Battlestar Galactica - "Faith"

(I use vivid about a billion times in the following. I'm sick today.)

Am I the only one who thinks that "Caprica" is a bad, bad idea? Science-fiction epic prequels have a bad track record - see "Star Wars," yes, but also "Star Trek: Enterprise," the last misbegotten iteration of a bloatedly overwrought mythos before the emergency Abramization; "The Magician's Nephew," the Narnia book that nobody ever remembers; "The Silmarillion" and the great bulging heap of posthumous work by Tolkien which forms the history of untold millenia of Middle-Earth and proves that nothing else ever happened there that was nearly as interesting, or as dramatic, as what happened in the year-plus-change that forms "The Lord of the Rings"; "Prelude to Foundation" and "Forward the Foundation," sequels written forty years after the original that follow the classic bad sequel rule of featuring the name of the original book, a conjunction, and a bland noun or verb; the dueling prequel versions of "The Exorcist," which proved that no matter what kind of filmmaker you hired (what two directors have less in common than Paul Schrader and Renny Harlin?) a prequel was bound to suck; and "Young Hercules," a fascinating curio spin-off that replaced Kevin Sorbo with, of all people, Ryan Gosling.

The problem is that prequels always seem like such brilliant ideas when you're talking about science fiction or fantasy. "The Silmarillion" is a good example. "The Lord of the Rings" is full of throwaway lines about old epic battles - who wouldn't want to see them? And there are so many wonderfully fascinating cities (Cities on mountains, cities in mountains, cities by the sea, cities on the sea) - who wouldn't want to see how they were built?

The thing is that cities get built by being built - slowly and surely, without much in the way of fascinating drama. Maybe that's unfair - certainly, there must have been a splendid amount of bureaucracy involved in the building of Moria, with building inspectors accepting graft from certain large mining cooperatives to ensure they got the deepest mineshafts, and artsy dwarves petitioning Durin to spend more money on public schools and less money on gigantic rows of columns, and all the money flowing in from levies at Khazad-Dum.

But this is storytelling on the David Simon level, requiring a storyteller who can make vivid drama out of abstract concerns and bureaucracy, and Tolkien, whose leaden prose depended on epic action and fanciful visuals, was just kind of boring writing from the remove of the mass-historical tone. I have friends who enjoy "The Silmarillion," but I could never get through it - just skipped ahead toward near the very end, when, in a few little pages, Tolkien describes the action of "Lord of the Rings" as if it were just a tiny skirmish between longtime adversaries the Elves, the Wizards, and the Dark Lord, when even a preschooler could tell you that the most important people were the Hobbits.

True, "Battlestar Galactica" itself was an out-there idea (remake of a crappy 70s tv show, financed by the crappiest channel ever? SIGN ME UP!) But part of the reason why BSG has been so much more narratively successful than any other work of science-fiction - and the main reason why it has been so embraced outside of science-fiction circles - is the very vivid sense in every episode that this story is the most important story in the universe. The show has been very good about portraying the different aspects of life on the fleet, but it always enters those different arenas at a point of pulpy drama - we learn about organized crime only after the Commander of the Pegasus gets strangled to death; we get a Saggitaron sociology lesson, but only because they're being mysteriously murdered in sick bay; we saw two Cylons, Caprica Six and Boomer, decide to take their race in a new course, but that was while they were standing in the wreckage of a resistance bomb, after shooting one of their own people.

That last one is a good example of just how well served the show has been by television's need to compartmentalize, to mark decisive turns in the show's overall mythology with vivid details of plot. Compare that decision to the morbidly slow politicking of the "Star Wars" prequels. There is a dynamic feel to politics in "BSG," like nothing else on TV except "The Wire" (which was far more realistic) and "The West Wing" (far less so.) Other shows have had some say in the abortion debate, but BSG is the one platform where abortion can genuinely be described as a danger to the future of humanity. Such dilemmas are explicitly moral, but more importantly, they are explicitly dilemmas - when there's only a few thousand humans left in the universe, they better start fucking, fast.

I'm not counting out "Caprica," but so much of what's great about BSG is that sense of desperation. It's there in the style of the show - the shaky cameras, the bleak shadows of spaceship back corridors, an alcoholic rationing what's left of his space booze into a measuring cup (and then selfishly drinking the whole thing.) The miniseries provided little more than a sketch of Colonial culture - flying cars here, Tokyo-esque buildings there - but nothing particularly stuck before the nukes went off. Perhaps because I came to it only after watching the first season, I've never been a huge fan of the miniseries - "33" is much more vivid starting point for the series. The destruction of colonial civilization is such a breath of fresh air precisely because it promises to cut through the all encyclopedic arcana of "expanded universes" that had become a sci-fi hallmark. In those mushroom clouds, you can see practically see a decade of Star Wars spin-off books and Star Trek comics and everything Stargate go "boom!"

The great thing about BSG is that, for the most part, it still feels as vivid as ever - now more than ever, perhaps, because it's so close to the endgame. I think it's because Ronald D. Moore and his genius brigade have so closely adhered to the "Lord of the Flies" meets John Rawls promise inherent in the original concept - the notion of building an entire civilization out of the bare ruins of a previous one. Rather than adding in dramatic new elements, they continually re-examine what they've already established in order to develop the essential dramas of the show even further.

