Television Can Blow Me (23 page)

Sci-fi: how the Cylons reinvented television

Aerial Telly believes in sci-fi. It's a genre that trades in big ideas, tends towards the philosophical and fantastical and likes to let the imagination run riot. It can also of course produce corny, ill disciplined, emotionally stunted writing and acting so bad it causes a stink you can smell from Mars.

Battlestar Galactica contained everything we already loved about sci-fi and added several things we never knew could exist in such a show. Respect is duly paid here.

And Doctor Poo gets the dilznick. It gets its salad tossed quite comprehensively everywhere else.

Battlestar Galactica Season 3

When Sci-Fi took onboard their reimagining of the Battlestar Galactica franchise they had a number of options. Camp it up and play it for laughs, create a reference laden nerd fest or make a serious attempt at grown-up drama. Thankfully, they chose the latter along the way making Starbuck a chick, the Cylons look human and Donnie Darko’s mom the President. So now Cylons have evolved and look just like you or I or any number of attractive Equity members.

Yes, that’s right broseph - Cylons are back and they’re hot. Particularly the Amazonian blonde known as Caprica 6 who used the power of cybernetic pussy to nuke the 12 Colonies and slaughter a jillion humans. Cylon ‘skinjobs’ walk amongst the humans like Soviet sleeper agents. It’s good to see this Cold War reference taking us right back to the Eighties although that’s really not generally a good thing.

Cylons are often referred to as toasters by the humans - a derogatory term the Cylons find deeply offensive. So if you’re a human be careful not to say it too loudly as they kind of have us by the balls at the moment. With the Cylon occupation of Nu Caprica in full effect it’s a good approximation of hell on Nu Earth. Humans are being picked up, detained and tortured with impunity by the Cylon boot boys. They even tear out our old favourite Colonel Tigh’s eye from its socket and show it to him. “It looked like a hard-boiled egg” he recalls. He’s grown a beard in captivity which is probably for the best as shaving without depth perception is a bitch.

But what Tigh’s lost in ocular capacity he makes up for with grisly determination, leading the insurgents in their guerrilla campaign against the toasters. Suicide bombings in cafe-bars and graduation ceremonies for the Uncle Tom human police force are among the rebels’ activities. This pisses the Cylons right off and they decide to get tough. Blimey. Apparently all those interrogating torturing guys were the liberal wing of Cylon political thought. “Round them up and shoot them” is the decision they reach. You've got to respect the classics.

Colonel Tigh only got out of captivity because his wife was shtupping the living shit out of senior toaster Cavil in exchange for his freedom. I hope those people who saw Ellen as the Lady Macbeth of Galactica are now suitably chastised. This is a girl who knows how to keep her marriage vows.

In a scarcely better predicament is Starbuck, living in an enforced marriage to Leoben, a toaster who she keeps killing who responds to this horrific domestic abuse by repeatedly downloading back into a perfect replica of his body (they can do that these days). And although they are not shtupping they have some kind of Stepford child whose purpose appears to be to mess with Starbuck’s heid mon, make her feel all maternal and domesticated so she’ll start sucking Breville Sandwich Toaster Cylon Man Cock. Though for the time being it’s safe to say that Homie Don’t Play That.

But don’t let that lead you into thinking that Jungle Fever has been wiped from the future. Inter species erotica is alive and well. They look human, and feel human so why the hell not? One product of this unholy union is the Cylon-human hybrid baby Hera born of the Cylon Sharon and human Helo. Hera is being raised in secret, away from Cylon eyes and the human hierarchy are amazed at her potential - I’d be quite happy if she has five settings, none of which burn my waffles.

Sci-Fi are keen to make this a brooding, philosophical update of the Battlestar Galactica story and it’s a very absorbing watch. There’s a gloomy claustrophobic feel on-board Galactica and all are trapped by their circumstances - and not just because they’re being chased across space by sociopath fascist robots that they created. The show likes pondering upon the moral ambiguities of the human condition. Commander Adama notes that in the rush to escape extinction humanity never really asked itself if it deserved to survive. The notion that the cosmos would be better off without humans is a recurring theme.

At its heart, the Battlestar Galactica myth is Frankenstein - man tormented by a monster of his own creation. Cylons act like the neglected, abused children they are. Humans look at Cylons and see their own reflection and they hate them for it. It’s as dysfunctional a relationship as you’ll find on TV and it’s providing a rich vein of character pieces and war stories showing that intelligent sci-fi is not an oxymoron.

The verdict on Battlestar Galactica Season 3:
Impressive weird sci-fi vérité.

Marks out of 10:
8

Castrating Galactica - why Faceman needs to can it

Earlier this year Dirk Benedict wrote an article for Big Hollywood about Ronald D. Moore’s reimagining of Battlestar Galactica. Benedict has a unique perspective here having played Starbuck in Glen A. Larson’s 1978 original and he is plainly not digging the new breed. He makes a lot of assertions about the franchise that are plainly horseshit. Motherfuckers need to get off that shit.

