Episode 138: Transcript

Episode: 138: Battlestar Galactica, 20 Years Later

Transcription by Keffy

Charlie Jane: [00:00:00] Annalee, do you remember what you were watching 20 years ago? 

Annalee: [00:00:04] man, I want to say some bad things, like, remember Dark Angel?

Charlie Jane: [00:00:11] Oh my God, I loved Dark Angel.

Annalee: [00:00:15] It had its moments for sure, and Andromeda. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:20] Oh, man, still love Andromeda. 

Annalee: [00:00:20] I feel like there was like a really bad Dune miniseries. Maybe it was good. I don't know.

Charlie Jane: [00:00:28] It had its moments. It had the middleman wearing little skimpy outfit.

Annalee: [00:00:31] Yeah, I feel like it wasn't, it was weirdly not super memorable. Like I feel like turn of the century sci fi TV was not, it was more about like the movies, like The Matrix and stuff. 

Charlie Jane: [00:00:45] Yeah, so, science fiction television of like 20 years ago feels like such a different time. The only Star Trek we had was Enterprise, which kind of felt like it was already kind of limping towards its eventual oblivion. Firefly was gone. Doctor Who was in a long, long, long hiatus. There had been a bunch of, like, space opera shows, like Andromeda, Stargate, Babylon 5, Lex, and Farscape.

[00:01:11] But all of them were gone.

Annalee: [00:01:11] Lex!

Charlie Jane: [00:01:11] Except for Stargate. I know, pouring one out for Lex. I feel like Lex deserves more love. 

Annalee: [00:01:18] That's for sure. 

Charlie Jane: [00:01:19] That was the moment, 20 years ago, when Battlestar Galactica burst onto the scene. 

Annalee: [00:01:23] Yes! And it was amazing. Like, I remember not just the fact that it was a great miniseries that was giving us a view of the future, past, present, whatever the heck it was, that we just didn't see in space operas. It was a very gritty, anti-Star Trek kind of vibe. It felt… like now we have things like Andor and The Expanse, which feel like they're kind of following in that transformation, but it was a real leap forward in terms of realism in space.

[00:02:00] And then the other thing I would say was that it was such a cultural phenomenon. It was one of those. It was one of the last water cooler shows where like everyone was watching it. There was even a Portlandia episode about watching it. , that's how much it had penetrated the culture.

Charlie Jane: [00:02:15] I know. It was in the zeitgeist and it had a huge impact and it really felt like a breath of fresh air. 

Annalee: [00:02:21] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:22] And , so to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the BSG reboot, I just went and marathoned all four seasons, plus the mini stories that started everything. I just watched all of it, like pretty much in one sitting. I haven't gone to the bathroom in like a week.

Annalee: [00:02:37] Thank you for your sacrifice. That's like 80 hours of TV, right? 

Charlie Jane: [00:02:42] It's a lot of TV, yeah. And I was surprised by how fresh and how relevant so much of it still feels. 

Annalee: [00:02:48] Wow. So, do you feel like it holds up after 20 years?

Charlie Jane: [00:02:51] Well, mostly? Yes and no, we'll get into it. But okay, here's a warning. We're going to give you spoilers for all of the BSG reboot, including the ending and everything else.

[00:03:04] So if you somehow have not managed to see this show and you think you might, stop listening now. 

[00:03:11] Also next week in our mini episode, we're going to be talking about other science fiction space shows from the 1970s that could be rebooted in a similar fashion like Space 1999, Blake’s 7, and even some unappreciated gems like Far Out Space Nuts and Jason of Star Command.

Annalee: [00:03:30] Mm hmm. All right, so that reminds me, we have a Patreon. And that's because this is an entirely independent show. We have no sponsors, we have no corporate interests breathing down our neck, telling us that we need to—

Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] We're not part of the Colonial Fleet. 

Annalee: [00:03:47] We're not part of the Colonial Fleet. No one told us you need to go talk about Battlestar Galactica because your checks are being cut by the studio that made it. We’re just us and that's because of you funding us through Patreon. 

[00:04:00] So, if you become a patron, not only are you making this podcast happen, which thank you so much, but you get audio extras with every episode and those are pretty hefty. And plus, you get access to our Discord channel where we hang out all the time and talk about the episodes, but also everything. We talk about everything there and it's really wonderful. There's so many great folks in there who are really smart and opinionated in good ways. 

[00:04:27] So, anything you can contribute would be great, whether it's five bucks or twenty bucks a month, anything in between. So, you can find us at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect.

Charlie Jane: [00:04:37] All right, let's set condition one throughout the ship and talk BSG.

Annalee: [00:04:43] So say we all.

[00:04:46] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]

Annalee: [00:05:17] Okay, so let's just like start at the beginning. Charlie Jane, what the heck is Battlestar Galactica? What is this show about and why is it so important?