As an example, take a plot point from last night which started out horrifically obvious. Starbuck is leading a tiny mission. With her are Boomer, Anders, Leoben, and some random. That's four characters with magnificent importance to the overarching mythology of the show - two sleeper agent Cylons, one original Cylon, and whatever Starbuck is/has been/will be - and, well, someone expressly introduced for this dangerous mission. Wonder what's going to happen to her? (Aside - I'm holding back the urge to check the episode's IMDB page, but knowing how good the writers usually are about this sort of things, I wouldn't put it past them to have taken a character who has appeared briefly in the past for this role, but even if that's true, then I think my argument still stands, because she wasn't even a random character we kind of care about, like Selix or Hot Dog.)

In bare outline, what happened next is basically the same thing that always happened to red shirted security people on Star Trek - the away team runs afoul of the hostiles, and the guy that's not Kirk, Spock or McCoy gets shot. But what actually happened was mesmerizing, because, even though neither character had a past on the show, the specific reason why they came into conflict had tremendous roots in the show's recent, and distant, history.

The Six - a softspoken, physically timid iteration of a model that once seemed to represent little more than seductive evil and evil seduction - approached the Random Woman almost nervously, but what she said carried force - "You killed me back on New Caprica." The Random Woman was merciless - "Yeah, and I'd do it again." And then the Six hit her - just a few times was all that was necessary, when it's a human head between a superstrong android fist and spaceship metal. In what was a death worthy of "Full Metal Jacket" (or at least "Apocalypse Now"), Barolay (that was the Random Woman's name - I broke down and checked wikipedia, and yes, she's been around since season 2) stumbled, stood up, mumbled "All right," as if preparing to counterattack or to break up a schoolroom scuffle, then fell down, dead.

What ensued was a standoff that seemed just suspenseful - IS ANDERS GONNA SHOOT HER ROH MY GOD! But then, something incredible happened. The Six described how Barolay had killed her - not professionally, not honorably, but mercilessly, watching her drown, maybe even laughing at her. I think this is the first time that the false death of Cylons - the one with rebirth on the other end - has been presented as a genuine trauma, as opposed to a minor inconvenience. Maybe Cylons don't dream of electric sheep, but they clearly do PTSD as well as any human soldier.

(Then something deeply weird happened - Tricia Helfer kissed herself - proving that BSG, not Lost, is the real inheritor of the Twin Peaks mantle of "strangest show on TV.")

As random as she was as a character (although all props to this show for keeping their third-stringers around - it makes pointless deaths all the more meaningful, in a meaningfully pointless way), I like Barolay, because I think her whole attitude speaks volumes about just how precisely this show has changed in three and a quarter seasons. At least in its presentation of Cylons, the show has morphed delicately, but purposefully, from a right-wing nightmare dream to a left-wing dream nightmare. Let me explain. When the show first started, the Cylons were shadowy yet infinite creatures, able to pop up in massive numbers at any time, launch nuclear missiles by the hundred, who literally destroyed all civilization. The fact that they were so shadowy made it even more frightening when one of them would show up - with dynamite wrapped around their chest, or worse, when they turned out to be the people closest to us.

Back then, the jocky cameraderie of the pilots was enjoyable - as were their slang terms, like "toaster." Something changed, though, and it's hard to tell when - maybe it was when Boomer, the central tragic tortured character of Season 1, got shot by Cally (and the killer's face showed nothing but abject hatred and mindless betrayal, while the killee's face was all sadness, and confusion, and resignation); maybe it was when we saw Gina, the much abused, probably oft-gang-raped Six on Pegasus (that was the first real sign that Tricia Helfer could create so many radically different characters, often onscreen at the same time); certainly our minds were changed a little in "Downloaded," when we realized that the Cylons were just as confused as the humans.

Its not just that we gained a deeper understanding of the Cylons - although that has always been the main genius of the latter years of BSG (its upperclassmen years, if you will), that it's somewhat fearlessly plunged us into Cylon culture. It's that we gained an understanding that the Cylons were, above all, a curious people - and moreover, that they were capable of regret, and of recrimination (they decided, after all, that destroying humanity was not a good decision.) Yet the humans maintained their antipathy to the Cylon race - even coming up with new epithets, like "Skin Jobs," which sounds like a nasty sex act, and which I hope to use someday to describe people I know and hate who got plastic surgery. There was something so tiny about the pilots, who were still known to mutter "Frakkin' Toasters" under their breath - while meanwhile, over in the Base Star, those Frakkin' Toasters were trying to find God.

That's why, in its own small way, the short unhappy tale of Barolay the Red Shirt may just be the turning point in the show - because, after the Six described her first inconceivable death, then welcomed her second one, I couldn't help but feel as if I was more on her side than on Barolay's.

In a nutshell: when BSG began, it was post-9/11, when everyone was united against a common enemy that was everywhere. It's a nightmare scenario, yet some kind of a dream for those people who dream of a simple, uncomplicated world where all you have to do is kill the bad guy. I called them "right wing" earlier, but that's not really fair - it wasn't just right wing people who gave Bush a huge support percentage after 9/11, it was practically everyone. Yet by now, when we're post-post-9/11 in the show, we have seen the enemy tortured behind any shred of dignity (and thus, have seen "our people" lose their own), and we have also come to understand their culture. We have come to hate our own people, and come to love and cherish the enemy. This is an absolute dream for liberals everywhere - that we can understand the enemy, and love them, even - yet it is, in its own way, almost suicidally sincere, overly diplomatic, the sort of thing that can only emerge from a world of complete chaos.