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Battlestar Galactica
A counterblast to the perceived wisdom on current televisual science fiction fantasmagoria
I notice that the tiny sand gnome we know as Mr Bickham has been
poo-pooing my in-office comments on Battlestar Galactica. Well, such is
his prerogative. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, and as the
internet amply demonstrates, we all have them. However, it is he, not
I, who stands chilled by the shadow of folly.
My dissenting voice on BSG stems from my hearing unmitigated praise heaped upon it by all and sundry before I saw it. So I was expecting something really rather excellent. Instead what I saw was a show that is merely very good, and one with several flaws at that.
Before I go into these flaws, I’ll tell you a little about my SF preferences. For me, the written form is the supreme expression of the genre, in terms of mental stimulation, evocation of wonder, and narrative cohesion. It is the work of one person (and, admittedly, their editor) and is all the more impressive for it. This is closely followed by films, though fewer of these live up to my exacting standards, games (for entirely different reasons, as the stories are often bobbins) and then, finally, television. TV SF has many drawbacks compared to the others. Unlike a book or a game, TV is an entirely passive form of entertainment, one that is less spectacular the other passive form, film. The need to fill endless airtime with story stretches the ideas of creator and scripter, and torture the budgets assigned to bring their visions to life.
Admittedly, it is the longevity of TV shows that attract a great many people to them. Their extended life-span builds fan bases like no other medium. But it is precisely this longevity that repels me. A great idea for 20 hours of entertainment becomes threadbare after 50, and unbearable after 70. I grow tired as TV producers try to take their concept and milk it for all it is worth, adding increasing layers of redundant complexity and retreading old ground in order to prolong its life (if ever there was a show guilty of this, it was the X-Files).
The TV landscape is changing. Ironically, short visual American SF has gone full circle. It started out as episodic matinee adventures in cinemas, until the advent of syndicated television forced a change to stand-alone stories where characters never developed, and details did not carry from one episode to the next. This form of entertainment remained prevalent until relatively recently, when video, the consolidation of various local networks into larger national channels in the US and finally, the advent of the internet, has made a return to episodic storytelling possible. Many channels, such as HBO, make their money precisely from this.
But though this trammel on over-arching narrative has been removed, a great deal of constraint still lies on TV writers. The tyranny of the 45 slot remains, of course, as does the inflexible episode count; both can lead to filler material. But far more damaging to the medium is the uncertain total length of a show. It could be one year, it could be 10. A series can never tightly planned, it can finish abruptly, or be spun out for a run far longer than the initial concept will support. It can even be canned and then reprieved, as Babylon 5 was. (For all its faults, Babylon 5, which blazed a trail toward episodic TV, worked well because it did have a tightly planned story. It only began to falter in its final season). Most TV does not have this story. Producers just make it up as they go along. We are, effectively, watching a first draft of a narrative under the polish of TV’s high production values.
In order to conceal this, TV shows now are overburdened with superficially complex ideas. They purport to be there to intensify the story, or even explore issues, in reality they exist to distract us from the weaknesses of the genre – TV’s man behind the curtain. By way of comparison, an author does not start writing a book and let people read what he is writing as he writes, nor does he keep on going, inventing as he does so, until the number of people reading drops below a certain level, upon which occasion he suddenly wraps up his story. American television does this.
Which leads me on to Battlestar Galactica. I’ve been out of the loop on a lot of US SF TV over the last few years. Since Christmas, I have been endeavouring to catch up. First with the BSG’s miniseries, and now the first season. I genuinely loved the original, and I want to love the new version. However, as enjoyable, and even compelling as it is, it is not loveable. Undoubtably, it is the best American SF on TV right now, but its shortcomings, which I reiterate I did not expect to find, highlight common to US TV shows of the moment.