Charlie Jane: [00:05:29] Yeah, so Battlestar Galactica is about a society of humans on another planet who created and enslaved super intelligent robots named Cylons, only to have the Cylons, predictably, rise up and rebel.

[00:05:43] Now it's decades later and the war between humans and Cylons has long been over, but the Cylons show up again and now they can look human and they suddenly wipe out most of humanity, forcing the survivors to go on the run. And the survivors are searching for a legendary lost planet called Earth, which they hope can be their new home.

Annalee: [00:06:06] So, it's basically combining the classic robot uprising trope with space opera, which is delightful. It’s kind of like how the Terminator series, which of course was another thing that was quite popular at the turn of the century, combined robot uprisings with time travel. So, it's kind of this mashup, like the robot uprising is on our minds, but it's seeping into other tropes. But the other thing is that this is a reboot of an older show.

[00:06:37] So, tell us. What was the older show and is different from the newer one?

Charlie Jane: [00:06:40] Yeah. So, the 1978 version of Battlestar Galactica, it was very clearly trying to be Star Wars. It was much campier. And, like, for example, it starts out with the near genocide of humanity, but then in the second episode, they go to a space casino for fun times, right after all of their friends and family have died. It's like, that's a good time to go to a space casino.

Annalee: [00:07:05] I mean, drown your sorrows, I guess. Yeah, so it was a little bit random, but then the new series, let's call it BSG 2.0, was produced by Ron Moore, who had already cut his teeth on things like Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and really made a name for himself doing that, because he really brought kind of complicated politics into Star Trek, but also a really nuanced treatment of religion and colonialism, and these were things that really, I feel like, inhabited the new Battlestar as well.

Charlie Jane: [00:07:37] Yeah, I mean, there were so many brilliant writers who worked on Deep Space Nine, but the DNA of Deep Space Nine is definitely embedded within Battlestar Galactica, the new version. And Moore had briefly joined the writing staff of Star Trek: Voyager after the end of Deep Space Nine, and he had been very vocal in public about disliking the fact that Voyager seemed to not take very seriously the implications of its own premise about a single starship that's stranded on the other side of the galaxy with a group of anti-Federation rebels among the crew. And it felt like Voyager didn't want to engage with the consequences of that seriously. So BSG kind of feels like Ron Moore trying to tell a story that takes its premise much more seriously than Voyager did with its premise. 

Annalee: [00:08:22] Yeah, that’s so interesting. I never thought about that because it is dealing with that idea of what if you're stranded in space with like your worst political enemies.

[00:08:29] So. what made the new Battlestar so groundbreaking?

Charlie Jane: [00:08:35] Yeah, so watching it again, a few things really jumped out at me. First of all, this is the first piece of science fiction prestige TV. Prestige TV was pretty new at the time. We had The West Wing. We had The Wire and other shows like that that were kind of pioneering that that format of narratives that are more serialized that aren't just episodic and characters that are more morally gray and that are more complicated and there's a lot more nuance. Battlestar, you can still sort of see how it's a little bit kind of in this in between state. Especially in the first season, there still are episodes where everything’s kind of wrapped up at the end of the episode. It was like, that was an adventure we went on. 

[00:09:19] And, also, it doesn't have the shorter seasons. Like, I was looking up, The Wire had seasons that were between 10 and 13 episodes long, which is roughly what you'd see now with prestige TV. 

Annalee: [00:09:28] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:09:28] But Battlestar had 20 episode seasons and they tried to kind of finesse that sometimes by having a break in the middle of the season where it would basically divide a 20 episode season into two 10 episode blocks. But there are definitely places where it feels like they're trying to do the prestige TV model, but sustain it for a much longer period. 

[00:09:52] And another thing that really stands out is that it’s such a well done show. On so many levels, there's so many things that are well done that still kind of feel like a highwater mark in terms of quality. The cast is all really great, they can all hold their own in scenes with Edward James Olmos, which is kind of an acid test. The world building is incredible, all the little details are so well thought out, the visual style, like the way that all the scenes in space seem to be shot with handheld cameras with manual zoom, like zooming in, like, whoop, that never gets old, the way that the paper has the corners cut off and all the little military jargon is just so kind of lived-in, everything feels really lived-in and kind of grounded and real.

[00:10:39] And, there are very few shows, even now, that do just space stuff and like space battles, but also the mechanics of traveling faster than light and the mechanics of dealing with stuff in space as well as BSG did. It's, everything is very well thought out and it's just excellent military sci fi in general.

Annalee: [00:10:58] It really is. And when you were saying the stuff about the world building and like the paper with the edges cut off, which by the way, I had a, a schwag notebook, that I got at some point when we were covering Battlestar for io9 that actually had the little edges cut off, which I really treasured. But it was making me think about fantasy world building and that's such a big thing now in fantasy shows where the backdrops and the built environments are so detailed. And that's part of the joy of it, is feeling immersed in this other world. And I feel like we all, we've always thought—

Charlie Jane: [00:11:33] Like, Westeros, yeah.

