Adventures In The Battlestar
I grew up without a television. No, I didn’t grow up in the 40s…I’m not that old. But my parents made the decision that their children’s lives would be richer (and less contaminated by popular culture, I suspect) if we had to find ways to entertain ourselves other than watching a screen. So, I read books. LOTS of books. As did my brothers. And to some extent, I think we were better off for foregoing the TV. But where I particularly felt the lack was in my inability to converse with my friends and fellow students at school about what had happened on The Dukes Of Hazard the previous night and not getting the in-jokes when someone quoted The Fonz.
I felt particularly hard done by when it came to science fiction shows. I didn’t get to watch the original Star Trek until I was an adult, although all the episodes had been novelized by James Blish (now out of print and quite expensive), and I did read those books. But that wasn’t the same as seeing it on the screen. And there were two other science fiction TV shows in the late 70s that I was keen to watch but almost never had the opportunity to view. Those were Buck Rogers In The 25th Century (which I might review on some other post) and the original Battlestar Galactica.
I occasionally got to view bits and pieces of those shows at someone else’s house but only fragments…just enough to whet my appetite for the TV shows I couldn’t have. So, I did something else instead. In retrospect, this seems odd even by my personal standards, but what I did was have a school friend of mine tape record the audio of the shows and then bring me the tapes so that I could listen to them. And I did listen to them. No one who hasn’t done this can properly appreciate the odd pictures one gets in one’s mind by listening to just the audio of a show which was meant to be seen. But I hid the tapes away from my parents and listened to them in the dark in my room, while I was meant to be sleeping.
Later on in life, of course, I did get to watch all the episodes that I’d listened to, and it’s an odd experience, watching the actual video years after listening to just the audio. Frequently, there’s a big disconnect between what I imagined and what actually took place on the screen. Plus, there’s odd little moments of deja vu, when I hear certain lines that I particularly remember listening to in the dark in my bedroom at night.
Anyway, I liked the original Battlestar Galactica series, although it got very odd as the series went on. But I find I much prefer the modern remake, which started with a four-hour miniseries in the fall of 2003, and then got picked up, with the first season airing in the fall of 2004. There were four seasons altogether, with a couple mini-series/movies made along the way as well. And I loved it. It was much grittier than the original, and felt much more real as well.
The general idea is that in some unspecified time (Past? Future?), humanity lives on 12 colonies on 12 different (but nearby) planets. They are at war with a mechanoid race called the Cylons. The origin of the Cylons is unclear but the implication is that they were created by humans, then gained sentience and got tired of being slaves, so they declared war on humanity. The mini-series begins amid “peace” between human and Cylon; a human military officer goes to a distant space station to meet with a Cylon representative, as he had every year since the end of the war. The Cylons never came. Except this time. And instead of coming as tall, bipedal robots, the Cylon representative is in the form of a beautiful woman. Who, we find out, is also a Cylon, just with a human “chassis.” And she has come to declare war on the humans again.
Caprica being bombed back to the Stone Age.
So the Cylons bomb the 12 colonies and the few humans and ships that escape the destruction band together under the protection of the only Battlestar to survive the surprise attack, the Galactica. The rest of the series is the story of the humans seeking a new home, the mythical 13th colony, Earth. And the Cylons harry them along the way. I don’t want to get too much into detail, because the plots are involved and stretch over the whole series. But it’s fascinating.
There is a mystic element throughout the series, often manifesting in dreams and visions. While this might seem odd, it works together perfectly with the more scientific aspects of the show. After I’d watched the entire series through once, I downloaded the Battlestar Galactica podcast, featuring showrunner Ronald D. Moore. What I didn’t realize before I downloaded the whole podcast series was that this was the audio commentary for each episode. So as I listened to the podcast while commuting to/from work, I was listening to the episode playing quietly in the background while Moore spoke over it, discussing many different aspects of the show, not necessarily just what was happening in the episode at the moment.
What I realized when I listened to all those episode commentaries was that the showrunners did not necessarily have a clear endgame in sight for the end of the series. Moore discusses many pivotal plot points where they had considered other directions than the way they eventually decided to go. This surprised me quite a lot, because I found the ending of the show to be completely satisfying, beautifully wrapping up all the plot points, and even bringing full circle some of the dreams and visions that were shown early in the series. To me, it genuinely felt like the end was written from the beginning, although the ending is not without controversy among some fans. I really think Moore did an incredible job with this show and I highly recommend it to anyone who likes science fiction. Make sure that you watch the mini-series/pilot first, then all four seasons. You won’t regret it.
Now, I want to show you a picture which reminds me of Starbuck finding her crashed Viper in the Season 4 episode “Sometimes A Great Notion.” And then I wish to point out that my neighbors, who built this brilliant thing, insist that it’s in fact an X-Wing fighter (which makes sense, given the little dome on the top where R2-D2 would sit). My neighbors also built this AT-ST Walker, which I suppose supports their opinion that they’re building in the Star Wars universe, not the Battlestar Galactica universe.
