In a recent conversation, I pledged my devotion to the BSG camp of Sci-fi over the Star Wars trilogy (eps. 4,5,6) and over Star Trek.
Here are some thoughts on the subject. The BSG (reloaded) universe is its own special universe. So far, it is separate from human history, though it may be tied to some far distant future, or past (gods forbid it's some scientology propaganda piece).
The Star Trek universe is a futuristic atheist-utopian fantasy where humans have united in spite of their differences upon realizing that we are not alone in the universe, as revealed in First Contact. Call me cynical, but I just don't buy that humanity can change that quickly. Another reason the Star Trek universe is flawed is that the vision and legacy of Roddenberry was corroded and polluted after his death to where misguided series after series were produced by Paramount to capitalize on the beleaguered, grieved fan base. The premises for each series grew thinner and thinner until finally people quit watching and they canceled "Enterprise" with the dreadful Bakula.
The Star Wars universe was a great piece of mythology for its time, but with the logistical problems of not doing the saga in sequence, it left the whole universe open to abject failure through the chaotic invasion of conjecture. The myriad books that expand the canon through eons before and after the saga of the 6 films seems like a cheap, capitalistic merchandising trick. When one realizes how vast the star wars merchandising universe is, one cannot help but lose trust in the motives of Lucas, et al.
All things considered, Battlestar Galactica is not without its own laundry list of faults. The most obvious of all is the boxing episode of season 3. I would have much rather watched a few more webisodes on Scifi.com than sit through the blood splatters just so we could see the memories of New Caprica come to life in the crews' thoughts.
The second problem is the sexuality of 6 and Baltar. Okay, we get it, she uses sex to manipulate people. Humans are weakest when we succomb to our base desires. yeah yeah yeah. We know you use the sex to get ratings. NYPD blue did the same damn thing about 10 years ago.
The third problem is Admiral Cain's lesbianism. It seemed that this was coming years ago, when we met Cain in season 2. It was hinted at somehow, in her body language with her ship's 6. My friend Chad called this a hackneyed stereotype. I think they should have hired Rita Mae Brown or some other lesbian writer to come up with some other way to talk about the issue. The BSG powers that be have been tempting us with Gaeta since the miniseries when we first see him gush over Baltar.
The fourth, and probably most overriding problem is the logic of posterity. My friend Chad and I argue about this in every, and I do mean EVERY BSG convo. A race of people capable of interstellar, faster-than-light space travel would surely have better records of their deities than scrolls, especially when the gods lived with them on Kobol. The only possible explanation is that the fractured, separatist nature of the colonies, and the fact that they were constantly at war with one another until shortly before the first cylon war, means that their militarism dominated all areas of society, and history and archives were never properly maintained.
All in all, the problems of BSG are ones that I largely can live with. The problems I have with the other universes cannot be overcome in my mind.
3 comments:
I agree that the Head-Six-seducing-Baltar scenes are starting to wear thin after three seasons. I think the writers are setting us up for a transformation of Baltar into some sort of pseudo-Messianic figure (it started with him in prison after they retrieved him from the Cylons, and continued when he was whisked away by supporters after his exoneration at the trial), which will be fun to watch, but less so if they don't cut down on the "Ha ha, he's getting horny from a chick in his head that no one else can see!" gags.
Come to think of it, they probably will, since the other thing Head Six is good for is leading Baltar to acceptance of the Cylon God, who must exist in some sense (since someone's pulling strings), and that thread has to be wrapped up in the final season.
I also agree that BSG is consistently more enjoyable than any Trek series, though they each serve their purposes. Trek is a bunch of episodic morality plays; these can be good and inspiring, like Devil's Due and Who Watches the Watchers?, which encourage skepticism, and The First Duty, which encourages a rigid and uncompromising pursuit of truth and personal integrity. (I mean, who wouldn't feel like an ant after being dressed down by Picard?) Or they can be lame, like anything Janeway ever did. (Helping the Q to end their civil war through sheer chutzpah? Please.) But at its apogee it was sublime, and it rarely took its eye off its central tenet of a more enlightened, all-around better future. Even the Boy-Scouts in space, Apollo-program vibe of season one of Enterprise was infectious. (And I don't get why you hate Bakula so much. He exemplified that eager-beaverness perfectly; it was the Flash-Gordon bugs-in-space braindeadness of the Xindi arc that killed it for me.)
BSG just aims to be naturalistic drama, and it hits that mark damn near perfectly. But by abandoning the pretensions of a Trek or a Star Wars, it loses its ability to inspire in quite the same way, and it compounds the problem by coming close to actively denigrating feats of the intellect: Skeptics of the Scrolls are always wrong, and scientists are either vain (Baltar) or hopelessly idealistic and naive (Gaeta, who was assigned to help him back in season one). Honestly, the new BSG is even a step back from the original series in that regard; as steeped in tacky Mormon theology as that show was (see [1] for where "Kobol" comes from), Apollo had a speech in the pilot where he expresses what I think is supposed to be genuine excitement that now that the Cylon War is over, they can get back to deep-space exploration, which he sees as more interesting than war.
That said, Trek never made me feel the visceral rush of when Adama and Cain were planning to assassinate one another, nor did I ever care quite as much what happened personally to any of the characters. Which is OK; entertainment for the adrenal glands and for the nobler impulses of the mind can coexist, I think. Hell, I enjoyed Beowulf.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
If_you_could_hie_to_Kolob
Yes, there are some great episodes of ST, but as far as the universes go, the RDM BSG universe is better than the others.
Thematically, BSG has a lot of problems, but it's a much more well-formed universe.
Oh, I agree totally that BSG succeeded at creating a believable universe, while Trek failed miserably. The idea that we would abandon our baser impulses, and war and privation would disappear, just because some pointy-eared bookworms show up in a flying saucer, is pathetic in its naivete.
Now, the invention of a replicator, and the subsequent elimination of scarcity, might do it, and if one would want to argue that the arrival of the technologically advanced Vulcans goaded us into a flurry of technological development, and thence came the replicator and transporter, and thence Earth's transformation into paradise (they actually called it that on DS9), I might buy it. But nowhere that I can recall did any of the shows make the argument that it was economic realities that made the society we saw possible. It was more the power of wishful thinking, or something, and that was stupid.
Also, setting aside the plausibility of the premises, Trek was absolutely awful about sticking to them. They didn't have money, except when they did; they couldn't communicate instantaneously over vast distances, except when they could; the Federation was really big, except when it wasn't; they couldn't transport through shields, except when they could; there's no more criminals, except when there are; there's no more common disease, except when there is; ad nauseam.
The BSG writers are paragons of consistency by contrast.
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