Annalee: [00:11:34] Right, like Westeros or like in, Wheel of Time. And I think that's something that's always been a component of fantasy in film, but in science fiction, oftentimes there's this like idea of like, oh, we'll cut corners. Nobody cares. The spaceship looks kind of plastic. Nobody, whatever. So, I think you're right that that was a part of what made it prestige, but it's also what made people feel like they were immersed in that world.

Charlie Jane: [00:12:03] Yeah. And actually it's interesting to think about that, because Star Wars had the kind of grungy, lived-in feel in terms of like the look of the spaceships, but the world building in other ways in Star Wars is very slapdash and very like, they make stuff up on the fly and it’s radically inconsistent from minute to minute, which is part of the joy of Star Wars. 

[00:12:24] But yeah, the third thing that kind of jumps out at me is the handling of politics in BSG. It's still the gold standard in terms of like handling political topics with nuance and sensitivity without there being necessarily good guys and bad guys. And they keep coming back to this question over the entire course of the series about how to maintain a civil society with a government that actually has legitimacy that comes from the people when you're on the run and on the edge of survival and the relationship between the military and the government is a huge concern that's constantly shifting. There’s this amazing quote from Commander Adama early in season one.

BSG Clip: You have the only armed, disciplined force available. 

Yeah, but I'm not gonna be your policeman. There's a reason why you separate military and the police. One fights the enemy of the state. The other serves and protects the people. When the military becomes both, then the enemies of the state tend to become the people.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:28] And then you get to season three, and Commander Adama is straight up letting the military serve as the police force. He's sending in marines to break up strikes. He's threatening to murder civilians in one case. The shifting lines are super interesting. 

Annalee: [00:13:42] Yeah, it's really intense. And then Gaius Baltar, like the creepiest of technocrat creepozoids, becomes president, and it kind of feels more plausible now than it did back in the day, weirdly.

Charlie Jane: [00:13:56] Yeah, I feel like Baltar becoming president, is something that back in 2000, whenever, I was like, that could never happen, and now I'm like, oh, that would… that could totally happen, even if we're not in a post-apocalyptic, refugee scenario. And the show keeps grappling with the impossibility of preserving our constitution and our way of life until finally you get this moment in season three where there's two gut punches in a row.

[00:14:21] First, Baltar, who we just mentioned, and Tyrol, the kind of chief of the deck, kind of point out together that people's jobs are becoming hereditary and the fleet is kind of developing a caste system, which is a super interesting idea that there's no easy solution to because everybody's stuck on separate ships doing jobs that they were trained to do by their parents.

[00:14:43] And in the season finale, Lee Adama delivers this crackerjack speech where he says that the fleet is not a civilization anymore, it’s a gang.

BSG Clip: [00:14:55] Because we're not a civilization anymore. We are a gang and we're on the run and we have to fight to survive. We have to break rules. We have to bend laws. We have to improvise.

Charlie Jane: [00:15:08] The thing about that moment is, it's super earned. The show builds up to it for a long, long time, and it reflects this unwillingness to sweep a lot of the bad stuff that the characters have done under the rug in the way that almost any other science fiction show of the time would've done. 

Annalee: [00:15:22] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:15:22] But the final thing that Battlestar does that feels really groundbreaking, and I'd love it if you could talk about this, Annalee, is it imagines a whole society of sentient AIs. 

Annalee: [00:15:34] Yeah, this is something that I think is really fascinating in science fiction generally around the turn of the 21st century is that we start to have, I guess you could call it like sympathy for the robot.

[00:15:48] And previously, we've had… I mean, the story of the robot uprising, of course, goes all the way back to Karel Čapek’s play R.U.R. in the 1920s. But it's not from the point of view of the robots. It's always from the point of view of the people who are being affected, who are basically heading off the rebellion, the humans. And suddenly you start getting authors like William Gibson, kind of in the ‘80s and ‘90s, showing us a little bit of the perspective of AI, although they're still kind of mysterious. 

[00:16:23] Once you get to the 21st century, though, You get stuff like Martha Wells’ Murderbot series, you get the movie Ex Machina, you get Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Person of Interest, a ton of other stories, including Westworld, for example, which is also a reboot of a ‘70s, thing. It suddenly asks us to think about what are robot politics?

[00:16:49] It’s not… instead of it just being like, oh, well, we oppressed the robots and now they hate us, which is kind of the simplistic view.

Charlie Jane: [00:16:58] That’s the trope, yeah.

Annalee: [00:16:59] Instead, you get things like in The Sarah Connor Chronicles where it's like, actually, there's different factions of terminators. Or you get something like Ted Chang's amazing novella The Life Cycle of Software Objects where it's about a person raising basically an algorithm as their child and these algorithms are growing up and they're confronting what it means to like live in a virtual environment or to become embodied. And it's more about child psychology. It’s really no longer about like robo-psychology anymore. 

