Jonah Goldberg makes me defend late-period BSG. Damn him!

But seriously, folks, I know that you put up with a fair amount of my BSG bashing and I've been on something of a TV-blogging kick recently. But stick with me, this is good stuff. (And given the combination of Jonah Goldberg and later BSG, I'm sure Bill Simmon is laughing somewhere.)

In the course of reading a post about BSG, I came across a link to what appears to be a relatively recent article by Jonah Goldberg (about whose book I once wrote a quick one-act play) about Battlestar Galactica. His thesis seems to be (naturally) that left-wing politics destroyed the show. The article is rather long-winded but is worth reading in full, if for nothing else, to read a novel interpretation on why Battlestar Galactica went awry in its later years. I feel I'd like to respond.

Goldberg's argument, when the padding is removed, boils down to this: the New Caprica arc at the beginning of season three of Battlestar Galactica ended a delicate political balance on the show in favor of liberal sloganeering on Iraq. Some brief excerpts:

The truth is that the audience was never given a remotely decipherable, never mind plausible, explanation for this radically bizarre and nonsensical turn of events. Rather, it was simply asserted in a hodgepodge of babbling dialogue. Almost immediately, the show’s protagonists are transformed into “insurgents” who have little or no compunction about becoming suicide bombers. [...]

Most egregiously, the human suicide bombers are not young men brainwashed in a madrassa and promised eternal life with 72 virgins, nor are they threatened with the murder of their families—the tactics used by jihadists to create their human bombs. Rather, they are decent, calm, and composed men and women fighting in a noble cause. Taken seriously, this romanticization of suicide bombers and “insurgency” has a cascade of revolting implications. The insurgency in Iraq was not an authentic resistance like the Warsaw Ghetto uprising or De Gaulle’s Free French forces. The ranks of terrorists in Iraq were overwhelmingly made up of Baathist remnants of the Hussein regime and al-Qaeda interlopers with their own imperialist ambitions for a worldwide umma. [...]

Thus, a show marked by gritty realism about how a decent but flawed civilization modeled on our own tries to cling to its decency while fighting an existential war against an implacable enemy veered wildly off course. The humans were no longer analogized to Americans; rather Americans were analogized to genocidal occupiers. In other words, we are no longer the inspiration for the futuristic Israelites trying to survive. We are now the Nazis.

Goldberg makes more points--I will merely address these ones, as I think they provide the bulk of his argument at its strongest. Leaving aside the puzzling remark that the Iraqi insurgents weren't "authentic"--infusing that word with a moral dimension is unnecessary, "freedom fighters" is a term that already exists--Goldberg has a fair point when he notes some of the sudden changes that had to be made for the New Caprica arc, which was sufficiently dramatic and interesting from a character perspective that it convinced most fans to go along with what turned out to be a very silly premise. Of course, it doesn't take 72 virgins to make a person want to kill themselves for a cause--Buddhist monks sometimes do it for free--but it is true that the Colonials were supposed to be stand-ins for us, and the thought of suicide bombings appalls most Americans. Goldberg, however, neglected to remember a scene between Baltar and Roslin in which Baltar pressures Roslin to say she agrees with these sorts of tactics and Roslin demurs. The suicide bomber (there was only one) was, as I recall, a depressed man who had just lost his wife and volunteered for the job. The man who encourages him to do this, Tigh, is portrayed as a madman who completely cracked after losing an eye during a cylon interrogation. The act itself is depicted directly, brutally, and unromantically. All of this doesn't add up to a glorification of suicide bombing, so much as an examination of the circumstances that lead to it, and whether it's an acceptable way to fight. The show makes no argument that it is proper, and such a reading is only possible if one ignores a number of inconvenient outlying details.

