The problem is not that Battlestar Galactica has tranformed science fiction television. The problem is that it has set such an impossibly high bar that its future imitators won’t be able to surpass it. I just got to watching Friday’s episode. This fourth and final season, every single episode goes places I have never seen in any sort of fiction, science or otherwise. I’m not even going to try and urge you to watch it. You do or you don’t. All I want to say here is, sometimes something comes along that changes all the rules. There has been a lot of good SF on TV — Babylon 5 was pretty awesome, but it went a different way. B5 was a mirror held up to the Star Trek shows that said, here are the parts of your shiny happy world you never talk about. Battlestar Galactica says, fuck the future. This is a cruel story, and all cruel stories end the same way.
6 thoughts on “Battlestar Galactica – the Ties that Bind”
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I wanna watch. 😀
Couldn’t agree with you more Tipa. BSG is the only fiction TV show I’m watching these days. Can’t get enough of it.
Oye, you aren’t kidding. I rarely get to watch shows that dazzle me with new ideas and fun concepts. I smile so greatly when I see the epic dog-fights between the raptors and they raiders.
BSG is by far the most fantastic show every to grace TV. I’ve been watching it since the beginning and after viewing all of season 3 it finally dawned on me how religious centric this show is. The Humans believe in “The Gods”, while the cylones just believe in a God. There are 12 Cylone models, just like there were 12 apostles. See how it starts to become mind blowing after a while?
The show is just so subliminal it could sell sand to people in the desert and they would never ask why it tastes so good.
Lately I’ve been thinking of the Cylons as the future of humanity. Once we decide our bodies are too fragile and we download our minds into machines to become immortal. And also wondering if that happens, say if not everyone can afford to do it, wouldn’t we end up with 2 races, one the original humans, and the second immortals.
That’s the basic premise of all post-singularity fiction. Well, almost all. Rudy Rucker’s “Postsingular” takes a different path. Greg Egan’s “Schild’s Ladder”, Greg Bear’s “Eternity”, Iain Banks’ “Feersum Enjin” and many others wonder just what it means when we’re just bits that can be copied, modified, stored, combined and retrieved. But yeah, I hadn’t thought of that in the context of Battlestar Galactica, but you’re right on. In the upcoming BSG prequel, “Caprica”, they explain the origins of the Cylons as being exactly that. A scientist’s daughter was killed in a terrorist bombing (her boyfriend was, alas, the terrorist), but she (and her boyfriend) had stored their personalities as software, “Zoe-A”. Zoe-A exists solely as software until her father builds her a robot body, Zoe-R, and becomes the first Cylon.
Good call. Just another example how BSG is blazing trails in televised SF never done as well before. I’d definitely never thought of BSG as different kinds of humanity staring at each other through the veil of Singularity.