[00:17:36] And also, the thing that I think is really important about this new wave of stories, which Battlestar is part of, is that they try not to anthropomorphize the robots and the Cylons. There are elements of their psychology, elements of their desires and politics that are just truly alien and that have developed out of their own types of bodies and their own types of reasoning and in some ways that's unknowable to the humans. The humans can't fully comprehend like what the terminators want but what we can comprehend is there's different ones who want different things, and I think that the Cylons become that in Battlestar so much. At first we can't even tell the difference between the Cylons and the humans, but then we start to learn, actually no, they have a really different point of view, they have a very different religious point of view, a very different civilization, and we're gonna have to understand that, we can't just fight them, we’re going to have to work with them.

[00:18:36] And that’s, I just think, a huge shift. And again, Battlestar was one of the really bleeding edge shows that brought that idea into the mainstream. It had been bubbling up in literature before that, but I think afterward you can't really have a robot uprising story anymore without having a robot main character.

Charlie Jane: [00:18:54] Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I love the way you put that. And it's interesting because when I rewatched Battlestar, recently, and you view it through the lens of having read Murderbot and having seen Westworld and, like, all this other stuff, it kind of falls short a little bit because it was laying the groundwork for a lot of that stuff.

[00:19:12] And, the Cylons do at times feel a little bit too much like human characters who are just… They bicker and squabble in a way that feels very much like humans bickering and squabbling. The Cylon politics are often a little bit confusing. It doesn't entirely… they make decisions that don't entirely make sense, in a lot of cases that don't feel like they come out of anything grounded.

[00:19:36] The Cylons are at their best when they're super weird. Like when we meet the hybrids on their starships who are these kind of women who sit in fancy bathtubs and spout off strange poetry punctuated with math. The relationship between the humanoid Cylons and their precursors, who are the big stompy robot. The Centurions. 

Annalee: [00:19:56] The Centurions, yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:19:56] The politics of those two different types of Cylons are really interesting, but at times I found myself being really frustrated by how not alien the Cylons were and how much I wish that they were more alien. 

Annalee: [00:20:09] Yeah. And, I mean, it's funny because they're framed as being this kind of almost Soviet Union type threat in a weird way, like every episode begins by saying the Cylons have a plan. And so as if there's like, if we use like, Cylonology, we’d be able to figure it out. 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:33] Oh my God. Yeah. And the producers have been pretty vocal, I feel, about saying that that line in the opening of every episode, “They have a plan,” was something that the Sci-Fi channel forced them to do. And they never really knew what the Cylon’s plan was, or they never really wanted there to be a Cylon plan.

Annalee: [00:20:51] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:20:51] They kind of tried to retcon it. But also, I mean, when I talk about the Cylons, making inexplicable decisions, like towards the end of season two is where we're starting to try to get into the Cylons psychology more, and that's when I started to get a little frustrated because, at one point the Cylons decide, okay, we're going to try to live in peace with the humans and we're going to kind of leave the humans alone, and it's like, okay, great, that seems like a really good choice, you guys.

[00:21:16] And then, three episodes later, the humans have settled on this planet called New Caprica, where they're just going to peacefully live on this planet and try to mind their own business, and the Cylons unexpectedly show up and, invade and put the humans under occupation and kind of oppress them with like a, a human police force, but also stompy robots and start executing people.

[00:21:39] And it feels like this is basically the show trying to find a way to deal metaphorically with the then current occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan and show it from the point of view of the people who are being occupied, which a lot of sci fi TV was trying to do at the time, even down to like having a debate over suicide bombings and how to resist the occupation.

[00:21:55] But, when you think about it from the Cylon perspective, and the show occasionally tries to, it doesn't really make any sense to be like, okay, we're going to just leave the humans alone and peacefully coexist with them, but now we're going to invade them and occupy them. Why? 

Annalee: [00:22:08] Yeah, it seems like a waste of time.

[00:22:11] It's interesting, too, that like, if their goal is to somehow, I guess, civilize the humans, like they're trying to be friends of the humans, or something, they don't ever set up like, Cylon residential schools or something to like reeducate the human population the way people did in real life, here in the states, especially, when the United States government wanted to indoctrinate and control the occupied people, the indigenous people that were here. Which, clearly, I mean, that is also something that I think is being evoked by that season of the show, and so we don't see the Cylons doing these things that we might expect. But we do see them… It’s almost like, what happened was, the show wanted to get political, but it wanted to comment on so many different political situations that it became a little bit unstable.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:06] Yes, I think that's exactly right. And it feels like the show is sort of gesturing at some very relevant political stuff from the early 2000s but doesn't quite know what to say about it. And I was just struck by a number of occasions watching the show where the Cylons seem to make decisions that move the plot forward, but that don't come out… Like, the humans generally make decisions that come out of like a deep understanding of the humans’ political and psychological issues and the Cylons sometimes just make decisions that are just, this is what we need to do to move the plot forward, kinda.

