Battlestar

Yep, I'm late to the party but the timing seems right. Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel before Friday, seems to me the other really serious show on television right now, and like The Wire when I say serious, I mean politically riveting.

If you've never seen it, you should give it a shot. It's Fridays at 9PM but they repeat it a bit all week and you might even be able to catch this season's 2-hour opener before this Friday's new episode.

Based on what I, as a teenager, considered a lame 1970's Star Trek wannabe starring Lorne Green of the mega-long running series, Bonanza, the current storyline picks up forty years later and looks like tomorrow's television show.

The gist is that the Cylons, artificial intelligence-powered robots which humans created to make life easier on the colonies but ended up fighting to a draw, are back. While there's still a stripped steel robot-looking series used to guard and slaughter, the new Cylons are humanoid, in a limited series but a lot of each one, meaning very often the actors playing Cylons have multiple versions of their character in the same scene, even disagreeing with each other. When one of these new (and in some cases highly attractive) Cylons gets killed, it's consciousness transfers memories and all right into just another one of the same, which is born in a sort of primordial spa.

This new series opened with the Cylons returning after forty years to destroy all humankind, mainly on our home planet of Caprica. The Battlestar up in space and some others are all that's left of humanity, in the tens of thousands if that. We lost the war in a matter of minutes, really.

The issue is always survival, how to keep our species alive, and from the start a tension developed between the Secretary of Education suddenly turned President (Mary McDonnell) and the Commander of the fleet (Edward James Olmos). Fight or flight? Search for that mythical "Earth" or not? How to avoid complete genocidal annihilation by the relentless, militarily superior Cylons?

You don't have to watch all the previous seasons on DVD to catch up (I've only seen a handful), and they tell enough of the set-up in the intro each week. What makes it particularly fascinating right now is that the humans have settled (during last season) on a harsh newly-found planet they dubbed New Caprica, only to be found by the Cylons and put under occupation.

The Cylons, it appears, have developed their own religion, and with it a need to find "love" as we humanfolk experience it. They admit to each other that it was a mistake to try to kill everyone (perhaps they wouldn't have voted for the war if they knew then what they know now?)but are still self-deluded into believing theirs is a benevolent dictatorship.

In the Season Three opener, the main rebel underground group began detonating suicide bombs, killing humans collaborating as police officers for the occupying force, which already mixes Israeli-occupied Palestine and Nazi-collaborator metaphors. The Cylons actually refer to the rebels as "insurgents," and you kind of do a doubletake when you hear it, like maybe freedom of speech is back on the airwaves in America.

The show has such great buzz right now that there's even rumors of the series moving to NBC (SciFi is a division of NBC-Universal). Hardcore fans I've talked to decry such a move, fearful that the gritty shooting (at times almost documentary style) and thought-galvanizing political edge with be smoothed out or censored. SciFi is a great home because it's just under the radar, like, "How the hell could anyone get worked up about the loser nerds that watch that network?"

The moral conundrums and dark worldview are sparking discussion in unusual venues, like progressive blogger Matthew Yglesias' site, where he writes:

It's pretty bold of them to have gone down the path of offering up such a straightforward Iraq analogy. In particular, they've done what really nobody's been willing to do in American politics which is try to cast a sympathetic eye on the insurgency. Of course, this is easier to do allegorically where you get a chance to paper over the fact that the Iraqi insurgency's substantive ideas about the nature of a just Iraqi state are rather repugnant. Nevertheless, I think it does do a good job of capturing the basic logic of occupation and rebellion. The cylons say they're seizing control of New Caprica for humanity's own good.

But who on the human side is going to believe them, especially given their past history (and note the USA's previous support for Saddam's regime, betrayal of the '91 intifada, decades-long indifference to the question of Arab democracy, view of Israel-Palestine universally regarded as anti-Arab by Arabs)? So people fight back. So the cylons fight back in turn. But cylon efforts to tighten their control merely reinforces their pre-existing bad image. The insurgents have much more leeway in adopting extreme tactics because they're not an alien force. They have a presumption of legitimacy while the occupiers have a presumption of illegitimacy. That Baltar is, in fact, the democratically elected leader of the Colonies is neither here nor there, for the simple fact of collaboration with the occupiers trumps the legitimacy of elections.

To top it off, they do one thing that science fictions space operas always cheat on. No sound in space. No whooshes or crashes like you would never really hear in the vacuum of space but somehow even get on Star Trek, bless it's pointy ears, always phoney-baloney, always the compromise to enhance the action.

Ron Moore is the Executive Producer with the reins, and he's making great decisions. I think that one recurring detail speaks to Battlestar's fundamental integrity. Saying it's the best frakking science fiction show in ages doesn't do it justice. It's engaged in the larger debate we're living through right now, and worthy of the challenge.