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ed_rex
(Cross-posted from my blog.)
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Giving oneself over to an episodic drama, produced over years, is always a gamble on the part of the reader or viewer. Unlike a novel or a feature film, the reader or viewer must take a leap of faith and trust that the creator or creators, essentially know what they are doing, that — even if they are open to making changes as things move along, organically evolving as they are surprised by their own creation — they at least have the ultimate end-point, the climax, always in view.
During its first two seasons, Battlestar Galactica showed every sign of being that rarity on commercial television, a show that was meant to be seen as an organic whole, with a begining, a middle and an end, rather than a series of adventures intended to go on (and on — see the eternal recurrence of Star Trek, for example) so long as it has enough viewers for advertisers to continue financing production.
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The program was smart, funny and often brutal; it dealt with serious issues without recourse to easy (or sometimes any answers offered to the viewer as the "right" one. The show's characters — even the noblest — were realistically flawed and very far from the virtually ideal usually served up in television and filmed attempts at science fiction.
To say that I quickly became a fan is an understatement. In truth, Battlestar Galactica was, in my opinion, the best show on television, asking its audience to think as well as to feel. (Since then, I've encountered such programs as Deadwood and The Wire, the former sadly cancelled before it's time, but the latter allowed to go on until it was truly completed.)
To tell you the truth, I lost my faith that Ronald D. Moore knew where they were going with Battlestar Galactica at some point about mid-way through the third season, when the series began running what were basically "stand-alone" episodes typical of network dramas that did little or nothing to further the progress of the series' main story: I read reports at the time suggesting this was due to network interference, to bean-counters messing with the creators in hopes of expanding the show's audience, but the Friday's final episode leaves me doubting that it was not, in fact, Moore who was responsible for the series' decline. Neverthless, right up until the final episode, I had home, if not faith, that he might surprise me, despite the apparent impossibility in pulling the program's myriad sub-plots and thematic threads into a well-realized whole.
Though I was sceptical about Moore's ability to pull it off, I didn't expect a dénoument that I can only characterize as, well, a cheat.
(Note: the following necessarily contains spoilers. Since I can't even recommend watching the episode, I don't think it matters, but stop reading now if you want to pass judgement yourself and have not yet seen the episode.)
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In a nutshell, Battlestar Gallactica posits a society destroyed by its own creations, the Cylons. Cylons are robots who gained sentience and rebelled against their position as slaves; following a half-century of peace, the Cylons returned, destroying the Twelve Colonies with nuclear weapons, and leaving only 50,000 survivors out of the twelve planets. The series follows those survivors, who are both trying to escape from the Cylons, bent on finishing their extermination of the human race, and to find refuge on possibly mythical planet called "Earth".
Despite the fantastic, science fictional trappings, Battlestar Galactica managed to provide pointed, non-didactic commentary on current events, such as the invasion of Iraq, the use of torture and the complexities of democratic politics with a sophistication sometimes matching the best of serious fiction. Even better it made concrete such abstractions as compromise and second-thought (as well as power-mongering and corruption) in its presentation of politics.
At its best, the program explored ideas, posing questions rather than offering Answers.
Even more, Battlestar Galactice provided some of the most complex characterizations I've seen on American television. Despite the military trappings and the dramatic structure, there wasn't a major character on the program who didn't make major mistakes. There were no easy answers, even for essentially "good" men and women; at its best, the program was "about" the creative tensions between conflicting understandings of right and wrong, about the difficulties inherent in balancing power with morality, of choosing the "right" course of action in times of crisis.
But having now seen the final episode, the climax, I can only feel betrayed. It seems clear now that Moore either did not after all actually know where the story was going to end up or, perhaps worse, that they did.
For decades, books and articles on the writing of science fiction have included a list of ideas that have been done to death (if you'll forgive me the cliche), of cliches to avoid.
Much of the time, the very first cliched idea to avoid is the "Adam and Eve" story, in which a couple or perhaps a larger group of survivors of some calamity crash-land on a pristine planet, only for it to be revealed that — gosh! — they were our ancestors!
Proof that Battlestar Galactica succumbed to a failure of creative imagination is that its ending was the above-noted cliche.
And how did the fleet manage to find Earth in the end? Through multiple acts of deus ex machina, that's how.
Our protagonists' arrival on Earth, perhaps 50,000 years ago, is "explained" by angels. Yes, literally angels, representing a kind of midieval Divine Providence.
I won't bore you with the details; if you're a fan of the show you probably already know them and, if not, this review is unlikely to convince you to invest a close to a hundred hours of your time in order to find them out.
