So Say We All:
Battlestar Galactica Is the Best Show on Television
Culture — By Joe Carter on April 4, 2008 at 2:12 am A shockingly large segment of the population suffers from the delusion that all artistic judgments are subjective. For instance, when confronted with a claim such as “John Singer Sargent is the greatest painter of the 20th century”, they believe that what is being presented is an assertion of opinion rather than a statement of fact. They do not realize that to agree is to be in possession of a correct judgment while to disagree is to simply be wrong.
Similarly, some people may attempt to dispute the indisputable fact that Battlestar Galactica is the greatest series currently on television and is, in my respects, one of the greatest shows ever. These self-deceived folks generally fall into two categories: those who have seen the show yet disagree (hence, exhibiting an inability to recognize the sublime) or those who have not yet seen the show and remain skeptical that such a claim could be true.
Rather than attempting to educated the first group–which would require more time and patience than I possess–I will focus on explaining to the second group what they are missing.
BSG is the best sci-fi show on television–ever: The paucity of good sci-fi on television becomes apparent when you consider the competition. When the Boston Globe put together a list of The Top 50 Sci-Fi Shows of All Time, they had to pad it with other genres (e.g., superhero: Batman, Adventures of Superman, Wonder Woman), series that were forgettable even when they originally aired (The Greatest American Hero, Nowhere Man), and shows no one has ever heard of (Space 1999, That Was Then) in order to come up with fifty.
The Globe ranks Star Trek as #1 and bumps BSG to #2. And indeed, the most serious challenger to BSG would appear to be the original Star Trek. But the cultural phenomenon spawned by Star Trek–rather than the series itself–is what is most interesting about that series and will continue to be its most lasting legacy; the culture of Trekkies is far more significant than any of the episodes featuring Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. The original has also been eclipsed by its successor, Star Trek: The Next Generation–another show that, while worthy in some respects, cannot compete with BSG.
BSG is the best show on television to explore philosophical issues–ever: In a recent issue of Wired, Clive Thompson wrote on “Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion of Philosophical Writing.” “If you want to read books that tackle profound philosophical questions,” says Thompson, “then the best — and perhaps only — place to turn these days is sci-fi. Science fiction is the last great literature of ideas.”
What is true of literature is also true for televised narratives. From The Twilight Zone to Lost, sci-fi shows have been able to explore questions of ethics, ontology, metaphysics, et al., in a way that conventional “realistic” shows are unable to do. What sets BSG apart from other worthy fare (like the shows mentioned above) is that it weaves truly big ideas–as opposed to merely interesting ones, like the effects of time travel–deeply into the story lines of each episode. From age old questions of free will and responsibility to such cutting-edge topics as the bioethics of transhumanism, BSG seamlessly incorporates philosophical themes into the narrative structure and forces us to consider how we should respond to such issues.
BSG is the best show on television about religious belief–ever: There are a number of television shows that have done a masterful job of exploring specific faiths (e.g., Christianity, Judaism) or religious themes. But no show has ever matched BSG ability to examine the effects of religious belief on politics, society, philosophy, and human (as well as humanoid) civilization.
The religious themes in BSG are complex and often confusing. The humans are polytheistic, believing in a number of gods that are connected with Greek and Roman mythology while their humanoid enemy, the Cylons, are monotheistic. What makes the series interesting from a religious perspective is that the beliefs of each of the two groups (as well as the subset of agnostics as atheists) have serious implications. Almost every major character has strong religious convictions that shape not only their own individual destiny but the fate of all humankind/humanoidkind.
BSG is the best show on television about the military–ever: The structure and tradition of the military in BSG is modeled loosely on the U.S. Navy, though it adds an intriguing level of gender-neutrality (e.g., living quarters are completely co-ed, officers of both genders are referred to as “sir”). This is characteristic of the show, for even when it falls back on clichés (pilots are cocky) the writers manage to include a unique twist (the cockiest most capable pilot is a woman).
While most shows about the military can’t even get the most basic details right (Marines with sideburns!) BSG goes to extraordinary lengths to achieve a level of realism. (As a Marine, I’ve worked alongside sailors in aviation squadrons and was impressed by how many details the series gets right.) No show on television has every captured the nuances of military culture like BSG. [Caution: The show substitutes the word "frak" for another plosive consonant that starts with "F." Although it may be a clever way for the writers to circumvent the basic-cable prohibition against profanity, it also adds a level of realism to the dialogue for in the military cussing is often used as a form of technical jargon.]
The fourth and final season of BSG begins tonight on the Sci-Fi channel. However, if you’ve never watched the show do not watch the new episodes. Begin at the beginning and watch all of the previous three seasons. You won’t regret this This list is but a sampling of what you’re missing if you’ve never watched this superb sci-fi series.
Addendum: Here are a few aesthetic judgments that I hold about BSG that are subjective:
- Caprica Six (Tricia Helfer) is the most beautiful machine in the universe.
- Edward James Olmos and Lucy Lawless have never had better acting roles.
- Kara “Starbuck” Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) is the most intriguing military character ever on a TV show.
- Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is the most loathsome, cowardly, painful-to-watch, character ever on a TV show.
- BSG would have been better had it made a Marine one of its main characters.
- We are in the Golden Age of Television (seriously), which makes the standing of BSG all the more significant.
- No show on television has ever had a better opening sequence (see video below).
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62 Comments
To wit: only 50,000 people left, women would not be pilots, they’d be pumping out babies. Genetic engineering and cloning and such would be the “biological advantage” over machines.
A few additional thoughts:
1. The genetic engineering in the series is done by the cylons who appear to have gained their abilities at the expense of unethical experiments performed on captured humans. In fact, genetic engineering seems to have only a marginal advantage. The human cylons have some physical advantages over normal humans but that only helps in hand to hand combat which is relatively rare.
2. It’s pretty clear that the cylons are not superior to the humans. During ‘fair fights’ human ships seem very capable of taking on cylon ships. It’s not easy but the cyclons are only able to achieve their great victory at the start of the series by exploiting a back door that allows them to deactivate almost all of the human ships and defense networks.
3. Aside from allowing themselves to again get too dependent on computers, the humans were doing fine. There was no need to take ‘emergancy measures’ like forcing all women to be breeders. In fact, I doubt you will find much historical precedent for this. Woman have historically been excluded from combat roles because not because of any ‘population crises’ but because they are not physically capable of many combat positions. Modern tech., though evens this advantage up to some degree.
A more realistic sci-fi scenario where women have to be pushed to breed would more likely be found not in war stories but biological ones like The Handmaidens Tale or Children of Men.
A few objections I have to BSG’s tech-
1. Nuclear weapons are rarely used by either side. Yet in space battles I think they would be very common. In the large distances of space, heavy armour of the warships and the vacuum of space you would need nuclear explosives to be practical weapons. I doubt you could lay down anti-aircraft flac with conventional explosives.
2. Since you don’t have to worry about fall out of environmental destruction the costs of using nukes would be very low. Needless to say, mass producing them would be very cheap too.
3. The fighters are great for dramatic purposes but I doubt you could shield them against the radiation of space combined with nukes going off all over the place. They are only sensible for fights that within eyeshot of each other and if you can get that close why not just set off an unmanned nuke?
I watched a few episodes yesterday. Good stuff!
Someone does raise a good question above, though. If you count the X-files in this genre, I think it would be a mistake to discount that show. For my money, the X-Files was one of the best series I ever watched.
Isn’t anybody concerned that we give so much sense of direction to mere television?
I’m not. It is a damm good show and much more worthy of 55+ comments than a lot of other topics that we’ve carried over the 200 mark here.
Childbearing Women again
The argument presented is that the BSG society should pull women out of combat duty because the human population has gone from something like 9 billion to less than 40,000. On the show the human society did respond to this crises by outlawing abortion except in cases where the mother’s life is in danger.
Why does this make sense? Well biologically women have the womb and men don’t. Making babies is very capital intensive in terms of wombs but sperm is pretty much free. So when you do get a womb, you should use it while sperm is pretty much worthless and if some of it gets wasted in combat deaths no big deal.
What the critics fail to note, though, is that this logic only applies to animals. If there was some strange chicken crises that nearly wipes out all chickens, the farmer can keep 99 chickens and only 1 rooster. The rooster will have no trouble making eggs with the remaining chickens. Should the farmer need to eat he would do well to look at the extra rooster before going after the female chickens.
BUT this would only apply to BSG society (and our own) if you’re also willing to rewrite the rules of morality around human reproduction. If you’re going to keep the ethic that babies should be made by one man and one woman and not one man with miltiple women then the man becomes equally important to reproduction as the woman.
In other words, banning women from combat because of their wombs makes sense only in situations that are much more dire than even the BSG one. It would only make sense in cases so bad you’re also willing to ignore rules against incest, polygamy, and so on (for example, the situation Lot’s daughter’s incorrectly believed themselves to be in).
I was a fan of the original but am an even bigger fan of the new BSG. I’d rank them:
1) BSG (new)
2) B5
3) Firefly (plus Serenity)
4) Deep Space 9 (the only Trek with continuity for much of its run)
The writing is (mostly) outstanding, with only a few duds, the acting is superb, the stories gripping (pick your nice metaphors). Hopefully, the payoff will be worth it.
Colin – concern for so much direction given to TV? No really, because it’s a really decent show–decent Internet water-cooler talk, unlike most of the lousy fare that passes for TV entertainment these days.
OK Joe, I’ve now watched the first three episodes, and I gotta say, Firefly this is not.
I was particularly annoyed at the prison episode. The writers of this series seem to have very little perspective about the scope of our contextual values. I’m sorry, but the survival of the human race is more important than democracy, or freedom, or the separation of powers, or whatever. And people would realize this. Things would become very primeval and draconian quite fast if only 50,000 of us were left and struggling to survive.
It had better get better pretty quick.
Boonton, you make a good argument for still allowing women in combat. Too bad the show has never made that argument. However, using the argument about the change it would require in morality is pretty weak. First, no one seems to have any hesitation about having multiple sex partners. I doubt that such a society would balk at polygamy. Also, I would have to believe that at least one of the tribes would religiously support polygamy. So, the moral argument is weak.
With regards to them being in ships and not wanting to procreate or only in a limited way until they reach a new home, the issue here is that they don’t see any need to control procreation at all. You have to figure that several of the survivors have been exposed to radiation levels that would cause serious mutations. So, we should be seeing some sort of screening for genetic defects before letting anyone have children. Plus, it further limits the pool of eligible females making them an even more rare resource.
Finally, your elite force argument fails because the most recent episode completely destroyed the argument. Lee just quits being a pilot. You don’t just get to quit when you’re fighting for your survival because you “feel” you would be better suited for a gov’t pencil pushing job.
Wonders, it doesn’t get better. You’re going to be pulling your hair out as you watch stupid decisions and idiotic concerns over things that in reality wouldn’t matter. I recently read a review where a person finally realized after three seasons that Ron Moore doesn’t care to build a coherent, fictional world. He’s more concerned about character moments. And, if there is a character moment he wants to show, even if it doesn’t make sense in his created universe, he’ll do it. Wait until you get to points where characters act one way one episode and then a couple episodes later they are acting completely contradictory. The biggest failure the reviewer has found, and after reading it it makes sense, is that BSG has never defined what a Cylon is. They can’t detect one. Yet, Cylons have a different molecular structure, are stronger than humans, can interface with computers via cables, can alter their own reality, etc. It’s logically incoherent.
Chris
Boonton, you make a good argument for still allowing women in combat. Too bad the show has never made that argument. However, using the argument about the change it would require in morality is pretty weak. First, no one seems to have any hesitation about having multiple sex partners. I doubt that such a society would balk at polygamy. Also, I would have to believe that at least one of the tribes would religiously support polygamy. So, the moral argument is weak.
The show doesn’t have to make the argument. The experienced female pilots were born into and trained in a society that didn’t have any population shortage. After the attack it wouldn’t make sense to kick Starbuck & other females out of the military. While this would marginally help the population shortage (adding 50 or so more wombs to a population of 30-50K) the damage to the military would be a lot worse.
Yes many in the society do have multiple sex partners but having kids is still done through mostly monogamous couples. Yes that rule is not perfectly followed, there are affairs, breakups, divorces etc. but it’s clear even after the attack the society still follows that pattern. IF you are to keep that pattern then the fact that women have wombs is of only marginal importance. You still need roughly one man to one woman so the argument that women have more value as baby breeders carries less weight.
