Lower Decks

This week’s topic is Battlestar Galactica. I must start it out by confessing I am not by nature a fan of the franchise. If I didn’t continually work at it, I would almost have no working knowledge about any of it. As it is, I watched the mini-series that heralded the reinvention back in 2003 out of curiosity, having never seen the original version, and stopped watching the new show out of diminishing interest at the end of its second season, quite content to leave it behind even as I learned its fourth season would be its last. In many ways, BSG and me are a lot like ‘Babylon 5’ and me, as chronicled in my last column. But, there are always interesting complications.

It’s no big secret that ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ original version, was created so that television could cash in on the popular success of Star Wars at the box office, though certainly with its own interesting ideas. Just because if you didn’t look very closely, you might assume you were watching a show featuring the Rebel Alliance and its squadron of X-Wing fighter pilots, didn’t mean there wasn’t more to it. Still, it didn’t last very long, and its final season was such a dismal failure that even its biggest fans to this day have trouble acknowledging it, except for a single episode that featured a character who wasn’t, at that point, even a regular anymore.

Anyway, a rabid fan base existed for some twenty years that would’ve liked to see it continue, which star Richard Hatch was more than willing to oblige, but Star Trek veteran Ronald D. Moore and a few associates beat him to it. I’ll admit that it was Moore’s presence that really interested me, because at that point (and to this day, actually), this was the project that had created the most buzz out of all the alumni from the ‘Star Trek: Deep Space Nine’ creative team (to take nothing away from other notable efforts such as Ira Steven Behr’s ‘The 4400’ or even Robert Hewitt Wolfe’s abortive participation in ‘Gene Roddenberry’s Andromeda’). Granted, and still to this day, I never really respected Moore as much as some of the others from that bunch. He’d been the ‘DS9’ guy before there even was a ‘DS9,’ but he wasn’t quite as important to the success of that series as Behr or Wolfe (for instance). (I’ll remind readers that I did an extensive series on this writing group during the summer of 2009.) But he managed the coup of all coups when he came up with the reimagining of ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ because he was about to begin work on a cult series that would effectively succeed Star Trek in the mind of genre fans, where other efforts like ‘Farscape,’ ‘Firefly,’ and most importantly, ‘Stargate’ had made bold strides but come just short. ‘BSG’ didn’t just energize fans, but transcended the genre and won over widespread critical acclaim.

The new version of the story radically departed from previous precepts (earning the wrath of older fans before it had aired a single scene), but stuck pretty definitely to what was most important about it, humanity being brought to its knees by its robotic offspring. Now, this was hardly a new concept, even when it was first introduced. One might easily say Isaac Asimov more artfully explored the material in fiction before the original version, much less Star Wars, was ever conceived. By 2003, both the Terminator and Matrix film franchises had explored the same material, too, to far more popular acclaim than ‘Battlestar Galactica’ ever had. I might also add Philip K. Dick to the mix, since ‘Blade Runner’ had, at the very least of his influence, left a rather significant cult legacy in the interim, too.

To begin cataloguing the TV precedents for the kind of thing Moore and his colleagues envisioned would have to include ‘B5,’ and probably high-intensity programming like ‘24,’ ‘The Sopranos,’ and ‘The Wire.’ The new ‘BSG’ lived and breathed exclusively in its grim reality, right from the start, and it never let up. Truth be told again, that’s the reason I lost interest, because there was never any variance in the tone, no overly expressive acting. Granted, these characters were living in a pretty terminal scenario, but as if to emphasize the point, most of them came packaged with still worse tragedies in their background: a president accepting the position in the worst circumstances, after just learning she had cancer; a father and son dealing with the death of a family member; a scientist who learned he’d been conned into genocide.

