BatGal: First Season Impressions

I’d forgotten that the new Galactica appeared in 2003, and that its premise and themes stake out a kind of post-9/11 science fiction.  Early episodes traffic in echoes:  burning towers, a suicide bomber, walls of photographs, and a morally ambiguous scene in which a fully humanoid Cylon is waterboarded while he insists on his capacity to feel pain.

Fortunately, the show pulls back from taking the comparisons too far.  This isn’t a historical parable, exactly, and the parallels are too weak to sustain one.  (Al Qaeda is a twist on David, not Goliath.)  What’s most interesting in the comparison is how fully, so far, the show seems to be complicating and humanizing its religiously motivated terrorist villains who aren’t even human.

By the end of season one, we still don’t know exactly what makes the Cylons tick, but we know it isn’t something as simple as pure evil.  It’s perhaps not even pure ideology.  Plotwise it’s still a mystery, and the season ends precisely where the premier began:  on Caprica, and somewhere else, with a beautiful Number Six Cylon gazing in wonder on the beauty and promise of an unseen infant.  There has been a certain amount of meandering in the series so far, but in the final minutes the entire season suddenly (in fact very suddenly) pulls taught.  Events at the finish abruptly demolish the patterns into which everything seemed at risk of falling.

But, wow, these people spend a lot of time having the hots for each other.  Perhaps that comes with having a species to reinvigorate, but in story terms it’s a bit much.  Between all the M/F couples coupling in bunks, airlocks, fantasy bedrooms, and the rainy forests of occupied planets, the show is pretty aggressively hormonal.  I guess it’s worth noting that about half of these people are Cylons, so maybe it’s something else.  Robosexual?  The appliances we were warned about?  (Honestly, I was kind of hoping that Starbuck would be gay, if only because “Kickass Lesbian Fighter Pilot” is an archetype just waiting to be realized.  Come on, SF.  You can do this.)

It’s at this level that the soap opera threatens to overwhelm space opera.  At times BG plays fast and loose with character development, building it mostly through personality conflict.  The under-motivated tantrums and improbably constant insubordination seem more high school than high frontier.  Not all of these people act like adults.  I enjoy Gaius Baltar, and the complexity of his relationship with his own Number Six is something very original in SF TV, but I could do with a bit less of his comic relief.  Colonel Tigh’s wife, meanwhile, obviously belongs on the Love Boat, not the Galactica.

Nearly everyone on the show is very blandly beautiful, with the dramatic exception of the Commander, who is gravitas craggily personified.  There seems to be a whole career visible in the wrinkles of Adama’s eyes and the seams and pocks of his cheeks.  Among all the special effects, the planetary vistas, the expensive sets, and the lesser and lovelier actors populating the fleet and what’s left of humanity, Edward James Olmos’s face is the most visually interesting thing the show has going.