Somebody Up There Likes You

Frakk em all!, Don Solo, 2009

As someone raised on Star Trek I've been reluctant to leave the comfort of the Roddenberry universe. Perhaps because Trek is the oldest standard for serious (by 60s standards) sci-fi television, all other shows come across as re-costumed copies. I was too young to see The Next Generation during its original run, but BBC2's tea-time repeats in the 90s made me a fan. When Deep Space Nine was imported I was probably too young to appreciate its breaking of the Trek mould - war, questionable ethics, the Federation losing for once. I preferred Voyager at this point but as it went on I became convinced Star Trek was losing steam. Voyager in particular was either repeating itself or TNG or pulling a deus ex machina every time they walked into the Borg. Despite that, the Doctor was and still is a great character, but his story arcs with Seven of Nine (and her own character development) would have been so much better if Seven wasn't visually the epitome of fan service.

Anyway, five years ago Sky One was doing one of their whole-series reruns in the afternoon and I decided to get into DS9. I really liked its 'mature themes' even if it is a wholesale rip-off of Babylon 5 (been recommended, yet to see) because it was within the familiar universe of Trek. At the same time Sky One was heavily promoting the new Battlestar Galactica (hf. BSG). Under the Trek-primacy mindset, my progressive abandonment of television, and being a contrarian; I missed BSG in its original run. It's always easier to be smug when you've seen a sleeper hit months before anyone else, but being a contrarian is sometimes costly. So I can't recall what led me to acquire the BSG boxset back in March. As Six would say, don't question his plan.

»SPOILERS FOLLOW«

For all I love the crew of the Enterprise, the characters are mostly subservient to the story. Deanna Troi is used for exposition because she's psychic, Data and Worf are both used to prompt discussion about human behaviour because they aren't human, and the entire engineering staff are used to identify plot points and solutions (technobabble). Because the definition of 'space opera' has shifted; BSG, being character-driven, is actually what we'd today term '(soft) science fiction' despite not actually exploring the fictional sciences. Thankfully no-one reverses the polarity of any particles, the reversals here are of space opera tropes. The Jedi are not inherently good and the Sith are not inherently evil - suck on your absolutes, Yoda.

Very early on in the series we learn that the cylons have made humanoid agents (hf. skinjobs) and have hidden them within the refugee fleet. The agents believe themselves to be human, think human, behave human, eat sleep and drink human. The humans use the epithet 'toaster' to describe the skinjobs, denigrating them as sub-human machines programmed to imitate "real" humans, unwilling to accept that they are one and the same, continuing to be speciesist in spite of the two being (virtually) indistinguishable down to the molecular level.

That their enemies are almost themselves is one of the many moral ambiguities present in the series that begins with a 9/11-esque surprise attack on the home planets. In the first season captured skinjobs are tortured and thrown out the airlock when no longer useful or considered dangerous. Later in the series the colonials settle on a new planet (New Caprica) only for the cylons to launch a sudden ground invasion (including Fall of Paris closing scene). Caught off guard and outnumbered, the settlers are forced to live under the benevolent dictatorship of Cylon rule. No matter how much the cylons just want to be loved, the settlers form a resistance culminating in suicide bombings. The parallels with our post-9/11 world should be startlingly obvious.

The re-imagining of BSG is very much a product of our time, in the same way that Shatner-era Trek was a reflection of a divided post-war world, and TNG was a reflection of the reuniting of that divided world. The historical framing of both series can be summarised:
In Star Trek we are all dead and it is the people of the future who will change.
In Battlestar Galactica the main characters are long dead and it is we who can change.

Note that in BSG, the planet the colonials settle on is revealed to be our Earth, though not the original Earth - it being destroyed by its own inhabitants in the distant past. We (the audience) are shown we can avoid the fate of the original and break the cycle, just as the surviving colonials (our ancestors) broke it by sacrificing their technology ensuring their descendants (us) a future and the choice to break the cycle in turn.

Thus, it is not the story of the utopians of the future gallivanting around the galaxy (fun in its own right), but about the redemption of people long since forgotten, and a cogitation on our own choices in our world reflected. That is why it is a great show that has been lauded, and why it should be seen by all.

So say we all.


Edited 11/05/10
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