It Turns Out I STILL Hate Battlestar Galactica
It's not because the show's bad, but because it's a fucking mess
In early 2008 (I think. It might have been late 2007) I ripped through the first 3 seasons of Battlestar Galactica on DVD, and by the time season 4 started, I’d move to and then past hate watching and progressed into resentment watching, then not watching… and finally, just getting the last 3 episodes off of iTunes so I could see how it ended.
It turns out that despite one of the show’s tag-lines about all of this happening before, and happening again, the show didn’t end how it started, full of promise, compelling hooks, ambition about what a military sci-fi series could be, and trying to navigate a few crooked prime time soap opera steps…
No, it didn’t end like that, how could it?
Endings and beginnings, no matter what poets and philosophers may say, are not the same thing. They can happen in parallel, and one can lead to the other, in fact one is dependent on the other, but structurally and mechanically they’re not the same thing. No, Battlestar couldn’t end with the same promise it began with, because promises are about the future, and endings are about the past.
But keeping in line with that same spirit of all of this happening before and happening again, the show ended by doing what it had mastered…
Shitting the fucking bed.
Battlestar’s not a bad show, and it’s not hampered by bad acting, or poor production, or feeling hollow like no one behind the show cared about it and just wanted to make a buck. No, it’s none of those things, and honestly, it’s just the opposite. Even at its lowest, the show was still made with love, and was still tenaciously trying to be something worth while.
Battlestar isn’t a failure of intent, or execution, and as I have no trouble complimenting its many strong, admirable, and enjoyable qualities, I can safely say that it frequently punched above its weigh (until it didn’t), and was responsible for some truly remarkable hours of television.
But as comics writer and editor (and creator of Wolverine, yes, that Wolverine) Len Wein was fond of saying about continuity, “It ties your best writer to your worst writer.”
In terms of Battlestar, that applies less to the writers, and more to the dramatic elements and elements of storytelling that made up the show; in other words, its own narrative continuity.
You see, the critically lauded and fundamentally overrated science fiction hit of the mid 2000s, the post 9/11 TV show that is so post 9/11 only 24 has it beat in being post 9/11, the gritty remake of the post Star Wars cash in space opera Battlestar Galactica, never had a plan.
Well, not past “make a prime time TV drama for as long as possible”, because even though it came out in a post “this is going to be five seasons and tell a story” Babylon 5 world1, the broadcast TV model was (and still is) make the show until it stops making money.
This is why why shows like Lost for example, are also going to shit the bed by default, because stories demand forward motion, while settings and premises like Grey’s Anatomy can rise and fall and endure.
Stories take characters forward, while characters pass through settings, and a lot of shows are settings and premises disguised as stories, like sit-coms, and soaps.
This lack of a plan isn’t really a problem when a show is seeded as a story with no clear or definitive ending, or when a show’s mythology and world building are an open space to explore characters, and tell an endless series of stand alone and serialized stories.
And while yes, endings seem like an inherent part of any story, not all shows (or stories) depend on an ending, or are told to get to an ending. Not building to a final and meaningful climax is fine if the point of your story is to be an exploration, but if the pint of your story, as is the case for Battlestar is to get to Earth… well, you’re narratively and structurally making a choice to have the ending matter, as it looms large over everything else.
Anyhow, you can also get away with not having a plan when the show doesn’t put itself into a position to glaringly contradict itself, or sacrifice its characters, narratives, or emotional continuity for cheap reveals and soulless moments of manufactured and tedious drama.
Plenty of great TV has been made with no end in sight, and often times great TV is imperfect because TV is an evolving, not static narrative platform. As a show goes on, some things work, and some things don’t, and this is what people mean when they talk about how shows might take a season or two to find themselves.
This has, historically speaking, been very true with sci-fi and fantasy shows2, in part because there’s so much for genre fare to wrestle with.
Honestly, not having a clearly mapped out story, or clearly defined hard and fast rules for your mythology is fine, as long as the core of your story doesn’t depends on those things…
Unfortunately, Battlestar Galactica did, and not just because they had set up getting to Earth as the whole narrative point of the story.
I know it seems presumptuous of me to assume that the show needed those things, and to assume that the show was running fast and loose all the time (all shows have show bibles, all shows have at least some boundaries), but let’s look at the textual evidence for my assumptions.