In what, to be fair, is a pretty well-written piece, Benedict starts off talking about his own experience playing Starbuck, the womanising Viper pilot the suits couldn’t stand because he was just TOO REAL. Women all over the world loved Starbuck but jealous suits turned down the chance to make themselves millionaires off the back of his popularity and viciously cancelled the show. That’s very nearly unbelievable, Dirk, but if you say it so then it happened.

But it still rankles with Benedict and he takes it out on the new Galactica. “the “re-imagined” “Battlestar Galactica,” bleak, miserable, despairing, angry and confused... reflects in microcosm the complete change in the politics and moranjui.lity of today’s world, as opposed to the world of yesterday”

Yes, because 1978 was a real moral and political utopia. Get tae fuck.
¹

He continues: “'Un-imagining' is more accurate. To take what once was and twist it into what never was intended.”

Not only does that not seem wrong it seems like the only working justification for a remake. Are we to be forever subject to the tyranny of authorial intent? Should we give a tuppenny fuck that Larson did not intend Galactica to stare into the universe’s void as unflinchingly as it does? Hell, naw.

Apparently eager to make a virtue of missing the point, he says “a television show based on hope, spiritual faith and family is un-imagined and regurgitated as a show of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction.”

Not even close. Original BSG is based on platitude, hokum and sentiment. Nouveau BSG is based on hope, spiritual faith and family in the face of despair, sexual violence and family dysfunction. Motherfucker, they find Earth. Cylon and human kick off homo sapiens. The slave centurions are free, free at last. Keep up.

He bemoans how the new show must “reflect the times of ambiguous morality in which we live, one would assume. A show in which the aliens (Cylons) are justified in their desire to destroy human civilization, one would assume.”

Moral relativism didn’t just arrive in 2004. Get your head around this, Dirk: simplistic morality makes for bad drama - stock characters saying and doing the obvious thing in every situation develops nothing and takes us nowhere. And cut out that “one would assume” shit. This whole piece is one big unwarranted assumption.

Unsurprisingly, he’s not crazy about the female characters in BSG. “The male characters, from Adama on down, are confused, weak and wracked with indecision, while the female characters are decisive, bold, angry as hell”.

This is balls on so many different levels. In what galaxy is Adama weak? Is this the same Adama who survived the Holocaust, assassination attempts, knocked lumps out of Chief Tyrol, threw the love of his life in the brig, ordered a nuclear strike on The Temple of Five? And while Galactica does have strong female characters they are as prone to vulnerability, fuck-ups and despair as the rest. How can characters as memorable as Kara Thrace, Laura Roslin and Caprica 6 be a bad thing? The suspicion that Benedict likes his female characters barefoot and pregnant is not easily shifted.

Now he really loses the plot. “The best minds in the world of un-imagination doubled their intake of Double Soy Lattes as they gathered in their smoke-free offices”

This is one of those bad observational comedy one-liners you see from time to time lifted from a half remembered stand up routine 15 years previous, popular among people who think that the middle classes give their kids names like Jocasta; people who will still be using the word chav five decades after it ceases to be relevant. Reimagining the team behind Battlestar Galactica as soulless Hollywood operators is just pathetic but it’s where we get to the heart of his argument.

“The creative artists have lost and the Suits have won. Suits. Administrators. Technocrats. Metro-sexual money-men (and women), who create ever more efficient formulas to guarantee profit margins.”

I have to give him credit here. It takes some balls to frame the antiseptic Star Wars bandwagon jumping Waltons-in-space potboiler Battlestar Galactica 1978 as the wild-eyed outsider labour of love of the creative artist and the dark, brilliant, twisted Battlestar Galactica 2004 as the brainchild of the money men. But still, fuck him for coming out with this despicable lie.

Developing the idiocy further, he says “Harvard Business School Technocrats run Hollywood and what Technocrats know is what must be removed from all business is Risk.”

Please. Battlestar Galactica is about nothing
but
risk. It makes the audience work like hell for every ounce of understanding they gain. Alienating the audience is in its DNA; its very obtuseness defines it. One actress playing six different characters; extended theological debate between machines; good Boomer, bad Boomer; Human Anders, Cylon Anders, hybrid Anders; human suicide bombers post-9/11. You want to talk about risk, motherfucker? This is the Russian roulette of remakes.

The whole thing is a shitty attempt to downgrade a great and brave work of art. “Health and safety zealots ban original BSG” is the article he really wants to be writing. The politically correct brigade have neutralised Christmas, renamed black pudding and ruined the beloved and lauded Battlestar Galactica.

Give me a break. Original BSG didn’t get cancelled after one season because it was too edgy for the suits. It got cancelled after one season because nobody cared about it. People couldn’t even be bothered to hate it. That is its legacy. The only way reimagined BSG could work is to make it as different from the original as possible. The only good things about the original - the story templates and character archetypes taken from the Bible - are the only things that remained.