Doomed to Repeat It: Battlestar Galactica, Thoughts at the End

I truly do believe that if Moore and his writers don't find a way to tell a story that mirrors present-day events without being overwhelmed by symbolism, Galactica will flounder. In all forms of writing, story must come first: the characters need to be real, the plot needs to make sense, you can't demand too much suspension of disbelief from your viewers. Place story second to ideology, and you'll soon find yourself with neither.

"Dear Ronald D. Moore: Scattered Thoughts at the End of Battlestar Galactica's Summer Season", September 27th, 2005

I think Moore is going to slide into the realm of metaphysics and go completely insane and I want to be there when it happens, not because I think the end result will be moving or awe-inspiring or even any good, but because I think it's going to be really, really big.

"The Episode That Broke Me and Other "Crossroads II" Thoughts", March 27th, 2007

Oh, God, it's totally going to end in mass suicide, isn't it?

Private e-mail, January 19th, 2009

Battlestar Galactica has been a recurring theme on this blog for three and a half years, nearly its entire existence. Going through my post-episode, mid-season and end of season posts from earliest to latest is like watching my fannish enthusiasm for the series curdle and die in stop motion: from a generally positive if somewhat cautious note, to mounting dismay as the second season unravels in its latter half, to exasperation and disdain during the third season, and finally to a dull rage and grim bemusement as the series draws to a close. I expected as much when I made such a review yesterday evening before starting work on this post, but what startled me was the realization of just how early on in my writing about the show I had expressed my main criticism against it--in my very first essay-length post about Battlestar Galactica, quoted above. Everything I've written about the series since then has been an expansion on, a distillation of, or additional examples supporting, this one single criticism.

So, for me, the important question as I come to make a final (though how many times have I told myself that this one post was going to be the final one?) statement about Battlestar Galactica is not whether it was a good series--it wasn't, not since the middle of its second season at the very latest--and not why it failed--I've gone over that ground too many times, most recently and, I think, most comprehensively just a few weeks ago--but why I kept coming back. Why did I keep watching a show that did nothing but disappoint and infuriate me? Why did I keep writing about it when all I was doing was saying the same thing over and over again in slightly different ways?

Popularity is a big part of the answer. It's doubtful that I would have been as invested in debunking the perception of Galactica as the best science fiction series of the decade, and a smart, well-written show in any genre, if these were not such commonly held and frequently voiced opinions both in and out of genre circles. Rage is another component. You can drop a show that bores and fails to engage you, but it's a lot harder to walk away from a series whose writing infuriates you, and whose every plotting and characterization choice seems calculated to belittle your intelligence. Galactica's mistakes were all driven by the same core flaw, but every time it made one I just got angrier, and when I get angry, the only way I can regain my equilibrium is to write about it. But most of all I kept coming back to Galactica because of fear. Fear that the plaudits and awards and (utterly inexplicable) invitations to speak at the UN had tapped into something true, or rather that they were creating truth simply by being repeated so often: that Galactica is the shape of science fiction television to come.

The general reception of "Daybreak II," and particularly its post-space battle segments, has been negative. People more knowledgeable about these subjects than myself have spoken about the dodginess of its evolutionary history and the plan it charts for Colonial humanity's survival as subsistence farmers, and many have expressed dismay at the show's sudden shift to an anti-science position. As problematic and disappointing as these elements are, they pale, to my mind, beside the fact that in its final episode Galactica once again, to borrow Dan Hartland's phrase, eviscerates itself. From its earliest episodes the show prided itself on being about the messiness of the human condition, about our tendencies toward war, violence, racial and religious strife. After four seasons of this the conclusion the show comes to is not that we should strive to be better, not that we should learn from our mistakes, not even that such betterment is impossible and that these blights are the unfortunate cost of being human, but that we should just walk away from the whole mess. History is rife with examples of man's inhumanity to man? Then end it.

There have been many complaints about the lack of an overarching plan to Galactica's plotting, but "Daybreak II" reveals that its political storytelling was just as haphazard. After so much time spent on tortured real-world analogies, so much of what made the show worthwhile sacrificed so that its writers could pat themselves on the back for asking the 'tough questions,' it turns out that the only answer they could come up with is one that even the most pretentious undergraduate would find painfully dumb. Don't learn from your mistakes, and don't repeat them either. Don't face up to the crimes and guilt in your past, and don't deny them. Don't forgive your enemies, and don't continue to make war on them. Don't come up with new ways to govern, and new ways to subvert those governments. Just forget. Forget about cities. Forget about communities. Forget about recording history for future generations. Forget the quest for knowledge. Forget about learning to understand your surroundings. Forget everything that makes us more than mere animals. We all made a big mistake coming down from the trees in the first place.

In a way, this is mass suicide. Not only of individuals, few of whom will survive long in small, isolated groups without the medical, agricultural, and industrial tools that the show so blithely dismisses as 'creature comforts' (one wonders whether the writers realize what they're implying when they say that the unearthed body of Hera is that of a young girl--that Hera not only died young but had children young, the latter possibly causing the former) but of Colonial civilization itself. Its history, culture, art and science lost forever, willfully and deliberately destroyed by its last few survivors. There's something almost laughable about the scene in which Adama decides to name the Colonials' new home Earth--as if it matters what these people call their planet when every hint that they ever walked upon it is going to be lost forever. By taking the fleet to Earth, Kara Thrace is the harbinger of Colonial humanity's doom, but it is her fellow Colonials, led by Lee Adama, who with Stepfordian gladness finish the job the Cylons started.

I might almost have respected the show if its writers had faced head on the implications of the ending they'd written, but with typical Galactican cowardliness they try to sugarcoat it. They pretend that a genetic legacy is the same thing or even better than a cultural one--because we all feel a deep personal bond to our great-to-the-nth-power-grandparents, but absolutely no connection to the people who shaped our national, ethnic, and religious identities--and decide that by some magical process Colonial society manages to shape modern American society in its image despite having been wiped away entirely--in the process all but saying that American civilization is the truest, most ancient civilization on the planet. Of course, these are the same people who have concluded their story by telling us, of every major question, coincidence, and plot twist, that God did it, but are so terrified of the religiosity of the resulting story that they desperately shoehorn in an escape clause at the last minute by suggesting that it's not God pulling the characters' strings, but a god-like alien.

Far worse to my mind than Galactica's ending being anti-science is the fact that it is anti-science fiction. Science fiction is the literature of change. It's about imagining the future--which things get better, which get worse, which stay the same; what new systems we come up with to live our lives, and how they fail under the weight of the same basic human flaws. Far from imagining it, with its final episode Battlestar Galactica has shown itself to be a series about ending the future. Everything that's happened in its four seasons, everything its characters have experienced, seen, or done, has been calculated to bring them to a point where they take their future apart, leaving nothing behind but their genetic code. And all this is so that we can arrive, not at an analogy or at an allegory of it, but at the actual, real-world present day and say 'we don't know what happens next.' Well, of course we don't, but that's just what science fiction is for--to say 'what if?' and then imagine the answer. And that is just what Battlestar Galactica has been desperately opposed to doing almost from day one.

What bothers me about this is less that Galactica itself isn't science fiction--I came to that conclusion at the end of the third season--but that there are still plenty of people who can't tell the difference between its stasis-oriented brand of pseudo-SF and the real thing. More importantly, it worries me that there are people, in and out of genre, who think that Battlestar Galactica represents a model of what science fiction television should be like--allegorical, present-oriented, cowardly and unimaginative. For better and mostly for worst, Galactica has been the dominant genre show of the last half-decade, and it has inspired and will continue to inspire other creators. Kings is very obviously taking its cues from Galactica when it neglects its worldbuilding and comes up with an imaginary world that doesn't suit its premise. Judging from its teaser trailer, the upcoming Stargate: Universe is desperately trying to ape the show's dark visuals and emotional tone (not to worry: the Stargate: Atlantis pilot was similarly a departure from its parent show, and that series bounced back to the SG-1 template before the first season was half over). When even Joss Whedon, a man who's forgotten more about good worldbuilding than the entire Galactica writing room ever knew, is reported to have said that "he aspires to make television like [Galactica]" you know there's trouble ahead.

I've been contemplating what I'd write about Battlestar Galactica's final episodes for weeks, wondering how best to sum up my feelings about it and its ending. For a while, I was toying with the idea of leading with a joke about our long national nightmare being over, but now I'm wondering, what if it isn't? I'm OK with Galactica itself ending badly, and not even a grand, bombastic bad but a dumb bad that hardly anyone can find it in their hearts to defend, because that's the kind of show it was--lots of buildup, very little payoff; lots of self-aggrandizement, very little justification; lots of talk, very little substance.  But that's because up until now I'd been assuming that the show would end and that would be that. We'd get The Plan (the title and concept of which never fail to make me laugh) and however many episodes Caprica managed to last (all the soapy allegory of Galactica, none of the space battles--I'm guessing not many), and that would be it for this universe on our screens. But what if the series and its failings have an afterlife? What if the next big thing, the next genre series to dominate the television landscape, isn't another Buffy, or Farscape, or Deep Space Nine, but another Battlestar Galactica, because that's what people--creators, producers, critics, even some of the fans--want?