Annalee: [00:23:39] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:23:39] Because they’re the antagonist and the show never quite manages to just let them be not just the antagonist, but have their own agenda that’s clear-cut.

Annalee: [00:23:52] Yeah. One of the, I think, missed opportunities in the show was developing the fact that the Cylons are monotheists and all the humans are polytheists, which I always thought was incredibly smart, interesting detail. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:11] I love that, yeah.

Annalee: [00:24:11] You rarely, rarely see a story that deals with, robot spirituality. I think one, great exception to that rule is Ken MacLeod's novel, The Night Sessions, which is also about robots developing a kind of rebel Christianity. Highly recommend that novel if you can track it down, The Night Sessions by Ken MacLeod. But what I will say is that, so we get these little glimpses of the Cylon culture and we know that they have this whole other way of seeing the world. But yeah, I wish there'd been a moment where they were like, well, because we're monotheists, that's why we have to occupy the humans, because we need to teach them about, God. We can't leave them alone on New Caprica unsaved, but we never really fully get there. 

Charlie Jane: [00:24:58] Yeah, I wanted to see the Cylons proselytizing, which we do see Baltar doing later in the show, in a weird way.

Annalee: [00:25:02] A little bit, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:05] Yeah, okay, so that seems like a good place to take a quick break, and when we come back, we're going to talk about God. We're also, first, before that, going to talk a little bit about gender in BSG. Make it so!

[00:25:15] OOAC session break music, a quick little synth bwoop bwoo.

Charlie Jane: [00:25:20] So, speaking of the Cylons, it feels like the Cylons are where a lot of the show's kind of anxieties around gender and sexuality are located. And the female Cylons all tend to be seducers and manipulators in various ways, while the male Cylons are all kind of walking consent violations. And it's just sort of weird, like they're very kind of edge-lord-y and the human characters by and large have some nuance in their gender and sexuality. I mean, you get some outliers, but the Cylons kinda start out embodying some pretty heinous stereotypes. 

Annalee: [00:25:55] Yeah, I mean, it's almost like, Battlestar can't quite think its way out of the fembot. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:06] Yeah, oh my God, yeah.

Annalee: [00:26:06] If we're gonna have something that's not a Centurion, like it’s either a fembot or a Centurion, and, of course, plenty of the male Cylons are not Centurions, but they still…

Charlie Jane: [00:26:17] But they’re like kind of pick-up artists, I don't know.

Annalee: [00:26:20] Yeah, there's sometimes, and they're also just very aggressive, domineering, militarized, and I don't think any of them use, fembotiness. I think you're right that it’s very gendered, but especially the female ones. They're all fembots pretty much. 

Charlie Jane: [00:26:41] Yeah, I found the first season kind of hard to watch at times because, Six, the Cylon played by Tricia Helfer really plays into the femme fatale trope. Like, she seduces Baltar to get the information that they need to attack the humans. And then she turns into kind of a sexy ghost who follows Baltar around giving him hand jobs while he's trying to talk to people. And meanwhile, Grace Park is playing two different versions of the same Cylon and both versions seem kind of manipulative.

[00:27:11] Like, in season one, she's Boomer, who is a brainwashed double agent who doesn't know that she's a Cylon. But that kind of manifests as her kind of being out of control and emotionally manipulative and constantly getting Chief Tyrol to cover for her when she has memory lapses and clearly has been up to some shenanigans. And she kind of sucks Chief Tyrol into complicity with her, making him kind of a victim of her tricksterness or whatever her trickiness. 

Annalee: [00:27:41] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:27:41] And, meanwhile, there's another version of that same Cylon model on earth who eventually becomes named known as Athena. And she kind of hooks up with Karl Agathon, AKA Helo. And she's trying to trick him into falling in love with her. And there's all these scenes where she's kind of hanging out with Helo and he falls asleep and she sneaks off to go to talk to the other Cylons and they're all like, did he say he loves you yet? And she's like, no, not yet, I'm working on it. And it's like this weird thing of she's trying to catfish him into falling in love with her because they have this theory that if he falls in love with her they can make a baby, which eventually does happen.

[00:28:18] And the show, later, in later seasons wants us to really believe that the love between Helo and Athena is real, but we saw basically a dozen episodes of her manipulating him to fall in love with her. So, it's kind of hard to not remember that if you've watched the whole show in one go. And meanwhile, Starbuck is getting imprisoned and gaslit by two different male Cylons.

[00:28:41] There's the Rick Worthy Cylon, who I don't think ever gets a name, who's like the creepy doctor guy. And then there's Leoben, played by Callum Keith Rennie, and all they want to do is lock Starbuck up and either harvest her ovaries or trick her into becoming a mom. And Callum Keith Rennie’s character, Leoben, we're going to talk about him a little bit more later in the episode, but he becomes super obsessed with Starbuck and becomes kind of a sadomasochistic spiritual guide to her, which is as weird as it sounds.