First, the hook for the central antagonists of the show is that the Cylons, killer robots built by humanity that rebelled against their creators, have in the time since the last war, created synthetic human versions of themselves. There are, famously, 12 models of Cylon, and according to the opening credits, wait for it… waaaaaaaaait for it…
They have a plan.
Of course, famously the writers did not have a plan for who the 12 were, and less famously, the title card in the credits was put there by an editor, not the show runner et al. The thing is, they left it there because they thought it was cool.
They made a choice to adopt and advertise the notion of the enemy having a plan, which is a great way to adjust. I’m serious, when something like that, when a real punchy hook like “the bad guys know what they’re doing, the humans are fucked” comes your way, you take it and run with it.
That flexibility is one of the foundational strengths of television.
But if you do, which they did because it stayed in the opening credits, then you need to actually have a plan.
By the end of the mini-series we know that, like in the original series (1978-1979, the less said about Galactica 1980, the better), the humans are trying to find Earth while escaping genocide, and we know that the Cylons want to, in the words of another TV robot3, “Kill all humans.”
But the insertion of the "Plan” card in the regular series credits indicates that there’s a larger plan than reactively hunt and kill all the humans that escaped the Cylon’s first strike.
It also isn’t helped by the Cylons who start out by destroying 12 planets worth of humanity with a well thought out and clinical series of attacks, then becoming just remarkably dumb for the sake of the show going on, so much so that by season 3 the killer robots have more in common with the South Park Underpants Gnomes (Phase 1, steal the underpants, phase 2 -mumbling-, phase 3, PROFIT!) than the killing machines of the mini-series.
Having x number of characters on your show that “could” be secret synthetic humans is a lot like prominently featuring time travel, it’s a lazy way to undo things or spice things up on a whim.
This is especially glaring when early on in the show you have characters actively solving the problem of detecting the Cylons, a problem that logically and mechanically needed to be solved for the sake of balancing dramatic tension, and being able to have any kind of interpersonal, or logistical cohesion, as well as practical narrative logic.
If they’re not actually humans, then something about them would be different, and in turn, detectable.
Additionally, if no one can trust anyone, then certain givens have to be established, such as the main characters that knew each other during the last war, or having kids, or having seen kids that grew up into being adults. These are required narrative failsafes to allow characters to safely interact with each other, and in turn not burn the audience out on apprehension, especially in a show full of other narrative stressors, while also reflecting the reality of the situation so we the audience can believe the characters, and see their choices as believable within the context of the story.
Further, for the story to advance, for the humans to have a chance, they have to have some trust, or they wouldn’t be able to “do” anything, for fear of the Cylons infiltrating the top of the chain of command etc.
All of these points create dynamic, dramatic tension, which was part of what made the show good (at the times it was good), but if anyone can be a Cylon sleeper agent or spy, then everyone is, and if everyone is, then it doesn’t matter who is and isn’t, since that can (and did) change at any time.
What I mean by that isn’t that there’s literally no difference, what I mean is that without rules and narrative constraints to focus those ideas and define them, then they lack any narrative and emotional weight past the shock of the reveal. If any character can be turned into a Cylon at any moment, just because, then nothing’s earned, because it’s not mapped out, or reflects what’s happened up to that moment.
And boy howdy did Battlestar Galactica go hard on the reveal, and even harder on the retroactive hand waving to try and make it all make sense. But it didn’t matter if it allegedly “made sense” after the fact, if what was sacrificed to have it make sense was the elements of the show that were actually earned. Character relationships were sacrificed for “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and in service of an unmoored and ever expanding mythos built on reaction, not forethought and grounding.
There are ways to elegantly retcon things, to retroactively change the continuity of a story, and one of the best things about reals is the value you get from breaking them, but since there were seemingly no rules, nothing was gained, and there was not a lot of narrative elegance left by the end of season 3 when the show was guiltiest of its worse shock and awe plot twists.
That is to say nothing, and I cannot stress this enough, nothing about whether or not Battlestar was also some kind of sloppy Biblical allegory4, and all of the religious iconography and tepid theological babble that inundated the show more and more the worse and worse it got.
The show didn’t know who its secret Cylons were, but it knew it needed a hybrid robot-human space baby Jesus whose blood could cure cancer… and people defend this shit…
Battlestar didn’t just collapse under the weight of its success, because it was successful in parts through its entire run, it collapsed under the weight of relying on the realities of mediocre TV storytelling, and that was there from the start.
