For the very few left who seem to care, we are drawing ever closer to the April air dates for the fourth and final season of the new Battlestar Galactica. The production company's hype machine is in full swing, touting the series as the "best show on television" (though, funnily enough, no one has referred to it as that since the first season . . .) and promising the few viewers still clinging to it a "rocket-ride to the end, with plenty of real punches to the gut." Now, I really wish they had stayed away from that kind of hyperbole; after all, series creator Ronald Moore said the same thing for the second half of season three, and the only "rocket-ride" we witnessed was a kamikaze-like plunge in the ratings from 2.0 to 1.0. On the bright side, however, we were served plenty of punches to the gut . . . mostly in the form of disjointed and contradictory stories which threw out logical progression and development in favour of a kind of stream-of-consciousness "character development" that perversely served not to progress either the story or the characters.
Hmm. Perhaps we should just rename the show Bafflestar Galactica.
The sad thing is, the show really could have been the "best show on television," not just for its first season, but throughout its run . . . if Ron Moore and his partner in crime, David Eick, had remained true to their own vision of the series. But they didn't, beginning in the second season and culminating in the complete hash that was the third season. Whether they were seduced by the critical acclaim earned by the first season and began to believe their own press, whether they became distracted by other projects they had in mind, or a combination of both, they allowed the series to come off the tracks. Not only did they allow that, it was the inevitable result of a single, critical creative decision they made sometime between wrapping the first season and beginning work on the second.
Put simply, the critical error they made was to change the fundamental nature and portrayal of the tale's villians, the Cylons. For anyone who has never seen the show, the Cylons are a race of sentient machines who were putatively created by the Colonials, the human protagonists (and I phrase it this way because, though the opening credits of the show through the first two and a half seasons reiterated this, events revealed in the second half of the third season directly contradict what Moore and Eick had previously established). After fighting one war with the Colonials, the Cylons suddenly withdrew for forty years and disappeared to places unknown. In that time, they developed the ability to produce models that could pass for human and, at the end of their forty years of self-imposed exile, returned and attempted the complete genocide of the human race.
Within the context of the show, the Cylons as villians functioned best the less we, as the audience, knew about them and their motivations. After all, there is something primevally frightening about a mysterious force you know little about, bent on your destruction and hunting you down. That's why a good ghost story, for example, is so effective at scaring you. As long as the Cylons remained an inscrutable, malevolent force looming over the Colonials, hounding them implacably, it lent an air of true desperation to the struggles of the Colonials to survive, allowing the story to play out on a larger stage. Remember, these are flawed human beings who aren't always doing the right thing; they're trying not only to survive the genocide of their race, but also trying to survive each other. The Cylons were the perfect villians against which to play that out, pushing the Colonials, striking when necessary, waiting to exploit any mistake and any weakness displayed by the humans.
The problem is that Moore and Eick, at some point, decided to humanize the inhuman. They decided to show us that the Cylons are, really, just people, too, complete with the same virtues and vices that afflict the human Colonials. But that completely destroyed the effectiveness of the Cylons as the villians. It removed them from the realm of the sublime, and reduced them to the profane. By making the Cylons just like the humans - right down to the ultimate goal of finding Earth and making it their new "home" - it became not an epic tale, but more like a bad Thanksgiving family dinner where someone gets stabbed in an argument over the last drumstick.
Think about this for a moment. What is it that made Frankenstein's monster so compelling in that piece? Was it because the monster was just as neurotic as the doctor, because he shared the same hopes, dreams, fears, desires and goals as the man who created him? Well, no. Or was it because the monster represented something primeval that resides in all of us?
Ah-ha. What made the monster so compelling was his single-minded pursuit of Doctor Frankenstein, his need for acceptance, his all-consuming pain and rage at being rejected by his creator. We, the readers, knew in broad strokes what drove the monster, the urge to hold the creator accountable for the act of creation, howling in pain and frustration at a world he did not ask to be "born" into, at a "father" who ultimately wanted nothing more than to forget what he had done. The monster worked so well as the villian of the piece precisely because we knew so little about him.
The Cylons functioned best when they were at the same remove from us, the audience. The moment they became nothing more than Moore's and Eick's television version of that relative none of us like to talk about, they lost their effectiveness. And when that happened, the show itself lost its driving force.
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