Galactica's writers can so cavalierly imagine the end of Colonial history, and paint that ending as a happy one, because that history was never real to them in the first place. In that sense, they're like the mainstream writers who write post-apocalyptic SF novels because it's so much easier to end the world than imagine it different. For all its SFnal pedigree, Galactica is the television equivalent of these novels--a science fiction series desperately striving to get away from everything that makes science fiction special and fun (and unlike at least some of these novels, it doesn't compensate for its shoddy worldbuilding in any way--beautiful writing, compelling character arcs, coherent plots). I'm terrified that there are writers out there who have learned all the wrong lessons from the protracted catastrophe that was Battlestar Galactica's rise and fall, and that in a few years' time all of this will have happened again: the cautious optimism, the dismay, the exasperation, the dull rage. Which, I suppose, is my reason for coming back to this show even though all I can do is say the same thing over and over again. Because I'm baffled, and angry, and worried, and the only thing I can do to exercise what miniscule amount of power I have to affect what gets produced for our screens and what the reaction to it is is to keep hammering in the same point: this is not science fiction. This is not good television. We deserve better.

More Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

I'll probably have some more substantial thoughts about Battlestar Galactica in a day or two, but in the meantime it's worth noting that it was a big weekend for science fiction all around, with several interesting developments.

• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Last Voyage of the Jimmy Carter" - a strong conclusion to last week's equally strong episode, which brings the Jesse-Riley storyline to a satisfying close. There are lots of good character scenes, and the flashbacks-to-the-future aboard the doomed Jimmy Carter are tense and quite creepy, and do more than the rest of the season put together to make Jesse sympathetic while stressing that she's caused as much suffering and horror as was caused her. On the other hand, the plotting is still middling-to-poor, most notably in the first and only encounter between John and Jesse, when the two of them have to pause what is otherwise a riveting conversation in order for John to spew exposition, alternately telling us things we've known for ages and retroactively altering the plots of preceding episodes by revealing that he knew about Riley's deception for months. It is also presumably an unintended irony that in an episode that is all about John confronting the burden of leadership and stepping a small way into that role, we learn that this whole tragedy--Riley, the submariners, and perhaps Jesse's deaths, John and Derek's hearbreak, the destruction of the Jimmy Carter, the loss of a potential T-1000 ally (who is presumably Weaver--her comment in the present about humans being a disappointment seems to suggest this)--was caused by an abject failure of leadership on future John's part (as well as, to a lesser extent, Jesse).
  
  Still, on the whole this two-parter was the best story the show has produced in a long time, which perversely enough aggravates me, because it is also the story that's given Sarah the least to do. This after a stultifying sequence of pointless Sarah-centric episodes that did nothing to advance either the plot or my understanding of her character. Is it really too much to a ask that this show's writers come up with interesting and exciting stories for their main character?


• Dollhouse, "Man on the Street" - this was the episode that was supposed to win us all over to the show, and while that would certainly be taking it too far, it's a definite step up in quality. Most notably, the episode moves away from the assignment of the week format that's been so unsatisfactory (though steadily improving) these last few weeks, and instead delivers a heaping plateful of plot and revelations (some--such as the identity of Sierra's abuser--were painfully obvious, while others--such as the truth about Mellie--were predictable but still a lot of fun to have confirmed). After several stories that seemed to be deliberately moving away from the idea of the dollhouse as a high-tech whorehouse, this episode returned to the sexual angle in force, and hammered in the skeeviness of what's being done to the dolls by both their handlers and their clients. I like this approach better, but at the same time it brings us right back to the difficulty that all the preceding episodes have tried, and mostly failed, to get around--that even the richest, most jaded, most particular people would probably be just as happy with a garden variety high-class call girl as they would with a programmable person. Add to this the man on the street interviews, which while not terrifically interesting seemed to be trying to imagine what effect the existence of dolls would have on the world, and it just becomes painfully obvious that Dollhouse should have been an out-and-out, future-set science fiction show about a world in which doll technology is commonly accepted (per the last interview about such technology changing the meaning of what it is to be human), not a crypto-SF present-day story.


• Battlestar Galactica, "Daybreak, Part II" - it's hard to imagine an episode that would better encapsulate the complete bankruptcy of this show's plotting and character work. The senselessness of last week's setup is compounded this week when Adama and Lee hand over the leadership of the military and civilian portions of the fleet to, respectively (and I'm still chuckling as I write this) Hoshi and Romo Lampkin, just so that the entire main cast can participate in one last huge space battle regardless of how much sense this makes for their respective characters. Of course, it isn't entirely fair to complain about this since, as I've often said in the past, huge space battles are what this show does best, and indeed the attack on the Cylon colony and rescue of Hera is a tense and well-done sequence, but it's a little sad that a show that's prided itself, with however little justification, on its political storylines, sidelines them in its finale first by concentrating on pyrotechnics, and then by dismantling its political system, in an ending so mind-bogglingly dumb, so steeped in airy-fairy New Age bullshit that even though I truly believed that I was long past being angry at this show I barely managed to make it through the (drawn out and tedious) ending segments of the episode. This is not even to mention the present-day coda, which tries to make some gesture towards a sad statement about man's inhumanity to man, but ends up suggesting that what we really should be worrying about in the real world right now is the possibility of a killer robot attack. Good fucking riddance.

Three Links Make a Post

Some of my recent online reading.

• Hal Duncan writes about Battlestar Galactica, and, as on most topics, does so intelligently, forcefully, and at great length.  Lots of interesting ideas here: some more exploration of what it means that the show's premise maps more accurately to the Holocaust than to 9/11 (I hadn't, for example, thought of Gaeta as embodying the cliché of the victim made monstrous by his victimhood, mainly because I was too busy being aggravated by the fact that the show's one and only acknowledged homosexual character was being depicted as a villain who kept seeking out powerful, charismatic men to follow), some provocative meditations on just how telling it is that its writers have favored the 9/11 parallel, and mainly a lot of insights into the kind of story the writers produced as opposed to the one they thought they were telling.


• Dan Hartland is rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories in order of publication.  I read these stories, and the Holmes novels, in junior high, and for years I assumed that this was a rite of passage for people growing up in Western countries.  Again and again, however, I've met people who knew Holmes as a character and cultural icon but had never read a single one of Conan Doyle's works, and eventually I realized that they were the vast majority.  Dan's series is a great opportunity to disentangle the iconic image of Holmes we all (including those of us who read the stories and novels) suck down from the aether from the actual fiction in which he appeared, and reevaluate them as works of fiction (thus far, to no great acclaim).


• Richard Morgan writes about The Lord of the Rings, and argues that the only emotionally honest moment in the whole gargantuan work comes during a conversation between two orcs.  I'm beginning to wonder if there's a clause written into the contract of every author who sells a potentially paradigm-shifting work of epic fantasy obliging them to publicly excoriate Tolkien, because it happens quite often.  Moorcock did it.  China Miéville did it (sadly, the essay is no longer online.  There's an excerpt here, but all you really need to know is that he calls Tolkien "a wen on the arse of fantasy literature").  Now it's Morgan's turn.  What always gets to me about these essays is their blistering certainty that they're saying something new as opposed to something that the community of fantasy readers has been debating for decades (OK, "Epic Pooh" was first published in 1978, but I find it hard to believe that Moorcock was the first person to express those specific reservations more than a decade after The Lord of the Rings' popularity exploded).
  
  Most fantasy readers go through a phase where they realize that The Lord of the Rings is conservative, reactionary and, by certain very real yardsticks such as, to take Morgan's example, realistic characterization, not very good.  It's like figuring out that Narnia is a Christian allegory.  You take a deep breath, pick your jaw up from the floor, and decide if you can go on liking the book in spite of these flaws--because it has other qualities that you value, and because a genuinely good work of fiction is one that you can enjoy even if you disagree with the attitudes it expresses.  I really don't know who it is that Morgan and the other writers like him think is going to be blown away by their regurgitated criticisms, and I have an unpleasant suspicion that essays like this one are actually written for people who have already decided that they don't like Tolkien, and are looking for ammunition to lob at his fans.

Saturday Afternoon Sci Fi

What is it with TV scheduling?  It was bad enough that something like half of the shows I follow air new episodes on Monday, but now Friday's become a hot spot as well.  On the other hand, maybe it was a good idea to suddenly supersize the quantity of shows I watch on this night, because quality-wise nobody brought their A-game this week.

• Battlestar Galactica, "No Exit": This episode was trying to be one part "Downloaded" and one part "quick!  There's only six episodes left in the series and we still haven't tied our wildly self-contradictory backstory in a satisfying bow!"  It's kind of a dud on both counts.  I liked seeing Ellen again, and liked even more that in her present incarnation she has both a spine and self-respect, since in the past it's seemed like she could only muster up one at a time.  I also liked that the episode made some vague gestures towards some of the issues I raised in my most recent Galactica post, including the question of ultimate guilt in the ongoing Cylon/human dispute, and one possible reason for the most recent chapter--by which I mean not Cavil's moaning about how horrible it is to be human or how horrible humans are in general, but confirmation, if any was needed, that he's a raging psycho.  Sometimes, 'the guy in charge is a raging psycho' is the most satisfying explanation you can give for atrocious acts.
  