[00:29:11] And in the final season, there's this political operative named Tory Foster, who we thought was just a human, but she finds out that she's a Cylon, and she immediately turns into a femme fatale. Like, there's such a switch that's flipped. She's suddenly seducing Baltar and doing stuff like creepily flirting with Tyrol in front of Tyrol’s wife to like try to mess with their marriage. Just generally like all the weirdest femme fatale stereotypes. Suddenly, the moment she knows she's a Cylon. 

Annalee: [00:29:38] Yeah, it’s really insane. And like you said, the Cylons are either femme fatales or they're obsessed with getting pregnant. So, it’s like…

Charlie Jane: [00:29:48] They are, which is a big trope in general in AI stories.

Annalee: [00:29:53] Really, it is. It goes beyond this show, but it's like, again, either they want to be the fembot or the mommybot. But then, you have the human character, President Roslin, who's kind of a great character when she's not being like a weirdo messiah. Which, to be fair, the male characters also have the weirdo messiah thing, so. I think she's a real exception to this.

Charlie Jane: [00:30:17] Yeah, and President Roslin is honestly my favorite character in the entire series. When I rewatched it, I was really struck by how great she is, and yeah, she does have those moments of, I'm tripping on cancer medications and having visions that are going to lead us to Earth. Which, there are periods where the show really leans into that and she becomes one of the characters who is kind of speaking for, she's kind of a spiritual leader and it gets creepy and culty at times. But, she's generally the hero of the series. And I think that the series, the show, definitely sees her that way. 

[00:30:52] She's the one who basically, and Adama very much later in the show admits this, that she kind of saves everybody because there's this moment in the miniseries where Adama's like, okay, the Galactica, the Battlestar is going to abandon all of the human survivors and go off and fight the Cylons in basically a suicide mission.

[00:31:10] And Roslin has to kind of convince him that the war is over and they lost and all they can do is survive now and try to find a new place to live. And she finally talks him out of this futile mission and she's the reason why anybody survives in the show. She's this really believable leader who has nerves of steel, even when she's dying of cancer and yeah, she acts like a school teacher, but the show does not let that invalidate her authority at all.

[00:31:38] And, considering that all the romantic relationships in BSG pretty much are depressing or dysfunctional or doomed or terrible or just kind of messed up. Like, I guess the relationship between the Saul and Ellen Tigh is just this kind of an ongoing dysfunctional relationship. But some of the other relationships are just like doomed from the beginning.

[00:32:01] There’s only one romance in BSG that's actually beautiful and heartfelt and feels organic and really just a beautiful love story. And that is the romance between Adama and Roslin, who start out as enemies and become really tender towards each other. And it's become one of my favorite romances of all time. I cried a lot at the end.

[00:32:24] I just want to come back really fast to the femme fatale thing because I feel like one of the things that struck me watching the whole show in a row is like you see all this stuff where like Six, in particular, is seducing and manipulating and being a femme fatale. And then you get to this really horrifying thing halfway through season two where they meet the Battlestar Pegasus and there's a Six on board who has been systematically gang raped by the crew of the Pegasus and it feels like this is the ultimate expression of the show's obsession with consent violations and using sexuality as a means of control or as a weapon. It kind of culminates in this terrible gang rape sequence, which luckily we don't see most of, but it really feels like there's some weird unexamined stuff going on there that I still am kind of chewing over.

Annalee: [00:33:17] Yeah, I mean, on one hand, rape is a big part of war, and nearly every total war has a ton of victims of rape. And so I think, I'm sure that's part of their effort, like, to go into kind of intentionality. I think that the, that the writers really wanted that to be realism.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:42] I mean, it's like Game of Thrones, Game of Thrones also was here’s some rape—

Annalee: [00:33:46] Super rapey, yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:33:48] Part of the realism or whatever. And it's like, there's a valid debate about whether you actually need that. 

Annalee: [00:33:53] I agree. And I think it does go back to being unable to imagine female robots that aren't at some level, fembots. And remember a fembot is both eroticized, but also is a killing machine, just like in Ex Machina.

[00:34:08] And the thing that I, to go back to Roslin for a moment. The thing that's so interesting about her character is that she doesn't represent anything to do with sexuality. She represents the contradictions and conflicts of democracy. And she's really the place in the show where we think through what is civil society? What is the relationship between the government and the military? How do we have an election? How do we know that this is fair? How do we separate religion from government? And so she gets to have that really rich position as a character that the other women are just not allowed to have.

[00:34:49] Maybe Starbuck does a little bit. 

