Battlestar Galactica
Tuesday, March 28, 2006
In Space, No One Can Hear You Vote
The problem of bad television is widespread and complicated: it's as aware of its own frailties as we are, which is to say not at all. Watching a bad TV show is like watching a senile relative, one who looks a little like you, groan about phantom aches and pains in order to get at what's killing him. Good television, on the other hand, as with good art in general, is a simpler matter: it falters on the basis of a few context-specific controls. In the case of a good show like the new Battlestar Galactica, running on the Sci-Fi network and now available on DVD, the creators face down dangers on two fronts. On the first front you've got the nervous corporate types, who want to ensure the profitability of an extremely volatile commodity (TV) and therefore demand more tasteful near-nudity and bareknuckled suit-on-suit action. Galactica gives this up with aplomb. Yet on the second front you've got your schoolmarms, who want to uphold a public-oriented Edward R. Murrow-like standard of public utility, and bury us underneath a lot of bulk-issue wet blankets about racial harmony and believe in your self-family-constitution-etc.-fill-in-the-blank. Here's where Galactica gets itself in trouble. But not too often.
I haven't seen every episode available, but the story as reiterated at the beginning of every show goes something like this: one day the Cylons (robots to you and me) rebelled against their human mommies and blew most of them up. The remainder of the human race act more or less like Americans and fly in the mere tens of thousands in a caravan of mismatched space cruisers waiting for the other shoe to drop. When it does (and it does in just about every episode) it moves the overall story arc and develops an entertaining, if not new, political dimension. The Cylons sometimes look like Mercedes Benzes but more often they look like people and are confused with friends. Some of them appear only in the mind. Some of them believe in God. The President publicly vows to stand resolved against them but admits privately that she doesn't understand the complete dimensions of the problem. She keeps secrets from the space-press.
The Cylons don't quote from the Koran but you get the idea. In one episode a Cylon-person gets dunked into a bucket of water by a cute-as-a-button lieutenant who just wants to know where the nuclear bomb is hidden. She spits into the Cylon's ear: "you're not human." The Cylon creepily quotes from scripture. So you've got your torture covered. In comes the president to pardon the offender. The offender breaks down into human-sized tears and tells her everything: there was no bomb, I just didn't want to die, and you're thinking, maybe this guy's all right, maybe he's like a person after all. Yet the credits don't roll. Instead the President gets all tough and glinty-eyed and says, "Right. Throw this thing out the airlock." Zip, out he goes into the vacuum of space, his mouth a black boomerang of worry. The President shrugs, says, "it posed a threat." End of story. The last image before the credits roll finds the cute lieutenant in her lockerroom, praying to some weird totem (religion has evolved in the future, apparently) for her own soul to be saved. Will she be capable of torture in the next episode?
As with other wars: you'll have to tune in next week to find out. And this is, finally, the advantage of a television show. It has time to show you the casualties. 90 minutes just isn't enough anymore.
posted by Greg Purcell @ 11:26 AM,