  On the other hand, it was an absurdly talky episode in both its halves--Ellen trying to justify herself to Cavil and Sam recalling his and the other four Earth Cylons' history.  Like the architect scene in The Matrix Reloaded, it smacked of the writers' inability to organically set up their backstory in the body of their ongoing plot, and not a little bit of desperation--of their realization that they had too little time to pay off too many debts of their audience's indulgence, while hastily laying the groundwork for the next chapter in the story.  I was too concerned with the very real possibility that Sam is going to be killed off to make way for a Kara/Lee finale (especially given the rather blatant scene-setting for a Boomer/Tyrol reunion) to pay too much attention to the potted history he was spewing, but what I caught had none of the sizzle of genuinely clever writing.  It was convoluted and obviously straining to tie together too many disparate elements for me to expend much energy trying to follow it.  I'm mostly annoyed by the revelation that there's yet another final Cylon (he's Starbuck's father.  The timeline doesn't work at all but he's Starbuck's father, and for the record we were saying it right after "Maelstrom" aired) though thankfully the number of episodes the writers can draw out the mystery of his identity is severely limited.


• The Sarah Connor Chronicles, "The Good Wound": Once again, the show goes for contemplative and moody rather than plotty, and we're long past the point where it can skate by on strong performances and appealing guest characters (especially considering that this episode's empowered-woman-of-the-week was quite flat).  There's constantly a sense on this series that something huge is about to go down--Sarah (or John, or Derek) will find out about Riley and Jesse, Jesse will make an overt move against Cameron, Weaver will tip her hand to either Sarah or Ellison--but every week turns out to be just more buildup.  I sort of liked the use of head!Kyle, and most especially the irony of him being Sarah's voice of reason and compassion when the real Kyle was a violent, damaged fighting machine who made Derek seem well-adjusted in comparison.  It was a nice way of drawing attention to the kind of person Sarah was when she met Kyle and acted as his voice of reason, and how much she's changed (though once again we got this point ten or fifteen episodes ago and it is seriously time to move on to new things).
  
  On the other hand, I'm not sure how I feel about the episode's deliberate (and rather ham-fisted, since Sarah's never called either Kyle or Derek 'Reese') attempts to merge Kyle and Derek into a single person.  If the point was to get to the final scene where the doctor spills the beans about Kyle being John's father, then it was sadly misjudged, since Derek's known about John for months and we've known that he knows since the end of the first season (in fact until this week I had assumed that Sarah knew that he knew).  What I'm really afraid of, though, is that Derek is being groomed to take Kyle's place emotionally and perhaps even romantically, especially once Jesse is out of the way as she surely will be by the end of the season.  One of the things I've most liked about his character is that there's been zero romantic tension between him and Sarah, and I would hate for that to change.


• Dollhouse, "Ghost": As Niall points out, what's most notable about this episode is its tone, and that tone's departure from the more punchy, more funny kind of writing we've been used to seeing from Joss Whedon.  Unlike Niall, though, I find the tone less successful.  Though "Ghost" is effectively creepy in certain scenes, most of the time it just feels slack.  None of Whedon's series have had especially good pilots, but all of them have been more distinctive than this episode.  I'm hoping that we're seeing another "Train Job" scenario, where a more interesting, better written pilot episode was yanked in exchange for something the network felt would have a better chance of pulling in viewers.  If that's the case then it was, once again, a really stupid move, and also highlights what seems to me like Dollhouse's core conceptual problem (besides, as Niall says, having a main character with no consistent personality).
  
  "Ghost" is a pilot episode for an adventure of the week series about a person who becomes something new and exciting every week, but the creepiness of its premise demands that there be more to the series than that, and I don't doubt that the story Whedon is interested in is more complicated.  The question is, which show will dominate--is Dollhouse a formula series with an overarching mystery storyline, in which case I probably won't bother watching (for one thing, because it'll mean that for all the blatant negative commentary about what's going on in the dollhouse, the chief appeal of the series will be the very thing it sanctimoniously shakes its head at), or is it a creepy, novelistic mystery/thriller that rewards audience loyalty and patience, in which case it'll quickly shed just those viewers this pilot was trying to capture and die a quick death?  Either way, it's frankly a relief to get past the hysteria that's surrounded this series since its announcement--it's misogynistic!  It's being screwed over by Fox!  Let's start a letter-writing campaign before the pilot's even aired!--and talk about the actual series, for however long it lasts.

Out of Focus: Thoughts on Battlestar Galactica's Mutiny Arc

Here's a hypothetical scenario for you: imagine that several years after the September 11th attacks there was a violent split in Al Qaeda, and some of its top members had been forced to flee for their lives. Imagine that in their desperation, they turned to the US, offering crucial intelligence in exchange for, not asylum, not immunity from prosecution, not the right to live and move freely in the US, but American citizenship.

Or, you know what, that's not bad enough. Imagine that the people in question are members of the SS Einsatzgruppen, the ones who used to walk into Eastern European villages, march the local Jews to a freshly dug pit, and start firing. Imagine that the citizenship they were demanding was Israeli. How would you feel if your government decided to acquiesce to such a demand? Appalled? Offended? Like you wanted to take to the streets, and vote the people who supported this decision out of office?

Neither of these scenarios even approach the awfulness of the proposition that sparks the recently concluded mutiny arc on Battlestar Galactica, because neither the Holocaust, which the series has never attempted to recall, nor 9/11, which it recalls constantly, approach the awfulness of what happens in its opening episodes. It's one of the show's core failings that it insists on drawing on equivalence between a terrorist attack that, though vicious and unconscionable, claimed the lives of only a tiny fraction of its target nation's citizens and left the rest free to live their lives much as they had before, and a genocidal attack that kills billions and destroys an entire civilization. This is just about the only positive thing I'll ever say about that show, but at least Enterprise managed to keep some perspective when it launched its 9/11 allegory arc in its third season--it posited a brutal and deadly assault on Earth, but one which the overwhelming majority of humanity survived, in the wake of which human society, politics, and culture carried on mostly unaffected.

That's not the situation on Galactica. The people in the fleet have lost everything. Everyone they loved, everyone they knew, everyone they ever met, is dead. Everywhere they lived, everywhere they visited, everywhere they ever thought of going has been reduced to radioactive ashes. Their own survival is a statistical anomaly, and growing more and more unlikely by the second, mostly due to the actions of the very people now asking to take the place of their victims as citizens of the society they destroyed, people who, because of the destruction and loss of life they caused, might now represent a meaningful voting bloc, and be able to affect issues of government and social policy. I would mutiny if my government tried to force such a move on me. So would you. So would everyone you know.

To be fair, another difference between the situation on Battlestar Galactica and the two hypothetical scenarios I suggested is that the Colonial government needs the Cylons a great deal more than the US needs Al Qaeda defectors or Israel needs SS informants. There are compelling practical reasons to agree to an alliance with the Cylons, however risible their demand for citizenship. Some very fine television could be wrought out of a debate, and eventually a violent split, between factions who supported each of these understandable and valid points of view, but that's not really what the mutiny arc amounted to. This is a sad thing to say, because I genuinely enjoyed this storyline, and "The Oath" in particular is one of the best episodes the show has produced in a long time (albeit in a way that demonstrates that Galactica's one true strength is action scenes), but like so many of Galactica's plotlines over the last three and a half seasons, it amounts to a missed opportunity.

"A Disquiet Follows My Soul" builds up to the mutiny by showing us Gaeta and Zarek stepping into the leadership vacuum created by Roslin, who is understandably worn out by the failure of the bid for Earth and by her looming death, and Adama, who once again fails to realize that leadership is more than just flat declarations and a stern manner[1]. Implicit in this depiction, however, is the assumption that, had Adama and Roslin been in fighting form, the mutiny would have been prevented. That had the two of them spoken instead of leaving the job to their less qualified lieutenants[2] the fleet would naturally have swung in their direction. I'm not convinced that's true. I'm not convinced that it is possible, much less inevitable, that people who have endured what the citizens of the fleet have suffered at the Cylons' hands for the last few years could ever be persuaded to accept them as fellow citizens, even if their survival depended on that acceptance. I would have been interested in seeing a story in which Roslin and both of the Adamas did their best to sell the alliance to the fleet and, once they'd failed, decided to act anyway and sparked the mutiny.

I think the writers must have realized they'd gone too far with the Cylons' demand for citizenship, because that aspect is downplayed once the mutiny gets going in "The Oath." The previouslys in that episode cut Tyrol's dialogue from "A Disquiet Follows My Soul" in such a way as to leave out the citizenship demand (and given this writing room's history it's hard not to suspect some attempt at retroactive editing) and thus reduce the proposition to an alliance. By the time "Blood on the Scales" comes along, Adama's crime is merely that he's not going to fight the Cylons anymore--that he doesn't, like Narcho, desire war without end. More importantly, the issue at stake is no longer truly the wisdom or folly of allying with a former enemy, but the legitimacy of Gaeta and Zarek's coup. Just in case we're not clear on who the bad guys are, the episode has Zarek massacre the Quorum and unilaterally claim the presidency for himself. When Roslin addresses the fleet she doesn't even talk about the Cylon alliance, and the mere sound of her voice is enough to sway a third of the fleet despite the fact that she's transmitting from aboard a Cylon basestar. Adama's victory and Gaeta and Zarek's execution at the end of "Blood on the Scales" don't merely signal the end of the mutiny but the end of the debate that sparked it--it's now a given that the alliance will happen (after all, with the entire Quorum dead, who's left to oppose Adama and Roslin?) despite the fact that the discussion of this thorny dilemma was never settled, merely replaced by an action-heavy storyline.

