All This Has Happened Before
With The Sopranos and The Wire ascended to TV heaven, I think it’s pretty clear that Battlestar Galactica is the best show on television. In the first half of the fourth season (which, really, ought to count as a complete season in light of Sci-Fi’s decision not to run the final 10 episodes until 2009), showrunner Ron Moore has continued to up the ante, especially with his increasingly complex layering of both big ideas about the human condition and small character motifs. The series keeps becoming bolder and more ambitious, and if it doesn’t always tie up its various storylines as neatly as everyone might like, it’s remarkably good at fleshing out big, often unsettling themes. Its spiritual overtones and its ongoing exploration of death and the dreamlife, in particular, remain fascinating. It’s true that sometimes Moore is too ambitious — this season, in particular — feels cluttered and overstuffed at times, both narratively and thematically. But in the main, the abundance of ideas works in the show’s favor; few TV series — hell, few popular narratives of any kind — have this sort of sweep or epic, particular vision. If you’re not watching this show, you should be.
For those who are, however, a bit of speculation in light of last night’s revelations (that means spoilers ahead).
At this point, I think it’s pretty clear how everything will end up. When the series returns, we’ll find out that the 13 colonies are Cylon-like creations of the original humans on Earth. There was a line in last night’s episode about how children have to destroy their parents, actress Tricia Helfer recently said that the series finale will make us look back at the show’s beginning, and there’s been a recurring idea that, as the Leoben model said, “all this has happened before” — so I’m pretty sure we’ll learn that Earth’s humans created the people who became the 13 colonies; they rebelled, nuked Earth, and then went off and settled new planets. That doesn’t answer every question, of course, but it does suggest an explanation for Head Six, and it would, I think, provide a suitably dark finish to the show and wrap up a lot of its themes quite nicely.
Y’know, I kneep hearing about BSG so maybe I missed out big time — I followed it, but season 3 sucked big time and my wife and I were gagging our way through the episodes. We stopped part way through and my colleagues kept watching in the insistent belief it would get better. Then the season had its baby-boomer oriented finale, driven by a Hendrix tune (which they told me about shamefacedly at work the next day) and I mocked them mercilessly and we all stopped watching. Now the fanboys are raving about the current season and I’m thinking, did you all just block out season 3?
— Sanjay · Jun 14, 07:34 PM · #
No, Season 3 had its problems, but I really liked it. I think, however, that if S3 wasn’t your bag, you might still enjoy S4, which has largely dropped the political overtones and worked very hard to develop the characters in novel and interesting ways.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 14, 08:18 PM · #
Bravo for articulating a fairly coherent explanation for Moore’s confusing story line, but you give the show’s writers way too much credit. Overall, I think season four has been incredibly disappointing.
The show’s treatment of religion has never been adequately explained and feels too much like a silly anachronism, which makes season four’s focus on religious motivation all the more confusing. Why would artificial beings intuitively develop religious feeling? Why is an advanced, space-faring society still polytheistic? I think these questions could have been answered in a compelling fashion, but the writers basically skipped the back story and now expect the audience to simply accept religion as a fairly implausible plot mechanism.
One of the main reasons I really enjoyed the first two seasons was that the writers took care to develop an atmosphere of plausibility aboard Galactica and (to a lesser extent) within the colonial fleet. The military routine was eminently believable, civilian society bore the recognizable hallmarks of an advanced civilization, and the day to day crises facing the fleet were both immediate and (given their extreme situation) frighteningly plausible. In fact, I think Moore’s careful treatment of colonial society is one of the reasons why the show holds up so well as political allegory.
Unfortunately, the writers never seem to approach religion in the same way that they’ve successfully approached the military and civilian society. Without an atmosphere of plausibility, a lot of these religious “revelations” feel like opportunistic plot mechanisms, not carefully developed story lines.
That being said, I still really enjoy the show. But I feel that BSG’s best stories always developed naturally from the day-to-day problems of governing a human society cast adrift in space. Season four’s ambitious religious themes have obscured a lot of what made the show so compelling in the first place.
And yes, that Hendrix theme was obnoxious.
— Will · Jun 15, 05:10 AM · #