'Battlestar' Breaks Out
By Mick Farren
The hook line on the Sci Fi Channel promo spot read, “What the frak is going on with Battlestar Galactica?” A good question, and the answer is “plenty.” The show’s writing team, in addition to coming up with the word “frak” as a workable substitute for “fuck” – still unacceptable on basic cable – has managed, as Battlestar Galactica moves into its fourth and final season, to elevate the series well above the juvenile Sci Fi fare of shows like Stargate SG -1, or their banal remake of the classic Flash Gordon.
That Sci Fi placed a print ad in The New Yorker to promote the climactic 2008 season indicates someone over there is well-aware what the frak is going on. With Battlestar Galactica, Sci Fi has a breakthrough show that has caught the imagination of a more sophisticated audience. The now fully formed science fiction saga functions as a guilty pleasure or comfort television for adults who have read both J.K. Rowling and Philip K. Dick, hooked by the complexity of plot and characters and even a generous helping of fantasy metaphysics.
Executive producers David Eick and Ronald D. Moore have achieved the near-impossible by transforming a Very Bad Idea into something that motivates fans to do more than just set their TiVos for Friday night. The original Battlestar Galactica, a Star Wars knock-off with a grafted-on disco ambience, which aired at the end of the 1970s, was the most expensive, and maybe the worst ever, space opera on the small screen. Spinning its tale of human survivors – either in the far past or the far future, they never seemed sure – who flee the menace of the robot Cylons to search for Earth, their legendary home planet, the formative Battlestar Galactica had sophomoric characters and endless raygun battles that paid little attention to either physics or literature.
Refitted for 21st century consumption, the new Battlestar dumped the kitschy cargo of its predecessor. It became cavernous and metallic, with an ever-present sense of threat. Names were carried forward from the old show, but the characters were diametrically changed. They now had drinking problems, issues with authority, and dysfunctional relationships. Some, like fighter pilot Starbuck (played by Katee Sackhoff), were given a new dynamic by changing their gender.
The bad guys were also radically developed. In the original, the evil
Cylons were merely lumbering chrome robots. Now they can become human replicants, indistinguishable from the real thing. And they have the capacity to be highly sexual, as demonstrated by Tricia Helfer’s Caprica Six, and also suffer a near-human angst. An extra and twisted revelation was, of course, that humanity created the Cylons in the first place. The original arch villain, Gaius Baltar, was two-dimensional. Updated and played by James Callis, he is an outstandingly flawed conniver. The writers on the modern Battlestar are also not afraid to push boundaries; at the climax of the last series, they went crazy-psychedelic with a version of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” echoing eerily from the bulkheads as the Cylons attacked, and Starbuck returned, supposedly from the dead, to lead her people home.
The Sci Fi Channel couldn’t have picked a better time to have an original drama series connect with a wider audience, as, in the aftermath of the writers’ strike, HBO flounders without The Sopranos or Deadwood, and even Paul Giamatti can’t save John Adams from being a ponderous history lesson. Meanwhile, Showtime makes it through with little but The Tudors and The L Word to pull in crowds until Weeds returns in June and David Duchovny in the freshly re-upped Californication comes back in the fall. But, before we all become too addicted to Battlestar Galactica, the bad news is that the show definitely ends with this season, when humanity will either come home or be Cylon fodder. All that’s offered in its place is a prequel, a series about the first Cylon war 50 years before this current storyline. But you know you can’t trust prequels.
Mick Farren blogs at Doc40.blogspot.com.
Published: 04/16/2008
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