Battlestar Galactica - "He That Believeth In Me"

There are several reasons to not be excited about "The X-Files" movie coming out this summer. The main reason is its writer-director, Chris Carter, who created the original series, but whose follow-up shows were so much weekend afternoon Sci-Fi channel flotsam, trying and failing tried to bite off some of the "X-Files" magic. "Millenium" got the dark visual tone, "Harsh Realm" the endless paranoia, "The Lone Gunmen" the mordant humor, but they all ended up as tiny, mostly tasteless morsels. ("Millenium" - like Clear Pepsi and Clarence Thomas's political ideology - has a few rare, sad fans.)

You could watch one episode of each of those later series and pretty much get the whole idea - whereas "The X-Files" was endlessly changing smorgasboard television. People always point to shows with lavish sci-fi mythology like "Lost" to illustrate the influence of "The X-Files," but really, a decade later, who wants to watch a random "mythology" episode? Sure, the alien plot led to some great bizarro bits - the fetus, the black oil, the faceless aliens - but the whole thing was an aimless tease. More and more, it seems obvious that the real legacy of "The X-Files" was its ability to basically become a different show each week.

It's all the one-offs – the black-and-white "Post-Modern Prometheus," the all-in-long-shots "Triangle," the banned-from-broadcast incest fun-fest "Home," and seven years of weird creatures – that remain inspired. That's why "Sopranos" is the real inheritor of Chris Carter's mojo - "The Test Dream," with Tony lost in a vivid Felliniesque dream (complete with Annette Bening!), is right on the same wavelength as "Jose Chung's From Outer Space," a vivid gonzo panorama (complete with Alex Trebek!)

Other cop shows like CSI feature a crime-of-the-week plot type; with "The X-Files," it was more like genre-of-the-week; now horror, now black comedy, now relationship drama, now eye-popping visual treat. (That kaleidiscope style was what made the series so enjoyable. How can a movie ever capture that?)

So Chris Carter is a genius for creating the show, but he's that peculiar style of genius invented and epitomized by George Lucas - the one-hit wonder in the multimedia age, dry-humping his lone great creation across decades of television, movies, video games, tie-in paperbacks, annual coffee table books, shitty comic books licensed by Dark Horse Comics, and the occasional reunion special, except that nowadays franchises are so important that "reunion specials" get called "prequels" or "sequels" and get big screen deals. And don't forget, the last two seasons of "The X-Files" make Lucas's prequel trilogy look good, or at least not bad.

There's more reasons why "The X-Files" movie might suck. Neither David Duchovny nor Gillian Anderson have done much with their post-show career. Anderson may just be choosy (her roles in "The Last King of Scotland" and "A Cock and Bull Story" are memorable, if tiny), but Duchovny has appeared solely in much-despised indie films (messy auteuristerbation from directors who should know better, like Soderbergh's "Full Frontal" or Freundlich's "Trust the Man") and a vaguely-enjoyed Showtime TV show that's getting sued by the Red Hot Chili Peppers. The original series ended with Mulder and Scully on the run from the law, but the whole appeal of "The X-Files" was their FBI partnership, so either the movie is a supernatural version of Bonnie and Clyde or we just agree, Hulk-style, to a healthy dose of continuity amnesia.

That being said, there is one lone reason why "The X-Files" sequel could be the movie of the summer: the show's central concern, the eternal maddening quest for "truth," has never been more timely. In the 1990s, the days of Clinton I and the End of History, "The X-Files" was pretty much the only popular narrative built on skepticism, a lonely gunman sniping at the government in a time when the worst it seemed the government could come up with was furtive office blowjobs and the occasional vague bombing of vaguely-defined nations. In the span of one year, "Independence Day" showed the American President getting in a fighter plane on the fourth of July to shoot down aliens, and "Air Force One" showed us the American President, played by Indiana Jones, wrestling evil Russians. At the time, this played like escapism; post-Iraq II and "Mission Accomplished," it plays like ingenius spoof, if not chic Stalinist jingo.

Now might be the perfect time for the return of "The X-Files," because we've finally caught up with its conspiracy-flavored, "trust-no-one" theme. The Atlantic monthly has a great article about the return of the 70's style of paranoid cinema; "The Wire" just rounded out five glorious years of exposing the miserable machinations of the upper levels of every political, economic, and heroin-dealing organization in the modern American city; and now comes the final season "Battlestar Galactica," the most consistently suspicious television show in history. It's a mesmerizing hallmark of post-"Sopranos" television that you can never be quite sure about who is good or evil, but "Battlestar Galactica" is the first show to actually ponder whether humanity is worth saving.

