There are a lot of people out there that consider Battlestar Galactica to be the best show ever on television. While I give the show a lot of credit for taking on a lot of decidedly non-science fiction issues in a science fiction show (most notably abortion, labor unions/class issues, terrorism, and a whole season that paralleled the US war in Iraq), I think saying it is the best show on television is going a bit too far. And I think the fact that it was such a sophisticated show working within such a traditionally unsophisticated genre led people to believe that it is better than it really was. I really enjoyed the show (enough to finish the entire series in just a few months), but to those who think it was the best show on television, I'd like you to consider the following points (note: if you haven't watched the show, you'll have no idea what any of this means....also: SPOILER ALERT):
•Baltar's vision: Early on into the show I was totally into it. I really only had one complaint: Gaius Baltar's hallucinatory visions of the #6 cylon. When my friends asked me how I was liking it so far I'd always respond that I liked it except for that, and they all responded along the lines of "ohhh, yeah, well, you might want to get used to that, because it isn't going away anytime soon". I don't have any insightful criticisms about this element of the show, I just thought it was lame. The explanation at the end that the vision was some sort of angel only made it worse.
•Inconsistent cylon threat: Something that was so exciting about the beginning of the show was the fear of the cylon superiority. When the first attack happened they owned any ship they came across. While I know that the whole idea is that the Galactica was so old that their techno-piracy didn't work on it, it seemed like at first any cylon contact meant you had to get the hell out of there, but by the third season, that threat went away. Suddenly you could just fight them. The cylon raiders are fucking robots, how can they possibly suck so bad when fighting a human in a viper. It seemed by the end of the show the raiders were no match for human pilots, and allegedly lousy pilots at that. As soon as they established that cylon raiders were fallible, any encounter with them just seemed routine: an unimportant character might get shot down, but for the most part the humans always came out ahead.
This problem existed with the 'skin job' cylons as well. Remember when they first determined that Leoben was a cylon and they had him in captivity? There was that moment when Starbuck was trying to intimidate him with force, and he quickly ripped his chains from the desk they were attached to and strangled Starbuck against the wall, showing that he had super-human strength, and that he was basically allowing them to chain him there because he couldn't fight the whole fleet by himself, but that the chains themselves were a joke. There was also the moment when Gaius did his cylon test on Boomer/Sharon, and his hallucination lady told him that he'd better be careful because if he tells her she might snap and murder him? They set this tone that the skin job cylons were super advanced, which made them pretty scary. But again, later they showed humans beating up cylons, and they totally removed the vibe that the human-looking cylons could destroy you when push came to shove. Once they established that fighting a cylon, whether it was hand-to-hand or ship-to-ship, a lot of the tension vanished. They were just a formidable opponent, not a superior force.
•Reluctance to kill main characters: At the end of the first season, when Adama takes two gunshots at close range and lives, you pretty much know that they probably aren't going to kill off any huge characters. I certainly don't expect main character deaths to be an integral part of a television series, but in a show where you have constant gunplay and space battles, you'd think a character that matters might meet their end every once in a while. In a show like Battlestar, it is important to kill someone that matters early on, just to show that anyone can die at any time. And no, Billy doesn't count.
•Cylon technology: Is it just me, or did you expect the cylon base ship to look way cooler than it did? When you've got a chance to design a spaceship designed by robots, you've got a chance to make something pretty crazy looking, and the ship that they designed was not very cool at all. Apparently, if robots ever design their own ship, there will just be a bunch of pointless gibberish projected onto every wall for some reason. Everything else will be pretty tame and expected.
•The hybrid: Was the hybrid not the lamest part of the whole show? I like how they were like 'she just speaks gibberish, it doesn't mean anything', yet she was at least speaking in understandable words and complete sentences? It might not be immediately applicable, but it was clearly not gibberish, more like bad poetry. Also, was there a single person who didn't think of those girls in Minority Report when they introduced the hybrid? There was never a good explanation for why their ship computer was some lady in a bathtub, and the whole thing was pretty hardcore lame.
•Character inconsistencies: An early strength of Battlestar Galactica was that they had pretty clearly defined characters. But midway through the series there were some events that provided some glaring inconsistencies, and not character growth, just one-off behaviors that were convenient for the plot of that episode. In the episode where Chief is inspecting the fuel refinery ship and eventually starts a work strike (Dirty Hands, season 3...coincidentally one of my favorite episodes of the whole series), Adama is apparently seconds away from executing Chief's wife Cally if he doesn't end the strike. For those who had gotten to know the Adama character for three seasons, this moment was ridiculous. He is a man of reason, and Chief was trying to be reasonable, but did the only thing he could to get his point across and Adama counters with threatening to execute his wife? Absurd. It would never happen, but they just kind of forced us to accept it because they needed a dramatic moment.
Another example of this is when Starbuck comes back from her mysterious (and never clearly explained) death journey. Everyone had reason to be skeptical of her sudden reappearance without any real explanation of where she was. But at that point, there primary mission was to find Earth. Starbuck returned claiming she had just been there, and knew how to get there, and everyone was like "ummmm...nah, not really". While it made total sense for Adama to be skeptical (since that is a consistent part of his character), the skepticism from Roslin was pretty out of character. This is someone who has made several important decisions based on visions and dreams of some fucking opera house and a baby. She is all about the 'dying leader leading their people to their final resting place' or whatever, but they won't even listen to Starbuck? Like "nope, my opera house dreams are obviously more important than your claim that you've actually been to Earth and know how to get there). They were basically just floating in space hoping they would stumble upon it, and they wouldn't even head in a general direction to see if maybe there was something to it? Stupid. But then of course later they give her an ship and basically the entire crew, when the situation had basically not changed at all. Whatever.
