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Notes -
A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:
So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.
So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.
It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.
You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).
But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.
So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.
I learned English with this show so it's very near and dear to my heart. Gaeta announcing DRADIS contacts and Adama ordering vipers to launch is burned in my memory.
The real genius of BSG is that it manages to weave hard scifi concepts in with something that seems grounded and palatable enough of a character drama that people who aren't scifi fans can get drawn in and still get to do the philosophical contemplation that the genre has always been meant to cause.
It's not a perfect show, and as the writers candidly admitted they made a lot of it up as they went along (ironically they didn't have a plan), but it a properly great show in my opinion, not a merely good one. It has a real aesthetic proposition, it has something real to say and it has the means to say it.
I also very much appreciated and still appreciate how the show embraced spirituality as a natural counterpart and foil to its hypermodern grounded science fiction. It is a lot more convincing and intriguing for it and it allows it to explore more of the human condition in deeper a fashion than a now too common disdainful secularism would be able to.
Ultimately its core theme of man and machine is now so relevant it's hard not to draw parallels between classic episodes and staples of the AI debate.
This is what kills the show for me. I do still recommend people watch the miniseries and maybe one season, but then at that point just stop and come up with your own headcanon about what's going on; whatever you imagine will probably be more enjoyable and more logical than what the writers put to paper.
To be fair, at least Ronald Moore had a good track record when he got his Mystery Box Show nonsense greenlit. I'd like to complain more about Disney being dumb enough to hire J. J. Abrams to kick off the Star Wars sequels ... except that their decision making hasn't started to backfire until many years and billions of dollars later, so can I really call it "dumb"? Instead I'll just kick myself for being dumb enough to go watch a Star Wars X Lost crossover in theaters while naively expecting it to be the start of a story with some consistency and payoffs and closure.
What aspects turned you off? I liked the political plays, the tension, the insurgency, the Mafia-style social deduction games. If you completely ignore the subplots having to do with spirituality and mysticism, it's a good show!
The combination of grandiose "there are Deep Mysterious Plans at work" claims with banal "Making Shit Up As We Go Along" reality. Ruined the whole arc plot for me as well as the social deduction games, and made the tension feel increasingly faked.
The political plays and the insurgency were excellent, I admit. And I have to credit the mysticism for at least being the least irrational way to get the plot out of an irrational corner.
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