BSG Gets "Good", And It's Awful

"Battlestar Galactica" was terrible last night. It was as though Aaron Sorkin decided to pen an extra pretentious episode of the West Wing, set on a spaceship in the distant future. Racism is bad! Let's all pat ourselves on the back for being such good liberals! Thank God(s) all the issues lined up nice and neat and no one actually had to think about anything!

Ordinarily BSG is so adept at reflecting contemporary socio-political issues. One reason is that the writers play around with parallels to modern politics, constantly undermining where viewers' sympathies are inclined to lie. In an article on Slate from last November, Adam Rogers described how this process worked in the BSG writers' room:

Then, the whole group [of writers] tries to figure out the Cylons' deeper motivations via a rapid-fire series of metaphors. The Cylons are Nazis, hell-bent on solving the Human Question. The Cylons are Jews, trying to defend Israel. The Cylons are U.S. troops in Iraq, caught off guard by an uprising.

Think about that. It raises a sensitive but incredibly informative question: What did the Nazi's have in common with modern day Israel? What do both entities share with U.S. troops in Iraq?

Does that make you uncomfortable? It should. It's also fascinating, and maybe the kind of question we should be asking ourselves more often. There are no good guys. History will judge all of us by what we do, not who we are. That's pretty powerful.

The wonderful thing about using fiction to understand reality is that you have the freedom to force your audience to confront its preconceived notions about the good/bad dichotomy. You can demonstrate that the good guys don't always act unselfishly, don't always do the right thing, and are often unsure of exactly what the right thing is.

You can also humanize the enemy, forcing the viewer to ask why this is the "enemy". This tactic is particularly sophisticated on BSG, where the enemy isn't human, but looks, feels, and acts human, right down to emotions like love and loyalty. Maybe this analogy is common place to longtime fans of science fiction, but I find it pretty novel.

So last night was disappointing in its predictability. Hopefully it was just a filler episode and an anomaly. Because unfortunately, there isn't another show on television right now that does what BSG does quite so well.