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?
