So, Battlestar Galactica. As I’ve mentioned before in passing, this season’s emphasis on the show’s increasingly baroque mythology–both in the literal, religious sense and in the X-Files metaplot sense–has turned me off a bit, in no small part because it’s attracting the same kind of crazed devotion that Lost does from the some of the same Lost fans of my acquaintance who are also driving with that show too. To me the biggest symbol of this is the new opening sequence, which has shifted from laying out the need-to-know details about the Cylon threat to the equivalent of Lost having a thing at the beginning of every Season Four episode asking “Who’s in the coffin?” And duh, I’m obviously not the only person to connect the Final Five with the Oceanic Six.
That being said, I still find it engrossing, suspenseful, and completely unpredictable. And while the overemphasis on the mysticism, mythology, and Starbuck (Vision-Quest Variant) has obscured this somewhat, it’s still frequently moving and profound. There was a time recently when I was very, very down, and suddenly the sinister appeal of Gaius Baltar’s “God loves you because you are perfect” gospel of absolution from personal responsibility became frighteningly clear. Laura Roslin’s terminal illness storyline is as grueling as such storylines get (favorably reminiscent of similar plotlines from The Sopranos and Deadwood). The Final Four Outta Five are fascinating to watch in action. The Cally episode was heartbreaking. And so on and so on.
Which brings us to this past week’s episode, “Sine Qua Non.” I was thrilled to see Apollo and Tom Zarek back in action–the former has obviously been criminally underused this season, particularly considering how his blockbuster conduct at the Baltar trial set him up to become a strange and powerful new moral center for the show. I was thrilled to see a return to the political machinations, the struggle for a traumatized society to overcome turmoil, that had driven the show through its first three seasons. I liked seeing Romo Lampkin, that weird Shakespearean fool of a character, come back. I liked the kitty-cat. I liked the fistfight between Bill Adama and Sol Tigh. (Of course, I like everything about Sol Tigh.) I liked the clue that Sol’s impregnation of the captive Six afforded us as to the fundamental difference between the Final Five and the main Seven–perhaps even the reason the Five were kept secret in the first place. Certain things were sloppy, like Lampkin’s meltdown (though we’ve seen that sort of thing from this show a lot in the past, including Athena’s meltdown in the previous episode), but still, I thought, good stuff overall.
So I was kind of surprised to see how much people hated this episode. My Tori Amos messageboard friends, Jim Henley and his commenters, the House Next Door’s commenters–“worst episode ever” was thrown around quite a bit, and since this series included “Black Market,” that ain’t just whistlin’ Dixie. In some quarters, the episode is seen not just as an isolated incident, nor as the hallmark of a lousy season, but as a sign that the entire show has been a complete waste of time.
This made me think: What is the defining characteristic of “the entire show”?
It’s odd, but I’m discovering that I don’t know the show as well as I know other shows I’ve followed this intently. With the exception of something obvious like “Fragged” (an episode cited as successful by Jim), I don’t really remember episode titles or what happened in them. I don’t even remember what came when! Maybe because Battlestar‘s seasons are so much longer than those of the other shows I’ve caught up with at least in part via DVD (The Sopranos, The Wire, Deadwood, and back in the VHS days, Twin Peaks), they tend to blend together? Maybe it’s just harder to track what each season is “about” plotwise, as opposed to The Sopranos‘s villain-of-the-season structure or Lost‘s mystery-of-the-season structure or The Wire‘s urban-blight-of-the-season structure?
But also now that I’m thinking of it, I would say that what I think this show is “about” thematically is harder to pin down than in those other cases. For me, The Sopranos is about how easy it is to be bad and the excuses people will find to do it; Deadwood (which I haven’t finished yet! one episode to go in Season Two is where I’m at) is about the consequences of choosing to do good despite the ease of doing otherwise; Twin Peaks is about the existence, and corrosive influence, of evil; Lost is about how we react to failure; and after watching the pooch-screwing final season of The Wire, I feel like that show is about being an op-ed piece.
What is BSG about? It used to be easy: It’s about the effect of war and atrocity on society. I still think that’s the case, though the Final Five guessing-game and the mysticism dilute it a bit. But last night’s episode (wonky decision-making by the Adamas and the quorum included!) made me think that maybe it’s cohering back into something even grander, and that now it’s about the end stages of this particular human civilization–that they’re all too far gone to make it work anymore. That notion has been cropping up explicitly in dialogue for the past few episodes, I think, and things like Kara’s mutiny-provoking vision quest, Bill Adama’s dereliction of duty, Tigh frakking the Six, Cally’s meltdown, Tory’s journey to the dark side, Baltar starting a religious movement whose message (”God loves us because we are all perfect”) is essentially a total abdication of personal responsibility, Athena getting paranoid and murdering the Cylon leader, Roslin instituting a Bush II-style pseudo-autocratic way of governing, the Quorum adopting a feel-good interim president despite all the obvious conflicts, even Lee giving a dog to a guy who talks to his dead cat–heck, a cynic like Lampkin losing his shit in the first place–it all points to the show depicting a society in its terminal stage. It’s easy to see how it could all be read as sloppiness, but I’m thinking (hoping?) otherwise. And man, won’t it be impressive if that’s where the series goes?
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