Battlestar Galactica

If I don't get flamed for this one, I may well get depressed.

Today I feel I should discuss a show that is certainly worthy of note--if for no other reason than that it compares unfavorably with the Satanically annoying little kid with the constantly-errant robot dog, shrieking "Muffet, Muffet! Come back Muffet!"

I mean, of course, the new Battlestar Galactica.

I would like to keep to my practice and first list the good things about the show...but in this case there are no good things about the show itself. I will say, however, that at least Edward James Olmos gets a paycheck out of all this horse-hockey. I'd prefer he just mailed the Cylons a few origami unicorns, but even he seems to have forgotten Blade Runner was ever made (probably he was just too nice to tell the writers), considering how original everyone seems to think BSG is.

Now for the bad. Hunker down, kiddies, this here's a long list. First, the minor quibbles.

The camera work (this is almost not minor): I understand that many modern filmmakers decided, on scanty evidence at best, that handheld shots made the subject more immediate or visceral or some other word they try to use to describe the indescribable, and so decided to use handheld shots as a substitute for any kind of composition or artistry in their shooting. But that is no excuse to have a show exclusively made of handheld shots. And if, having decided not to do any work on your cinematography, you then decide to have handhelds in space...I for one think you should be honey-dipped and buried in an anthill. Whose POV is that, an EVA astronaut floating off into the void, still filming while he prays that hard vacuum or suit overheat gets him before dehydration does?

The guns: this is what happens when a bunch of liberals write a war story. They can't be bothered to look up a damn thing about guns, and so you get rail guns--identified as such in dialogue!--shooting out clouds of smoke! "Gee, Adama, maybe we need to move the smoker's break room away from the gunnery deck, the clouds're getting caught in the accelerator." And I do believe, also, that the pistols (whose bullets, doubtless supersonic since they penetrate Centurion armor, somehow don't make any kind of big noise) have shell-ejector gates, but I've never seen one spit a shell, despite the fact spent casings flying out are cinematic gold! John Woo's whole career is based on shell casings and pigeons, not counting one innovative idea about shooting cop movies like wuxia--and his American audience isn't acquainted with wuxia! I won't lucubrate on the wastefulness of using nukes for a space-to-surface bombardment (what, Cylons can't build magnet-guns big enough to lob meteors?), or the fact there's no space for bullets to feed into Centurions' arm-mounts, but I expect to be treated with more respect than this. Law and Order writers know more about weapons than these hacks!

The tech: that whole, no networking the computers so Cylons can't hack them, thing, is kinda neat, actually (though I doubt it'd be necessary--all you gotta do is put the comms on a computer with no access to the others, and make all your other networks wire rather than broadcast, and you're good). But otherwise, there is no excuse for the tech in the show. Nobody that can go at FTL velocities is dying of breast cancer, okay? That's not always, or even I think most of the time, deadly for us, and we never made AI. Similarly, decent liquor, not to mention food or sanitation, is not a problem for anybody to whom the phrase "space fleet" is not a television reference! If you can put that many ships in space for any length of time, you can make food in the lab that'd fool Alton Brown. Also, I know the idiots promised us their "naturalistic SF" would not use the deus ex technobabble from Star Trek (which cliche doesn't even exist outside Trek anyway--nowhere in Farscape, Firefly, Bab5, or even Andromeda), but that doesn't let them off discussing the tech as military techs, in space, really would. "Wireless" will cut it on earth because we only use radio, but in space it could be radio, lasers, masers, and possibly gravity "waves" sent directly...to say nothing of FTL comms. If your fleets have FTL drives, I wanna know what kind. We talking jump-drives a la Traveller, or hyperdrives, or warp, or spacefolding? They wouldn't just call it "FTL". At least have the decency to make up a name!

The vaunted originality: whatever TV Guide writer called a remake of a show from the early 80s "the most original show on TV" should be subjected to death by a thousand cuts. Especially considering the original BSG was just a Mormonized re-tread of Fred Saberhagen's "Berserker" series. And, of course, the human-looking Cylons are nothing new; they're called bioroids. Edward James Olmos used to hunt them, remember? Tigh (or however you spell it) even called them "skinjobs," which is slang for replicants! Remember Armitage III, back in '94? She was a bioroid (with mechanical parts) that could breed with humans! And BSG's space combat, that the critics were so impressed by? It's just a sad European clown version of the Itano circus. Been there, kids, done that.

Finally, the culture (there are really two problems with the culture, but the other's bigger): why are they all totally homogeneous, despite being multi-ethnic? Oughtn't Boomer's people (or rather, the people whose DNA she was bioroided from) have a different culture from Starbuck's, and both from...the cute but irritating black chick that used to be President Teacher's aide, whose name I never bothered to learn? Unless they engineered themselves to have different traits for different planets a la Niven (black skin for high UV, etc.), they wouldn't all be the same--and if they did, that needs to be mentioned. You get no diversity points if all the other races differ in is some Pier One furniture.

