Poster Boy

Meet Rep. John Fleming (R-LA), who can't live on $600k/yr and who's shown up right on time for his Party's math lesson.

Caprica

On Friday night SyFy premiered the new Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, which takes place not in outer space but on a planet very much like our own, 58 years before the events of Battlestar. The creators of the earlier show (the sequel to this prequel?) have applied the same sharp political edge that invigorated the space series, except here we're watching the highly advanced society that made whatever mistakes that led to the revolt of the cylons (both human-like and chrone plated robots) and the planet-wide destruction of Caprica by the very devices they originally manufactured to serve their needs.

Bottom line up front: the pilot is brilliant.

This is clearly a comment on our own society with some interesting differences and one key reversal. The event that sets off the plot and eventually leads to the downfall of humanity is the death of two daughters in a terrorist bombing. One is the teenaged child of Daniel Greystone, played by Eric Stoltz, an engineering visionary who is the cornerstone of a huge corporation that is currently working on the first crude cylons, all exposed metal and clumsy artificial intelligence, hoping to keep the huge defense contract. The other daughter is that of Joseph Adams, played by Esai Morales, who's surviving son will become Galactica Commander William Adama in the years to come.

Making friends through their shared loss, Greystone uses Adams to get something he needs to begin bringing his daughter back to life -- as a cylon. The conflict between the two men begins. The second major conflict is one that runs through the original series as well -- that of religion. Caprica is polytheistic, but as we learned in Battlestar, the cylons are seeking the "one true God," and their anticedents are here already, an underground network of human beings who want a single God who knows right from wrong -- like the one that's dominated all major religions in our real world since the beginnings of Judaism, Christianity and Islam.

So while the series looks to bend the mind with the question of what really makes us human and whether a human-based artificial intelligence is itself a being with the same worth as a flesh & blood person, by far the most transgressive element of the series is the questioning of our very own monotheism. This is using science fiction in the best possible way, by positing an alternative reality that rips open otherwise unmentionable questions and letting us reconsider our most precious assumptions in its light.

I don't think it's a stretch to say that Caprica posits monotheism as a source of violence based on the certainty of the faithful. On another level (thus far -- the series is just beginning) it is also an abdication of personal morality, arguing that the reliance on a single all-knowing God is a way not to wrestle with morality on one's own.

On the other hand, Caprica is already a decadent society, with a gangster syndicate (from the Tauron colony planet, where Adams/Adama hails from) and young people entering holo-clubs using technology originally invented by Greystone, clubs where sex, drugs, violence and even human sacrifice are all part of the scene.

And there's a Shakespearean element to the drama as well. We're looking at the characters who's actions will set the groundwork for the fate of the planet six decades down the line, and their very human grief, yearnings, desires, lusts in steady conflict with each other have a weightier feel for our knowing what will come. This series is by nature a multi-season tragedy.

The cast is well-prepared for it. Stoltz seems more handsome than he did in his youth, and fellow '80's film veteran Morales is a great match. Greystone's wife is played by Paula Malcomson, whom I'm so pleased to have back after her breakthrough as Trixie on Deadwood. Polly Walker, another HBO vet, from Rome, is great as the headmistress of the school where Greystone's daughter went, and where his daughter's best friend (Magda Apanowicz) is coming under the influence of the One-God underground. The rest of the cast is terrific as well -- Alessandra Torresani as Greystone's daughter, Zoe and Sasha Roiz as Adams' violent gangster brother are the other regulars thus far.

I predict another peak sci-fi experience from Ron Moore and company. It's a nice change-up from the setting of the first series, and the themes may cut even closer to home.

Bye-Bye BSG

Just a quick note on the grand finale of Battlestar Galactica since there's other stuff written that goes into detail here and here, and a fabulous interview with chief creative officer Ron Moore here. And lots more out there if you've got the Google. I'll try to avoid SPOILERS but probably won't.

So there's a lot of fan comments against the ending, as if one could expect anything else, and I think they're all wrong. While I was watching the finale and the huge battle, the biggest since the rescue on New Caprica several seasons ago, I realized they were going for the title of "Best Science Fiction Television Show Ever" in a big balls-out way. Not only were the climactic battles huge and reminiscent of the best science fiction book covers from the 1970's, with scale like Larry Niven's Ringworld, but thematically the capper took in maybe 155,000 years of history, give or take a few, and successfully consummated the marriage of docudrama science fiction (think Outland) with the mindbending sci-fi tradition, the kind that keeps you thinking and discussing and even arguing long after the show or book or movie is over.

The character closures were tremendously satisfying -- Baltar becoming a pivotal agent of good, the end of Roslyn's journey and Adama's grief so realistically and bravely captured by Edward James Olmos, Tory's evil act suddenly returning like the repressed always does and with such disastrous consequences, Athena thanking Boomer for delivering Hera with a round of bullets, Lee staking claim as the nearly mythological adventurer and Starbuck realizing her true nature with tremendous peace.

If there's a character who could carry on it would be Starbuck, but while it might be spectacular to follow her travels (the Route 66 of science fiction shows?) there'd have to be some invented drama to make her character interesting now that she's so clear.

And I loved the cameo by Ron Moore, perhaps aluding to the moment where he gets the idea for the series?

The previous Best Science Fiction Television Show of All Time was the first two seasons of the original Star Trek series. No other show had so consistently delivered on the promise of sci-fi literature, even as it had been building for decades. The Twilight Zone was the previous master, and The Outer Limits had its moments, but the combination of heady concepts and pulse-racing moments has never been bested until now, and what makes it so interesting is that BSG is so very different -- more sociological, with the biggest "supernatural" elements being saved for the resolution, focused more singularly yet more grandly in the overall arc, as ultimately revealed.