Charlie Jane: [00:34:50] Yeah. And one more thing about the romantic relationships in the show is that I found season three kind of frustrating in its own way. Because that's the season where, at the end of season two there's a one year time jump and when we come back at the end of that time jump a bunch of characters have gotten married. And we don't get to see the honeymoon, we don't get to see them falling in love, for the most part. We just get to see their marriages falling apart and it's actually really painful to watch, especially without having gotten to see the good part. And actually, it’s weird. It's kind of dystopian. 

[00:35:22] And actually, that leads me to one of the characters that I really became obsessed with this time around, which is Anastasia Dualla.

Annalee: [00:35:29] Mm, yeah!

Charlie Jane: [00:35:29] So, she's one of the most prominent Black characters on the show. She’s a Black woman and there’s the other Black characters that come to mind immediately, and please let me know if I'm forgetting any, listeners. But there's the evil Cylon played by Rick Worthy and then there's also a bunch of Black characters who are, like, from the planet Gemenon, where everybody is hyper religious, and they all become part of Laura Roslin's cult followers.

Annalee: [00:35:53] Yeah, they're like the Black [crosstalk]. 

Charlie Jane: [00:35:54] I mean, there's one or two Black characters who actually become prominent, but they're there to kind of prop up Laura Roslin's spiritual legitimacy. 

[00:36:04] But Dualla is actually a great character in the first two seasons. She gets a lot of great moments and in season two, she gets this amazing scene, which is like probably my favorite scene in the entire show, where she tells Adama that he needs to reunite the fleet. 

BSG Clip: [00:36:19] You made a promise to all of us to find Earth, to find us a home, together. It doesn't matter what the president did or even what Lee did. Because every day that we remain apart is a day that you've broken your promise.

[00:36:44] People aboard those ships made their own decision. It was their decision, not mine. Thank you, petty officer. You may leave now. 

[00:36:57] You asked to talk to me, sir. Maybe because you think that I don't have anything to say. But I do. It's time to heal the wounds, Commander. People have been divided. 

[00:37:14] I said that's enough.

[00:37:15] Children are separated from their parents. 

Charlie Jane: [00:37:20] Such a powerful scene and Kandyse McClure absolutely sells it. And she's the last person that Adama expects to stand up to her, so it hits twice as hard coming from her. And she kind of is the moral compass of the show in season two to some extent. 

[00:37:33] And then, get to season three. She's just Lee Adama’s wife, and she's kind of relegated to giving him moral support and then later getting upset with him for being a shitty husband. And then halfway through season four, she kills herself, kind of out of nowhere and it feels honestly disappointing that this character who had so much great material in season two is kind of cast aside and turned into a love interest.

Annalee: [00:37:55] Yeah, it's not good.

Charlie Jane: [00:37:58] And, the show does such a fantastic job, I just want to shout out one other character who's super nuanced and complicated and flawed, who also happens to be a person of color. Felix Gaeta, who is this [crosstalk]

Annalee: [00:38:09] Love him! Love Felix.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:09] Character who makes really tough choices and ultimately turns against his comrades for really legitimate reasons. And actually one character who I found too cartoony the first time around when I watched the show before, Gaius Baltar, he worked a lot better for me this time because he’s kind of this holy fool who is being stalked, like we said, by a horny angel. And he keeps just like blundering into situations where he's way out of his depth, but people take him seriously for some reason. 

Annalee: [00:38:40] Well, he’s like a famous scientist, or something.

Charlie Jane: [00:38:44] Or something. And he's kind of the comic relief of the show, but he also gets some of the most poignant moments.

[00:38:51] I was like, okay, yeah. I feel like Baltar does a lot of really interesting work on the show.

Annalee: [00:38:59] You know, we haven't even talked about Starbuck, yet.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:01] Yeah. And like, that's—

Annalee: [00:39:05] So many feelings. 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:05] My feelings about Starbuck are, yeah, so many feelings. Like my feelings about Starbuck are kind of inextricable from my feelings about the show's supernatural elements, which I was kind of saving for last because in the final season, Starbuck kind of becomes an angel.

Annalee: [00:39:20] [Heavy sigh] You know, I really liked the cigar chomping, fisticuffs version of Starbuck, and I was— 

Charlie Jane: [00:39:31] I think that we all liked that version.

Annalee: [00:39:33] Yeah, so that? Yeah, it was a bit disappointing.

Charlie Jane: [00:39:38] Yeah. I feel like Starbuck is an example of character who's like a recognizable type. She's the badass pilot who screws around, drinks hard, gambles, and is out for a good time, but is kind of secretly super damaged. And the show does a lot of interesting stuff with that. But also kind of wants to take her in this other direction. And, Starbuck becoming an angel is sort of emblematic of the main thing that bothered me about this show. And I'm just going to come out and say it. 

Annalee: [00:40:04] Okay. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:04] After watching all of BSG in one go, my overarching takeaway is that Battlestar Galactica is one of the best science fiction shows ever made. It's in the top 10. It's the gold standard. 