So much for the little quibbles. Now for the gaping, sucky flaws.

First off, the writers seem to think that religion doesn't matter--that is, that all religions are the same. Their Colonials who worship the Greek pantheon have the same religious issues as modern America. Um...leaving to one side how ridiculous it is for people we presumably left tens of millennia ago to worship a pantheon first recorded in the 12 century BC, it is nevertheless a fact that a people who worship those gods and never had Christianity, would not be anything like us. They'd be more like India--in fact almost exactly like India, since at some point the Devas and the Olympians were the same gods.

That religion, even in India, is not based on books. It is based on traditions, some of which get written down, and it is based on initiation into mysteries--that is to say, it has an exoteric and an esoteric component. But where are the Chthonics among the colonials? Where are the worshippers of Lykaon Apollo who eat Cylon bioroids (now that would shake up TV taboos!)? Where are the Eleusinians who see the destruction of their worlds as but a greater cycle of death and rebirth, as the Maiden is once again called back to the side of the Hospitable One? Where are the Dionysians who have to be restrained under arms from running, frenzied, through the ships? Where are the Orphics, for Eurydice's sake? Their metempsychosis with the possibility of final union with the gods, their esoteric asceticism, and their sacred texts are just about tailor-made for writers of shows of this quality (it can be dumbed-down easily into Hollywood Buddhism, being not unlike real Buddhism), and yet nowhere do they discuss the Grievous Circle, or seem to even have an inkling of the existential melancholy that is a part of all Indo-European religions--the best word for it is the Buddhist term, anitya.

A minor but related quibble is, nobody that worships the Greek pantheon objects to abortions on the same basis as Christians do. They objected because abortions introduced a death contamination into the womb, not because of any idea of the sacredness of life--they exposed infants, remember? Ten minutes with a damn encylcopedia might have brought that up, if the writers were actually here to write a show for thinking adults, not a morality play for eighth graders. Seriously, why not name the characters "Tolerance" and "Gender Equality," since it's obvious they're not there to be real characters? Actually, of course, it's because all the characters would be named "Post-Modern Self-doubting Yet No Less Self-Righteous Moral Muddleheadedness", and that's a mouthful, not to mention confusing.

Second, the characters. When Gaius "Sold out humanity to get me some" Baltar is the most likeable, sympathetic character, you have a serious failure as a writer on your hands. Most amusing of all, of course, is that the vermin writing it think they're being original--"Naturalistic SF," they call it--and claim to have done without SF cliches. Ignoring the fact that there is no literature, not even in England, that can wholly divorce itself from types, they're also full of it.

Why, unless my eyes deceive me, there's nothing particularly original about "Boozy Hardass XO Whose Personal Life is a Shambles", "Compassionate but Tough Captain Whose Career has Negatively Impacted His Personal Life (subspecies Workaholic Dad)", "Son Who's Trying to Live Up To and/or Distance Himself From Said Captain-Father, While Mourning Dead Brother (cross-breed with Brash Pilot)", "Compassionate Teacher Lady-President (much better than Bush of course, we wanted to make that very clear) Who Has a TV Movie Disease Despite Being From a Spacefaring Civilization, (subspecies, Religious Wacko a la Nancy's Astrology or Hilary's Talks With Eleanor Roosevelt)", "Brash Pilot (subspecies Feminist Mary-Sue Who's Better At Everything Than All The Men Despite Being a Dimwitted, Alcoholic Ass, crossbreed with Religious Wacko)", now is there?

And what's naturalistic about a civilization on the brink of destruction still bitching about civil rights? For that matter, what's naturalistic about a military--an Ancient Greek military, mind--where an insubordinate showboat like Starbuck wouldn't have been capped and shoved out an airlock?

Third, the "ripped from the headlines" quality of it. All the nonsense about the Cylons being undercover in the Colonials' ships (as though anything not detectably different from a human, would have remotely different abilities from a human), was obviously the writers' oh-so-imaginative portrayal of fears about terrorist cells in the US. The lame-brained (and culturally laughable) debates about the civil rights issues raised, obviously the writers' take on the Patriot Act (which they, of course, have never read). They had an election (which is suicide in that situation) at the same time we had an election.

The whole debacle on the planet, with the Cylons taking over and the government being viewed as collaborationist, the training a new police force, the bandying about of the word "insurgent"...all of it is a not-even-bothering-to-hide screed about their illiterate view of the Iraq War. 'Scuse me, you hopped-up soap writers, but do you think you could ease off comparing our soldiers to genocidal assassin 'droids? Just a thought, a quibble really.

Pigs.

In any event, though, I am not as bitter as I might seem. For I have been vindicated. You see, as my mother and I were in Wal-Mart buying my little brother a birthday present, we happened to spy the magazine rack. On this rack was a Soap Opera Digest, and on the front page were the words, "Battlestar Galactica Preview." It's officially a soap opera.

Bet Roy Batty wouldn't be sad about the memory of this vanishing like tears in rain.