, then the rest of the story is not interesting, no matter how much you cram it full of laser-spears or seven-foot tall bald dudes with weird tattoos or bad-ass mutant zombies or what have you. And that is why, even speaking from the point of relative ignorance whereby I have only seen scattershot clips or single episodes of the Star Gates and the post-TNG Star Treks and Babylon 5 and any number of other fantastic shows I can say, with confidence, that they all fucking suck.

But when science fiction or fantasy or horror *are* good and *do* have interesting characters, then they can serve to show us our own reality in a new light. They can explore possibilities, both psychological and scientific, in a way that straight fiction simply can't. Just as dreams can show us things about ourselves that literal, expository dialogue never could. The trick is to bring it back from that dislocated reality and socket it back into place with our own literal realities. The trick is to wake up from that dream (or vision or nightmare) of raw imagination and put it into context with experience. Most science fiction and fantasy and horror never bothers to do so. Maybe horror is justified in getting away with it sometimes, as horror is about the exploration of what happens when reality breaks down, but I'd still posit that horror is most interesting when its characters have a psychological reality--R.J. MacReady or Kirsty, instead of an utterly fungible twenty-four year old breast-augmented and already-faded starlet.

So when I went to watch BSG, I was watching it for the characters. I wanted the special effects to be good, of course--and they are. The CG space battles are as good as anything I've seen, and the CG cylons are honestly terrifying (at least in the first season). More telling, though, was the fact that all the enemies *weren't* CG; the pilot introduces cylons who look exactly like humans. It also shows a city with trees and fountains and streets. People aren't decked out in silly silver spacesuits or heavy robes or body paint, but wear clothing that wouldn't look out of place in any contemporary city. When the soldiers pull their guns, they have pistols and assault rifles, not laser weapons that fire beams of animated light (that perversely travel far slower than projectiles, such that you can actually see them go across the screen; go figure). It's as if the science fiction elements--the robots, the spaceships--were dropped directly into a contemporary or very-near-future society, and nothing else is changed. There's no Trek-like utopia. There's still racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, economic strife. The better to allow the characters to be real. And the conflict between the humans and cylons is ultimately a metaphor for such things as racism, factionalism, religious zealotry, disagreement, and economic strife. It's not an easy battle between good and evil. Very soon, it becomes clear that these cylons are not your daddy's (and certainly my own father's) easy-to-hate Others who have no conscience and no identity outside of being evil.

Still, I wasn't sold on the show. At the outset, the characters were more interesting than those of most science fiction shows. But I didn't know if they were interesting enough. Commander William Adama, as played by Edward James Olmos, is a father figure who sometimes struggles to balance his personal feelings with the responsibilities of his post. He strives to keep control over his ship and the remnants of the human race, and that control often slips. It's an interesting character, and certainly more interesting than the kind of benevolent paternal authority figure who is always right about everything (see Lorne Greene in the original BSG), but it is one that I felt I had seen often enough before. Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, as played by Katee Sackhoff, is a rebellious hotshot who has trouble with authority. I *knew* I had seen *that* character before. But Colonel Saul Tigh, as played by Michael Hogan, is an alcoholic who experiences no miraculous recovery in the course of his character arc. He is abusive, both with himself and with others. And yet he is utterly dedicated to his job and gives as much as he can to the honor of his office, and he is lost without his uniform and his position to define him. Now this was something I had not quite seen before.

I was still dubious about BSG for the first half of the season. I appreciated the changes between the pilot and the first actual episode: the ship got darker, tighter, and the shots were more close-ups shot at cramped angles. The show was becoming more intimate, and more intense. But I didn't yet know if it really had characters--and so stories--that would keep me interested.

I wasn't completely sold on BSG until episode 1-8, entitled "Flesh and Bone." In it, Starbuck goes to interview a Cylon prisoner about a bomb threat. And by interview, it is understood that she is planning to torture him for information. When this was starting out, I was expecting something along the lines of 24, wherein the bad guy is put through excessive and gratuitous pain before he caves and tells everything he knows, and then the good guys rush off to save the day. I was thinking this was where BSG was going to lose me, even as 24 has lost me.

And that is how things start. But the Cylon is not spiteful or defiant. He doesn't condemn Starbuck or humankind, indulge in racial epithets, or do anything that would invalidate him or justify the torture. Instead, he questions Starbuck on her own morality and spirituality. Starbuck is unnerved by this intimate contact with the hated machine enemy, and ceases to be an effective torturer.

The episode resolves with the President of the surviving humans, who had up until that point been an almost too-sympathetic character, lying to the cylon and promising him his safety if he reveals the location of the bomb. The cylon reveals that there is no bomb, and the President has him blasted out of an airlock.

Now this was something I definitely hadn't seen before at all.

The characters are further made interesting by their struggles to define their own humanity. Some of the "humans" are revealed to be cylons, and have to reconcile themselves to this knowledge in some way. Others come to love cylons, or at least think cylons have some claim to be free from persecution.

In the end, there is no difference between man and machine. The creator is not divorced from his creation. What we do is who we are. Our essence is not divisble from our actions.

Good and evil--human and cylon--are labels applied after the fact to try to simplify beings with limited capabilities who are compelled to make choices in a complex world. And these labels are ultimately shown to be bereft of real meaning.

Having spent most of my life feeling excluded from humanity, it's natural for me to sympathize with the monsters in a piece of fiction, and so this kind of thing is right up my alley. My own personal issues aside, I do believe that the exploration and examination of what makes us human is a worthy one. I think it's too easy to assume that "personhood" is restricted to only living, organic humans. Or, better yet, that it's restricted to people of a certain race or creed, and that everybody who is not a member of a certain in-group has no right to life. I think speculative fiction, when it is at its best, challenges our narrow definitions of what it is to be "human." BSG certainly does that.

Maybe the reversals are too facile in some cases, especially in the last season. I felt like a lot of the shows towards the end, after the false duality of cylon and human has largely been deconstructed, try too hard to show that cylons have feelings, too, and are sad when they have miscarriages or when they lose a loved one or when they are unloved. But I'm still glad that those reversals exist at all. Again, good speculative fiction challenges the assumptions of its characters. Immature and fetishstic speculative fiction (and most video games, and most fan fiction) doesn't ever challenge the characters' beliefs in any serious way. And while I don't always like the way BSG handles these developments, and there were times when I felt like I was watching an episode of Grey's Anatomy in Space for all of the overwrought drama, I would say that BSG does hit the mark at least as often as not in creating meaningful and defining moments for its characters.

So I am going to miss BSG. It is the kind of sophisticated, intelligent speculative fiction that I always want and so rarely get.

Unless I write it myself. Which I try to do.