Season Two is dark. Besides the usual bang-up violence (with attendant blood and bruising), some things we've seen include alcoholism, cancer, terrorism, torture of prisoners, fascism, rape, contempt for dissent, martial law, forced impregnation, forced abortion, soldiers shooting civilians, prostitution, child trafficking, and assassination. This is just so far; I'm still working through the episodes. A lot of these things (and not just the ones you'd expect) have been perpetrated or at least intended by the show's good guys.
I really do like all this murk, at least as drama, and all the more because much of it is impossible to endorse. Characters here often make the wrong decisions, and the show doesn't always follow up with correction, nor does it attempt to concoct justifications. We're still unsure, for instance, how to take the brutality with which Colonials treat their entirely humanoid Cylon prisoners. It's one thing when the abrasive and cruel Admiral Cain does it, but one of the most memorable incidents was Starbuck's, and we're supposed to love her thoroughly.
The politics of BG are hazy and variable, hard and soft by turns, not quite incoherent but definitely inconsistent. In this, the show really does reflect the War on Terror that is both its context and its uneasy inspiration. I'm sure some people have written off the series as ridiculously right-wing (or left), but I think it's somewhere else. More than anything, it reflects the insecurity and discomfort of our uncomfortable search for security since 9/11.
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