A slightly disgruntled BSG followup

[chipotle]

I’ve gotten a few comments, on the journal and off, that are along the lines of, “Oh, that sucky ending for ‘Battlestar Galactica’ makes me feel glad I never watched it. It must have really sucked. The Sci-Fi Channel sucks. Suck suck suckity suck.” You know, in direct response to me writing that despite its problems I think it was the best science fiction show that’s been on television.

Setting aside the question of what problems the show had in its second half and to what PSI the finale did or did not blow, to me this is kind of like saying that because so many people threw tomatoes at the series finale of “The Sopranos” it must not be worth watching, or that “M∗A∗S∗H” devolving into self-indulgent moralistic drek for its last few seasons negates the mostly brilliant writing of its first few seasons.

Anyone who actually cares about science fiction on television should watch at least the first season of “Battlestar,” because not having done so is like claiming you care about science fiction in the cinema but having no interest in seeing Blade Runner and Alien. You might see them and think they’re overrated and flawed, but just not bothering to see them is, for that field, like being a literature student who’s never read Hemingway and Faulkner. Sure, you can hate Ernie and Bill after you’ve read them—but you’d better damn well read them.

Did I just compare the first season of BSG to Blade Runner? Yes. And I’d do it again. Bite me. Maybe you’ll think the show lost its way (a very defensible position), and maybe you really won’t like it much from the start. (Although if you really come away thinking that none of the writing and none of the acting and none of the story was worth engaging with, you’ll probably have to remind me just what it is we have in common.)

If you haven’t watched it, though, don’t tell me that the presence of religion or providence or Bob Dylan demonstrates that you don’t really “need” to see it in order to know how terrible it was. Because you know what? If I ever got a TV show on the air and it only “failed” as badly BSG did, I would be unimaginably ecstatic.

Now back to your regular programming, whatever the hell it is you kids are watching these days.

Comments

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

I wasn't really singling out your grousing for my return grouse; there were a few people who made objectively uninformed comments to me, as in, "I didn't watch because of X" when X never happened. If somebody forms an opinion based on incorrect facts, they might get called out on it. I apologize if I came across as "anyone intelligent must like this show," but frankly, I was getting a little tired of comments that were to me coming across as the exact opposite. If I had a quibble with yours, it's because it essentially came across to me as, "Oh, there was apparently religious revelation in the end, that confirms it was as bad as I thought."

There are perfectly reasonable reasons not to be interested in the show; if you have an active dislike of military science fiction, it's probably not going to be your cup of tea. I don't think the show was "about" the military, per se, but it was very often about the way military and civilian power interacted. The questions of how intelligent, well-meaning people could make horrific decisions were where a lot of its strongest--and most controversial--plot lines came from, but not everyone likes dark brooding on the morality of power to be the subject of episode after episode. Personally, I appreciated that it seemed to be about the only show deeply grappling with these issues as they were actually coming up in real life, rather than giving them superficial gloss like "24." It's possible in time that will date the show too much, though--it's very much a post-9/11 drama.

And, yes, on the average I would call "Battlestar" the best science fiction show that's been on television. "The better episodes" of "The Twilight Zone" and "ST:TNG" may be better than the median episode of "BSG," but the median episodes were not. And unlike either of those shows, "BSG" was arc-driven, not episodic. It's a lot easier to have a "classic episode" in a show where episodes are self-contained stories, but being able to point to individual episodes of "Law & Order" that blew you away doesn't necessarily make it a better drama than "The Wire." We haven't really seen any other American sci-fi TV show try to tell this kind of arc story, other than "Babylon 5." (And I suppose it's worth noting that while "B5" was a more conventional and less challenging show overall, strictly in terms of pulling off one big-ass multi-season story, it did it better than anything before or since.)