Battlestar Galactica (The New Show)

Most storytelling starts with the characters:  Who are these people, and why should I care?  For better or worse, though, SF usually has to start with world-building.  Sometimes the most important questions are the world questions:  How is this place different, and how is life different in it?

The two-parter miniseries that kicks off the new Battlestar Galactica is unusual SF because it's dressed in only a thin veneer of difference.  The BG world has no connection to Earth but feels very much like it:  people wear suits and ties or jeans and t-shirts, they sleep in beds with sheets and pillows, they read printed books, they frame pictures on the wall.  Their architecture could be any large American or Canadian city.  At the same time, this is a star-faring culture spread across several planets.  High technology is present here but nearly invisible until we find ourselves aboard a spaceship.  The overall feel is that their civilization is basically ours but with the somehow-not-very-radical addition of jump drives and sentient killer robots.

All this familiarity makes the slight touches of otherness more notable.  There are suggestive details here and there:  their printer paper is hexagonal, their booze is bright green, and their clothing is just slightly unusual enough to give pause.  (I’m estimating here, but I have the impression that they mostly wear 1990s cuts of 1970s fabrics.)  Some of the most interesting SF touches are actually retro ones:  Galactica is an older ship that lacks wireless networking and even cordless phones; the Vipers that survive the Cylon assault are vintage models, space fighters with analog instruments out of the Vietnam War.  All in all, however, these people’s attitudes are ours.

They are, however, polytheistic.  The names of their pantheon are those we know from ancient Greece:  Artemis, Apollo, Hera.  What worship and liturgy I’ve seen bears no resemblance to anything Homer would have known, but of course it doesn’t have to.  Anyway, I suspect that we’re supposed to take all this familiarity not as verisimilitude but as a kind of analogy. 

But the simple fact of religion being here at all is amazing because mainstream SF has rarely dealt with religion in any serious way.  This is not to say that the show is about religion, or at least not yet.  So far I’ve watched the first ten episodes, and while religion has been established as a background condition of human life in this world, no one seems exceptionally wrapped up in it.  (The leading clergywoman we’ve seen has a kindly Desmond Tutu quality about her, but there is certainly no sense that the temples actually run things.)  It seems more the case that these people worship at Christmas and Easter (mutatis whatever), and of course also at the many funerals we’ve been shown.

Most interesting of all is the relationship between religion and the Cylons.  Unlike the humans so far, the Cylons are devotedly pious and theological.  Religion seems to fill their worldview and inspire their violence.  They love to talk about their faith.  They are also determined monotheists, insisting that there is but one God, and that they are His children, and that He is Love.

Battlestar Galactica (TOS)

The Geek vs. Cool dichotomy was already well-established by fourth grade.  In that 1978 you could love Star Wars or you could love KISS, but it was not culturally acceptable to love both.  I think, at the time, I had the sense that liking Gene Simmons was akin to rooting for Darth Vader, which was of course exactly the point.

The original Battlestar Galactica premiered in September of that year.  All of us nerds were primed for it:  the commercials had been running all summer, there was already a comic book adaptation, and we were all, although no one would admit it, a little tired of seeing Star Wars for the eleventh or fifteenth or twentieth time.  (Twenty-two, actually.)  In retrospect, it’s kind of amazing that they were able to produce and mount a ready-for-TV knock-off of Star Wars’ unimaginable success in little more than a year.  Who says the world moved more slowly back then?

The night BG premiered, it was interrupted and delayed by TV news coverage of the actually very important Camp David Accords.  There’s still a part of my brain that believes that science-fiction television might in some way someday be responsible for peace in the Middle East. 

When the show finally showed, we all loved it:  Cylons were creepy, Galactica was mighty, and Vipers were zippy and cool.  Nevertheless, this was 1970’s television, and there was no way it could measure up to Industrial Light and Magic even when both were still stuck using models with wires and drawing lasers by hand.  While BG may have been something of an achievement by TV standards, there was still a severe clunkiness about it.  Cylons were obviously off-brand Stormtroopers, and Vipers never really had the elegance and style of X-Wings.  (It’s worth noting that Air Force pilots at the time adopted “Viper” as the unofficial nickname of the F-16, a mid-budget jet fighter that never really compared to its F-15 big brother.)  The show was formulaic.  Its characters were flat.  It had a robot dog that would have embarrassed Sid and Marty Krofft.

Most of all, BG lacked the full-fledged vision of a Gene Roddenberry, who genuinely believed that SF would bring peace to the Middle East, and that this was in fact its role.  BG fell into most of the traps of TV crime and adventure shows, seldom allowing anything like a theme or character arc to jump the boundary between episodes.  While the extended plot of the search for Earth was something new in SF TV, the gnawing desperation of fading humanity’s grim situation never seemed to affect the characters themselves.  And when they did at last find Earth—well, the less said about that, the better.

Nevertheless, there it was, and there it went.  BG was cancelled after one season.  While no one really missed it, it had marked out its position in geek history.  If nothing else, it served as a counterpoint and a placeholder while we waited for The Empire Strikes Back.  I doubt that anyone expected that Battlestar Galactica would be revised and reborn as a new world of television a full quarter of a century later.

But now, look.  Here we are, and it’s something altogether different from what the nerds in 1978 thought possible.

Blogging Battlestar Galactica

Because I need to do something with this blog, and because I believe writing helps to keep the Black Dog at bay, I’m going to start a series on the latest (wow, last-decade) incarnation of Battlestar Galactica.  Here it comes.

Despite a life of loving Science Fiction, I’ve never stayed current with SF TV.  I missed most of the 90’s and all of the 00’s, including Babylon 5, Buffy, Firefly, and the entirety of BG’s run as a new show in 2004-2008.  (I did track down new Trek, though not exhaustively.)   I haven’t had cable since leaving home, and it wasn’t convenient to catch up via the early internet, so I let the whole thing go.

