I Love This Show
Battlestar Galactica is quite simply an amazing show. It gets under your skin with situations and people that you know even though it is shrouded in space and robots. As Stephen King puts it, it’s the show that doesn’t realize it’s sci-fi. Of course, we all know that it is if only for the fact that it’s on the Sci-Fi Network. And as Kurt Vonnegut once noted, he wanted to get out of the file drawer of sci-fi because so many critics mistook it for a urinal.
Well, there’s no mistaking this show. It’s quality.
The most important theme in the show is maintaining a sense of order. And while the show regularly shows military and government in a positive light, it also shows the potential abuse of power. At the core of military and government is and should be a belief that they are people with needs and a right to be treated fairly, etc. Yet the show can pull a whammy with talking about abortion rights, religion, and even election fraud. In the season 2 finale, one of the characters who has become a union leader gives a speech that is verbatim the speech Mario Savio gave on the UC Berkeley campus in 1964, which can be seen in the documentary Berkeley in the 60s. It’s pretty intense for a show that at first sounds merely like geek bait.
But what I really love about the show are the little touches. It’s as if the future is the same as us but just with a tweak. For example, paper is octagonal, not rectangular. And religion is polytheistic so whenever they exclaim, “Oh my god!” it actually comes out “Oh my gods!” Bathrooms are unisex. And most endearing of all, they use the F-word, but it’s not our f-word. They say “frack.” As in “I fracked a fracking unbe-fracking-liveable robot.”
The show also joins the proud tradition of shows that are increasingly blind to racial boundaries. We got Latinos, blacks, Asians, whites, everyone under the sun and not a single nod to ethnicity or race. You could argue that in the future those distinctions are erased given that people were forced to band together into 12 tribes, according to their legend. But clearly, there is a strong black contingent in the one tribe that is more religiously centered….perhaps a nod to the strong tradition of black churches. In fact, the most jarring ethnical distinctions are with the white people. Two of the actors, James Callis and Lucy Lawless, are not American and do not speak American English. Callis is a Brit and Lawless is Australian. It’s strange given that no one else really has such distinct accents on the show, but yet it works. Callis is a genius scientist so it fits in with the trope of intellectuals.
Season 2 ended on a note of complete separation with the previous seasons. For the most part, we’ve been in space and on the run from the Cylons, robots we created who evolved to become our murderers. Season 3 begins in a wholly different way, which will be exciting to see how far they can push the concept and the balls they have in the air. While the sophmore year did lead to the inevitable “placeholder” shows, but even those were decent and moved the plot. I wouldn’t be surprised if we haven’t seen the best the show has yet to offer.
And as if the show didn’t already have my heart, it also used a Philip Glass solo piano piece as pivotal part of the score….it starts off as source music from a radio. It’s the first of his Metamorphosis pieces.
And here it is.
