Los Angeles magazine, January 2009

This past summer the only thing that made me forget the mortgage and November’s election was Battlestar Galactica. If this sounds unlikely, I understand. Aside from an aberrant burst of acclaim—Time named it the best TV show of 2005—Galactica has been absent from annual top ten lists and has never won a major Emmy. While its champions have talked it up for half a decade, the rest of us couldn’t help remembering it was originally a cheesy Lorne Greene show in the late ’70s, the lightweight’s Star Wars, which itself was lightweight. I would like to think at this point in my life I’ve gotten over this sort of critical correctness, but apparently not, because I also dismissed Galactica until one or two too many people whose opinions I respect urged it on me. So as July turned into August, after everyone else in the family had gone to sleep, I mowed through Galactica on DVD in the course of several weeks, vacillating between astonishment that the show could be as good as it is and shame at having fallen in with a lemming culture.

This, then, is a mea culpa, and if it’s largely characterized by the zealotry of the convert, hold that against me and not the show. Galactica is that thing that always seemed possible in science fiction but for whatever reason hasn’t been: an adult drama, built around adult relationships, that happens to be set in a science fiction context, which in this case is a nomadic armada of spaceships searching for a harbor among the stars. At the same time, the series abounds with the big ideas—about politics, philosophy, myth, and theology—that the best of sf always has been known for. Most TV isn’t meant to be watched in large swaths the way I watched Galactica. Even the best series have a repetition of motifs that is part of the point, and by the third season of Deadwood or the fifth season of The Sopranos you can tell the writers are making things up as they go along. So what’s striking about Galactica is the scope; it’s a nearly 80-hour epic that unfolds as though it’s been thought through from the beginning. Even the weaker episodes usually advance the larger plot in ways that don’t become apparent until later.

Galactica’s central premise isn’t in the least original. Humankind nearly has been wiped out by a race of evil robots called Cylons, some of whom—as represented by Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, and Lucy Lawless—are disconcertingly vixenish. The central question to which this unoriginal premise gives rise isn’t original either, having preoccupied virtually everything novelist Philip K. Dick wrote: What makes us human? Is it simply that the hardware of the body—veins and muscle and nerve endings—is more authentic than wiring and chips and electricity? Are memories and emotions less real if they’re programmed rather than experienced? Dick never pursued the implications to more unsettling effect than does Galactica. For good measure the show throws in post-9/11 paranoia, as the fleet’s commander, William Adama, and the tenuous, floating republic’s president, Laura Roslin, flirt with martial law, dictatorship, and electoral fraud while struggling to preserve something resembling a democracy, assuming the republic can survive at all.

Battlestar Galactica is the most subversive TV series I’ve seen, the simplest example being the word “frack,” employed in place of the more-terrestrial expletive that basic cable doesn’t allow. With a vowel change here and a consonant thrown in there, the writers make an end run around the problem of censorship that Lenny Bruce would have admired, and “frack you,” “frack this,” and “motherfracker” blow through the dialogue like an asteroid storm. It’s inspired, and one can only imagine the censors’ dismay. More profoundly, Galactica routinely fracks with every assumption and emotional investment the audience makes: That these humans are not earthlings at all—the Galactica searches for an Earth that Adama suspects is a myth—and that none of this may be taking place in the future but rather in a distant past are only the most predictable revelations, coming early on. In the face of human pettiness, the Cylons occasionally display flashes of a greater nobility; and while, like the ancient Romans, the humans worship a plurality of gods, the Cylons are the monotheists, for whom resurrection isn’t just a religious tenet but technological reality. Picking up where Blade Runner left off, more and more of the Galactica’s crew learn that they themselves are the Cylons (whom they call “toasters”) they’ve come to hate and dehumanize. To everyone’s dismay, by the second season humans and Cylons are having babies together, which has the effect of exposing humanity at its wisest and most ruthless, its most compassionate and murderous.