As Battlestar Galactica's ending draws near, I've found myself thinking about the show as a whole, trying to articulate to myself the core reasons why it went wrong. I think a major contributor has been the issue of focus: the writers' tendency to take their story to places it doesn't want to go, because their interest lies in topics that aren't supported by their worldbuilding or the simple facts of human nature. It's easiest to observe this tendency in the show's 'issue' episodes--Roslin outlaws abortion in order to ensure the survival of the human race, even though she can't afford to feed or care for helpless infants, and anyway it's the natural human response to catastrophe to breed like crazy; the fleet, two years after the Cylon attack and a year after settling on New Caprica, prizes accountants and lawyers over manual laborers and skilled technicians, even though the former contribute little or nothing to the survival of the species and the latter are worth their weight in gold--but it also infects the show's more organic storylines.

Almost from day one, Galactica has treated Cylon and human politics as two discrete realms with virtually no effect on one another. The two sides responded to one another tactically, but never politically. We've seen little or no debate on either side of what their opponents are like, what they want, and why they're evil. It's as though both humans and Cylons have a fixed image of one another that they're neither interested nor, it sometimes seems, capable of revisiting[3]. On one level, this makes sense--especially in times of war people have a tendency to think of their enemies as an undifferentiated block of otherness, and certainly the humans could be forgiven for pointing to the many and terrible crimes committed against them and saying that look, the Cylons are clearly pure evil. The thing is, though, that hardly anyone in the Colonial fleet ever says this. It's more common to find humans accusing Cylons of being soulless machines than it is for them to accuse Cylons of being evil. When Helo discovers that Sharon is a Cylon at the end of the first season, he's not angry because she's an enemy combatant, complicit in the destruction of his species, but because she's not human. Though far be it from me to discount the role of blind prejudice in perpetuating armed conflicts, it often feels as though the writers are making things easier on themselves by insisting that prejudice is the main or perhaps sole reason for the humans' hatred of the Cylons--making it easier to focus on the humans' flaws, and to equate the humans' excesses against Cylons with the crimes committed against them.

The problem, however, with trying to denounce anti-Cylon sentiment as mere prejudice, is that when it comes to Cylons a blanket prejudice might very well be the only correct and moral response. There was a twisted sort of sense in Helo focusing on Sharon's race rather than her individual guilt back at the end of the first season, because at the time we were still thinking in human terms. To accuse Sharon of genocide made as much sense as holding a single Wehrmacht soldier responsible for the Final Solution. In the intervening two and a half seasons, however, we've learned that there's no such thing as a Cylon non-combatant or even a foot soldier. Their decisions, we've seen, are made en masse, with each model voting unanimously (Caprica breaking with the other sixes on the question of whether to nuke New Caprica was unprecedented and shocking). Unless the writers make a last minute revelation that the eights opposed the decision to attack the colonies, there's no other conclusion to draw but that when polled, Sharon said that yes, billions upon billions of dead humans sounded to her like a good start.

Terrifyingly, Sharon is actually the closest thing the Cylon race comes to a moral thinker. Unlike the other Cylons, she's formulated an ethical code. It's on the level a five year old could grasp--pick your side and stick with it--and it's based entirely on personal connections rather than ideals or beliefs--Sharon's loyalty is to her husband, her daughter, her commander--but it's leagues beyond what the other, opportunistic, self-involved Cylons are capable of. The only Cylons ever to contemplate the possibility that destroying humanity might have been wrong translated that conclusion into the occupation of New Caprica[4]. The rest of the Cylons still don't get it. Even after New Caprica. Even in the face of the fleet's desperation. They don't understand what they've done, the suffering they've caused. Caprica--of all the Cylons the one who shoulders the most responsibility for the destruction of humanity--actually has the gall to look hurt when Nurse Ishay's face crumples at the realization that the Cylon race might survive while her own is probably doomed.

As they've been presented in three and a half seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the Cylons are, if not pure evil, then at least so completely lacking in morality or even its basic building blocks as makes no difference. Even the worst monsters, tyrants, and mass murderers in human history had some infinitesimal fraction of themselves that told them they'd done something they'd be expected to feel shame for, and so they made excuses, or covered up their crimes, or blamed their victims. The Cylons, who with no meaningful provocation[5] snuffed out the lives of, at a conservative estimate, forty or fifty billion people, don't even realize they've done something shameful. I don't know if soulless is the right word to describe such a deep dysfunction, but it's certainly not far off the mark, and though it's clearly as wrong to torture Cylons as it is to torture anything capable of suffering, I understand, and in fact support, the point of view that you wouldn't want Cylons living next door or dating your sister.

The mutiny arc makes a vague gesture towards acknowledging the legitimacy of the anti-Cylon position with Lee's speech in "The Oath." The problem is, that speech is directed to Tigh, who is one of only five Cylons who don't share direct responsibility for the genocide of humanity. By making Tigh the recipient of his rage, Lee, and the writers, buy into the fallacy that anti-Cylon sentiment is a prejudice, and like the hostility towards Germans that was still floating around in my early childhood, something understandable but irrational in its broadness. This when we know for a fact that with the exception of Tigh, Ellen, Tyrol, Tory and Anders, every Cylon in the fleet is an Eichmann. By tying the anti-Cylon position, on the one hand, to Gaeta and Zarek's violent and criminal actions, and on the other hand to Lee's undiscriminating prejudice, the mutiny arc deligitimizes it, and bolsters the view that letting go of anger and hatred of the Cylons is the correct course of action.

It takes a crucial failure of the imagination, of the muscles of empathy and moral outrage, to blandly insist that humans need to get past their anger at the Cylons, as the mutiny arc seems to conclude. I'm reminded of Fred Clarke's monumental, years-in-the-making takedown of the first Left Behind novel, and his oft-repeated complaint that this book posits the disappearance of a third of the planet's population, including every single child, as nothing but a starting point for its plot, with almost no acknowledgment of the awfulness of this event or the scale of grief and rage that should follow it. Battlestar Galactica isn't quite as bad as that, but its depictions of the reactions to the destruction of humanity are on too small a scale. People miss their spouses, their children, their dogs. They're angry at the discomfort and danger they live in every day. There's no sense of the magnitude of what they've lost--not just family and friends but culture, history, art, society--nothing on the level of this passage, from just a few chapters into The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

Nelson's Column had gone! Nelson's Column had gone and there would be no outcry, because there was no one left to make an outcry. From now on Nelson's Column only existed in his mind. England only existed in his mind--his mind, stuck here in this dank, smelly steel-lined spaceship. A wave of claustrophobia closed in on him.

England no longer existed. He'd got that--somehow he'd got it. He tried again. America, he thought, had gone. He couldn't grasp it. He decided to start smaller again. New York was gone. No reaction. He'd never seriously believed it existed anyway. The dollar, he thought, has sunk for ever. Slight tremor there. Every Bogart movie has been wiped, he said to himself, and that gave him a nasty knock. McDonalds, he thought. There is no longer any such thing as a McDonald's hamburger.

He passed out. When he came round a second time he found he was sobbing for his mother.

This is a comedy. It's played for laughs, and yet Douglas Adams comes closer in this passage to what it means to lose your entire world than Battlestar Galactica has done in three and a half seasons of misery and torment. When I went on the March of Life at sixteen many of our stops were not in concentration camps or memorial sites but ordinary Polish towns. There we'd be taken to see the cemeteries, the dilapidated husks of synagogues, the houses with mezuzah holes still in the doorjambs. It wasn't just people that the Nazis destroyed in those places. It was a world, a society of European Jewry that has been wiped from the face of the Earth. The writers of Battlestar Galactica have never tried to depict this tragedy because, once again, they're not interested in going where their premise demands that they go[6], and because they won't acknowledge the magnitude of what the Cylons destroyed and the justness of the rage humans should feel towards them, much less the complicity of every single Cylon in this crime, they get to pretend that the choice between granting the Cylons Colonial citizenship and a more dangerous, more uncertain future has an obvious right answer.

It's an undeniable truth that the past is the past, and that we'd all--individuals and nations--be better off if we let go of our pain and anger and tried to start afresh, but to be capable of putting aside our losses so easily is inhuman, and maybe not something to be desired--what sort of person is willing to break bread with the destroyers of their civilization merely for the sake of their own survival? It's easy to say 'you need to move on', but it's also the sort of thing that a conqueror says. The victors have the privilege of letting go of the past because doing so doesn't hurt them, and because they've got what they wanted. For the victims, sometimes pain and anger are all that's left. It is the ultimate expression of Battlestar Galactica's skewed perspective, of its incorrect focus, that it tells a story from the point of view of those who have been beaten and robbed and expects us to believe that these people, or at least their leaders, are willing and able to put their grief and grievances aside so easily, and that this is the right choice. It's a show told from the perspective of the conquered, but its writers are thinking like conquerors.

---

[1] If you haven't done so already, check out SelenaK's running commentary on the series; in her post about this episode she writes very cogently about Adama's many failings and the massive contribution they make to the destabilization of the fleet.

[2] And this is once again the time to lament the inconsistent treatment of Lee. Catapulting him to the position of president in the first half of the season was bad enough, but if you're going to do so, and especially if you're going to do so by claiming that he possesses the integrity, vision and charisma of a born leader, then why is he so ineffective in the buildup to the mutiny, and why is his role in this story strictly military?