There’s this phenomenon in TV storytelling, especially in sitcoms, where the entirety of the problems the characters are facing could be solved by having a conversation, and by acting the way their characters have acted in previous scenes, but since the show needs a conflict, characters stop acting in character and start doing things for the sake of the plot5.
This isn’t a question of projection on the characters, or seeing it form the point of view of the audience, this is a matter of observing narrative and emotional continuity, and the show not earning the choices it forces on the characters.
Even without hard and fast mythology a show still defines itself, builds on itself, and the same is true for characters. Eventually things that exist take and hold a shape, and even if it has weak bones or no real skeleton, it still has that shape. Art is artifact, and all artifacts have shape, because all things that exist have form.
But is something is forced to stand on its own and it has no bones, it falls apart easily, and under its own weight. Further, with Battlestar since there are no real rules for how and why the show should grow and change, no limitations to it, then not only do is collapse on itself, but it lost its shape and symmetry on its way to its collapse, the good being consumed by the bad, until its shape is barely recognizable save for hte packaging.
So in closing, Battlestar Galactica wasn’t a bad TV show because it wasn’t good, it was good enough that I got hooked on it and devoured it, even after just having to accept almost immediately that it was a soapy primetime drama6, no, it was bad becasue it was ultimately less than the sum of its parts, because there was nothing cohesive to keep its strengths together.
Battlestar Galactica is remembered in out culturally memory as daring to be a serious remake of a very silly show, and for being so serious it dared to challenge and depict a post 9/11 world, and America’s occupation of Iraq… like daring to have depth was somehow new and bold for genre storytelling, and not for what it actually was, a promising show pulled down by mediocre prime time soap opera bullshit and a lack of narrative forethought and commitment to coherent and cohesive storytelling.
I’ll end with this, despite not really nailing the ending, The Expanse is actually as good as people think Battlestar is.
Babylon 5 by writer/show runner J. Michael Straczynski was famously pitched as and planned to be five seasons, but written with back doors and outs for characters coming and going, and for spin-offs and other long tails in case it turned out to be a golden goose. Babylon 5 doesn’t have the gleam of Battlestar but is a stronger show because it actually narratively makes sense.
I personally thing seasons 1 and 5 of B5 are pretty lacking, but I’ve rewatched the seasons 2-4 run multiple times. Part of this comes with the show not being renewed for the 5th season until it transferred networks, so season 4 was also a lot of what season 5 was going to be… as I understand it.
Babylon 5, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Star Trek the Next Generation, and another person favorite of mine Highlander the Series all have famously bad to mediocre
Bender from Futurama
I’m not going to research just how much Mormonism went into the the original late 70s show, but there was at least some, and the remake has a real hackneyed mad on for theology from the jump.
I know my atheism is deeply invasive when it comes to questions of religion, specially Christianity in any form, in shows and movies, but the Cylons literally know who made them, people, people made them, and yet they reject the gods of man to espouse a monotheism that makes no sense at all… because again, they were manufactured, not “created”.
But what’s worse is that there’s so real wacky miracles and magic on the show too. It’s a mess, it’s a kitchen sink of 100 level philosophy thrown at a wall level of mess. I do not respect this show’s theological curiosity, or interrogation of man’s Promethean acts of creation, because like everything else on the show past it’s human relationships, it is not earned, and done for nothing more than cheap dramatic stunts.
One of the all time worst examples of this is Jon Snow in Game of Thrones's season 6 episode “Battle of the Bastards” when he throws the plan out the window and charges. The show tries to make us care and believe it because of Rickon Stark, but it fails because we don’t care about Rickon at that point, and neither Jon nor us the audience have been given enough for Jon to reach that breaking point.
Seasons 5-8 of Game of Thrones use the Battlestar Galactica just turn off your brain and go with it, look how cool this is playbook, and it’s bad TV, it’s bad, lazy, insultingly stupid, bad fucking TV, mainly because a various points in both shows it really wasn’t.
Which came at the end of season 1 episode 1, 33, which is just a great 45 minutes of sci-fi TV, just fucking great, and full of promise… except that when it was all over, they didn’t put Baltar against a bulkhead and shoot him because, logic be damned he needed to stay on the show.