Before the third Matrix movie came out, many fans couldn’t stop lavishing praise over the writers. They over-analyzed every conversation, every detail. They saw the religious and mythical themes as prelude to a Great Meaning as if the show was to become the equivalent of a Sophocles masterpiece. When the third movie came and went, many people spoke out annoyingly about the movie and about the merry-go-round they were on. All that Gnostic theorizing was for nothing, they thought. Other fans argued against them, but they were in a state of denial. They had invested too much emotionally into the stupid movie to see clearly. (If people go into denial because of emotion they invested in a movie, imagine how people go into denial because of emotion they invested in a politician or even girlfriend/boyfriend.)
The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series is headed like a train straight for the end of those tracks. Like the Matrix analogy, the Battlestar Galactica series is excellent in a technical way, very nicely done with the special effects. The show has some extremely good actors such as Olmos, McDonnel, Hogan, and Callis who can handle anything and make any scene be very watchable. The music is also very well done.
But the reason why the show is going over the rails is because of extremely bad writing.
Science fiction and even fantasy have very little rules to obey which makes it so attractive to beginner writers. But as many science fiction and fantasy writers demand, especially Orson Scott Card at his writing shops, is that the rules established by fantastical fiction must be obeyed within the story or else the reader feels ripped off. For example, if a fantasy story has the cost of ‘magic’ to be pieces of one’s own body, the rule has been established (this is an example I heard Card use). People without limbs in the story would have cast the biggest uses of magic. But if the story suddenly and without explanation has people cast magic without any consequence, the readers will fell ripped off. In other words, every fiction, even fantasy, has established rules in it. When those rules are being broken for whatever reason, convenience, shock value, or something else, then the entire fictional world falls apart.
It is not that Battlestar Galactica doesn’t follow any rules set by the original series, science fiction, or common sense, the problem is that it doesn’t follow its own established rules in order to create a ‘shock event’ or to make a character ‘weep’. This is Emo Science Fiction. (Spoilers below)
-Cylons who were established as mechanical thinking beings, with a precision that can be seen in episodes like “33”, whose cgi centurions are frightfully real, who could easily network and destroy any device connected to a network, now cannot get together to hold caucus meetings on their disco themed battlestars, whose computer panels are water fountains, while they listen to the gibberish from a Minority Report extra in a bathtub.
-During the press conference on Colonial One, you have to wonder just who dry cleans and makes sure all these outfits are nice when resources are limited to non-existent. You also have to wonder what happens when the press conference is over. Where does the press go? To the cargo bay?
-The series starts off saying that the cylons have a ‘plan’. Of course, there is no plan. Moore and his writers are just making it up as they go along. There is no explanation to the earlier puzzles of why cylons nuked the colonies, why they attacked precisely 33 minutes in “33”, or why the radiation field around Ragnorak Station is harmful to them but the nuked Caprica is not. The show moves on to the next puzzle and hopes you forget about the last one.
-In order to make a ‘shock’, Moore randomly chose four cylons to unveil at the end of season 3. Nothing was planned about choosing these cylons. After doing so, these characters enter a ‘character reboot’. The actor Hogan complained that the character he was playing as Human had been turned into a cylon.
-Hera is ‘special’ because she is the child of a cylon and a human. However, so is Nicky. Oops! The writers will likely write that someone else fathered Nicky, not Tyrol.
-Adama looks at the dead body of Boomer and asks, “Why?” Later on, Athena answers. Huh!?
-Ron Moore began the series chastising Star Trek Voyager because the Voyager ship never had any damage, kept having a reset button hit after every episode, and had an endless array of torpedoes and shuttles. Yet, Battlestar Galactica keeps hitting the reset button on every character, has an endless array of vipers, and bizarrely makes political morality tales when there is no reason for it to exist to forward the plot.
-At the last cylon caucus meeting, Boomer is ‘special’ because she voted against her model. “This has never been done before!” cried the two. Yet, there is another eight that has been living and siding with the Humans since season one: Athena. Apparently, the writers do not watch their own show.
-Ron Moore does not know how to write women and apparently neither does anyone else on the writing staff. Every woman on the show is ‘special’ in some way. (Starbuck: harbinger of death, angel of aurora. Roslin: dying leader with cancer. Cain: insane tyrant.) Even the cylon females cannot just be ‘female’, they, too, must be made ‘special’. Head Six, Caprica Six, Boomer, Athena, super human Tory, and final fifth Ellen are all ‘special’. The only normal woman was Dee who had no scenes and proceeded to blow her brains out (who wouldn’t if you were the only woman that wasn’t special?). All the other females on the show act like men, literally. On the other hand, all the men are written like emos. They are constantly having temper tantrums, crying, or weeping.
-Ron Moore and his writing staff also apparently have no idea what religion is. In Battlestar, religion is nothing more than a jigsaw puzzle to be ‘figured out’ on their course to Earth. Baltar, whose cult is apparently made up of only hot women, says abusrd things that no religion, or even philosophy, would say such as ‘You are perfect’.
-Roslin is dying of cancer until the writers gave her a dose of magic baby blood which ‘solved’ the cancer. Very convenient. More convenient is to have the cancer magically re-appear so we can have more weeping and crying in the final season. Also very convenient that the magic baby blood apparently no longer works.