I haven’t seen any episodes in the new series that implied that any of the tribes had polygamy, but polygamy by itself is not enough. If breeding becomes your #1 priority to all else; the strategy to employ would be polygamy combined with a way to eliminate ’surplus males’. On the farm this is done with the help of the slaughterhouse. In a human society this would be done either by using the males as cannon fodder or simply getting rid of them (polygamists in Utah are known for ‘dumping’ young teenage boys into the homeless populations of nearby cities).
What I’m saying, then, is if breeding moves so high up on the priority list that you’re going to be kicking the females out of the cockpit then you’re also going to be embracing lots of other ideas that you normally would not.
With regards to them being in ships and not wanting to procreate or only in a limited way until they reach a new home, the issue here is that they don’t see any need to control procreation at all. You have to figure that several of the survivors have been exposed to radiation levels that would cause serious mutations. So, we should be seeing some sort of screening for genetic defects before letting anyone have children. Plus, it further limits the pool of eligible females making them an even more rare resource.
I would assume a society in which space travel is as common as ship or plane travel with us would have relatively efficient ways to limit radiation damage. There was an episode that took place back on the home planet where survivors raided hospitals for ‘radiation blankes’ presumably to protect themselves from the residual radiation from the cyclon attack. I’m going to guess that except in extreme cases, radiation is as manageable as sea sickness in the BSG world. For the sake of the argument, though, if you’re sticking with one man- one woman then a man damaged by radiation exposure hurts the population cause as much as a woman.
Also I don’t think it’s that they don’t see any need to either procreate or control procreation, it is simply not on the priority list. It is a little like asking people in a concentration camp to make plans for which country they want to live in when the war ends. Day to day survivial is the priority and they are only doing a halfway decent job at that. Anyway, if the plan is to go to earth then the hope is they will join a much larger population of humans.
Finally, your elite force argument fails because the most recent episode completely destroyed the argument. Lee just quits being a pilot. You don’t just get to quit when you’re fighting for your survival because you “feel” you would be better suited for a gov’t pencil pushing job.
Good point, however:
1. He is the Admiral’s son. Hence he has some leeway.
2. The population is still trying to follow law. Provisions have not been made for either a draft or forcing unwanted extensions on the active duty. (In one episode it was mentioned that all colonial military had ‘re-enlisted’ after their tours were technically over making it unnecessary to contemplate a draft).
3. Especially with elites, you have an Atlas Shrugged problem. You may be able to force someone to stay in the hanger bay prepping ships but pilots cannot be so easily forced. It’s probably safer to let an unwilling pilot take a leave or put him in reserve rather than force him into the air against his will.
4. Several esisodes have also made it clear most of the population does not have the freedom many of the ‘elites’ have. There is not a free market for labor and those with specialized skills (such as fuel refining) do not have the freedom to easily quite their jobs.
The biggest failure the reviewer has found, and after reading it it makes sense, is that BSG has never defined what a Cylon is. They can’t detect one. Yet, Cylons have a different molecular structure, are stronger than humans, can interface with computers via cables, can alter their own reality, etc. It’s logically incoherent.
You’re never going to get perfect coherence from a sci-fi world. Star Trek can employ as many ‘continuity editors’ and make its writers read as many ‘tech manuals’ as it wants and there will be some things that don’t add up.
Only one cyclon was shown interfacing with a computer via cables, that was Boomer. Balter also developed a ‘cyclon detector’ that did appear to work (he falsely reported that Boomer had passed the test). As for their ability to ‘alter reality’, they only alter their perception of reality (imagining they are walking in a forest rather than down the drab corridors of their ships)….nothing amazing there. They are marginally stronger than humans and have some better physical stats…that is limited though. If you need physical strength you’re better off going with the dumb metal cylons.
As for the definition of what they are, I think you should refer back to the original series when Six refers to her kind as the children of men & Adama muses over whether humans deserve to survive after creating intelligent persons for their own ease. The definition of cylons is confused because the humans in the series continually dodge the truth; human or not the cylons are people. This denial is sometimes able to be suspended in special cases (i.e. letting Boomer become part of the crew again), but with the exception of Baltar it continues to elude the rest of their thinking. This is probably not that different than slave owners 200 years ago. They could possibly relate to individual slaves as people after they lived with them for a long period but their larger thinking about the people remained incoherent.
A really addictive new sci-fi book is…
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