•Resources: Didn't it kind of seem like the entire fleet was constantly critically low on pretty much every resource, yet they never actually run out of anything? They frequently mention that things are being rationed and that they are running out of booze and that this is the last roll of toothpaste, but they never actually run out. Wouldn't it have been kind of cool if they actually just ran out of toothpaste and everyone starting having gross teeth? Or they run out of booze so people start doing other things to relieve their stress?
•The Final Five: Early in the series, the idea that anybody you came across could actually be a cylon was kind of cool. It added a level of mystery to every new character that you came across. But once they revealed that there were five final cylons that would be revealed at some point, you pretty much knew that they were reserving those final five as main characters. You weren't going to find out that some unimportant background character was a cylon, or that some person you've never met before was a cylon. It was pretty much established early that they were going to attempt to mindfuck us by revealing that 5 main characters were actually cylons. But the thing is, there were only, like, 10 human characters that mattered at all. So you knew that roughly half of the people in the series were going to be cylons, it was just a matter of which ones. And Admiral Adama or Lee Adama were eliminated from the running, because they were father and son. So when they revealed the four, it was just kind of like 'oh, okay, so it's those four, I guess'. Then the fact that Thai was a cylon was a little suspect, since he and Adama had been friends for 30 years. Their attempt at just saying 'ummm, no, umm, they are special old cylons....that age, for some reason' was pretty weak.
•Earth: So, for three seasons they are looking for Earth. Then they finally find it, and show that it is all fucked up, and they pretty much just turn around and leave immediately? I understand that it is all radioactive, but it just seemed really anticlimactic when it happened. There was all this drama leading toward finding Earth, then they find it and it is all gray and they are all sad and then they leave? Okay. I guess they end up finding Earth 2 or whatever in the end, but there was all of this ancient text pointing toward a specific planet, and then it ends up being a gross planet, and that is that. It didn't really seem to make much sense.
•Technology: Whether they are in a time period way after or way before the year 2000 A.D. on earth as we know it, it is clear they were more technologically advanced than we are at this point on real life earth. In any science fiction show, I expect a steady flow of futuristic technology. I don't mean laser guns and silver unitards and weird haircuts and an alien lady with green skin. I mean more everyday stuff. How about some advances in medicine? We've made pretty severe advances in treating cancer in the last 100 years. But apparently our treatment now is advanced as it will ever get. Do we really think that the formal outfit of choice in this advanced society will still just be a regular suit and tie (as Lee wears for the last couple of seasons)? In a show like this, every little detail is a chance for the show to be creative. What will bars be like in the future? Oh, apparently they will be exactly as they are now. They won't have some sort of strange new way of getting intoxicated (like oxygen bars or something), they'll just have regular booze in a regular way. What will cars be like on Caprica? They will just be totally regular cars from off the street in the early 21st century. Couldn't they have at least borrowed some concept cars from a car show to show some close ups of? Then Roslin's sisters die in a car crash? I'd bet money that in 20 years, we will no longer be driving cars, they will be totally automated and will be directed to their destination via autopilot (the technology is pretty much already in place, it is just a matter of actually implementing it). It could be argued that part of this was lack of budget, or maybe they wanted these everyday elements to be recognizable and relatable, but I think it may have just been lack of creativity. The movie 2001: A Space Odyssey was made over forty years ago, and the technology design in that was much more interesting and futuristic looking that pretty much anything shown in Battlestar Galactica. They couldn't have even had some hoverboards or something? Or that's right, they had that pyramid game. But of course, when they showed Anders during a post game interview in the last episode, he was healing in one of those metal jacuzzis that are decidedly unfuturistic.
•The ending sucked: There was no explanation over why the little girl was important to the human race. I suppose they chillingly imply that humanity as we know it is part cylon. But why? I think the pre-cylon invasion humans had procreation down pretty well. I think the humans would have been fine without her. And as far as the fact that they reveal that everything we saw took place in the past...did they ever see Star Wars? A long time ago in a galaxy far far away? I felt like they were trying to blow our minds way too hard, instead of just making a satisfying series finale. And the Starbuck plot...was that supposed to be some sort of resolution to the fact that she found her own dead body? Okay, she disappeared. That doesn't make any sense. Maybe she is some sort of angel like the Gaius and Number 6 visions, but then wouldn't she know that she wasn't really real? I don't know. All I know is that their weak attempt at resolving that plot was a complete failure. And remember how Starbuck was supposed to be the harbinger of death or something? I guess not. So what was that all about? Nothing, I guess.
The thing that was a little ridiculous about the way the whole show ended is that they introduced a bunch of this crazy mythology two thirds of the way into the series. They really didn't need to introduce all of these mysteries late into the series that they couldn't resolve cleanly. Why couldn't they just continue the series as a human versus cylon war, with the ending of the show being some sort of final resolution with the war? Did we really need all of this ancient cylon knowledge, and 'all of this has happened before and will happen again' stuff? That isn't was made the show fun and interesting in the first half of the series, and it never really became interesting or enlightening. Especially when their explanations were totally weak.
So say we all.
So say we all.
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