-Battlestar Galactica is a show of no plot. It just has characters running around screaming, weeping, or crying. It is very rare when plot does occur. So it is no coincidence that everyone’s favorite episodes are when there is an actual plot. Episodes with an actual plot are about maybe three per season.
-Dee was OK with her husband cheating on her or running betraying orders on the Pegasus. But as soon as Lee is appointed to the court attorney, it is suddenly a Big Problem.
-Who is the fifth cylon? Talk about anti-climax.
-Earth was nuked 2000 years ago yet bones and metal objects are right on the surface! And apparently the planet is uninhabitable! Yet, Caprica was nuked one year ago and the cyclons are inside coffee shops, sipping lattes (this is not a joke. They actually do it. Centurions also are planting trees).
-In episode 4.11 (the latest one as of this writing), we discover that Tyrol wore glasses and ate fruit while Anders played Dylan songs. So why does Tyrol not need to wear glasses anymore?
-Emo Battlestar shows its true colors in episode 4.11 where everyone goes drama queen. Moore explains this is because the episode had a theme of ‘despair’. Apparently all episodes have themes now. I suppose the next episode’s theme is ‘rebellion’ where Zarek (the original Apollo from the original series) says, “What the hell have you done to my series?” At least, that is what I dream.
-Deanna says she wants to stay on Earth because she wants to get off the ‘merry-go-round’. Many in the audience (of the few still watching) are asking the same thing.
-Ron Moore’s wife has declared: “Continuity is for sissies.” Hey missy, I thought your husband was writing a serialized series. How can they exist without continuity?
-Ron Moore has a flood of podcasts and ‘commentary’ for each episode to ‘explain’ events to the audience. I’m sorry, but if you have to ‘explain’ anything to the audience, that is bad writing.
-Writers keep trying to give the show moral complexity, but it rarely succeeds. One of the few times where there was moral complexity, of Tigh killing his own wife, has totally been destroyed since not only is Tigh a cylon, so is his wife (who will obviously return to life).
Television series are difficult to perform a long-term story with executives meddling, actors coming and going, budgets being cut, etc. But there is no excuse for the above. When a story breaks its own rules, it becomes a self-parody.
My biggest fear is that the lovable geeks at companies such as Blizzard will emulate this Battlestar Galactica style for Starcraft 2 (Blizzard used Starship Troopers for Starcraft 1, Lord of the Rings for World of Warcraft, etc). We will know this is the case if Starcraft 2’s characters all end up going emo (Raynor suddenly bursts into tears, throws tantrums, etc.) and bizarre shocks are cheaply thrown in (“Humanity and Protoss used to be the same but one side evolved.” “Zerg will evolve to transcendence and this peak ends up becoming… Protoss.”)
When you look at Ron Moore’s career, one sees that he had to reside in the Star Trek mythos (and they are very tightly controlled about that mythos). To my knowledge, Moore has never written his own mythos, his own set of rules he needs to obey.
The truth of the matter is that Battlestar Galactica should have been canceled when Enterprise reruns began getting more audience than new episodes. The reason why it is still on the air is because it has become a ‘prestige show’. Sci-Fi channel loves the show because it is attracting talent to their channel such as actors, executives, writers. This is a great example of a show that doesn’t pull the audience yet the industry likes it so they continue it anyway.
I laugh when people try to give Moore accolades about ‘his great vision’ with Battlestar Galactica. If Moore is so creative, so passionate, let him write his own source material rather than rely on Larson’s original Battlestar Galactica. I expect the director of the new Star Trek movie to be given accolades from Hollywood due to his ‘creativity’ and ‘vision’ as if he invented the notion of Star Trek itself! This apparently is a trend in science fiction from Hollywood lately.
To those who think Sackoff (Starbuck) is a bad actress whose range is only ‘brat’, the reason may have more to do with Moore than with her:
Sackhoff told the producers that they should fire her halfway through the last season. “I was complaining about the fact that I had no idea how to play Kara anymore. And that I felt like my acting was in complete shambles,” she says. “I said, ‘I’ve got nothing to hold on to.’ I have no idea who she is, and no one’s telling me anything, and I feel like I’m just grasping at straws here, and one day I’m playing her this way and the next day I’m playing her this way, because it’s what’s on the page.’ And I really started freaking out, and [creator] Ron Moore looked at me and went, ‘That’s why it’s so good.’ And I said, ‘What are you talking about?’ And he goes, ‘If you would just calm down for a second, you’d realize that you’re actually just being her.’ I was like, ‘Oh. Right. ‘Cause that’s probably how she’s feeling.’ After that I calmed down. But it was my first moment as an actor where I kind of threw my hands up and went, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing.’ It was interesting to just realize that that was in the moment of not knowing what I was doing and embracing that I found her … after four years.”
Beware the Battlestar Galactica fans, of any that still remain, as the last episodes go up. They will either be in fierce denial or devastated that the emperor has no clothes, that the entire show was nothing but improvising with no design, and that the show is written for the writers and actors’ enjoyment, not for the audience.
At least the music was good:
