The original post: /r/television by /u/Federico216 on 2024-05-20 22:26:59.
With it’s recent return to streaming, I wanted to do a little write up in honor of the show.
For those who haven’t seen the series: Battlestar Galactica (BSG) was a 4 part Syfy (Sci Fi at the time) miniseries based on the 1978 Glen A. Larson series with the same title. The miniseries was quickly picked up as a full series that ran for four seasons in 2004-2009. The Emmy, Hugo and Peabody award winning remake starred Edward James Olmos, Mary McDonnell, Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Jamie Bamber, James Callis, Grace Park and Michael Hogan with Ronald D. Moore (For All Mankind, Star Trek: TNG/DS9, Outlander) as showrunner. The series tells the story of artificial intelligence (named Cylons) turning against their creators resulting in a nuclear holocaust. With Cylons hot on their tails, the last remnants of humanity escape in a battleship capable of interstellar travel. Their purpose: finding the “home of the lost 13th tribe”, Earth.
I’m not going to specifically discuss plot points, but there’s gonna be spoilers by implication, so close this thread right now and go watch the show, starting from the miniseries.
So, 20 years later it’s a good time to ask, does Battlestar Galactica hold up? Given the massive rise in TV-series budgets in recent 20 years, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that in terms of visuals, BSG shows its age. Still, CGI was very good for its time (two Emmy awards for VFX to show for it) and it doesn’t become a distraction unless you’re looking for Avatar level VFX. In the last season, I would go as far as consider some CG shots quite good looking (battle of Ionian Nebula comes to mind). The show tries to hide the low budget with reusing CG shots and frantic camera movements, which some might find grating, but the latter also gives the show a very distinct look. The choice of shooting “documentary style” might suffer from Seinfeld effect, but at the time quick zooms/shaky cam/out of focus shots were a bold choice in a genre known for static shots and little camera movement.
In very early 00’s fashion there are times when the show tries to stick to episodic nature. Streaming has pretty much killed procedural television, so for people used to consuming modern series, this will come off very jarring. Occasionally there are a few hammy acting choices and scenes of clunky exposition that you rarely see in modern prestige dramas, but in terms of political themes it’s almost depressing how some of the issues seem even more relevant now (e.g. class society, abortion, freedom vs. security, AI/consciousness, religion). BSG is very obviously a child of Bush administration politics and occasionally lacks subtlety, but the political issues are handled with just enough care to feel universal and timeless.
The cast of characters is deep and rich, and could easily go toe to toe with most series you see today. Not to even mention the soundtrack by Bear McCreary, which without hyperbole, remains as one of the best of all time (I could write a whole another post this size about the soundtrack alone, so I’m just going to leave it there). Yes BSG shows its age at times, and there are many ways in which it cannot compare to modern television series, so for the most casual viewers it might be too much of a deep cut. Still, it was also very influential piece of scifi television and especially genre enthusiasts and newer viewers with interest in the era when television series turned from background noise to respected entertainment, should absolutely give it a watch.
So what is Battlestar Galacticas legacy and sphere of influence? In the early 00’s, television sci-fi was still defined by a certain aura of campiness despite tackling complex and serious themes from the get go with titles like Star Trek or The Prisoner. Scifi was still very much kept in its own box in the early 2000’s, often (very unfairly) associated with cheap sets and aliens in rubber masks. While there were scifi series that enjoyed mainstream success far before BSG, a gross oversimplification of 2000’s scifi television landscape might go something like “BSG walked so Expanse could run”. BSG probably wasn’t the first scifi series to show people having sex, doing drugs, committing suicide, battling alcoholism/PTSD/depression on spaceships, but doing it with seriousness and conviction, brought a new level of grit to the genre that helped later shows break out of the old mold. The series is very good at muddling morality and pitting two characters you love with understandable motives on opposite sides of an issue, which I feel like is still quite rare to see done convincingly.
