Battlestar Galactica review

Review Number One: Battlestar Galactica

(Note - I will not actually be posting reviews of the American Dance Festival dances we went to because a) I suspect the interest level is probably low, even accounting for the vast number of people who read this blog (my audience has soared into the single digits!) and b) writing about dance without sounding either vague or fatuous is REALLY HARD.)

Luckily, I can write about SF TV and not care that I sound vague *and* fatuous!

Way back when, when I was about 10 or 11 and the original Battlestar Galactia came out, it was a godsend, coming as it did in the SF drought after the original Star Wars but before any of the sequels, back when the networks and studios were still absorbing the fact that SF could actually be a mainstream success. For those youngsters craving space battles and robots, Galactica was an oasis in the desert, but, as I eventually came to realize, an awfully cheesy oasis. The cylons were cool, with their vodor-voices and their scanning cyclopian eyes, and the premise was good, but the show was pretty clearly aimed at kids most of the time, and a diet of cotton candy soon cloys.

The new Galatica, whatever flaws it may have, is *not* aimed at kids.

The pilot movie took the basic premise of the original and made it make emotional sense. (For those who don't know Galactica - and who don't mind SPOILERS - the setup is this - twelve human worlds (not directly related to Earth, but human) created a race of robots called Cylons, who rebelled. After a long war, a truce was reached and the Cylons left. The show begins many years later, when the Cylons attack again, and wipe out all the human worlds. The last battlestar (big human military ship) flees with a random bunch of human ships that happened to escape the carnage.)

In the original series, the fact that the fleet constituted the last survivors of humanity didn't carry much punch. The new series, though, conveys the sense of fear, loss and desperation quite well. There's a running tally of the number of survivors, and a real sense that the extinction of the human race is coming, and that there may, in fact, be no hope at all.

The way the pilot managed to convey this emotional punch was to be, essentially, a disaster movie with all the tropes thereof - the introduction of a large cast each of whom has complex personal problems, the military leader about to retire, the unassuming bureaucrat who must shoulder the burden of leadership, the guy who is secretly a traitor, etc. But Galactica handles all these tropes very well, and the acting is good throughout. James Edward Olmos is always fun to watch, and seems to be at his best when playing emotionally-repressed characters like Adama. They made Starbuck a girl, and it works surpassing well. The pilot moved through the required acts of any disaster movie - casual, everything-normal days to introduce the characters, the dramatic irony that only the viewers know disaster is coming, the character's initial disbelief as the jaws of fate close, the alternation of heroic pulling-together with conflict brought about by stress, etc....but again, it did so with elan, *using* the cliches rather than being used by them.

I also really liked the way the pilot didn't shy from showing the brutal pragmatism that a real disaster would have to entail. In too many such movies, when there's a choice between saving one guy, or one ship, or saving everybody, the heroes inevitably make the "heroic" choice and put everybody's lives on the line to save the one lost puppy - and of course it always turns out OK. In the Galactica pilot, helpless people are left behind to die - not once, but several times - because they *have* to be left behind if the majority of people are to survive. Good, well-acted wrenching stuff.

As the series goes on, the tension remains ratcheted pretty high, and, as Auden would be pleased to note, the sense of danger does not disappear. It uses lots of the soap-opera conventions of pacing and of constantly-delayed resolution, but, so far, it does so with a deft touch.

GOOD THINGS
-The development of the character of the president. The character is a strong woman who's finding out her strength as the show progresses and the writing and acting is at it's best when it focuses on her.

-Starbuck - just fun to watch a character so exuberant and who has so much invested in not ever admitting fear of anything.

-The use of some of the visuals and costumes from the old series as "antiques" in the new series is fun. And the national anthem is the theme from the old series.

-Colonel Tigh - a great portrayal of a flawed character who's in a position with far more responsibility than such a character should have. If there's a human villain in the series, Tigh is it for my money, as he mismanages himself and the situation into disaster, furious at himself for his failures and at the world for noticing. Perhaps the alcoholism is a little too soap-opera-esque, but it works in the context of the soap-opera-esque show.

-The portrayal of religion in the show is fascinating. The Cylons have religion - they're the monotheists and the humans are the polytheists! The Cylon religion is all about love and redemption, and none of the Cylons seem to have a problem reconciling this with genocide. Will be interesting to see if this becomes an issue later. The most interesting thing, though, is that as the president becomes all mystical and prophetic and religious-nutty, the sympathies of the viewer tend to lie with *her* and not with the rationalists in the military. This is almost unheard-of in science fiction (which still clings mostly to its roots in the tradition of "defending rationality against the superstitious peasants") and it's an amazing achievement when it can work even on *me*. When a show has ME (who so often foams at the mouth at what religious whack-jobs are trying to do to science educationj in this country) rooting for the prophet over the rationalist, it's doing something interesting, at least.

The fact that the actors can use the made-up expletive "frak" with a straight face is a tribute to their professionalism. Frakkin' A!

MIXED THINGS:

The fact that the terminology, the society, and the technology is so very Earthlike - and more, American, strains the willing suspension of disbelief. But it's necessary for the tone and feel of the series.

The character of Baltar, the "bad guy" is confusing. He may be being tempted by the Cylons via a chip in his brain, or he may just be crazy. The Cylon temptress who appears in his waking dreams may be aligned with the rest of the Cylons or she may not. Her talk of god's love may be nonsensical, or it may be the true faith of the show. When the Baltar story arc works, it's a great portrayal of a selfish, scared man slowly turning (or being turned) into a sociopath. But there are so many ambiguities here, with so many degrees of freedom in different directions, that after a while it's hard to tell the difference between a very complex and nuanced plot and random vacillating.

The long-running plot-drivers of the show - the fleet is looking for Earth, the military and civil governments at odds, the corruption of Baltar, will the humans find the Cylon agents, etc. are fun ways to keep the tension going. But if you pull the tension out too long, it stops being suspenseful and just becomes annoying. You can only do so many moments where "character X *almost* reveals the truth to character Y but character Y is distracted at the very last moment" before it's played out. And the greater danger is the overall plot arc - when you have a series based on a quest archetype, you're boxed in - we know that the fleet can't find Earth, because then the show would be over.

Unless they do something clever. I'll be watching with some interest to see if the show can finesse the limitations of the endless-deferred-resolution. Ending the show after a set time, a la Babylon 5, might be the perfect solution, though not, I'm sure from the point of view of the people working for the show, who might prefer job security to narrative perfection.

THE BAD:
Finally, a few complaints.

The idea that the Cylons are indistinguishable from people is annoying to me - it just seems like too much of an SF cliche and a lazy-man's plot device - they're vulnerable to the same radiation as their metal cousins, but we can't find any difference in their anatomy or blood chemistry? And, if you're going to go with the "indistinguishable" cliche, then *don't* have them be super-strong and fast.

But that's a quibble, I guess. Mainly, I just want to see more of the robot Cylons, and to know if they're self-aware and religious the way the human-appearing Cylons are. I get the impression that the show's creators couldn't imagine the metal Cylons as having personality, which strikes me as a failure of imagination.

Baltar's hallucinatory Cylon-temptress is entirely too much of a bland supermodel type. The scripts she reads seem to be calling on her to be darkly compelling, and she doesn't, in my opinion, really make that work.

Tigh's wife has wandered in out of "Dynasty." *Way* too soap-opera harpy in writing and acting.

But these are relatively minor distractions from the overall excellence of the show, I think. My main worry, as I say, is that they'll become an endlessly-extended soap opera and not be bold enough to close off some major plot lines and move on to new and interesting new plots. Time will tell.

What do you-all think?