Galactica.com - The final frontier, Battlestar Galactica is the only award-winning drama that dares tackle

By guardian.co.uk, on 13-01-2007

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Battlestar Galactica is the only award-winning drama that dares tackle the war on terror, says Dan Martin

There's a little 10-part series you can watch on YouTube at the moment that tells the story of an ordinary guy who we'll name "Duck". He's part of a guerilla resistance to the military occupation he lives under, his wife is killed at a massacre after the rulers find a weapons cache in what was supposed to be a place of worship, and to cut a long story short, he ends up becoming a suicide bomber. The whole of this graphic saga is currently being shown on Sky One.

Before you contact the relevant body to complain, we should point out that the series is called Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance, and it's a 10-part series of mini "Webisodes" telling the entirely fictional story of the events between the end of Battlestar Galactica's second series, and the start of the third, which you can see in the UK this week.
Before the sci-fi Channel's re-imagining of the series formerly known as "The Shite Star Wars", the genre was hardly on fighting form. As the Star Trek franchise declined exponentially with every splinter series, a spawn of even drearier efforts like Farscape and Babylon 5 sprung up in its wake. The only glimmer of quality, Joss Whedon's Firefly, was hauled off air after just half a season.

"I always found them very difficult to get involved in and a little bit sterile and too tonally safe and straightforward," says David Eick, the man behind the bold new BSG. "The good guys always acted like good guys, the bad guys always acted like bad guys."

It's hardly fortunate that producers David Eick and Ron Moore found themselves developing the remake in the wake of September 11, but the story's broad premise - the human (read: American) military's struggles in the wake of a massive terrorist attack - suddenly gained resonance. In making the humans look, talk, shag, smoke and govern themselves so closely to how we do ourselves the show went way beyond sci-fi. Placing the action in space removed it sufficiently enough to hold a mirror to the one part of society that's normally off-limits: the way we fight right now.

Giving the murderous Cylons human form - anybody could be one and probably is - meant the show could plough a chilling allegory on civil liberties crackdowns and western paranoia about sleeper cells. Painting them as religious fundamentalists who justified the genocide as a means of carrying out God's will in the face of human corruption forged a fierce parable on the war on terror that good taste would never allow so called "proper" drama to go near. "Our antagonists are not villainous necessarily," says Eick. "Yes they're out to kill us, but they've got an awfully sympathetic point of view in many respects. They're much more like the audience in terms of their being monotheistic. They're not moustache-twiddling villains and that's a strength of the show."

Critically at least, the show has become as adored and influential in the US as Russell T Davies' Doctor Who has over here. The prestigious Peabody Awards, which normally honours high-minded things like State Of Play and Deadwood, even gave it a gong. Naming Season 2 the Best Thing On Television, Time magazine boomed: "most of you think this entry has got to be a joke. The rest of you have actually watched the show."

Still, the creators insist they're not (just) tubthumping liberals. Reckons Eick: "We don't need to say 'OK, let's do the episode where we're gonna do the Abu Ghraib scandal'. We don't think in terms of adapting headlines like they do on the big law shows. They literally will sit with the New York Times and talk about what to do and suddenly (as happened on Law & Order last year), you've got Chevy Chase playing Mel Gibson making anti-semitic remarks and everyone goes 'oh look, they're doing the Mel Gibson one', and that works for them. But we do gravitate in those directions when it comes to the storytelling. And I think that's what does set us apart from what 'old science fiction' used to do, which is to reflect the culture."

Which has stopped precisely nobody from looking at this week's opening episodes of series three from saying "Oh look, they're doing the 'Iraq's a big sodding mess' one." At the end of last year, the Cylon threat was presumed to be over and the survivors had settled on a habitable planet christened New Caprica, until the robot raiders arrived and Centurion guards took the streets. We rejoin the survivors a year into a fragile peace under a Cylon occupation, our tormentors having seized control and enacting an experiment to see if we can live alongside each other comfortably - under their rules.

With conditions unbearable on the ground and the Galactica ship way out of contact, the opening episodes dare the viewer to think so far outside the comfort zone it could cause your brain to crack. The humans' puppet government is controlled by the Cylon military agenda, a secret police force "disappears" suspected insurgents, and the resistance is getting desperate. Desperate enough, in the case of our friend Duck, to do the unthinkable. His suicide bombing and the sectarian chaos it unleashes dominate the opening episodes, sending an always morally ambiguous series down a further stultifying twist, to justify that behaviour. This time round, the Cylons represent the Allied forces and the characters Tyrol and Tigh - who lead the human resistance - are the Iraqi insurgents. Kind of.

"The opening episodes to this season are as much a story rooted in political tales like the Vichy France or Vietnam," says Eick. "There are a lot of different sort of reference points for us that aren't necessarily current that inform our culture in profound ways. Battles from the second world war have been used for several of our more actiony episodes. I've always said from the beginning, it's a war show - that was always our initial touchstone. We watched the movie Black Hawk Down as a reference more than any science fiction film. Though I have to say between Black Hawk Down, Alien and Blade Runner, we should probably be cutting Ridley Scott a cheque after every episode."

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