I just realized it while watching the last episode. The self-conscious "darkness" had annoyed me for some time until I realized what was wrong with this show: it's a show that is interested only in the darker side of human experience. Joy, happiness, satisfaction, contentment--these things go unexplored and unmentioned. I realize that this is an intentional decision, as Ron Moore and his merry gang are interested in what people do under pressure, when all seems lost, when the game seems over, etc. But I think this is a problem with the show that few seem interested in exploring, but that makes the show substantially less watchable and also of quite a bit less interest as an artistic achievement. One of the things that makes, say, The Godfather such a good movie is that, at the end of it, the viewer has experienced so many waves of different emotions. There are things that are funny, sad, happy, and so forth. And so much is explored in so much depth that one cannot help but feel fulfilled, on an emotional level, at the scope of what has been accomplished.
Galactica, on the other hand, seems to be more interested in only the "dark" emotions. Which is fair enough--Ron Moore has his vision and it is fairly uncompromising. That it is entirely wrong, and rings false to anyone with some form of life experience, is incidental. That it has been promoted by many critics is unfortunate. As someone who was quite bullish on early BSG and thought that it would be better off if it were funnier I have been disappointed by how the vision has been fulfilled--in fact, the rare flashes of humor in the early seasons have actually been diminished. People living under dire circumstances don't just sit around and cry about it. Far from it, in fact. If you have read Elie Weisel, for example, you would know that concentration camp inmates would often make jokes that someone like myself would often find appalling, like jokes about people's heads being blown apart. Such a thing would likely confound the writing staff of BSG but it is true, and there is a very specific reason why people do things like this--because humor is a protective device. Joking about something makes it less real, less immediate, and living in such awful misery will just drive someone insane, which is why one needs to protect one's sanity with jokes. Now, if BSG wanted to have Admiral Adama race through the Galactica stark naked, shouting Dylan lyrics while balancing a clicking metronome on his head on the last episode I'd grant their point, but for a show whose creators often talk about "hope" I find little of it on their show, and rather a perverse tendency to try to defuse it to the maximum extent possible.
Battlestar had two very strong opening seasons, and the show could have evolved along the lines of The Wire, which also depicted stark human misery but liberally included humor to make the misery go down more easily. The Wire, of course, is not disputed as a masterful exploration on humanity. BSG could have done that, and it probably would have made the show more watchable. They could have occasionally given us some victories along the way, and the show would have been more satisfying. In other words, they could have tried to present a complex and complete portrait of humanity rather than the emo stylings of people trying to make a point, but they chose not to. The first two seasons had hints of those things, but rather than grow up the show burnt out, and this last half season has been full of pretensions to high drama and meaningful tragedy while never understanding that the loss of something cannot be tragic unless it is valued to begin with. BSG eventually wound up being the second act of a tragedy, when everything is falling apart, but the staff never seemed to realize that the losses have to be contextualized in order to be hard-hitting. This past season has asked us to ponder the tragedy of humans perishing, unable to find a place in the universe for themselves. The show has reached a point where that has ceased to seem tragic.
So, basically, the show falls down in depicting humans realistically, as all the humans would have killed themselves long ago if actually confronted with a voyage like Galactica's. It is unsurprising that Galactica would have wound up with a totally incoherent worldview, as I've come to terms with the fact that, despite some fascinating and worthwhile early episodes, the show is basically high-toned pulp and always has been, and that it's all been made up as we went. It's actually pretty disappointing from a show that gave indications of being something more, but one must accept that there's much less there that meets the eye. I have.
