NYT on Battlestar Galactica

Haven’t had a chance to write about it yet, but after seeing another bloggers’ list of his five top tv shows of the year, which included my three favorite Deadwood, Lost, and Veronica Mars, I decided to check out the new Battlestar Galactica show that I’d been hearing some buzz about. I watched the mini-series last week and was quite impressed; I’ll be checking out the first season when it comes out on DVD. This is a realistic sci-fi show that is much more relevant and interesting than most tv.

The New York Times has a long article from Sunday on the show, while it most spends time on the (re)creator Ron Moore and the history of the development (and the failed development of original star Richard Hatch), there are a few quotes that get to the heart of the show:

…[Moore] wrote a two-page memo that laid out the basic tenets of what the new ”Battlestar Galactica” would eventually become. ”We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpy-headed aliens, thespian histrionics and empty heroics has run its course, and a new approach is required,” it began. ”Call it ‘naturalistic science fiction.”’ There would be no time travel or parallel universes or cute robot dogs. There would not be ”photon torpedoes” but instead nuclear missiles, because nukes are real and thus are frightening.

In the miniseries Moore wrote to introduce the new ”Battlestar,” the echoes of the war on terror were unapologetic and frequently harrowing: what happens when an advanced, comfortable, secular democracy endures a devastating attack by an old enemy that it literally created (which enemy, in Moore’s version, also happens to be religious fanaticism)?

…in the current version… most of the evil Cylons look like people and have found God. Ruthlessly principled and deeply religious, the Cylons have been compared by fans and critics both to Al Qaeda and to the evangelical right. And the humans they are relentlessly pursuing are fallible and complex. Their shirts are not clingy or color-coded; the men of space wear neckties… and their stories revolve as much around the tensions within — between the military and civil leadership of the fleet — as they do around the Cylon threat. As Eick described the show to me last month with evident, subversive pleasure, ”The bad guys are all beautiful and believe in God, and the good guys all [expletive] each other over.”

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