I posted some time ago about the new Sci-Fi network miniseries, but we just started watching season one of Battlestar Galactica, and it holds up to my cautious excitement. The third episode: as the fleet scurries to escape Cylon pursuit, the President (Mary McDonnell, playing a minor political functionary who becomes Pres because everyone higher up died in the massive destruction of humanity) and military commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) begin to fight behind the scenes for control; Cylons have infiltrated the ships disguised as humans–and have begun a series of terrorist attacks on the ships, including venting most of the fleet’s water supply to space; an insurrection on a prison ship opens up problems about who to call a ‘citizen’ of the fleet, how to envision the future of democracy during wartime, etc….
You get a small sense of the picture: it’s a by-god sociopolitical soap opera, with fascinating foci on issues of how actually to “run” a community with scarce resources, limited cohesion, attackers on all sides (and within). The allegorical connections to America’s current situation are not hyperbolically shouted, but hell they don’t need to be.
It’s amazing, but I think this is the most interesting “post-9/11” fiction I’ve yet seen. And it ranks up there with the best television science fiction. So far. But I am very hopeful….
mike, how does it compare with “firefly”? and why has “firefly” not found a new home on the sci-fi channel?
Firefly is character-driven, and almost like sci-fi as anthropology: deeply imagine a set of cultural conditions and values, then set an idiosyncratic crew a-bubble with some fun but ludicrous plots, and allow “culture” to ripple up, manifesting itself intriguingly, here and there. I greatly enjoyed it.
Yet it’s Bradbury to Galactica‘s Asimov; the latter show is more concerned with social institutions under deep structural pressures, and the characters–while occasionally intriguing–seem less like “characters” than certain social roles, set into motion. That is NOT to undersell the actors, often quite good. (For those who, like me, fell under the spell of the original sometime way way back, Richard Hatch is cast in the new one, but as a quasi-freedom fighter/terrorist prisoner… and he’s pretty darn good.)
I happen to be a fan of both Bradbury and Asimov, so I wouldn’t suggest one over the other–but only Galactica seems concerned with what Freddie Jameson might affirm as an extrapolated social and historical imagination.
I’m still getting my sense of the show, so it may fall off or fade. And there are some kinks: a crazy “genius” doctor strongly (and implausibly) haunted (?) by a Cylon hot chick seems at times like he’s playing Dr. Zachary Smith.
A slight qualification and update:
We’re almost done with Season one. I still recommend it, perhaps not as vigorously. There were four outstanding episodes. The other nine range from decent, reasonably-entertaining television (a mild compliment) to flat awful. (Only one in that last category, but still.) So it’s television: its political and narrative sophistication comes and goes. But it is entertaining.
Back to “Firefly”–I think it’s the more successful, less-conventional of the two series. But “Battlestar” is better hard-nosed sci-fi, if that’s your cup of tea.
For those who care, we’re almost done with the first half of season 2 (which got released early, to draw in more viewers for the second half). This is excellent television sci-fi, or just plain excellent sci-fi. (Or just plain excellent television. I get caught up in very, very few tv dramas–but this one I would/will try to catch in real time, rather than just awaiting comprehensive dvd sets.)
Adding to my earlier impressions:
–The characters, as would be expected for any on-going series with a decent writing staff and actors, have grown more complicated and more alluring. For instance, the interplay between Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos) and his often near-to-dictatorial militarism and President Roslin (Mary McConnell) and her near-to-loopy religious mysticism leaves viewers rooting for and against both of the fleet’s leaders. I find it fascinating that we have not just two flawed, intriguing characters, but through them a scenario about government that resists easy answers….
–The writing is more consistently solid and challenging.
–I think the show is more consistently action-packed, as well; the opening two shows of the season, for instance, work pretty damn well as an action film–suspenseful and riveting, while also playing out some of season 1’s cliffhangers.
Again, this is another species than Firefly, but both are worth your time.
David Weddle, who wrote an excellent book on Sam Packinpah (If They Move, Kill ‘Em) is one of the series’ writers. A colleague of mine is friends with Weddle, and I may ask him to invite Weddle to the College. Maybe do a screenwriting workshop or talk about sci-fi, or Peckinpah. Reynolds, what do you think of the shows he’s written?
I had Season One, Disc One in my Netflix queue, but they sent Season One, Disc Two by mistake and have yet to send me Disc One. So I can’t say anything about this yet except that I am looking forward to it.