[3] Though what, exactly, the Cylons believe about humans--much less what they believe about them that justified their wholesale extermination--is something that the show has yet to articulate.

[4] I'm still waiting for an explanation of why Boomer, the most human of all the Cylons we met, thought this was a good idea.

[5] Don't talk to me about "Hero." Even the writers are trying to pretend that episode never happened.

[6] For one thing, it would require actually constructing a Colonial culture, as opposed to pretending that the Colonies were 21st century America with spaceships.

Sometimes A Not-So-Great Notion

Well, what do you know: it's possible to be underwhelmed while expecting an anticlimax.

A while back, I came across this quote from Ron Moore in an io9 spoiler roundup:

[The revelation of the identity of the final Cylon] will never be as powerful as the build-up. I resigned myself to that a long time ago. The "Who Shot JR" of it all is an instructive lesson: No matter who it is, it's still going to be a bit of a letdown.

I considered saying something about this here at the time, but then decided that I'd already said my piece on the topic of the final Cylon. Having watched the premiere of season 4.2 (or whatever the hell we're calling it) and having had that identity revealed to me, I feel that my reaction at the time bears repeating. And it is: fuck you, asshole. How dare you make such pathetic excuses for your own incompetence? That's the kind of bullshit I expect from the writers of Lost, and even they've had the common decency to realize that that won't fly, and (by all accounts) to fix their show. Disappointment of the kind you're talking about isn't inevitable. It isn't a law of nature. It's a consequence of bad writing, and there's a very simple guideline to avoiding it: don't build up what you can't pay off. Either come up with a revelation that's worthy of the frenzy you've aroused in expectation of it, or don't orient your entire show towards it.

The ending of "Sometimes a Great Notion" wasn't disappointing because no ending could have satisfied viewers who have been waiting for months to find out who the final Cylon is. It was disappointing because it was badly done--not just the identity of the final Cylon, but the manner in which that identity was revealed, which was so muddled and confusing it actually took me a few seconds to realize what I was seeing. The word 'revelation' doesn't even seem appropriate to that mess of a scene, which is probably why the episode ended with a character literally standing up on screen to say 'look! X is the final Cylon!'

As for the rest of the episode? Eh. Like too many Battlestar Galactica episodes it was about twice as long as it needed to be and relied too heavily on histrionics to make its point. I'm also even further convinced in my pet theory that there are two kinds of women on Battlestar Galactica: the glamour girls, who are beautiful and messed up and allowed to get away with just about anything, and the ordinary girls, who are plain (well, TV plain) and competent and do boringly domestic things like be wives and mothers on top of doing their job, and somehow manage to handle all of these responsibilities with class, if only because they know that they're expected to act like adults, and that if they throw a tantrum there will actually negative consequences down the line. It's the second kind who keep dying, and not in grandly tragic ways that are ultimately rolled back, but in mundane, often grotesque or humiliating ways from which there is no return. Still, maybe this has nothing to do with men and women. The arc of Galactica's character work from day one has been to either get rid of or debase any character who tries to behave in a mature, responsible manner. It's a show full of emotional teenagers. Talk about your post-apocalyptic horror.

The Final Cylon, Revisited. Again.

I know, I said I didn't care. But then that's been the arc of my entanglement (it is by now far too long since I could call it fannishness) with Battlestar Galactica since the middle of the second season--I'm annoyed and even disgusted with the show, but I can't seem to break away.

SyFy Portal is claiming to have a reliable source about the identity of the final Cylon. They're not revealing who it is, but they have posted a list of five contenders, one of which is, to their knowledge, the real one. I have to say, I hope their carefully worded caveat that this information "could be incorrect, changed, or even part of misinformation" is more to the point than the list itself, because if any of these people turn out to be the final Cylon, I am going to be so disappointed. The revelation that any of these characters are a Cylon would undo so much of the show's character work, not to mention hobble its underlying themes of morality in times of crisis and the role of law and order in the wake of catastrophe.

When Battlestar Galactica was just getting started, its writers made much of the fact that they wanted to emphasize conflicts between different human groups over conflicts between humans and killer robots. How did we get from that point to this one, where the Cylons are not only better-developed than the humans, but where nearly every character who represents a side in those inter-human struggles has either turned out to be, or is strongly suspected of being, inhuman? Is it really too much to hope for that the final Cylon not turn out to be a character we know? Surely that device was played out at the end of the third season. As I said at the time, learning that character X is a Cylon really doesn't tell us that much about either the Cylons or X. All it does is reduce, in some indefinable way, the sum of our understanding of human society, to which that character no longer truly belongs. The first half of Galactica's fourth season did a fair job of examining the existential crisis that followed when four main characters discovered that they were something they themselves didn't understand, but do we really want to go through that again?

I'm much more inclined to believe that this rumor is false (or, if the "Starbuck is dead" debacle is anything to go by, an outright lie). I don't have that much respect left for Battlestar Galactica's writers, but I'd like to believe they're still better than any of these disappointing, anticlimactic answers to the question they've let take over their show.

Epic Wrongness of the Day

Now that Comic-Con is over, the folks at io9 can get back to their regularly scheduled mix of quirky science stories, film and TV news, off the wall lists (best TV robots! is actually a rather unremarkable example), and opinion pieces. I'm fond enough of io9. I wouldn't like it to be the only source for genre news and commentary around, and it's certainly not my first stop when looking for same, but I do tend to read it most days. Which is how I ended up, at an ungodly hour this morning, being confronted by a television piece by the blog's editor Annalee Newitz, in which she muses that "There are a lot of cool ways this underrated show could return to TV as something darker, less campy, and more socially relevant, just like Battlestar Galactica did."

The show in question? Farscape. Which, Newitz goes on to opine, could be made into "a potential hit" by deepening the moral abmiguity of its characters (Rygel as a former genocidal despot, Zhaan as a ninja assassin, Chiana as a political activist with violent tendencies), remaking Scorpius into a smooth-talking politician, and sinking Crichton and Aeryn even further into tragedy ("Perhaps their son was killed by the Peacekeepers").

Let's do Newitz the courtesy of assuming she's not simply trying to rile up Farscape fans (though if she is: mission accomplished), and that she truly believes in what she's saying. Similarly, let's assume that when she talks about giving Farscape "a Battlestar-style reboot," Newitz is aware that from a technical standpoint--dialogue, character development, plotting and plot arcs, worldbuilding, just about everything, in fact, but the quality of the shows' respective space battles--Farscape pisses on Battlestar Galactica from a great height (the overall acting caliber on Battlstar Galactica is probably higher than Farscape's, but its actors are given so little that's worthwhile to do that the difference is hardly noticeable), and that the emulation she's hoping for is strictly in the realm of tone and theme. She's still dead wrong.

Newitz calls Farscape campy, and this is simply not true. Camp, the dictionary tells us, is "banality, artifice, mediocrity, or ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal." Something is campy, in other words, when it is so knowingly and deliberately bad that that badness becomes enjoyable. Farscape could be silly and over the top, and occasionally it was plain bad, but it was never campy--winking at its viewers, urging them to mock it as it mocked itself. In fact, if Farscape had a crowning virtue, it was that it took its premise, setting, and characters utterly seriously. Which is not to say that the show was afraid to laugh at itself or just be funny, but its writers never stopped believing in the reality of their universe. When they told a story, no matter how outlandish its premise or how absurd the events within it, they told it with complete earnestness, and took the time to imagine how real people would react to these unreal circumstances, even if those people happened to be muppets. This gravitas is the reason that Farscape, and Farscape alone, could take a shlocky and embarrassing premise like the characters being exposed to a chemical that makes them horny, and make of it not only a great episode--one of my all-time favorites--but a genuinely thoughtful and resonant hour of television.

What Newitz wants, what she's calling a reduction in Farscape's campiness, is to change the show's tone to match the bleak naturalism of Battlestar Galactica. That's not what Farscape is. Farscape's tone, from day one, was operatic. It was an epic. An adventure. A grand love story. There's nothing inherently wrong with Battlestar Galactica's more sombre tone (though I liked the show a great deal better when both it and its characters still had a sense of humor), but Newitz's approach seems to be that it is, in fact, inherently superior. That television shows, and science fiction shows in particular, would be better if they steered clear of space opera and stuck to telling as grimly realistic a story as they can.

That's the kind of unimaginative attitude I've come to associate with mainstream reactions to Battlestar Galactica. Viewers who couldn't look past the makeup, prostheses, and funny names to see the wit and intelligence that made other science fiction shows worth watching flocked to it, convinced that it was the absence of these elements that made the show witty and intelligent, and its characters believable as human beings. Just this morning, Andrew Rilstone posted an essay about the Buffy episodes "The Body" and "Forever" (Andrew Rilstone! Writing about Buffy!), in which he points out how that series, as operatic as Farscape ever was, told a story about grief that cut him to the quick without surrendering that tone or its fantastic elements, because it believed in both its characters and its universe. It is profoundly disappointing to discover that a science fiction blogger like Newitz is incapable of seeing how Farscape, week after week, achieved that same marvel, but what other conclusion is there to be drawn when she calls Scorpius a "campy leatherboy zombie guy" and states that his ultimate goal is to take over the universe?

