The Speculist

There’s a controversy brewing over the season premiere of Battlestar Galactica, which aired this past Friday on the Sci-Fi network.

For those unfamiliar with the show, Battsgac (which is what all the true fans call it) deals with —as Lorne Greene was wont to say about an earlier incarnation of the show — “a rag-tag fugitive fleet” of starships populated by the last remnants of the human race. These folks are busily “fleeing Cylon tyranny” (the Cylons being a race of rebellious upstart robots, perhaps the most vindictive and unruly product of human technology since the photocopier), and they are carrying out a quest for “a shining planet known as Earth.”

But that description hardly does Battsgac justice. For two years now, the new incarnation of Glen A. Larson’s masterpiece has delivered consistently gripping, compelling television by way of the Cylons kicking human butt all up and down the galaxy. This show has it all: political intrigue, human-machine crossbreeding; gritty battle sequences (often filmed with artistic overexposure effects and jerky camera movement); serious religious debates like you haven’t witnessed since your freshman year of college; eclectic, innovative profanity that slips right past the censors… I could go on and on.

Oh, and good acting and special effects and stuff, too. Snarkiness of previous (and upcoming) paragraphs aside, I really do love it.

At the end of the previous season, most of the human survivors had decided to settle on a newly discovered planet, brimming with hope that they would be able to resume normal human lives as farmers, labor union organizers, pet psychics, and so forth. Things were working out more or less okay for a year (actual elapsed TV time: about ten minutes) when, wham! What should come thundering out of hyperspace but an entire gods-damned (see how it slips right past?) Cylon armada , and before you know it all of our human friends – except for a few who were still orbiting the planet and who managed to hightail it out of there – are living under Cylon occupation.

Okay, now this is from whence the aforementioned controversy commences its aforementioned brewing. In the two-hour season opener, we learn that the humans have initiated a resistance movement, referred to by the Cylons as an “insurgency.” Where taking out Cylons is concerned, our plucky insurgents will stop at nothing. Soon they’re hiding weapons in houses of worship, building bombs next to a hospital with no regard to safety of the patients, and sending suicide bombers into situations guaranteed to take out Cylons, with less and less regard for how many humans are killed in the process. Meanwhile, the evil and tenacious Cylons are arresting people off the streets, detaining them indefinitely without privilege of attorney, and torturing and killing them pretty much indiscriminately.

Though the practice is not mentioned by name, it’s a safe bet that the Cylons are subjecting human beings to waterboarding. They might also be flushing copies of the Holy Scriptures of the Gods of Kobol down toilets, although, again, this practice is not explicitly referenced. But one guy did get his eye gouged out.

Now, believe it or not, if you examine these fictional events carefully and think really hard, you begin to see parallels, very subtle parallels, to real-world events. And these parallels are disturbing. Because, if you think about it, all that detaining and torturing and so forth that the Cylons are doing is kind of like what the US is doing in the War on Terror! And when you watch all that brave hiding-weapons-in-temples and blowing-oneself-to-bits that the humans are doing, you can’t help but think of things that have gone on in Israel and Iraq.

Remember, the Cylons are calling the human rebels insurgents. Think about it, folks.

Some might come to the conclusion that the creators of Battlestar Galactica are inviting us to view Americans as bad guys (Cylons) and Iraqi and Palestinian terrorists as good guys (humans). Wow, what a turning of the tables. What a shocking, edgy, and courageous line of storytelling that would be. And think I already mentioned subtle, but once again. Subtle.

Once you start down this path, the logic is unavoidable. The US is, indeed, reminiscent of the Cylon Empire. I mean, ultimately, aren’t we a just a bunch of religious fundamentalist genocidal robots? Be honest. And then consider how much your average Jihadi cohort has in common with the typical hard-drinking, hard-loving, free-thinking, and co-ed military unit depicted on Battlestar Galactica.

Eerie, isn’t it?

Of course, it’s possible that the creators of BattsGac didn’t want us to draw any particular conclusions. Maybe they just wanted to see what happened when certain concepts were juxtaposed, and characters with whom we’re sympathetic begin to do things we find abhorrent. That sort of thing can be interesting, after all, even if it does lack all that appealing shock value.

On the other hand, if they really were suggesting that the US is the Cylons to the Iraqi insurgents’ human resistance movement, then I have exactly two words for the creators of Battlestar Galactica.

The first of which, interestingly, is frack. (Please don't follow that link if you tend to be offended by language. Thanks.)

But I don't think it's as simple as that. I think, at some level, the folks who make Battsgac know that they're doing a show about people who fly spaceships and shoot at mean robots. While they appear to take the whole thing extremely seriously, that kind of polemic doesn't appear to fit in with what's come before.

Here's what one of the actors has to say about how the show really is an allegorical representation of Iraq :

"Nothing is going the way we thought it would in Iraq," said Olmos, who has spoken out on antiwar and pro-Latino themes in the past. "And in our world, we make you re-evaluate all the time who the good guys and the bad guys are. (Our heroes) are using suicide bombings to stay alive. So while you're being entertained like crazy, it also makes you think.

Wow, talk about hitting the nail on the head! That does indeed make me think. It makes me think that it's a good thing they're paying this guy to act and not to write. He is totally missing the point that the insurgents on Battsgac aren't doing much to "keep themselves alive" by using suicide bombers. In fact, the Cylons can kill all the humans any time they want to -- and have even discussed wiping out 80% or so of the remaining population to keep them "manageable." The only reason they didn't just wipe them all out to begin with was because some of the Cylons have been infected with a new a idea, let's call it a meme, that says that there should be peace and love and other good stuff between humans and Cylons.

So what we really have going on here is a full-blown meme war. (Hey, if everybody else can stamp the show with their pet ideas, why can't I?) Some Cylons have picked up the love meme from humans, but unfortunately some humans have picked up evil, brutal memes from the Cylons -- or developed them themselves, it doesn't matter. Now we have a real parallel to the current situation in the world. It's all a matter of whose memes will win out.

In both settings, my money says that niceness will somehow prevail.

* Feldercarb? Felgercarb? There appear to many possible spellings. It's the dumbest word in the Battsgac lexicon, with the possible exception of "dagget."