I am posting this comment in order to distract myself from the Super Bowl pregame, which began at 4:30 this morning.
Yeah–it’s hard to place writers with episodes, except for one writer (Toni Graphia) whose name popped up on my favorite episodes, but the next-to-last one I just watched was Weddle and his collaborator, and it was good. (“Flight of the Phoenix”–some nice structural play between storylines, a refreshed take on the war-is-hell plot, etc.)
Peckinpah, eh? Interesting–this series is tough-minded, in the right ways. Maybe not quite Straw-Dogsy, but neither is this some namby-pamby Number One steely-eye-ing Picard as the episodes move toward neat conclusions. People behave meanly, and poorly, and the show seems to delight in disrupting our identifications. Again, I don’t want to oversell it, but Galactica gives good space opera.
Season 3–and I gather that I may be the only person paying attention, unless John caught up from the missent Netflix dvds–opens with some changes. We closed last season with the humans deciding to settle on a newly-found planet, and forget the ceaseless flight. Bad idea. In the last ten minutes of season 2, the show flash-forwarded one year’s time, as the Cylons roll in, catching everyone complacent and changed.
We begin 3 with a vichy-style human government and a Cylon occupation. The government has been detaining (and torturing) humans without trial or any recourse; the human insurgency has begun suicide bombing. You get the parallels, eh? If The Wire didn’t have the category locked, this’d be the most challenging political commentary on television, and it runs in the top 3 or 4 for best show, as well. It’s brutal and complexly-structured and wonderfully nuanced; it’s what sci-fi can do very, very well. (I.e., show us, in extrapolation and allegory, the way historical and political systems unfold at the level of everyday life.)
I’m back to overselling it.
I have never watched Battlestar Galactica, partly because I don’t like to watch TV that I don’t have to pay premium rates for, and partly because I don’t like joining series when they are well underway.
But here I am in Stockholm and there are about a dozen channels of TV, mostly showing US shows, and I watched an episode of BG. It was astonishingly good. It sounds like it is from this 3rd season. Essentially, a democratic dissident, who has been imprisoned for opposition to the regime (I don’t have the background to know who is called what), holds several visitors hostage while demanding democratic elections. There were some lines from the dissident early on — responding to predictable complaints about the use of violence and the need for a period of stability before moving to democracy — that were quite wonderful in the way they skewered mainstream thinking. The Iraq parallels are absolutely obvious. It is increasingly the case that I am impressed whenever anyone is allowed to make the case for violence (see our thread about terrorism movies) on US screens.
The one criticism I would make, and the thing that ultimately made this mainstream basic cable fare, is that ultimately the “good guy” has to win the argument. The dissident is unmasked as wanting a bloodbath and being hypocritical in his call for democracy. This is a generalization, of course, but I think what ultimately separates most of these TV shows from the very best of HBO is that they creep close to the edge of genuinely radical, unsettling thinking, but they back away at the end; they don’t have the courage of their own convictions.
Every TV show or movie will eventually have to face the Reynolds question: whether to kill the cute kid. Most fail (‘Crash’) and a few succeed (original ‘Assault on Precinct 13’). The same goes for politics, and here the equivalent to the cute kid is to question the virtue of democracy and to urge political change through violence.
Hey Chris-
actually, that episode is from season 2. What changes in season 3 is that the human regime loses power–now the cylons are in charge, and it is a (ragtag) crew of humans using violence to upset the regime. So what’s interesting is that the show shifted gears so that it actually could open up that issue of using violence to achieve political ends…
… and even more interesting, is that the question gets confusing because the humans wreaking havoc are (so far) not exactly subtle in their philosophy. One says that his SOLE goal is to create mayhem and disorder, in ways that might foster a breakdown of authority–and he’ll do anything (including sending in suicide bombers, and attacking ‘civilians’/humans) to accomplish those ends. Further, the cylons (who have a monotheistic religion much more like ‘ours,’ contra the polytheism of the humans) seem damned reasonable. (I read an interview with the creator, of the show, not the Creator, who said that writing for this season has forced him to imagine and empathize with the Bushies’ vision of controlling Iraq….)
I think it often does get stuck returning to some (basic cable) conventions, but the more acclaim they get, the more the show’s creators seem willing to explore the far side of what’s allowed… In some ways, I’d draw a comparison to “Deadwood”–that show’s in another class, BUT both posit that social and political order are not excluded by crude, violent abuses of power–rather such order (and the ideals that go along with it) are products of such abuses. Always and already, forever and ever amen.