Battlestar Galactica’s biggest weakness is that there is just too much in it. The original, for all its robo-dog chimps, sexist attitudes and laughable disco glitz had at least a simple purity to it – it was the story of a group of people fleeing across space in the face of an insurmountable threat. It was a story about what that flight did to the civilisation and people who comprised it. This simple premise – drawn by Glen A. Larson from the story of Moses, was leavened with intriguing ideas drawn from Erich von Danniken’s Chariots of the Gods. The rest of it was ropey TV tosh, but the concept was a winner (it is, perhaps, ironic that the episodic nature of the story contributed to the show’s cancellation – it was too difficult to syndicate).
Now a new version of this, suitably updated, sans chimp, would have been excellent. But that is not what we have. Instead, Ronald D Moore’s take on the show virtually sidelines the ‘exodus’ aspect of the show in favour of shaky political comment and the relationships between three generations of creative force (God, man, and finally, machine). These are very interesting avenues to explore in SF, but I am not sure that TV is the best medium to explore them in. More, I think that the show’s ambitions outstrip its means of achieving them. Here’s why.
i) Exodus. The core of the original is poorly used in new BSG. Where explored it is generally in terms of “we’re short of X, let’s find some”. Fair play, a fleeing fleet will need more fuel, more water, but the set ups for both episodes this occurs in are poorly handled and dully realised. (For example, the water tanks need bombing before we have a water shortage; all the pilots are killed in a freak accident, and we never see their replacements bar Hotdog after the episode). There are other perils in space besides shortage.
The scale of the trip they must make is undermined by the ease with which Starbuck nips back to Caprica in the Cylon raider. Likewise, the segments with Helo on Caprica distract from the fleet’s travails, annoying as Helo’s adventures do little to add to the Boomer-as-Cylon storyline. Both undermine the scale of the universe, taking away from the claustrophobia of being trapped in a few ships deep in space. In some ways it makes their predicament look too easy.
ii) Shaky political comment. SF is fantastic for exploring tricky issues outside of a contemporary frame of reference. The roots of the genre stem from this need – early fabulists like Voltaire and Swift set their political satires in fantastical worlds so they could safely criticise government. But BSG does not use SF as a metaphor, it simply puts Americans in space. There is nothing clever about this, and it irritates. As a piece of SF, BSG is fundamentally undermined by the sheer mundanity of the USAF in space.
iii) Cylons. The Cylons aren’t unstoppable killing machines, they’re people too! Yet another attempt by the US to get its head round alternate cultural viewpoints by pointing out actually, underneath it all, we all just want to be Americans. This is especially true here, with the Cylons attempting to become human.
This does several things to the dynamic of the show’s multiple story strands. Firstly, the Cylon’s ostensibly hard-core monotheistic belief in a loving god robs the Cylons of true motivation in destroying humanity. Secondly, blurring the line between human and Cylon removes the monolithic threat of the machine. We learn that they can be bargained with, they can love as people do, they can even breed with us, questioning the validity of both genocide and flight. Returning to this theme over and again further shifts focus away from the ‘exodus’ element of the story. The relationship between man and machine, thus complicated, becomes then one of soap-opera interaction rather than one of peril. I’m not one to say that enmity is a simple thing – the world is not cast in black or white, but BSG is not the best place to explore this over-trodden theme.
The sad thing is, these disparate parts do not gel together. They should reinforce one another and thus the show’s central theme, but there is no central theme. What we have is watering down of the original concept by a grab-bag of faux-philosophical conceits that themselves are not satisfyingly explored.
Where it does work is when the show is concerned with events aboard the fleet – the Tom Zerek arc is particularly well handled, exploring the issues of violence in politics and democracy excellently, without establishing a direct parallel with the real world. This is good TV SF metaphor.
There is much to like about BSG, and as entertainment it functions perfectly. I do enjoy it, and look forward to devouring the second and third seasons. Be assured I will comment on them here when I have, but at the moment I am forced to admit a certain amount of disappointment, and that is what this blog is really about – over expectation. Many people led me to expect a hard-hitting, complex drama that rises above the limitations of its medium, and this simply is not the case.
There is a much tighter, stronger show in here; one about sacrifice, adversity and loss, but as it is, Battlestar Galactica is good TV that intellectually over-reaches itself.
Guy Haley May 21, 2007, 01:44:31
