BSG: Neither Allegory Nor Polemic
June 9, 2011
I’ve watched Battlestar Galactica start to finish only once, so what I say here may square only with my faulty memory of the series. Because the show’s plot and thematic developments clearly paralleled real world events pertaining to the war on terror, it’s to be expected that viewers will see the story as a commentary on those realities. I didn’t see the show in that way. For the most part, the creators refrained from judging the controversial actions of their characters by imparting easy moral messages or through contrived plotting that resulted in preconceived, self-serving outcomes. Instead they typically allowed each individual character to respond and judge according to who each person is. The writers didn’t tell us whose side to take when Captain Adama and President Roslin faced off as enemies or when Billy could not in good conscience follow Roslin’s attempted takeover of the fleet to its end. Was Roslin right to outlaw abortion given the possible extinction of the human race or wrong to try to steal the election when facing the treacherous Gaius Baltar as an opponent? We’re not given definitive answers to those and the other morally messy situations the heroes and villains find themselves wallowing in. Instead we’re treated to the actual moral drama of people making choices and having to face the consequences, both material and spiritual. It’s a mistake in my opinion to approach the story as an allegory, like Jonah Goldberg does, or as a polemic, which is how Adam Serwer seems to view it.
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I think you’ve basically described the great strength of the show–showing the messy complexity of human beings and behavior. It’s hard to get a bead on the show, given that it seems that the creators’ vision did not get to be played out in full, given the early plug-pulling by Sci-Fi. But in some ways I think that was a good thing, as they were forced to avoid the pitfalls of determinism that they seemed to be building into the plot (“all of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again”). As a friend of mine pointed out, had they gone the route suggested by the first season, both Helo and Athena would have been killed off.
It also, I would argue, forced them to finesse at least last season and a half, which was a mixed bag plot-wise, to put it mildly.
If you get BBC America, the show will be debuting on that channel this month.
The third and fourth seasons lacked the narrative direction of the first two, but I still enjoyed them, and the unraveling made narrative sense, whatever the authorial intents and decisions . And I liked the ending, but then Helo and Athena were among my favorite of the characters.
Oh, I still enjoyed it, but it was more scattershot the last two seasons. Agreed as to the ending, too. For the most part, I don’t understand the furor.
It was a remarkable show. Is Caprica worth the effort?
Haven’t seen it.
Definitely. The characters are, if anything, more flawed. A little too unsympathetic at times, but the concept is very well-realized. Be prepared to be frustrated, obviously, as there’s only that one season.
Speaking of epic villains and heros, I am surprised Vox Nova has not been abuzz with the interesting ideas put forth by Joe Carter on First Things. His article “The Fountainhead of Satanism” is a great skewering of the right-wing, and by heavy implication the Catholic right-wing. This is certainly the the implication limned by Michael Sean Winters today on the topic. Thanks to Joe Carter we now know the real intellectual etiology of the religious cancer known Siriconian Satanism. It is in the the devil-worship of Anton LaVey and his mentor Ayn Rand. We might call this Catholic beelzebubbing something like La Papism. There may have been an angelic tongue in an angelic cheek somewhere with all this, but if one seriously parses the issues ,maybe not. This is what I have been suspecting for a while, the whole lot of the crypto-nihilistic right- wingers and their hatred of all things gay and decently liberal are at bottom, Satanists. Well, there is an epic tale of truthful fiction even better than Battlestar Galactica!
Wow. Segue.
While the sci-fi aspect of BSG throws me off a bit, I’ve been looking for a series to get into. However, since I finished “Six Feet Under” nothing else seems to even come close.
I recommend anything by Joss Whedon. I’ve yet to see the Wire, but I hear it’s outstanding.
The Wire isn’t Whedon. May have given that impression.
The Wire may be the best thing ever put on television. My wife and I are starting in on it for a second time.
[SPOILERS]
The show did a better job than most at standing apart form it’s characters, rather than siding with heroes against villains — but there was still a divide. My favorite character, for instance, was Admiral Cain. We are invited to sympathize with her (especially in Razor) and Adama himself refutes clean distinctions between the morality of their relative choices. Nonetheless, my impression was that the authors invited us to regard her as one of ‘them’ and not one of ‘us’. (Likewise, despite giving the Cylon’s side of the story, we ended up with good Cylons vs. bad ones, mainly along quasi-racial lines.) And, ultimately, Cain was killed off in a contrived way that spared the main characters a variety of difficult decisions.