Newitz goes on to spin potential plotlines for the revamped Farscape, some of which I've mentioned above. What she's doing, essentially, is writing fanfic. There's plenty of fanfic out there that makes fundamental changes to the original work's tone, setting, and premise, to the personalities of its characters and their relationships with one another, and it's not uncommon for fanfic writers to feel that in doing so they are improving on the original (and in some cases they are quite right). It's entirely possible that this show--this bleak re-envisioning of Farscape in which a bereaved Crichton and Aeryn roam the universe in Moya, trying to stop Scorpius the politician's plan to implant the population of the whole galaxy with neural chips, while Zhaan performs political assassinations, Rygel waxes fondly about the death camps he built as Dominar, and Chiana spouts Marxist rhetoric--could be good. It just wouldn't be Farscape, nor do I see any reason why this show would automatically improve on the original. (As for being socially relevant, anyone who's been reading this blog for any amount of time will know just what I think about Galactica's so-called social relevance, but regardless, it takes a lot of nerve to suggest that Farscape, the series that gave us Aeryn Sun, a character still unparalleled in the annals of strong heroines--for all that Newitz calls her merely a "perfect pre-Sarah Connor Chronicles beautiful, hard-bitten hero"--needs lessons in social relevance.) Worst of all, what distinguishes Newitz from many fine fanfic writers is that I have no idea what kind of story she wants to tell. She's mixing a little bit of Farscape with a bit of Battlestar Galactica, but what, beyond her insistence on making the show 'dark' (as though the original Farscape were lighthearted, and as though darkness were a virtue in its own right), does she want this new show to be? What qualities does it have that are all its own, that justify its existence?

Newitz seems to have arrived at her thesis by noting certain superficial similarities between Farscape and the original Battlestar Galactica, and concluding from them that a Galactica-style reboot could only do Farscape good, but in so doing she's lost sight of both the qualities that made Farscape special and the flaws that afflict Galactica. We should be grateful, therefore, that her shiny new vision of Farscape will never get farther than a post on io9. As I've said in the past, I fully expect, as the years transform me from a young fan into a not-so-young and eventually an old one, to see the holy relics of my youthful fannishness manhandled by fandom's next generation. There may very well be a reboot of Farscape some day. Let's hope whoever is in charge of it has a better ear for the original show's strengths than Annalee Newitz, and more importantly, their own ideas about where they want to take it.

Who Is the Final Cylon?

I don't care.

No, really, I just don't. Granted, my level of interest in Battlestar Galactica has plummeted over the last year and especially over its last half season (funny how that works. When the show was meeting my expectations in its first season, or falling tragically short of them in its second and third, I couldn't shut up about it, but now that I've come to expect mediocrity and gotten just that, I find myself with little reason to care), but I'd like to know how the show ends, and there are questions I'd like to see it answer and issues I'd like to see it acknowledge and resolve. It's just that the identity of the final Cylon is pretty far down that list. I'd be annoyed if it weren't revealed, because the show's writers have made promises, and piggybacked quite shamelessly on the tension created by keeping the final Cylon's identity secret, but on my rapidly dwindling list of reasons to watch Galactica, this revelation doesn't rate a spot.

And the thing is, I just don't get people for whom the identity of the final Cylon is crucial. I can understand being eager to know the solution to a mystery, or the revelation of a secret, on an intensely- and well-plotted show. I've experienced that eagerness myself, as the first seasons of Veronica Mars or Dexter drew to a close. These seasons were impeccably constructed and delivered mysteries, and they revealed the solution to their central puzzles with an awe-inspiring flair, and just the right combination of surprise and inevitability. The satisfaction derived from such denouements comes from being able to say that you couldn't have guessed the solution to the mystery, but that it makes perfect sense now that you know it. Nothing I've seen from Battlestar Galactica in three and a half seasons leads me to expect the same level of competence when the final Cylon is revealed. In fact, when Galactica delivers revelations, they tend to be plucked out of thin air, neither foreshadowed by previous events, nor congruent with the show's themes or character arcs.

For all that, whenever I come across discussions of the show these days, the question of the final Cylon's identity seems to be paramount. io9's Galactica discussions seems almost monopolized by it, for example, and just yesterday Strange Horizons published a review of the fourth season by Roz Kaveney that boils down to speculation about this very question. As disenchanted as I am with the show, even I'm not willing to reduce it to this question. That kind of attitude is fine when discussing a show like Lost, which is basically a sequence of 'wow!' moments strung together, but Galactica was supposed to be more than that--a show that told a story, that asked interesting questions about the human condition. That said, it's been a long time since I truly believed Galactica could deliver on the latter count, and there is no denying its writers' fondness for yanking major twists out of nowhere. As Dan Hartland put it when discussing the second season finale, Galactica has a penchant for eviscerating itself, sacrificing--or never even bothering to deliver--months of careful plotting for the sake of a few minutes during which the top of the audience's heads come off.

So, really, I have no idea who it is that's supposed to care about the identity of the final Cylon. People like myself, who don't think the Galactica writers can plot worth a damn, have no reason to expect anything different from what we've already seen--a nonsensical revelation parachuted in with no grounding in the plot, and perhaps even in direct contravention of established facts (see, for example, Tyrol's son, and the utter lack of fuss at yet another Cylon procreating in spite of the species's alleged obsession with the issue in the second season and the continuing importance of Hera). As for people like Kaveney, who are still in love with the show (though she is frustratingly vague about the reasons for that love. She says, for example, that the show "turns Starbuck, for a while, into an obsessed seeker for whom [Earth] has become less a possible home than the White Whale of the novel from which she takes her name," but doesn't bother to support the implicit claim that this character arc was successful or convincing, which leaves people like myself, who found it, and just about every other character arc in the fourth season, tedious and poorly done with no room for argument), surely there are more important aspects to the show to obsess over?

Perhaps not, as Kaveney's essay begins with the proclamation that "We watch Battlestar Galactica for the space battles and the sudden revelations and reversals, of course" (the over-inclusive first person plural voice setting a record for the number of words a review takes to put my back up, though I admit to being quite fond of the space battles), and when she goes on to speculate about the identity of the final Cylon she demonstrates just the kind of deafness to theme and successful plotting that an obsession with sudden revelations and reversals fosters. Her top candidates for the last Cylon slot? Roslin, Adama, and Baltar. Now, Baltar went through a period during which he wondered whether he was a Cylon, eventually hoping to discover that he was one in order to shed the guilt of having betrayed his species. In the end, he was forced to accept that such an easy escape wasn't in the cards for him--one of the only successful and interesting character arcs in the third season, and just about the only time I've found Baltar appealing. For the show to reverse that conclusion now would gut that arc's significance. Similarly, Adama being a Cylon would undermine his breakdown upon discovering that Tigh was one, and surely the question of Roslin maybe being one of the final five was definitively dealt with in "The Hub" (in a moment that, to my mind, is one of the series's highlights, right up there with Galactica breaking atmo in "Exodus II" and the camera panning to Chip Baltar in "Downloaded," if only because, let's face it, if you were in D'anna's shoes, wouldn't you have done the same thing?). Not to mention that we've already observed four main characters come to terms with being secret Cylons and really don't need to go through that process again, and that having yet another Cylon in the fleet and in a position of power would be over-egging an already quite eggy omelette.

But then, none of this would stop the Galactica writers. It would be unsatisfactory and contradictory to everything that's come before, but they would totally pull any one of these rabbits out of their hat just to make the audience's hearts race for a few minutes. In the final accounting, I think Roz Kaveney is probably watching Battlestar Galactica as its writers mean for it to be watched--not as a coherent story, an exploration of issues and characters, but as a sequence of space battles, sudden revelations, and reversals. I just don't see why anyone would be interested in that show.

Too Little, Too Late: Battlestar Galactica Thoughts

Last year, when it was announced that Battlestar Galactica's fourth season would be its last, I responded to the show's producers saying that "This show was always meant to have a beginning, a middle and, finally, an end" by quipping "Good luck trying to cram all three into a single season." I wasn't expecting Ron Moore and his writers to take me up on the challenge.

Alright, so that's overstating the matter, but there is no denying that in the first half of its fourth season Galactica, which for a season and a half has seemed, not even aimless, but deliberately mired, has regained its momentum. In terms of the show's story--not the Law & Order-style ripped-from-the-headlines political allegory, not the perfunctory issue-of-the-week-in-space anthology show, not the execrable soap opera starring impossibly pretty people behaving like total assholes, not the woo-woo New Agey drug trip, but the actual story of humanity's struggle to survive a genocidal attack and find a new home for itself--there's been more, and more definite, movement towards a conclusion in the last ten episodes than in the thirty episodes preceding them. If we combine the show's first season and the first seven episodes of season two, we get an intense, incredibly compressed, and very nearly self-contained story about the weeks and months immediately following the apocalypse. A first chapter in a saga, in which the characters get to know one another, discover their commonalities and differences, and clear the first hurdles towards developing some sort of working relationship. The first half of Galactica's fourth season isn't exactly the next chapter after this one, but it's a hell of a lot closer to it than the intervening season and a half ever were.