The conceit that this show happens not in the present nor the future is the biggest part of the reveal. The godlike force is the one that plays in the imagination -- is it science, perhaps, by another name?

A finale like this means the series will have a huge life post-initial broadcast. Not only will audiences pore over it for clues to the ending, but the reputation it'll develop for having ended so well (despite the more hardcore fans who might try a little fanfic if they can't handle the creator's own vision) will drive interest.

As for me, I missed the second half of the first season and all of the second, including the Pegasus arc featuring the always excellent Michelle Forbes.

So I've got something to live for.

So say we all.

Battlestar

I could write about Obama on greed or Biden's new Middle Class Task Force or McCain defending Limbaugh or House Republican Leader John Boehner lying that there is $200 million for contraception in the stimulus package (it's actually a $200 million savings in the same area) or Michael Steele -- congrats to the GOP for breaking the color line in party leadership, even if it did have to be with a Republican. But all that really matters is that Battlestar Galactica ends in seven episodes, and tonight it once again proved why it is so far and away the best dramatic series currently on television.

Yes, SPOILERS.

No other American series (or one anywhere?) is dealing seriously with the ambiguities of armed insurrection by a democratic populace. I don't know another series that would even try. It seems like a feature film theme, Costa-Gavros or Winterbottom or Greengrass. Or Warren Beatty. But BSG (the acronym isn't exactly proper, but it's what's caught on) is going all the way, every single character we care about in a jackpot situation at tonight's "To Be Continued" card -- the President about to be assassinated, the Commander of Galactica and his first mate are cornered, holding off a squadron, the first cylon mother of a human-cylon hybrid is imprisoned with her child and wounded husband and threatened with rape, and the Commander's son and their best flyer, the young romantic leads, with a skeletal crew of loyalists, are the only hope for retaking the ship from the mutineer uprising.

Emotional arcs set in motion back in the first season (this is #4, or 4.5 as it seem to have broadcast) are paying off big-time, and based on the preview for next week it seems there's cashing out to be had as well. Ron Moore and David Eick, and their team of writers have been grappling with all the darkest questions that have run through the Bush years, and its fitting that the series is ending now, one wonders if it might be a note of ambiguity or a definitive verdict on the ability of humankind to both survive and evolve. Because ever since the cylon fleets destroyed all known human planetary populations, leaving us finally with @ 39,000 nomads looking for a new home, it's been a very material jackpot situation for humanity itself.

While this sci-fi series is played for real, nothing hokey, never metatextually jokey, it does have one particularly larger than life character at the center, and that's Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck. When Starbuck finally kicked into what she does best tonight, i.e. devastating righteous violence, I stood up in front of the TV and stayed there for the rest of the episode. Sackhoff is leaving it all on the floor now, ever since hollering "What am I?" over and over two episodes ago on Earth, maybe before, but she's created a new kind of female hero, the next generation past Sarah Connors of Terminator fame, the most lethal character with the strongest, simplest code. It's a more extreme form of role reversal than we've ever seen on television before, and the directness, the sudden firmness of her move to kiss Lee Adama in their strategy huddle between action sequences was her signaling her return, her leadership, her assurance.

And then there was other kiss between Commander Adama and President Roslin, the elder romantic leads and leaders of our civilization,finally revealing their love without pretense on the forgotten storage flight deck, their friends around them for the first time, an on-the-fly wedding, on the edge of their dangerous parting. Olmos, McDonnell, Sackhoff all Emmy-worthy.

They got John Dahl to direct and he did a feature-style job, particular Adama and Tigh setting up their last stand -- all Kurosawa and Peckinpah in masculinity and camera placement, especially the three shot sequence of Adama firing at the door just before the grenade is thrown in on them.

Unlike more typical series, BSG has rarely sat still, and the tension has been up and down over the past four years. But this is something bigger, and I hope it does turn out to be both surprising and satisfying in the conclusion. Where is that destination? I can't say for sure, but tonight I had an epiphany.

The ultimate arc of the series is about human evolution. There hybrid babies were all flukes, unprecidented, hence the product of either a plan we don't understand or, more likely in retrospect, natural evolution, Darwin 101. The natural mutations that occur and are needed to survive external changes in climate, food source, and interspecies threat.

So my theory is that the drama we're seeing played out is, with a step back from the intricate human stories taking us through, really about winnowing out the race to those most equipped to survive, in this case those willing to accept that the very machines we created are now independently sentient enough for us interbreed with them in order to survive as a species. Yes, we'll be different. But (and this is where the cylon search for God folds in) we'll still have a soul.

It's not dissimilar from the ultimate theme of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, where an alien race intercedes with our species every 200,000-odd years to goose our evolution. In that film a signal trace sends a crew of humanity's best and most fit -- astronauts -- to reach the signal source. However, only one representative of humanity makes it all the way, ultimately being evolved (after "death") into the Nietzchean Star-Child. Our best and our brightest, the individual apex of humanity as he has proven himself -- ironically (in light of BSG) by disabling mankind's most advanced tool, the mutinous H.A.L. supercomputer.

So while BSG doesn't have the particular formalism of Kubrick's masterwork, it is grappling with similarly monumental themes, albeit within the rubric of the best action show on television since Band of Brothers. It's obviously more character-oriented than 2001 (what isn't, the dictionary?) and warmer for that reason, but it doesn't skimp on bad news, hard choices, good guys doing questionable things like, say, America for the past eight years.

So as Bush goes out, leaving behind the stench of his doomsday, mounting in his wake (will we eventually count over 100,000 jobs lost this past week?), the question BSG asks is whether we've got what it takes to survive and prevail. It's the question we're asking ourselves as our one sliver of light has taken office. And it's going to take all of us making choices, all of us balancing our perceived needs for our selves and our families with a sense of the common good.

Will we pull together enough to survive?