Talking Out Of Turn

For those who do not know, all three of the authors on this blog are fans of the new Battlestar Galactica.

Unfortunately, we all became fans long after the series started. So we watched the miniseries and seasons 1 and 2 on DVD, and some of us watched season “2.5″ on iTunes, and some on a mixture of the SciFi Channel and iTunes. (As of two days ago, all the aired episodes are now available on DVD.) Season 3 is going to start in early October.

If you think you will ever watch this show, then you don’t want to read this post or any comments that may follow it, because there will be spoilers. I tend to think that this is one series that you don’t want to have spoiled; some you can get away with, but not this one.

Anyway, last night Tracey and I caught up to Patrick and watched the last episode of the last season. The only thing we’re not caught up on is the “webisode” called “The Resistance.”

A number of plots have either unraveled or seriously moved forward in the last 3-4 episodes of season 2.5. We have moved forward in time a whole year, and in that year most of humanity (over 49,000 throughout most of the series) has moved into a tent city on a habitable planet called New Caprica. They did this without giving thought to defenses, trusting some kind of radioactive cloud in their solar system to protect them from the gaze of the Cylons.

In addition, the Cylons had presented a unilateral cease-fire, claiming that the destruction of humanity and the pursuit of the fleet were mistakes. (By the way, I really hope they’ll keep using Dean Stockwell. He did well in the role(s).) This seemed to flow from the influence of two very humanesque Cylons, Number Six and Number Eight (”Caprica Six” and “Galactica Boomer” respectively), who (in a rare glimpse of the internal life of Cylon society) were either haunted by a suddenly moral ghost of Gaius Baltar or in love with the Chief on Galactica and hating herself for being a Cylon.

Unfortunately the show has become a soap opera in space throughout much of season 2.5, with tons of relationship issues seeming to rear their ugly heads. Who will be sleeping with Apollo or Starbuck or D or Baltar this week? I could do without all that. What I am interested in is character development, and even more (call this my love of Greek tragedy, I guess) how inexorably what a man or woman is leads them to their fate. Baltar is a classic example of this; he has now caused the downfall of the human race on three occasions (once, in allowing Number Six to access the defense computer network; second, by providing the nuclear warhead needed to destroy Cloud Nine and alert the Cylons even through the radioactive fog; and third, by destroying the defenses of the fleet and New Caprica through attrition and surrendering the human race to the Cylons). But character development has rarely seen anybody improve; Apollo is a mama’s boy, Starbuck is distracted, Roslin was actually pretty mercenary to begin with but the show revealed that to us only over time, the Chief is apparently some sort of Sandinista, and Adama is losing his edge. Billy improved… and he’s dead. Is there anybody else? Tigh, at least, has been removed enough from power that his problems are under general control.

What’s left in the plot? Will it be public knowledge that Baltar has been the great Judas Iscariot of the Twelve Colonies? Will Tom Zarek turn on him? Will Adama and Roslin have to treat with Zarek to accomplish the new end of saving humanity all over again? What happened to Caprica Sharon (Helo’s lover), and will she end up being good or evil?

It is interesting that as time has gone on, the series seems to be drawing us more and more toward a picture of the Cylons as being people just like us… even if they are destructive, one-dimensional people who need not be afraid of dying and can therefore be suicide bombers, and agents, and so forth. They have feelings, and uncertainties, and doubts, and so on, but they are portrayed as far less complicated and far more driven by ideology (and perhaps even dialectic). As such, I wonder sometimes if we are being shown the producers’ view of fundamentalism, of believing anything to be absolutely true, and so forth. People like Adama and Roslin sound tough and would as soon throw a Cylon out the airlock as look at them, but for some reason we have become less sympathetic toward them because their personal flaws are coming to the forefront (culminating in the stolen election and Roslin’s fling with the former President). The Cylons, however, have terrible convictions, don’t budge on them except for truly human reasons (arrived at generally by logic), and don’t compromise on them much except possibly for dialectic reasons. Both sides have strengths and weaknesses but for most of season 2.5, we have been shown human weakness in a bad light and Cylon weakness in an “awww, they’re really just human!” light. It is now meant to be jarring when a human calls a Cylon a “toaster,” even though we were down with that earlier in the series when we were always fighting for survival. But gradually we have come around to have sympathy for the devil with the pacing red light. I hesitate to always make this about media bias and that sort of thing, but ultimately we seem to be hearing that (a) if we understood our enemies, they wouldn’t be our enemies, and (b) absolutes and commitment to religious or ideological fundamentals seem good but result in evil. Neither are true in every case, and in this Western society where our enemies hate Christ as much as the culture that came from Christianity, and our religious fundamentals are Christian morals, virtues, and doctrines… well, it seems targeted at us narrow-minded religious folk who think that our enemies should die before they get the chance to kill us.

So say we all. Or at least we should.