Battlestar Galactica, Sky One

Commander-in-Chief, More 4

Trying to turn someone on to a TV show you love is like introducing your new partner to your friends: you instinctively select their best selling points and pathetically show off the funny and clever things they say. You don't mention the other stuff which doesn't immediately sound so good, but will be fine once they get to know each other.

So when I'm trying to tell people why Battlestar Galactica is currently one of the best programmes on TV - yes, even if it is a remake of some dodgy old show with Dirk off Celebrity Big Brother - I tend to talk up the serious drama, the heavyweight actors, the deeply political storylines involving torture of PoWs, abortion, and presidential election fraud.

It's about survivors of genocide, who have been desperately fleeing their enemies. They thought they'd found a sanctuary recently, only to be invaded and occupied. Eventually they escaped again, but only after a brutal struggle in which some became suicide bombers, others collaborated with the regime and many died. It was a brave take on the grey areas of resistance, accommodation, and the increasing pressures on the (deeply religious) occupiers who find their attempts at "pacification" crumbling. And it got away with making the good guys into sympathetic terrorists because it's set in outer space, not the Middle East.

On the other hand, it does have sexy killer robots. I can't deny it. The Cylons are artificial lifeforms who wiped out the humans' worlds and can download themselves into identical bodies when they die. And the Cylons now turn out to live on spaceships which look like something from a pretentious 1980s pop video, all reds and blacks and geometric shapes shot in slow-motion, with a permanent soundtrack of haunting piano music.

Well, they are robots who have modelled themselves on humans, but not quite right, so why wouldn't they design something like this, or make themselves beautiful? Still, I can see why it would put off the type of people who just refuse to watch science fiction. It's kind of, you know, embarrassing. But trying to pretend that Battlestar Galactica isn't science fiction is to miss the point; what's interesting is how it combines the strange with the familiar.

Last night's episode was a good example: half the story was about the awful human tensions between the angry survivors of the invasion and those who avoided their hard choices. The other half focused on the fascinating Gaius Baltar, a weaselly self-serving traitor and former puppet ruler, stuck with the Cylons because the humans would kill him.

Gaius, who's half genius, half idiot, spends most of his time talking to a sort of imaginary friend/sexual fantasy girl - and that sounds awful, I know, but it's actually terrific. James Callis (the height of whose career before this was being Bridget Jones's gay pal) somehow brilliantly manages to make a man who has repeatedly betrayed humanity for robot sex into a tragic, understandable figure. And the Cylons themselves are wonderfully flawed: likeable killers, devout machines, whose insistence on creating their own worlds makes them dangerous.

Sadly, in real life we can't really edit reality and force people to see things only through our eyes. Judging for ourselves makes us human.

Like BSG, Commander in Chief features a female President, but the Geena Davis show - which dragged to a halt last night after a confused and sluggish 18 episodes - didn't have half the political guts. The show had definite potential but soapy plots, her whiny children, and Davis's constant saintliness all meant it was no wonder it didn't get re-elected for a second term.

Source Link:  http://living.scotsman.com/tv.cfm?id=198662007

Submitted by Zipper

Talk about this article on our forum: http://galacticabbs.com/index.php?showtopic=1154

---

Last update : 06-02-2007

Keywords : News, Battlestar Galactica News, I swear it's great, by the Lords of Kobol

Average user rating

No rating

Display 1 of 1 comments