In fact, if one examines the major developments in the first half of the fourth season (surely there's a less cumbersome name? Given that the second half apparently won't air until 2009, and that the mid-season finale provided a very definite stopping point, doesn't it make more sense to call the ten episodes just completed the fourth season, and the upcoming ten the fifth?) it's startling to discover how many of them could easily have followed the mid-second season "Pegasus" arc, or at least the second season finale. Lee leaving the fleet and entering civilian politics was clearly the logical next step after his crisis of faith in "Resurrection Ship II." The questions of Cylon individuality which became prominent in the fourth season premiere, and have driven the Cylon civil war ever since, were clearly indicated in the show's first season and a half, and would have built well on the appearance of the traumatized and individualized Cylon Gina (and later on the events of "Downloaded"). The humorous tone of "The Hub" seems to call back to "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down," and other instances in the show's first season when its writers acknowledged that even in the grimmest of situations there is always something to laugh about. Most of all, the recurrence of Roslin's cancer seems to invalidate the events of "Epiphanies," and given that the solution that episode provided for her cancer was contrived and tecnobabbly, it might have been better to keep her sick.

With very few alterations, many of Battlestar Galactica's episodes during the second half of its second season and the entirety of its third season could be jettisoned, and the result would not only make sense as a story, but would probably be tighter and more compelling. I'm not talking merely about the throwaway 'issue' episodes like "Black Market" or "The Woman, King," but about entire plot arcs. The settlement and occupation of New Caprica? Made for some interesting (and then infuriating) television for four hours and was then rolled right back, with very nearly every character returning to their previous position in the fleet and the aftermath of occupation only haphazardly dealt with in the ensuing episodes. The trial (and, earlier in the third season, trials) of Baltar? Seem to have little or no bearing on the show's plot, and to have existed primarily in order to give Lee a chance to give yet another big speech. Starbuck's downward spiral? Was a horrifying, retch-inducing arc which transformed a character for whom I had felt at least some sympathy into one of my least favorite characters, not only on this show, but on all shows. And then it was simply done away with, as Starbuck regained some semblance of normalcy only to die. In fact, the only necessary element in all of Galactica's third season is the revelation of the existence of the final five Cylons, and the identities of four of them.

When I wrote about the fourth season premiere "He That Believeth in Me," I noted hopefully that "there's almost a sense that season 3 and its histrionics have been swept away, and that season 4 is picking up from season 2 and maybe moving in a direction that might make the show watchable again," and while, as I've just finished saying, the first part is indeed true, I'm not sure I'd call the result much more than watchable. A big part of the problem is that a sizable portion of the season 4.1 was given over to Kara Thrace and her now-you-see-'em-now-you-don't shenanigans. Once again, Starbuck behaves in a manner that is not only self-destructive but destructive to others (and this time around, she's also being stupid, such as when she threatens Roslin in "Six of One"), only for the writers to hit her 'act like a human being' button right as she's crossing the line from exasperating to Ellen Tigh, at which point she suddenly remembers how to comb her hair, wear clean clothes, and do her job. None of which, incidentally, does anything to advance the plot of even the fourth season--it's Leoben who ultimately leads the fleet to Earth, by suggesting the alliance between humans and Cylons, not Starbuck's hunch about where to go, which comes to nothing.

But beyond the fact that Kara Thrace is now my least favorite character on the show (with Adama a close second; that said, I don't think there's anyone in the main cast I still like except for Tigh, and that only because of his gruff heroics in "Revelations"--I was ready to give him up when he took up with Caprica Six), there are other problems with the story delivered by the first half of season 4. For one thing, now that the plot is actually moving, it's easier to notice that the show's writers don't seem to know too many interesting ways to get it where they want to go. When the stories the writers are telling are as forgettable or ill-conceived as "Unfinished Business" or "Black Market," it's easy to assume that the episodes are failing because no one, no matter how talented, could spin gold out of this dross. But take an episode like "The Hub"--probably the best hour in the recent bunch, and a far sight better than most if not all of season 3--and the predictability and tiredness of the writing shines through. "The Hub," with its mystical visitations from a no-nonsense ghost/spiritual guide who hands the main character some painful-yet-necessay home truths, feels like a second-rate retread of better Buffy episodes (the most obvious parallel is "Intervention," another Jane Espenson-penned episode in which Buffy goes on a vision quest to meet the first Slayer because she fears that she's incapable of love, but there are also similarities to "Conversations With Dead People"). There's nothing clever or new or unique about it except for a format that's been done better by others. It's as though Galactica were taking a page out of the Stargate handbook, and regurgitating some common SFnal TV trope (repeating the day, main character wakes up in mental asylum and is told she hallucinated the entire series) without bothering to make it its own.

But for the greatest failing in Galactica's fourth season, the real reason why the show hasn't climbed further than watchable, why it has in fact tragically settled into the mundane valley and is fast losing its grip on my interest, look no further than the title of this post. It's all very well and good for the fourth season to behave as though the third season hadn't happened, but it did. More importantly, all of the developments that should have taken place in order to bring us organically to where we find ourselves at the end of season 4.1 didn't, in fact, take place.

Lee should have resigned his commission after "Resurrection Ship II," but he didn't. Instead, he hung around getting handed ever more inane stories like "Black Market" or the infamous fat suit, so that when the writers finally realize that the character works much better as a politician than a soldier, they have half a dozen episodes to make him president--a feat which they manage only by driving Romo Lampkin insane (a derangement which is, yet again, executed in a painfully pedestrian manner) and having Lee make a stirring speech, thus apparently demonstrating his worthiness for high office. The effect that Roslin's unilateral and secretive decisions has on the fleet's morale is something that we should have seen building up for months, but instead it's dropped on us in such a way as to make the Quorum of Twelve (and this isn't really relevant right now, but I've made this complaint so many times already I might as well repeat it here--why are we only seeing the politicians? In a population as tiny as the one in the fleet, why aren't we seeing actual civilians interacting with their government? "Sacrifice" and "The Woman, King" don't count) look like whiny brats nipping at Roslin's heels, and Lee needs to stand up and speak for them when their justifiable despair and valid criticism ought to have been obvious and palpable. Most of all, why did we spend a year dicking around with Cylon mysticism instead of getting to the meat of what they are and whether they can be moral beings, as season 4.1 finally got around to doing?

This isn't a case of the show building on what came before it, gradually constructing plot arcs, character arcs, and themes. Instead, Galactica's season 4 is giving off the whiff of Friends's season 10, when the writers realized that there was finally nothing stopping them from putting Ross and Rachel together permanently. It's hard to escape the conclusion that a similar reticence tied the hands of Galactica's writers in season 3 and the latter half of season 2--a crippling fear of changing the show's format, of doing anything too drastic or too new, of veering too far from the status quo. Knowing that the end is nigh has obviously freed the show's writers from this fear, but now they have to contend with the mess they've made. For all my reservations there's no denying that Galactica has measurably improved in its fourth season, and the shocking-yet-not-surprising ending of "Revelations" sets the stage for a potentially very interesting conclusion. It may well be that Galactica's strong beginning will be matched by a strong ending, but I will always think sadly of the show we might have had if its writers had been willing to give us a worthwhile middle.

Flotsam & Jetsam

I watched three major SF-related shows this weekend, and I was hoping to get a blog post out of at least one of them, but instead I find myself with very little to say. So, I'm going to smoosh all three reactions into a single catch-all post, and hope that there's something more substantial for me to write about in the pipeline. (That said, I'm anticipating a bit of quiet around these parts during April.)

• Battlestar Galactica, "He That Believeth in Me" - That was surprisingly enjoyable. The first act plays to the show's greatest strength--cool and intense space battles--and wraps up in one hell of an interesting way which makes one of my favorite characters even more interesting, and might even get me over my dubiousness about the identities of the Cylons revealed in "Crossroads." The rest of the episode is also strong, as the show finally starts paying attention to an issue that should have started cropping up in discussions and conversations in the second season premiere--the question of what it means to be a Cylon, not physically or biologically (though some answers on that front might be nice), but emotionally and morally. I liked that this issue was being considered from both sides of the divide and from several perspectives, and that discussions of it called back earlier entries in the conversation such as Boomer's attempts to hold onto to her identity and Baltar's Cylon detector. In general, the characters feel more grounded, more like real, semi-rational people rather than the shouty, angsty messes they were last season--in fact, there's almost a sense that season 3 and its histrionics have been swept away, and that season 4 is picking up from season 2 and maybe moving in a direction that might make the show watchable again. Here's hoping.


• Southland Tales - oh, hell no. I've been very, very dubious about this film, not just because of its by-now infamous brutal reception at Cannes and the two-year delay in its release, but ever since I watched the Donnie Darko director's cut, and discovered that instead of reinstating some great character scenes, which would have fleshed out Donnie's family and Drew Barrimore's character (why doesn't anyone else get Barrimore to play bitchy and sarcastic? She's so great at it) Kelly tried to make his film comprehensible, and to foreground the dodgy SFnal plot device driving it. As if anyone fell in love with Donnie Darko for its plot. That same crucial failure of priorities is what drives Southland Tales into the ground, which is not to say that Kelly strove to make an easily understood movie. Quite the opposite--I doubt I've seen a messier, bittier, more non-linear and nonsensical film in my life.
  
  To even begin to understand the events of Southland Tales, I'd have to read the graphic novel prequel, trawl through the interactive website, and wait for the six-part mini-series version, of which the film is only the truncated latter half. For some reason, Richard Kelly thinks I'd be interested in doing this--in slowly puzzling out the details of his imaginary future--though he's given me no reason to do so. No interesting or appealing characters or relationships, no clever dialogue, no funny or touching set pieces. At its very best, Southland Tales is beautiful--several sequences towards its end recall the camera's dreamy dance around the characters during "Head Over Heels" or the powerful kinetic quality of the "Notorious" dance in Donnie Darko (it's pretty clear that what Richard Kelly really wants is to direct a musical--there's even a dream sequence in Southland Tales in which Justin Timberlake's characters lip-syncs to The Killers' "All These Things I've Done" while a bevy of chorus girls flit and flounce around him)--but this is hardly enough to sustain the film through 2.5 tedious and ultimately frustrating hours.


