What's he on about now?

In case the articles, essays and opinions throughtout this site just weren't enough for you, here's my online diary (a.k.a. 'blog'). It's as close as you'll come to the inside of my head, so don't say I didn't warn you
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   Monday, April 04, 2005

   ROBOTS WHO PRAY

No, not more Pope-bashing but, on a lighter-yet-vaguely-related note, my aforementioned plug for the new TV version of "Battlestar Galactica" (stay with me here). Like many children-of-the-70's, I eagerly tuned in to the weekly "Star Wars" rip-off from Glen A. Larson, creator of 'classics' like "The Six Million Dollar Man" and "Knight Rider." I adored the show's fancy special effects yet found my TV affections constantly reverting to the bargain-basement rubber monsters of "Doctor Who." What had gone wrong?

A night fifteen years later answered the question. Mildly drunk and wildly nostalgic, a group of us in university rented a batch of 70's videos, including "Mission Galactica: The Cylon Attack," a two-parter stitched together and featuring Lloyd Bridges as a rogue spaceship captain. It was, we realized, absolutely and irreedemedly stupid. What was shiny chrome to children was tin to adults. One brutal-yet-entirely-accurate summation of Larson's career refers to the show's "idiotic" plots and argues that:

Today, there exists no better indicator of the rampant stupidity, vacuity, and incompetence in contemporary Hollywood than the news that there are now competing factions fighting for the rights to relaunch Battlestar Galactica. The mind boggles; it’s like fighting for the rights to make a sequel to Howard the Duck.

That relaunch eventually arrived and I ignored it. One bitten and all. But after an initial miniseries, more episodes were commissioned and the loudly-enthusiastic praise from critics and viewers alike finally convinced me to rent the DVD. The new BG is...well...bloody fantastic. It's not only the best sci-fi series in years but it's among the best dramas.

For one thing, the show features a provocatively-creepy notion for an American television show: the bad guys -- unrelenting, genocidal robot "Cylons" -- believe in God. 'Our' God. One of them explains that, while humans still remain "one step away from beating each other with clubs," the Cylons have evolved into perfect synthetic duplicates of their human creators and God has now chosen to give them the souls mankind have abandoned. They will extermine humanity because God has decreed it.

This theologically-disturbing notion comes from writer/producer Ron Moore, a "Star Trek: The Next Generation" veteran responsible for some of that show's best episodes and the co-creation of its superior follow-up, "Star Trek: Deep Space Nine." "Battlestar Galactica" takes many of DS9's cultural and political themes and digs in deeper. Moore made a thoughtful blog posting this past weekend that does a bang-up job in explaining the show's appeal:

I do see the show as an opportunity to raise questions in the minds of the audience and ask them to think, which is something of a rariety in these days when politics seems to be about stoking emotionalism and finding simple-minded slogans to stand-in for actual answers to complex problems. ("Culture of Life!" "Right to Die!" "Ban Smoking!" "The Ownership Society!")

Galactica is both mirror and prism through which to view our world. It attempts to mirror the complexities of our lives and our society in turbulent times, while at the same time reflecting and bending that view in order to allow us to extrapolate on notions present in contemporary society but which have not yet come to pass, i.e. a true artificial intelligence becoming self-aware and the existential questions it raises. Our goal is to examine contemporary culture and society, to challenge (and sometimes provoke) our audience, but not to provide easy answers to complex problems.

This is what science fiction was meant to do; what television ought to do. BG asks all the big questions of "The West Wing" but does it with sex appeal and spaceships. What's not to love?

Labels: religion, TV