During the first 2 seasons, the series was showing how humans are flawed. Drawing a symbolic parallel with the “War on Terror,” the program suggests that America isn’t a shining example of Goodness for the world as the right-wing rhetoric would lead us to believe; things like Abu Ghraib and Hadifa happened, and during times of war we often fell into McCarthyism. The Cylons attacked the humans because they thought they were evil and a flawed creation and characters openly questioned whether humans really deserved to survive. However, the third season is turning this entire paradigm on its head.

While the humans are still depicted with shades of gray, this season, the Cylons are revealed as far from perfect. Some of them are at best naïve, and others have turned into hypocritical torturers. Thus, while in the first 2 seasons the Cylons could be seen as an allegory for Al Qaeda relentlessly pursuing the humans through space, now the Cylons are the occupying power fighting human terrorists, and (surprise, surprise) the Cylons can now portrayed as the allegory of America. The human government officials have been reduced to a puppet regime under the Cylons, and they’re even training local humans into a collaborationist police force, in a sort of “pro-Cylon humans step up, we step down” plan (sounds awfully familiar…).

There’s a human resistance (which they actually call an “insurgency,” not “our rebel heroes”) who are attacking Cylon soft targets with IEDs, but soon graduate to suicide bombers. In a scene that simply could not happen on any other TV show, a resistance member straps himself with explosives, infiltrates the graduation ceremony for the new human-collaborator police force organized by the Cylons, and detonates himself in a crowded hall filled with 200 people, killing dozens.

Nonetheless, the show actually plays all of this ambiguously; it could be an allegory for Vietnam, or Israeli-Palestinian conflicts, or Vichy France. It would have been heavy handed if it was a direct allegory of the Iraq occupation, but thankfully the lines are blurred enough that it stays fresh. Some would throw up their hands and decry the show for having the “Good guys” using suicide bombing as a tactic for “supporting jihad” or something, but this show is asking the tough questions about our moral situation today that literally no other show on TV would even contemplate doing.

The Cylons, in an “America is great and spreading democracy” analog, are really naïve and actually think they’re the “good guys” (sort of a “White Man’s burden” vibe) in helping out the humans by trying to “coexist” with them by occupation. Even dissenting Cylons have noticed the anachronism; these other Cylons are capable of realpolitik, don’t share the naiveté of the others and are advocating large scale executions of suspected resistance members. Granted, it’s meant to not be a blow-by-blow parallel to the occupation of Iraq, but parallels are there and I applaud the show for doing it. The Cylons even have their own Abu Ghraib of sorts; trying to “win the hearts and minds,” but torturing and detaining people without trail with the other.

In a scene obviously paralleling green-tinted night vision camera videos we see on CNN of American soldiers rounding up “insurgents,” we see the human collaborator police through a night vision camera “apprehending” the wife of one of the insurgency leaders and tearing her away from her baby in the middle of the night. Of course, this doesn’t “win the hearts and minds” either. Eventually the Cylons settle for just rounding up detainees in mass sweeps, driving them out to the countryside and machine gunning them down en masse in retaliation for another round of suicide bombings. The line between “good guys” and “bad guys” has been shattered, with the human insurgency leader even bluntly stating “we’re on the side of the demons, we bring destruction wherever we go; I’m surprised you didn’t know that already.”

They’re also not scared to change the show with long-running storylines on the series. Star Trek kind of went down the tubes when they started employing the “Reset Button”; at the end of any cliffhanger, every character was reset to the position they were in when the episode began, essentially making every episode interchangeable. “One Year Later” was the ultimate anti–Reset Button, and now it’s been revealed that during the past year half of the cast has been married. However, these changes weren’t out of the bluer “shocker” marriages, but long running romantic relationships are finally getting the payoff of pairing the characters up by tying the knot, instead of a constant “will they, won’t they” cycle (one couple even had a baby in the year that got skipped).

One of the series’ greatest strengths has always been the character interactions. There are over twenty-five recurring characters on the series to date, all of which appeared in the season premiere, and they just keep adding more. Oftentimes what happens is that the writers take popular minor guest characters that originally were only going to be in one episode, and then just round them out into full recurring characters. At the same time, there’s actual drama on the show because extras don’t die, recurring characters do: the suicide bomber wasn’t a random extra, he was a pilot on Galactica appearing throughout the second season, with his own personality and backstory. The series is unafraid to kill off popular recurring characters, and the writers have all but promised a meatgrinder of a season in which half of the cast will be wiped out, i.e. “no one is safe!” And this, fellow viewers, is what makes for edge of your seat action and compelling drama.

The season 2 finale wasn’t just “a good episode”; they were hands down the best episodes the series has ever produced. Every single scene, one after another, was quotable and dramatically compelling; not once did it lose momentum over the course of 2 hours. Every line of dialogue was crisp and punchy. Some lines of dialogue were obvious shout outs to the fans that were itching for confrontations between several key characters (such as Cally and Boomer), and a bit self-referential for those in the know. If you haven’t started watching this series yet….welcome back from your desert island. This isn’t just a “must see television” kind of good, this is “drop what you’re doing and break into someone’s home to watch this show on their TV instead of missing a single episode” good. So please, catch up on the DVDs (it’s impossible to watch the series out of order, sort of like Lost) or buy them on iTunes, and enjoy the best TV series of the past decade.

Source Link: http://www.tuftsobserver.org/arts/20061020/space_out_on_battlestar_g.html

Submitted by Zipper

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Last update : 21-10-2006

Keywords : News, Battlestar Galactica News, Space Out on... Battlestar Galactica

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