Citizen Power

Tonight is the season and show finale of Battlestar Galactica,  in my opinion the best sci-fi show to ever hit the airwaves.  I would not have written that 8 years ago, when I still thought Star Trek TNG was pretty much the pinnacle of TV sci-fi; or 7 years ago, when I loved Firefly, but BSG has surpassed them both.   Of course, movies used to be another matter altogether, but with the introduction of BSG, that changed too.  The show has always had movie-quality special effects, and movie-quality writing and acting. The show just took TV to another level completely, and even made me get plasma screen HD envy.  But alas, I still have my little 20″ TV screen, and it doesn’t do justice to a show with such walloping great production values.

I won’t bother to review the  show. You either like it or love it, or you don’t like science fiction, in which case I can’t change your mind and won’t try, even if BSG was and is far more than science-fiction.  It’s human drama at its finest.   I have never seen anything like this show on TV except for the long-defunct “Firefly”, the 2002 sci-fi show by Joss Whedon.  That show also had great writing, acting and special effects, but it was on FOX and didn’t even last one full season. Still, I was a huge fan.  Battlestar Galactica came very shortly after it and included some of the hand-held camera effects, and similar quick cuts in action.  Actually, I’m not a fan of the quick cuts but I like the hand-held effects because it seems more like you are there in person viewing the battle scenes, etc.

This show is famous not only for its quality but also for  how it mirrored a lot of the dark times we suffered as a country after 9/11.  The show took everything much farther of course:  an existential threat of being wiped out by a scary enemy, the tough decisions, the wars, the following ethical concerns of torture, capital punishment, holding captives, and much more.  There were alliances with good guys and bad guys, there was disloyalty and treason, and there was even a thrown election!  Remember the President cheated in order to win her election by throwing out some votes!  It seemed this show had a mirror event for everything we were going through, but of course, they were floating out in space with many fewer choices than we had.

I will mourn the end of this show for a reason related to that — as the war in Iraq is ending, so is BSG, so it will probably be the fate of the show to forever be tied to the so-called “war on terror” in peoples’ minds.  That’s too bad, because even without our own events the show would still be great.  It was one of the darkest, most confusing, most ethically-challenging shows of any type that I can recall.

And just to tie this slightly to my “power” theme — did you know they only ate algae-created food?  This might be our future, if we manage to move to becoming vegetarians, and then say climate change-created droughts cut down on the food supply drastically.  We might need to turn to the oceans for our food supply, and that might involve algae.  (or, gods-forbid — Soylent Green .  Let’s hope it never comes to that!).

They also powered their ships with “tylenium”,  a substance that doesn’t seem to exist.  The closest I can come to finding out what the frak that is, is a reference in a book discussing a “dimethylacenaphtylenium ion”.  Since I have no idea what that is, I can’t even write about whether or not it’s a plausible source of energy!

If you have never watched BSG, I would not start with the finale.  For the rest of us who have, the finale promises to be an amazing ride.