Fuck, and I still don’t even know what a cylon is. I’ve put series 1 in my Netflix queue. So much for that manuscript due November 10th.
I still don’t know where we are in the series (the woman who seemed to be president in series 2 was just sworn in as president in tonight’s episode), but regardless, there was a great Guantanamo episode tonight. It would be easy to mess this up and exaggerate in fiction what the US is doing in fact. But BG goes the other way: its fictional secret trials are fairer, or at least the jury of peers appears scrupulously fair, than the Guantanamo equivalent. Again, as in my post above, I would have preferred them to get it wrong and execute an innocent person, rather than figure out their error at the last minute and give us a warm and fuzzy West Wing feeling, but it was still an impressively subversive episode.
BTW, the Cybermen made a long-awaited reappearance in the Doctor Who episode that runs just before BG. I remember hiding behind the couch and having nightmares for days when I was nine years old after I first saw the Cybermen. Halloween movies? Ha! That’s nothing to a person in a metal suit with a disembodied voice. Scary shit.
Most of the way through Season 3’s dvd set, and hit on another great episode–which loses its way, much as Chris has diagnosed in the posts above, in the last 10 minutes.
The set-up is that the democratic leaders are dealing with a fuel refinery plant sabotaging product, and finally going on strike. The leaders come down hard, imprisoning and hard-bargaining… but an argument emerges through the episode about the development of an aristocracy and an underclass among the fleet’s inhabitants, people forced into specific social/economic circumstances by war pressures, etc. It does what the series can do so well: turns the good/bad on its head, so that the person arguing most forcefully about the underclass is the sleazy disgraced former President (whose motives are very much in question) and the villains are our democratic heroes….
…of course the last 10 minutes, they allow the tension to fade, the government accepts the need for a union, and blah blah. Everybody learns. This may be a symptomatic problem of the show, again as Chris has argued, but–still!–a sci-fi show focused on the problems occluded by most every sci-fi show ever made. (And much of the genre, in any medium.)
As my friend Stephen put it, the Enterprise had no bathrooms, but on Galactica, we see the shit; the show is relentlessly concerned with the ambiguities of power and war and social systems…. even if it is a little too dependent on healing the wounds it reveals.
we’ve just started watching. we just finished the 3 hour miniseries/pilot that kicked off the series, and will dive into season 1 proper on saturday. i really liked the miniseries, and am hoping the standards will remain high. of course, i cannot read the rest of the comments here for fear of spoilers. since we’re three seasons behind we should be caught up a couple of years after the show ends. see you then!
Just finished season 1, and tonight I’m beginning season 2 as we hunker down for Tropical Storm Hanna. I have a few colleagues here who are fully into the show, and given the positive rumblings from reynolds et al., I thought I’d try and catch up with everyone.
Like arnab, I can’t read much of what’s above. Any chance we could create separate threads for seasons 1, 2, 2.5, and 3?
we’re almost through season 3, and i have a source for season 4 episodes. therefore i no longer sympathize with those who wish to have a spoiler-free discussion.
john: everyone on galactica turns out to be a cylon in season 3.
D’oh!
In response to reynolds’s reponse (#3), yes there are some real clunkers in this series. I’m in the midst of season 2.5 and it offers the best examples of his point: “Black Market” is absolute crap. It’s written by one of the producers, Mark Verheiden, and I can hardly say written. It’s crap. But then, along comes David Weddle (another producer) for the following episode, “Scar,” and we’re back on track (Weddle knows where the waters of inspiration are sweetest: the well of the American Western). And then another fantastic episode, “The Sacrifice,” follows.
I understand (I think) how a series like this runs. The demands of the network are such that compromises must be made (more producers than the creators want, more writers than they want). Even the great Twin Peaks could not withstand the weekly demands of ABC. It, too, suffered (though most die-hard Lynch fans understood the one-season premise of the show anyway–and that subsequent episodes would be, well, just “on,” and, well, why not watch anyway?).
All in all, and in spite of unforgivable crap like “Black Market,” I think this series is excellent.
yeah, there are some terrible one-off episodes. there are a couple of real crappy ones in season 3, and one in the first half of season 4 as well. in a way this is the opposite of how the x-files worked–there it was the ongoing narrative thread that became increasingly tedious while the one-offs remained enjoyable.
and watch out for romo lampkin at the end of season 3.