Similarly, Goldberg's point that the New Caprica arc changed the show's metaphor from Colonials-as-Americans to Cylons-as-Americans strikes me not only as wrong, but as fundamentally missing the point of the latter seasons of BSG (which, to be perfectly fair, isn't the hardest thing to do in the world). The Colonials-as-Americans parallels are too easy to exaggerate. Obviously, America has not been taken over by al-Qaeda and Osama bin Laden has not seized power. The parallels aren't direct. But saying that the Cylons' purpose here was merely to satirize the Iraq War is not correct. One of the major goals of the series' final two seasons is to humanize the Cylons. In the first two seasons, we see relatively few portrayals of Cylons, and most are malevolent. The second two seasons show that the Cylons are misunderstood--that their society is immature and prone to terrifying acts of violence (such as the one that began the show), but as the show progresses, it tracks the spiritual and political fractures that shatter the Cylons, and we see Cylons go beyond their programming and begin to have the same sorts of debates, scruples, and desires as humans do. Now, one could argue that the show didn't entirely succeed at this goal--I'll be the first to admit that these humanistic themes were never handled as gracefully as possible, and the increasing focus on faith proved to be a blunder as Ron Moore knows little about it--but it was what the show was trying to do. Adama's opening question of the series is, "Is humanity worth saving?" It remains an open question. But with the Cylons, the question goes from, "How do we kill them?" to "How can we live with them and understand them?" Because they must. They don't have a choice, the cycle must be broken. It is entirely unsurprising that Goldberg didn't like this turn of events and pines for the days when Cylons were faceless bad guys that Starbuck would shoot up before coming back, drinking a beer and punching Tigh in the face. Personally, I felt that having the Cylons turn out to be functionally the same as humans was not the best plot twist, especially after a whole season of playing "Guess the Cylons". But the reason Goldberg hates this progression so much is not because he thinks the show lost creative energy so much as that he doesn't want to believe that the internal politics of the Muslim world are, in fact, complicated and often misunderstood, and that a final resolution with Muslims is not going to involve guns and bombs but rather forgiveness, awareness, and acceptance. We must do this. We don't have a choice. There isn't another Earth, we're easily outnumbered and Westerners and Eastern Muslims must find some way of living together. Goldberg sees the world as black and white--bad vs. good. He thought the moral universe of BSG was structured in the same way. Only the latter two seasons showed that it wasn't, however imperfectly executed the entire business was. In fact, the show was never structured that way, but Goldberg wasn't able to pick up on that until the show got too strident in referencing the Iraq War. His sharpness as a cultural critic leaves much to be desired.

The funny thing is that Goldberg is right about the general timeline of BSG's decline but wrong entirely about the reasons. Galactica was a truly phenomenal show for the miniseries and roughly one and a half seasons after that. It asked big, serious, deceptively simple questions, like, "Can democracy exist during wartime?" and, "How can we fight against an enemy that doesn't value human life?" and, "Is torture wrong?" and so on. These were questions [with the proper substitutions, of course] that we were all asking ourselves when BSG first came on television, and the show resonated with a lot of people as a result of its political acuity. During the first 1.5 seasons, the show examined each of these questions (and many others) at some length until everything came to a head with the Pegasus episodes. In those episodes, our heroes on the Galactica encounter a ship that has made the complete opposite choices as Galactica--one that gladly practices torture, that has ended any political rule and is solely a military operation that decides to sink to the level of what they're fighting. It turns out that these ideas--ones with which Goldberg sympathizes, from what I've read--turn out to be completely disastrous. The proper frame for viewing these episodes is essentially that Admiral Cain is Dick Cheney--younger and more attractive, but she basically sees things the same way as our former vice president. The shows depicted the Bush-Cheney worldview stretched to its maximal extreme, and the results were absolutely horrifying. The pivotal subplot involved a Cylon woman named Gina who had been brutally tortured and gang-raped by the Pegasus crew with full consent of the command authority. It was decided that Gina was not a person and had no rights--a bit of an exaggeration of the Bush Administration's philosophy on this, but not much of one. The end result was that the Pegasus crew was made up of snarling psychotics and what few decent people remained (e.g. Cain's XO) were too terrified to speak out against the evil on the Pegasus. What's more, the episode didn't resort to cheap shots. It made Cain smart, tough, and determined--uncharismatic, unable to see the big picture, yes, but she was the kind of leader that Bush seemed to want to be and that Cheney was. And the episode showed, poignantly, exactly how it all happened. As it turned out, Gina was guilty and had committed a very evil act that got hundreds of people on Pegasus killed. Later in the show's chronology, she committed another evil act that killed thousands more innocent people. She was a true terrorist, one who was absolute in her convictions and finally became a suicide bomber. But the episode poignantly showed how easily corruptible people are, and how easily evil can ride in on the heels of good intentions. The show merely illustrated how the same evil that drove the Cylons to eradicate humanity is also in the comparatively "good" humans, and that good people can be driven to do evil things for reasons that are entirely laudable. In the end, Gina wasn't successful in her sabotage mission. But she was able to wreck the moral compass of the Pegasus crew, as Admiral Cain committed slow suicide by seeking to wreak impossible vengeance on the Cylons against impossible odds. None of this is difficult to intend or obsure in any way, it's actually basic Christian thought on good and evil, consistent from Augustine to Niebuhr, and it's one of the rare times the show deployed any sort of religious idea without botching it thoroughly.