• Doctor Who, "Partners in Crime" - Pleasant, though not much more than that. Plot-wise, there's not much there there, but this is Doctor Who, and surely by now we've learned that unless Stephen Moffat or Paul Cornell's names are on the title page the plot will be something we've seen twelve times before, and an unbaked, unengaging thing at that. What's worth talking about in this episode is Donna, and here I see reason to be optimistic. The impression the episode gives off is that the writers have gotten as tired of the show's romantic subtext (and just plain text) as we have, and Donna is literally introduced as a character whose relationship with the Doctor is not in any way romantic. It remains to be seen whether the show will stick to its guns in this respect (and whether it will resurrect the romantic plotlines with either Martha or Rose--the latter, at least, seems almost certain), but I do like the dynamic that's developed between the Doctor and Donna. I like her acknowledgment that it's one thing to say that you're going to cast off mediocrity and live in an adventure, and quite another thing to make that adventure happen on your own--most especially because that adventurousness is something that Donna needs from the Doctor (as you may recall, my first inkling that something wasn't right about Martha was my realization that she had no need the Doctor could answer, and sure enough, that need soon appeared in the form of an unrequited love) but that is different than what Rose needed from him. I'm still waiting to see what Donna brings to the equation, other than companionship for the Doctor, but at least I have an understanding of the foundation of the relationship. This could turn out alright.

Self-Promotion 16

My review of the Battlestar Galactica TV movie "Razor" appears in today's Strange Horizons. If you've clicked through from there, you might be interested in some of my other posts about the show, or at least in the odd effect of the reverse chronological order they're presented in--you can watch me get less and less bitter, and finally enthusiastic, about the series.

The Episode That Broke Me and Other "Crossroads II" Thoughts

In the podcast for Battlestar Galactica's first season finale, "Kobol's Last Gleaming II", Ron Moore talks about his original concept for the season-ending cliffhanger (end of act 2 and beginning of act 3):

[Baltar] comes into a room and he hears music and it's a recognizable Earth-tune ... It was Jimi Hendrix was playing, actually, and he goes, "God, I recognize that." And then somebody- or somebody s- a voice says, "You recognize that?" And he says, "Yes." And he turns and it's Dirk Benedict. (Laughs.) And Dirk Benedict said, "Hi. I'm God." And you just cut. We just cut out on that. ... that was gonna be the end of that whole storyline and at the episode. I liked it. I thought it was wacky. I didn't quite know what it meant. I thought- I was looking for a surprise.

I was still infatuated with Galactica when I watched this episode and listened to the podcast, and even so Moore's words gave me pause. I was troubled by the realization that he could so cavalierly discuss introducing such an absurd plot twist without knowing its meaning and resolution, and even more so by his willingness to jeopardize the integrity of his invented universe for the sake of a metafictional gag. At the time, I told myself that it was wrong to judge Moore by the crazy notions his hyperactive imagination spun out. He had, after all, dismissed the idea--his better impulses and the people around him had talked him out of it. The bullet had been dodged. Two seasons later, it seems to have swung around and hit us*.

The massive plot twist at the end of "Crossroads II" differs from both of the cliffhangers preceding it. It is not, like Boomer shooting Adama in "Kobol's Last Gleaming II", an organic extension of previous events. Neither is it, like the 'One Year Later' title card in "Lay Down Your Burdens II", a massive perspective shift, a moment in which, as Dan Hartland put it, the show eviscerates itself (although as it turns out Dan vastly overestimates the consequences of the leap forward in his essay. The third season wasted very little time in restoring the status quo, and the aftereffects of both the Cylon occupation and the year spent on New Caprica have been only fleetingly and half-heartedly explored). If these two previous cliffhangers had the audience going 'Oh no!' and 'Wow!', respectively, the end of "Crossroads II" is more likely to have elicited a 'Huh?'

The return of Starbuck is only surprising in that it happens so soon after her 'death'. The less said about the incongruous musical choice, the better**. Plenty of people are scratching their heads at the identity of the Cylons revealed--two of them decent, morally upright people; one of them a violent, self-destructive drunk; two of them serving at the respective right hands of the two most powerful people in the fleet; one of them older than the Cylon race; one of them a parent; three of them major characters; one of them a virtual non-entity; all of them key members of the New Caprica resistance movement--but I can't help but feel that we'd have a easier time accepting Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tory as Cylons if we had a better idea of what, exactly, a Cylon is.

I'm going to say this again because it's just so mind-boggling. At the end of Galactica's third season--if rumors are to be believed, three quarters of the way into the show's run--we have no idea what a Cylon is. What little information we've been given about them is spotty and contradictory. Cylons are biological, but they can interface directly with fiber-optic cable. Cylons can breed with humans, but their blood has a different molecular structure than ours. Cylons have a psychology similar to humans--they can be tortured and fall in love--but they have only a rudimentary grasp of individuality and can tailor their perception of reality to suit their moods and protect them from the harshness of the real world. Moreover, Tigh and the others aren't garden variety Cylons. They're Final Five Cylons, whatever the hell that means. Within this fog of uncertainty, the only thing we can safely say is that these four characters are not what we thought they were, but we might as well have discovered that they all have a rare blood type, or a supernumerary toe, for all that we can understand the ramifications of this discovery, much less of their choice not to let biology--or mechanics--determine their destiny.

At the risk of sounding like one of these people, I've been toying for a while with the notion that Galactica is not, in any meaningful way, science fiction. Most narrative genres take place in a universe that operates according to a set of rules. The difference between naturalistic and fantastic fiction is that, in the latter, the universe is not our universe, and the rules are not our rules. Nevertheless, they exist, and are comprehensive and coherent. When it comes to Battlestar Galactica's fantastic elements, I'm beginning to wonder whether there are any rules. For more than a year, I and a host of other Galactica fans have been screaming to high heavens about the show's shoddy worldbuilding. Halfway through the second chorus of "All Along the Watchtower", I started to think that maybe Ron Moore isn't incapable of creating a coherent alternate universe. Maybe he just doesn't want to. Maybe a story that I've been reading, with ever-increasing frustration, as fantastic is actually surreal.

I'm not saying this to let Ron Moore and his writers off the hook. There's a vast gap between Battlestar Galactica and Twin Peaks, and let's not lose sight of the show's failures on the character level, or when wearing its other genre hats--the action adventure and the political thriller. Surrealism eschews coherence and linearity for the sake of ambience, but when it's done badly--and sometimes, even when it's done well--that ambience can fail to materialize. The audience, in cases like this, is jettisoned out of the story, and left with no emotional hook other than a bewildered amusement. If I'm right, and Ron Moore is prioritizing the gestalt effect of his story over any of its individual elements, then he is tragically out of step with the vast majority of his audience, and likely to lose more and more of them as his show sinks further into weirdness. All that said, I've often wondered about the thought processes of the surreal artist. When the only purpose of the work's details is to come together into a certain kind of whole, how do you know which details to use when? How do you decide that the backwards-talking dwarf goes here instead of there? I imagine that the process must be largely intuitive--perhaps along the lines of a writer who thinks that Dirk Benedict as God is a good idea.

As far as I'm concerned, there was only one question that "Crossroads II" needed to answer--is there any reason for me to come back to this show in January? If the rumors turn out to be true and the fourth season is confirmed as Galactica's last, I suspect I will. I want to see what Ron Moore comes up with as an ending, because at this point there is no doubt in my mind that it will be absolutely deranged. I guess you could say that "Crossroads II" is the episode that broke me--at this point, I am no longer interested in analyzing this show or pointing out the faults in its worldbuilding. In fact, I find myself dangerously close to the 'but it's not supposed to make any sense' mindset that keeps people watching 24 and Lost. In my defense, I just want to see whether or not I'm right. I think Moore is going to slide into the realm of metaphysics and go completely insane and I want to be there when it happens, not because I think the end result will be moving or awe-inspiring or even any good, but because I think it's going to be really, really big. At least, I'd like to believe that it will be. There must be some kind of way out of here.

---

* Which, in a way, is fitting. Why shouldn't the ghosts of the first season's aborted plot twists cap off the third season, which in the general shape of its plot progression resembles nothing so much as the second season's deformed twin? Both seasons start with the main cast divided, several of them stranded on a planet and in need of being rescued from the Cylons. This situation persists for several episodes, at the end of which order is restored--the fleet is reunited, Roslin and Adama are reinstated in their old roles and relationship--just in time for the mid-season two-parter to challenge it by positing a thorny moral dilemma. Once that storyline is wrapped up, in a wholly unsatisfying manner, the season devolves into a sequence of tedious and ill-advised standalone episodes which, in their turn, give way to a finale revolving around a momentous public decision--which turns out differently than any of the characters could have reasonably expected--and is then capped off by a shocking event.

** According to the show's composer, Bear McCreary, this choice doesn't imply "that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the characters' universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics," and if this is true then I can only say that the episode misses its mark by a wide, wide margin.