Suffice it to say the finale reveals that our "heroes" have been endlessly manipulated by divine intervention, as if the mental and imaginative lives of Moore are one with Homer's. The gods are hidden, but live among us, nudging us here and there, in hopes that someday we can escape the wheel of eternal recurrence.
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The endlessly venal and self-serving Balthar, along with Caprica Six are revealed as some (unexplained) sort of divinities. Kara Thrace, once one of the most unusual and strong famale characters ever portrayed on American television, herself turns out to be some kind of angel — literally, it is more than implied; she in fact very literally disappears into thin air — presumably taken bodily back to heaven — following the completion of her "mission" (leading the survivors to Earth).
Galactica has always included a paranormal or religious element, a mystery that we were implicitly promised would be explained. What we were given however, makes a vaguelly-mystical hash of explanation, let alone of logic.
I suppose one can intuit an over-riding rationale for the events presented in the final episode (and, by extension, in the series as a whole) but this reviewer, at least, has his doubts. The dénoument reeks of a failure of imagination, if not necessarily of courage.
Battlestar Galactica is a series which has included some of the best television writing I've seen come out of North America, but if one accepts the conceit that it is to be taken as a single work, as a single dramatic narrative, it must be judged an almost tragic failure.
If a success, it is the success of an essentially pagan vision, in which the Gods are with us always, inscrutable, mysterious, incomprehensible and apparently arbitrary but acting with a Purpose we are not given to understand.
Despite its technological trappings, in the end, Battlestar Galacticta turned out to a fantasy after all and, like most fantasies, it is essentially reactionary in philosophy, denying the existence of individual volition, of free will, in favour of mysterious Destiny, where reality is beyond even the hope of human understanding and where — despite the often-supperb characterizations throughout the series — the individual human being is important only when he or she is a tool of that mysterious Destiny.
What a let-down. What a tragic waste of a lot of sometimes brilliant work.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-22 10:16 pm (UTC)The folks who are most upset seem to be those who are not personally religious.
only for it to be revealed that — gosh! — they were our ancestors!
I've seen this compared to one part of the "Hitchhiker's Guide" novels.
One fellow post-er did predict this (type of) ending, and weeks ago.
I thought of Adams ...
Date: 2009-03-23 06:50 pm (UTC)With some hesitation, I'll offer the position that even if I were religiously inclined I would still be dissatisfied. Particularly with the revelation that Kara Thrace was (for lack of a better term) an "angel" sent back from death to complete her task just didn't make sense to me, given the background — from childhood up — they'd developed for her. But if you've actually been watching it, I'd be interested in your take on it.
As for Adams, I forgive him because he was writing the sort of comedy from which one doesn't expect things to make sense. And I feel pretty certain he knew it was a cliche — not so sure about Moore.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-22 10:41 pm (UTC)*Always* feel free to argue with me with here!
Date: 2009-03-23 10:40 pm (UTC)Mind you ... there was some pretty damned fine drama there, even if I'm right about the conclusion.
Re: *Always* feel free to argue with me with here!
Date: 2009-03-24 05:15 am (UTC)Re: *Always* feel free to argue with me with here!
Date: 2009-03-30 06:54 pm (UTC)I've become quite a fan of at least the potential inherent in long-form television and BSG was a big part of the change (along with Deadwood, which was almost tragically cancelled before they were able to "finish" it (I use the quotation marks because, with an episodic work of art, one has to take it on faith that there is an end-point in view) and especially The Wire, which did come to a satisfying conclusion, along with a few British series.
While BSG could have worked in book-form, I really wanted it to work as television — I believe the amount of time available allows for what is, essentially, a new art-form, but one bloody difficult to pull off because of the complicated collaborative nature of film/television as opposed to a single writer pounding away at the keyboard.
Especially the idea of the possible Cylons living amongst the humans after the begin to repopulate---I feel like this could be a great basis for the explanation of the belief in the Greek Pantheon of Gods, etc, etc.
I just don't buy it. Since the aborigines we saw were pre-linguistic, we're talking at least a hundred thousand years ago and I don't believe cultural memories would last that long. After all, the Greek pantheon itself was almost certainly created within the past 5,000 years.
But they started out on Earth
Date: 2009-03-22 11:30 pm (UTC)I swears it!
I mean, I only watched the miniseries and part of season 1, but I swears that Caprica looked exactly like Simon Fraser university here on Earth!
Re: But they started out on Earth
Date: 2009-03-23 10:41 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-03-22 11:54 pm (UTC)I get really annoyed with the idea that humans have to come from elsewhere. And yet somehow have exactly the same broken genes as the apes0 and a fairly good fossil record about 5 times older than Moore is suggesting.