To me, it was the best thing the show ever did, and it more or less closed out the great political questions the show asked. BSG began faltering nearly immediately afterward, trying to refocus from being a political/military show into being a sociological/faith/prophecy/whodunit/??? show, and it never quite reached its full potential after that. But Goldberg doesn't mention Pegasus at all in his argument. To miss the political themes' development and conclusion with Pegasus strikes me as fundamentally not understanding what the show tried to do, and while he is right that, "After the Iraq story line, Battlestar Galactica deteriorated rapidly over the course of its final two seasons. The plot shift led the show’s writers and producers into a bizarre and meandering world of visiting angels, pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, and deus-ex-machina literary devices," he cannot even begin to connect the dots as to why the show was successful and why its later seasons were rather insipid. The show's grace notes were the most political and arguably the most "liberal", though even from the beginning the show's moral universe was complex, not all Cylons were evil, not all humans were good, etc. The colonials were always America and the Cylons represented--to an extent--the Muslim threat. But the show's ultimate message was that neither side owned a monopoly on good or evil, that the Cylons were hardly bloodthirsty savages (well, not all of them, anyway), and that peoples can mature, change, and find common ground. This should all be bleedingly obvious to anyone regardless of their politics, but it isn't obvious to Mr. Goldberg. The disposition of his worldview makes it impossible for him to actually appreciate Battlestar Galactica, and his lack of curiosity evidently keeps him from even considering alternate interpretations for the show's meaning. In the end, I just feel sorry for the guy. He's going to live his entire life missing so much because everything has to get fed through the political outrage machine. Sometimes, it's better to listen, to learn, to be quiet, and to reflect.

Caprica is on the way

I'm skeptical that it will be any good. This review seems to be making the rounds, and it seems like BSG minus the action, which is also known as the latter seasons of BSG. This didn't exactly work that well, because the showrunners became enamored of the intellectual component of the show while the show always made more sense on a visceral and emotional level, with tight storytelling that developed its themes but kept them in the background. Unfortunately, it looks as though we're going to get another show about "ideas" that aren't all that new that overpower good characters and good drama. It seems that humans learn all the wrong lessons from history.

The review asks the question of whether or not BSG fans will tune in. They will, and they'll keep tuning in, the same way they tuned in during some pretty dire seasons of BSG. But are they enough to keep the show going? I found this chart which tracks the show's viewership over its entire run:

Basically, the longer the show was on, the lower the ratings were (this goes through the beginning of Season 4). The show wore poorly as it went on, though it stayed relatively stable during individual seasons. Near the end it looks like the show more or less plateaued around 1.2 million viewers, who are the diehards that will watch Caprica. I wouldn't even be surprised if a few disaffected BSG fans checked out the new series, as well as a few newbies that heard about BSG and want to see what all the fuss was about. My guess is that these folks won't stick around long if Caprica repeats BSG's mistakes, which fundamentally boiled down to poor storytelling and an unrelenting grim tone that--surprise, surprise--people got tired of at a fairly linear rate. If Caprica doesn't develop some coherent and compelling story arcs off the bat, as well as to do a better job of showing some real humanitas instead of Ron Moore's Opera of Gloom, then it will be gone soon. Time will tell.

The notorious BSG (finale)

Okay, you have to give me some props for that title.