I knew at the time that BG was thought good, and I knew Starbuck was now a lady and that Cylons looked hot and worshipped God, but that was really it.

Now, Hallelujah.  I have Netflix, and BG is streamable.  The world breathes anew.  I’ve just recently started watching the show, and I’m going to capture impressions and criticisms here.  While I’ve encountered a few spoilers before now, I don’t think they’re tremendous.  I’ve begun from the beginning, and there are, what, 75 episodes ahead of me?  It looks like fun.

I Saw The Hobbit, a Film

Back to Middle-earth.  Much time has passed since my last post, but with the passage of time come new Peter Jackson adaptations of Tolkien, so there you go.

I saw The Hobbit with a group of 9-year-olds, one of them mine.  We'd already read the book together and were geeked for the movie, but then I'd also read certain weak reviews.  I was ready to be disappointed, but in the end I enjoyed it pretty consistently.  If PJ's LOTR was 100%, I'd call this Hobbit about 85% enchanting.  The kids loved it.

I won't really review it here, except to say this:

--The whole opening sequence of Erebor getting blasted is great.  The other opening sequence with Elijah Wood hanging around Bag End making noises about the Big Party feels forced and artificial.

--Then everything gets nice because Martin Freeman is terrific as Bilbo.

--I could listen to Ian McKellan talk all day.  He could probably tell me about his laundry and I would find it enthralling.

--Most of the battle sequences and fast action business, however,  feel far too busy, as if they were designed merely to give the 3-D something to do. The tempo and noise and violence don't mesh with the rest of the movie even as well as they did in LOTR.  

You'll recall that I don't believe violence is exactly Tolkien's thing, but it is clearly Peter Jackson's.  It risks a certain bland dichotomy to say that the most bloodyactionistic scenes are both the most cinematic and the least literary, but that's what we have here.  Middle-earth is many things, but it is not a kinetic roller coaster, or shouldn't be.

--I could also have done with a less ridiculous Radagast. He was entirely too dopey. Plus, while one rabbit-sled chase might be acceptable, two is far too many.  At a few points Radagast comes embarrassingly close to channeling JarJar Binks.  I hope his action figures sell poorly.

--Whatever flaws exist are redeemed by Gollum. The whole riddle and escape episode between Bilbo and Gollum is absolutely superb. Andy Serkis is just as compelling here as he is in LOTR.  While his Gollum was just one of the great things in the earlier trilogy, he is far and away the best thing in this movie.

--Thorin Oakenshield is far sexier here than I have been accustomed to imagine in my reading.  This I can accept.

Big Books I Have Read: LOTR, Part V

We're continuing to enjoy LOTR aloud.  We've finished fighting at Helm's Deep and we're moving into book 4 (that is, The Two Towers part 2), which seems an excellent occasion to consider some differences between the Tolkien text and the excellent-but-of-course-very-peculiar-because-hey-cinema Peter Jackson movies.

No red-blooded old-school D&D'er who found his way to Fantasy via Tolkien doesn't love seeing orcs hacking and getting hacked.  I suspect that this describes Peter Jackson as much as it does Yours Truly.  The battle sequences in the films are almost all top-notch, even when they go over the top.  No, I don't even mind seeing Legolas shield-surfing into a crowd of Uruk Hai.  That's allowed, given how grimly everything is otherwise going, and anyway those Uruks had it coming.  I fully admit that I choke up a little at the fear in the eyes of Rohan's pre-teen soldiers, and later at the just-in-timely arrival of Haldir's stoic Galadhrim.

Rereading the same scenes in the books again, though, I'm struck at just how little Tolkien seems to be interested in not only action-beat pacing but fighting in general.  Tolkien had been a soldier, let's remember, and in WW1 he experienced the kind of world-ruining awfulness that makes movie-style sword-swinging look not only tame but ridiculous.  ("By 1918," he tells us, "all but one of my close friends were dead.")  What's more, as everyone knows, JRRT was fascinated with the ancient cultures of northern Europe, most of which were concerned with martial virtue above all else.

In the books, however, nearly all of the exciting/dramatic/gory details that make the movie battle so visually compelling are either totally absent or barely implied.  There is a sequence where Gimli keeps count of hewn orcs, but it is brief, and there is no relish in the bloodiness of the fight.  Sometimes JRRT might almost be describing the movement of pieces across a map rather than dwelling on sweat and pain, and he never forces us to look at horror.

Indeed, the most terrifying and disturbing moment in the book's battle of HD is one completely free of blood and gore.  It doesn't even appear in the movie, and it is composed solely of dialogue.  Aragorn has lept atop the wall of the fortress, and he is calling on the endless army of Saruman's orcs to surrender:

               The Orcs yelled and jeered. 'Come down! Come down!' they cried. 'If you wish to speak to us, come down! Bring out your king! We are the fighting Uruk-hai. We will fetch him from his hole, if he does not come. Bring out your skulking king!'

               'The king stays or comes at his own will,' said Aragorn.

               'Then what are you doing here?' they answered. 'Why do you look out? Do you wish to see the greatness of our army? We are the fighting Uruk-hai.'

               'I looked out to see the dawn,' said Aragorn.

               'What of the dawn?' they jeered. 'We are the Uruk-hai: we do not stop the fight for night or day, for fair weather or for storm. We come to kill, by sun or moon. What of the dawn?'

There's a creepiness here that no amount of makeup can produce.  It isn't direct and it isn't allegory, but it echoes the hateful mob that stands in the darkest moment in Western narrative.  "Bring out your king!  We come to kill!"  We are near Golgotha.