Before the actual series could launch, my interest in this kind of storytelling was forever hobbled by the debut of the omnidimensional ‘Lost,’ which shattered every expectation possible and forever altered the landscape. Compared to that, what could ‘BSG’ possibly have to offer? I didn’t need a lot of prodding to lose interest. I was bitter that people actually thought this approach was superior to what Star Trek had been doing, unconvinced that Moore was the man to do it, unimpressed with the progress between episodes, and frankly, had better things to watch. I did very much enjoy certain elements of the show, but left with things that didn’t cohere all that well, I just didn’t have the patience (much as had been my experience, again, with ‘Babylon 5’).

So as the series came to its conclusion, I had some interest in seeing how it was received, because that was certainly one of the key selling points all along, that the creators always knew that and had been building toward it quite deliberately. I was underwhelmed with the response. I heard about ‘The Plan,’ a special movie that would explain the saga from the viewpoint of the Cylons, which I figured was what I had really been interested in, and so decided that when it was released on DVD, that would be the point where I would finally have something to care about again.

One of my favorite comic book writers, Marc Guggenheim, chose to tackle ‘Galactica 1980,’ the aforementioned final year of the original version, for Dynamite Entertainment. Since I trusted Guggenheim and was interested to see what all those fans had rejected (remember the title of this column and the viewpoint it fostered, that everything I like is what others typically don’t), I figured I’d give it a chance. The first issue revealed the intriguing twist that, quite literally, the original version ended the story in 1980, with the Colonial fleet discovering that the Earth they knew as home was our present. Later, when I tracked down the DVD collection, I got to see where the show and the comic deviated, how Guggenheim made certain improvements (those of you who’ve seen some of the show but haven’t read the comic will be interested to know that the scientist portrayed by the Brady dad has an expanded significance, for instance), detailing just where ‘BSG’ in that version fits in with our own past, quite cleverly.

Combined with ‘The Plan,’ the ‘Galactica 1980’ comic served as the ‘In the Beginning’ (continuing the ‘B5’ analogy) for me and ‘Battlestar Galactica.’ Though confused as to why ‘The Plan’ apparently emphasized that there actually was no plan (as the series had continually insisted) and ended pretty much at the point I had stopped watching the show, I was amused by Dean Stockwell’s Cylon philosophizing and was fairly content to leave it at that.

Then Target had the DVD “Season 4.5” on sale, I bought it, and had the opportunity to watch the final episodes of the re-envisioned series. It took me a while, a little patience and a little determination, but “All Along the Watchtower” helped push me into watching the finale and seeing just what had been accomplished. The twist on the ‘Galactica 1980’ conclusions and the renewed emphasis on human/Cylon relations, not to mention Angel Kara Thrace, “all this has happened before, and will happen again,” and Edward James Olmos’ DVD ruminations and connections to his ‘Blade Runner’ past, ended it with a bang.

As with ‘B5,’ I would still find it remarkably hard to actually sit through the entire experience and try to appreciate everything that culminated in that point (a good reason to savor ‘The Plan,’ and the many ways it did further illuminate the Cylon side of the story), but as a complete story, it’s hard not to appreciate the impact of what was accomplished. If the whole point was to prod the viewer into a new experience and suggest a deeper level of significance, then it was certainly a success (what does ‘Caprica’ have left to do but explore the human/Cylon dance that much more?). I might not have agreed that the approach was always followed the best it could have, I guess it didn’t really matter.

Looking back, I would argue that the new ‘BSG’ has less in common with the old one than ‘Andromeda’ with its dashing Captain Hunt (Kevin Sorbo, with his modified Hercules hair and relic High Guard ware, certainly looks the part, doesn’t he?) and his ridiculous mission to save all of civilization on his own, and doubtless, old fans would still agree, but again, that hardly matters. ‘Battlestar Galactica,’ now a proper franchise, can also claim its spot among the iconic sci-fi creations to grace any screen. Talk is that Bryan Singer would like to do it all over again. Personally (you’ll understand why), I don’t have a problem with it. Maybe I’m just ready for it. Maybe that wide audience is, too.