Finally watched the very last episode of Battlestar Galactica, and I will admit that it was better than advertised. It was about as good a wrapup as we could have hoped for, I suppose. A few elements really bothered me, mostly centered around the religious elements of the show. Obviously, religion was something the show was interested in from the start, and allowing the existence of the supernatural as part of the denouement seems fair, since there were signs before that of some sort of supernatural power out there. However, the hokiness of interspersing the ubiquitous Opera House vision into a pointless scene on Galactica was annoying to me because it was a blatant attempt to try to show that the showrunners had a plan all along, but jamming it in like that merely served as proof that they never did. The Starbuck resolution was really, really bad--the worst kind of copout, unsatisfying and craven. You have us spend years wondering, hey, what's the deal with Starbuck and then she's just gone?! Ugh. And the notion that the Galactica humans would just start over and work the land, with no technology of any sort or any seeming opposition to the plan, seems like the very sort of convenient consequence that BSG created by the boatload during its run.

Still, it's over. I guess I'm a bit more charitable now than I was earlier, and as for the religion stuff, I guess I'm willing to cut them slack for trying to say something, even if they didn't ultimately have anything interesting to say about it. The social commentary aspect about scientific discovery was half-baked and not a significant part of the show, and trying to say that the show was about it all along is silly. Ultimately, the final episode fit the show quite nicely: it failed to deliver on what it promised (aside from some fairly captivating fight scenes), and ultimately became a catalogue of whatever banal thoughts occupied Ron Moore that day.

Still, between the false tension that the show constantly displayed, the multitude of loose threads the show dropped (remember Baltar's gang getting guns? Or the guy from Hero?) and generally ramshackle storytelling, the pretension toward intellectualism and the use of magic to explain away much of the finale when it really hadn't been invoked before, one wonders how the show managed to retain critical acclaim. These days, getting those reviews seems to be a lifeline for shows that don't make money, both to deserving shows like The Wire and Arrested Development and undeserving shows like BSG. Which is too bad for good niche shows like Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Dollhouse and Kings that don't have the trappings of critically acclaimed shows, but that are provocative and interesting in their own ways. But, hey, at least one of them will survive, maybe? It's even more annoying since Heroes, another bloated carcass of a bad sci-fi show, will get another season. There truly is no justice.

BSG's fatal flaw

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.

The mutineers were right

Robert Farley lays out the pro-mutiny case for Battlestar Galactica. I will admit the mutiny episodes were better than most of post-New Caprica BSG, though that's not exactly a high standard. Ultimately, though, introducing this three episode arc right after the first episode back introduced so many revelations--the Cylons are ancient and predate what the humans built, for example--was pretty dumb: these new threads were basically shelved so that we could have some coup episodes that weren't ultimately important to the arc of the show. Narrative discipline used to be a strength of BSG, but for some time now it's been clear that the showrunners are making things up as they go, and their instincts in following the most interesting parts of their stories have long since been dulled.

What separates the (superior) first two seasons of BSG from the clunky latter two? Simple: danger. The first two seasons had it in spades: we had Galactica being chased by bloodthirsty, unreasoning robots with a smattering of human-looking models. Humans were nearly annhilated and could only manage to stay one step ahead of the Cylons. Since New Caprica that hasn't been true, and aside from a handful of S3 episodes the Galactica has not been in any danger at all. The show then played on largely uninteresting narrative threads (e.g. Who are the final cylons?) before wrapping them up in an unsatisfying way (i.e. it doesn't matter, as there is no difference between humans and cylons). Minus the danger, the show's momentum has been slack for some time. The fourth season has been a little better, but the show's obsession with making things "dark" and treating everything from cylon standoffs to quorum meetings with the same level of hyperactive, nervous energy is nothing short of tiring, and while the general level of quality has improved it is nowhere near the rapturous highs of early BSG. Add this to the show's perverse embrace of hopelessness (an early episode like "The Hand of God" which ended happily is inconceivable these days) and you have something that simply isn't all that much fun for anyone anymore, which is probably why the ratings have been going down since Season 3. At this point, BSG is still watchable but it has been some time since it's been "the best show on television". It's not even the best science fiction show anymore, as Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles has come a long way and is, so far as I can tell, the best written and best acted show on television, and one that actually has some new and interesting ideas to convey.