Battlestar Galactica: A Crunchy Con's Favorite Sci-Fi Show?
I’m still sorting out my thoughts on last Friday’s Battlestar Galactica finale, and I’ll be writing about the show elsewhere, but here are two brief thoughts on how the series closed:
As a creator, Ron Moore is an open theist — he wrote Battlestar Galactica as it went along, finding out what would happen as it developed, just like the show’s viewers. But thematically, the show leaned toward determinism: there are greater, unknowable, mystical forces leading humans to their destinies.
The finale’s big ideas — the divine exists, and humanity is best served by eschewing technology in favor a more natural existence — struck me as rather crunchy in flavor. Was Rod Dreher secretly a consultant?
Moore’s theism is an interesting tidbit. I’ve always found the show’s treatment of religion maddeningly vague, and perhaps the creators’ spiritual orientation helps explain this. Moore may believe in some divine presence, but he can’t use an organized religion’s terminology to explain or describe this phenomenon. The result, I think, is the show’s jumbled mysticism.
— Will · Mar 23, 08:41 PM · #
So, the Cylons had a plan but Ron Moore didn’t? Color me not surprised. I haven’t seen the finale yet but by most accounts it was a disappointing end to a disappointing series.
— Chet · Mar 23, 09:57 PM · #
I was hoping that the finale would shed some light on the divide between cylon monotheism and human polytheism. It isn’t necessarily poor writing to invoke god as a plot-fixer—for instance, I thought Starbuck’s fate was handled well. But when you build up a specific theological dispute as central to your mythos, it is bad form for “God-did-it” handwaving to completely ignore the question.
— salacious · Mar 23, 09:58 PM · #
Disappointing is exactly the correct way to describe Battlestar Galactica, considering the inital promise of the show. I mean, honestly, it was never as smart as The Wire, but the show’s early themes, though they were handled in a very TV fashion, could have involved into something interesting. The tension between authority and security did make for the show’s most compelling hours.
I think that once the show took religion from the background to the foreground the show pretty much lost its punch. I mean, I’m a huge fan of The Wire—so I don’t mind heady TV—and a show about religion and its effects upon individual decisionmaking and so forth would have been interesting. But the latter-BSG obsession with religion, identity, predestination and cyclic history became progressively more boring, especially when one realizes that the creative team had little to say about these things—they just found them interesting, and made shallow episodes out of large themes. The result was pretty damn pretentious and not particularly watchable.
The realization I had during this past season, which bothered me quite a bit, was that Battlestar Galactica was just basically well done pulp. After Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, et al. I was invested in the notion that the show had interesting insights to reveal, and while it did have a few early on it just became depressing to watch the show’s death throes and wonder at what sort of show it could have been.
— Lev · Mar 23, 10:18 PM · #
Pulp would have been much more fun to watch, though. Good pulp is fun, doesn’t take itself too seriously. Fringe is a great pulp show. BG was just tedious and, as it turned out, random. (God I’d suspected that they were just making it up as they went along but Ron Moore just comes out and says so? Unbelievable! Didn’t they have a story bible or something?)
— Chet · Mar 24, 12:57 AM · #
Respectfully, folks, I don’t think those condemning BSG for just making it up as it went along but praising Deadwood and the Sopranos have a leg to stand on. Moore may not have known every single detail of how the show would develop (yes, they had a story bible) but he has said he’s known how the series would end since the first season. And you may dismiss the show’s ideas about survival and being worthy of survival as shallow, but at least the show was consistently trying to develop those ideas in new ways up until the very end.
In contrast, the Sopranos spent four seasons taking us absolutely nowhere it hadn’t taken us in the first two – Tony’s never gonna change, and Dr. Melfi’s enabling him. And based on what David Milch has said about the relative unimportance of plot and the supreme importance of letting his characters spout off whatever dialog feels right (and the resulting train wreck that was John From Cincinatti when those ideas were fully implemented), I don’t think Deadwood’s a particularly good example of any kind of serious thematic development.
And no, BSG is not as good as The Wire, just like Lord of the Rings is not as good as Shakespeare. Deal with it.
— Chris · Mar 24, 01:14 PM · #