Right with you, buddy!
Date: 2009-03-23 10:44 pm (UTC)I remain open to the possibility we do ultimately come from comet dust (I draw the line at human/cylon hybrids!), but the question won't interest me much unless and until we find some actual DNA floating around out there.
Re: Right with you, buddy!
Date: 2009-03-23 11:10 pm (UTC)However the notion that Earth was "seeded" with organic material by comets and asteroids does have some merit as amino acids (though nothing as complex as full proteins) have been found in interplanetary gas clouds, some meteorites and iirc comets too. But under that definition of "coming from comet dust" we're also supernova dust because that's where all the elements heavier than iron come from.
Re: Right with you, buddy!
Date: 2009-03-23 11:16 pm (UTC)For what my (layman's) opinion is worth, it looks like amino acids are almost as common as self-righteous right-wingers on American talk-radio, but I'll bet that DNA (and probably RNA) are local products. Interbreeding with the natives of Alpha Centauri IV will take a lot of lab-work.
review
Date: 2009-03-23 01:45 pm (UTC)Re: review
Date: 2009-03-23 10:45 pm (UTC)There's still some awfully good programming in the series — the first two seasons (plus mini-series) are especially worthwhile so long as you can keep in mind that the climax ... well, isn't much of a bang.
Re: review
Date: 2009-03-26 03:11 pm (UTC)The truth is that no show that puts that much effort into creating expensive little meta inside jokes should be written off as lazy or cliche. The show was written as it was being produced and the endpoint was constantly changing, but the format of the show never changed. Ron Moore asked the hard questions and left out the easy answers because he and the writing staff wanted to challenge the audience to find the answers themselves. To do the work and come up with whatever worked best for them. (I have numerous friends who have alternately taken the Cylon's position or Zarek's over the course of the show)
You don't like Kara's disappearance tell yourself she didn't make it off the ship and Lee imagined the conversation they had on Earth. No evidence to support that isn't what happened. The first half of the show revealed that Lee Adama has clearly been in love with Starbuck for a long time. I mean she clearly had to have some kind of supernatural knowledge but if angel doesn't work for you write in your own explanation for her disappearance.
Watching the finale I was afraid that she was a time traveler and playing all along the watch tower was going to land Galactica on earth in the 1980s. I was more than relieved by what they come up with instead. Hmm... the Battlestar finale was a tour de force performance that brought together a huge cast for one last hurrah. (except Lucy Lawless maybe?) I think Ron Moore had a better understanding of what needed to be in the finale versus what fans believed to be needed in the finale. Daybreak pt. 2 was Battlestar Galactica.
Re: review
Date: 2009-03-30 07:06 pm (UTC)Maybe so, but at least up until some point during the third season, I had been convinced that Moore et al were striving — and succeeding — in creating something other than (just) "a TV show". One of the reasons I was so excited about BSG was precisely my impression that Moore was telling a story, not just writing Star Trek-like episodes where everything was set back to zero at the end of each episode.
Ron Moore asked the hard questions and left out the easy answers because he and the writing staff wanted to challenge the audience to find the answers themselves. To do the work and come up with whatever worked best for them. (I have numerous friends who have alternately taken the Cylon's position or Zarek's over the course of the show)...
Yes, very much so — and that's another reason why I was so disappointed by the finale. The level of political sophistication during the first couple of seasons, for instance, blew The West Wing out of the water, if I remember the latter program well enough to make the comparison.
The truth is that no show that puts that much effort into creating expensive little meta inside jokes should be written off as lazy or cliche.
I completely disagree. The Adam and Even (and Cylon) ending was a cliche, one (as I said) SF writers and editors have been warning tyros against literally for decades. Doesn't mean it can't be used well, but in this case, I don't think it was.
(Mind you, in retrospect, I shouldn't have been so surprised by the use of the mystical; it's not like Moore was hiding that aspect of things. I just hoped he'd surprise me.)
Re: review
Date: 2009-04-26 09:39 am (UTC)Re: review
Date: 2009-04-28 11:03 pm (UTC)Re: review
Date: 2009-04-28 11:18 pm (UTC)I often like a book (I don't do film) but don't like the ending. I guess endings must be hard to write.
Re: review
Date: 2009-04-28 11:40 pm (UTC)To reply to your suggestion, BSG was one hell of a complex piece of work. To "fix" the ending, I'd need to re-write just about the entire series — out with the mysticism, in (and much expanded) with the politics and psychology.
And more, I'd rather write my own stuff than re-write someone else's.
I often like a book (I don't do film) but don't like the ending.
That's interesting. I seldom like a book if I don't like the ending; the latter ruins the former for me.