Saying BSG revolutionized scifi would be a bit too generous of course. While one of the pioneers of the genre, it owes a lot to its predecessors too. Babylon 5 and Star Trek: TNG/DS9 are the obvious names to drop, but perhaps even more relevant was a criminally overlooked and short lived Fox series Space: Above and Beyond (which hit most of the same themes as BSG with similar sense of seriousness almost 10 years prior).
One of the big BSG headlines during its run, was gender swapping the character of Starbuck. In 2024 of course this seems like an absurd controversy, but at the time it was a serious issue. Original Starbuck (played by Dirk Benedict, who vehemently opposed and trashed the decision to make Starbuck a woman) was a mix of roguish womanizing attitude and toxic masculinity typical for 70’s media. Making the cigar smoking hotshot a woman (and adding a frak of a lot of layers to her) was of course the right call and Katee Sackhoffs Starbuck ended up being perhaps more iconic than the show itself. It should be ridiculous to laud a television show for doing what should be the expectation: writing a complex female character, but quite frankly in the early 2000’s sci-fi landscape (or just TV in general) there just hadn’t been a character like Starbuck before. She’s sex positive and tomboyish, but not defined by either one of these traits. She’s really good at what she does, but makes mistakes and is constantly battling her demons, so all her successes feel very earned. Objectively she’s an asshole, but seeing her story from her point of view makes you sympathize with her. While there are moments where BSG doesn’t handle female characters with quite such finesse, Starbuck definitely left a lasting mark.
This being Reddit, I couldn’t help but discuss the inevitable talking point that always comes up, did Battlestar Galactica really get that bad in the latter half? Well, the short answer is no. Objectively speaking, the last season of the show still holds a respectable 92% Rotten Tomatoes score, from both critics and audience. In fact the final episodes remain some of the highest rated in almost any review site. Perhaps it’s also been helped in retrospect by shows like Lost, Dexter, Game of Thrones etc. upstaging it in the “bad endings department”. Saying it “wasn’t that bad” is not a glowing endorsement however. There are some valid reasons to why the show lost viewers along the way and why the ending sparked such controversy.
Let’s start with the very end of the show. It’s very clear rewatching the show that a lot of the time Ron Moore had no idea where it would all end up. Some aspects of the ending were planned, (in fact on this rewatch, I was surprised how early some things are foreshadowed and established) but some arcs were thrown out and forgotten and some just improvised on the go and tied together very hastily. The show will spend a couple of seasons foreshadowing something, only for it to be abandoned for something completely different (very noticeable, especially if you’re aware of some of the changes made during production and the writers strike). Ron Moores character work remains fantastic throughout the show, but he seems to be one of those writers who needs to be occasionally reined in to keep the story cohesive. While saying the ending was just “God did it”, is an oversimplification, the fatalistic implications of the cyclical nature of the story is understandably frustrating and retroactively devalues the stakes felt in the earlier seasons. Too many things are left for chance or fate and as a result, the ending feels kind of unearned. And while most individual character arcs come to a beautiful conclusion, fumbling Karas ending is probably the biggest sin of the three part finale. /somewhat ironic sidenote, this is what GRRM had to say about the shows ending “Sometimes the journey is its own reward and I certainly enjoyed a lot of the journey with BSG. But damn it, doesn’t anyone know how to write endings anymore?”
Now, a lot of viewers abandoned the show after two seasons and it’s understandable. There’s a massive tonal shift in the series after the New Caprica arc. The show got intensely dark and brooding in the last two seasons. I always thought of BSG as a serious show, but I had forgotten how there’s a lot of comedic moments, even physical comedy in the first couple of seasons. There was also that wholesome sense of optimism typical for scifi of late 90’s and early 00’s. Even when things got dark, usually by the end of the episode the gang was together, toasting another day of living. Come season 3 that’s all gone. Even Galactica looks different, as if the fleet lost half the light bulbs during the occupation. Every character is suffering from depression, PTSD and exhaustion and the show feels like it too. You no longer get "Action stations, action…
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