The show has never been popular --- (Although really, do we even really know what's popular anymore? If the top-rated show on television gets 30 million out of a possible 300 million documented citizens to watch, does that still count as popular? Some of the best and least-watched shows on television are also probably the most illegally-downloaded – I knew several people in college who would always download a high-quality foreign rip of "Lost," because the ones they were putting up on iTunes were full-screen and iPod quality – so is it even possible to remotely guess how many people actually watch what they watch? One of the biggest subtle jokes on Stuff White People Like is that just about every pop culture item it mentions – Wes Anderson films, "Arrested Development," "The Daily Show," Michel Gondry, indie music – is actually incredibly overexposed in the media, and only really popular among people who used to be tastemakers, and in an era when a movie critic loses his job ever two seconds, who's even trying to make taste anymore? What is popularity?)

Anyway, "Battlestar Galactica" has never had very many viewers - a function of its crappy channel, its shitty time slot, its off-putting-yet-secretly-kickass title. The show is expensive to make, and even with two channels co-producing it, you can feel the producers constantly stretching the cash as far as it can go (and you can hear them talk about it on the endlessly illuminating podcasts.) Unlike its compatriots in the new mytho-pop fantasy TV canon, "Heroes" and "Lost," "BSG" has never had a brush with success, and films out of Vancouver, a town synonymous with "cut-rate production" (though also, tellingly, the same place they shot the first four seasons of "The X-Files," and the new movie.)

That lack of excess cash forces the show cut the fat out of its own genre. Shaky close-ups hide tiny sets; long dialogue scenes replace zap-zap space battles; the original series' robots, here computer-animated and never quite convincing, steadily fade into the background to make way for the fascinating human-ish android overseers.

That central conceit of making big somethings out of just a little bit more than nothing, also applies to its central storytelling style: the endless layering of mystery on mystery. In a typical "Battlestar Galactica" scene, three people will be talking about the Cylons. One person, an authority figure (Admiral Adama, President Roslin), will be discussing the need to figure out who is and isn't a Cylon. One of the people they are speaking to will actually be a Cylon, although that person may or may not know this. The other person will not be a Cylon, but will be talking to the invisible Cylon in his head that may be a computer implant, an angel, or a figment of his imagination. The show lost the whole "Who is a Cylon?" thread in season 3, which may, I think, explain the general viewer ennui - now, with the revelation that four of the main cast is Cylons, it's been brought back and supercharged, one last surge towards the series finale.

"Battlestar" never lets us quite believe anyone. The military authorities once declared martial law; the president is a fundamentalist who lets scripture dictate the course of all humanity; and even scrappy underdog characters might turn into sleeper-cell robots, or may be driven mad with homicidal rage, or both. Most post-9/11 narratives address the new fundamental fear that attacks can come from anywhere at anytime - that there are villains everywhere. "Battlestar" pushes this one step further into near-madness, pondering a fear that You are the villain, that You could attack at any time, that a time bomb is waiting to go off in Your mind which could destroy Yourself and everyone around You. Call it Pre-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

And the show never lets us believe in anything, by specifically making the very act of believing one of its ongoing plot points. The two factions on the show - the humans and the Cylons - have very different religions. The humans, our protagonists and the people who are most like us (wearing ties, watching tabloid television, mostly ugly and swearing all the time), are loony polytheists (you will never get tired of hearing old badasses like Edward James Olmos cutely throw in that extra "s," as in "oh my gods" or "Gods damn it") who happen to believe in the Greek pantheon.

The Cylons, the antagonists and the people who are least like us (wearing designer clothes, hanging out with duplicates of themselves, all model-perfect and monotone-speaking), believe in one God and do their best to spread His word everywhere they go. The central genius of the show is that both religions pay off in big dividends - the fleet follows a track mapped out in their bible to earth, and the Cylon God keeps sending people crazy dreams - but you never really trust either one.

The show has the same narrative directness as "Lost" - a cast of ethno-diverse castaways in close quarters on a series-length search, replace "island" with "spaceship" and "getting home" with "finding earth" - but is at once more straightforward and more grandly conceived. "Lost" is littered with references and easter eggs; a single episode will reference a whole host of movies, books, theoretical physicists, and philosophers. "Battlestar" has teasing links with its crap-tastic progenitor and ended season 3 with a version of "All Along the Watchtower," but besides that it's in a pop culture vacuum. Yet it also directly tackles plenty of modern topics - abortion, suicide bombs, political dynasties - with a mixture of the purposefully shrill allegory of "South Park" and the pinpoint dramatization of "The Wire."