Annalee: [00:40:17] Agreed. 

Charlie Jane: [00:40:17] But. It's also kind of a mediocre fantasy show.

Annalee: [00:40:23] Hmm, okay.

Charlie Jane: [00:40:24] The fantasy elements are threaded through the show from the first season onward. There's like prophecies, magical dreams, miracles, angels, and everything keeps coming back to this weird vision of an opera house and this special child that we start seeing in season one. 

[00:40:44] And like, Battlestar Galactica is so careful with its science fiction elements. It's so thoughtful about how it handles robots and starships and space battles and all that stuff that it feels even more glaring that the fantasy stuff is just always a little bit hand wavy. And I'm a huge believer in the idea that supernatural elements don't always need to be explained and you can have magic that's just kind of vibes that's just dreamlike or numinous.

[00:41:13] I love a trippy magical story where it's just like, woo, some stuff happened. But I feel like the problem that I have with BSG is that it puts so much weight on these fantasy elements and they kind of are so central to the plot after a while. And like every single character has mystical experiences after a while. And God is kind of heavy-handedly controlling things from behind the scenes. And, at some point, you kind of want some kind of explanation the same way that on Deep Space Nine, the prophets would show up and talk to Sisko. I kind of crave that. The Head Six and Head Baltar weren't doing it for me.

[00:41:48] So, the show just doesn't want to ever explain its fantasy elements in any meaningful way. 

Annalee: [00:41:52] Yeah, that's so interesting. I mean, it makes me think a little bit of like 2001 where you also have this very meticulously realistic representation of being in space and corporate sponsorship of spaceships and then suddenly there's—

Charlie Jane: [00:42:11] Giant baby.

Annalee: [00:42:11] Glowing babies and 1960s woo woo LSD stuff, and I think that it’s… to be fair, I think that these are narratives that are kind of invoking Clarke's third law, which is like—

Charlie Jane: [00:42:26] Oh yeah, for sure.

Annalee: [00:42:26] Which is like sufficiently, which we have critiqued in a previous episode, but the idea that anything that's truly technologically advanced will feel like magic. 

Charlie Jane: [00:42:34] Mm hmm. 

Annalee: [00:42:34] And I feel like probably BSG wants that to be the case. But also wants to have its fantasy cake as well. 

Charlie Jane: [00:42:46] Yeah, and there really is this long tradition in space opera of meeting God or whatever.

Annalee: [00:42:50] Sure.

Charlie Jane: [00:42:50] Star Trek does it all the time. But I feel like where I have a problem is when it starts to get so plot heavy, when it gets to be so much like… In Lord of the Rings, you know what the ring is, you know who Sauron is, there’s stuff that when it’s central to the plot and when there's objectives and quests and things that have to be done. At a certain point, you just have to put your cards on the table, I think. And BSG isn't content to just have the occasional trippy experience, but then we're back to the plot. It's like the trippy experiences are the plot after a while. And the opera house doesn't entirely pay off for me. It's feels like a lot of stuff is kind of vibes, but they want it to be more than vibes. 

[00:43:31] And so, okay. The character of Starbuck is where a lot of my issues really come together. 

Annalee: [00:43:35] Yeah.

Charlie Jane: [00:43:35] We talked before about Leoban, the kind of pick-up artist Cylon, who's played by Callum Keith Rennie. And he's kind of a stalker. He's creepily obsessed with Starbuck. 

Annalee: [00:43:44] He's like a domestic abuser. 

Charlie Jane: [00:43:45] He is a domestic abuser. He locks her up. He gaslights her. He gives her a fake daughter and tries to make her fall in love with him. The Cylons are really obsessed with making humans fall in love with them. It's really weird. 

[00:43:58] But show doesn't just want Leoban to be this creepy dude who's obsessed with Starbuck and is kind of a shitty PUA. The show wants him to be her spiritual guide and he can kind of see stuff about Starbuck that is important and it comes to a head at the end of season three where a mystical oracle tells Starbuck that Leoban knows her better than she knows herself.

[00:44:22] And this is feels like the show speaking to the viewer and saying, Leoben is right. And Leoben understands things that Starbuck needs to know. And it's like, what the hell, guys? Really? And then following on from this notion that Leoben is her spiritual guide, she basically kills herself in this really weirdly, pointless, horrible episode where her death could have been averted.

[00:44:49] Anyway, it’s actually really upsetting. Like she at one point is like, I'm not going to fly anymore. And Leoban, naw keep flying. It's all good. And then she dies. And it's like, why did she have to die? And then she comes back from the dead and she's even more kind fucked up and miserable when she comes back from the dead. 

Annalee: [00:45:08] Yeah, as a kind of point of order, I just don't like a narrative where two major female characters have to kill themselves. Just not into it. Don’t like it.

Charlie Jane: [00:45:24] Me neither. 

Annalee: [00:45:25] Don't like it at all. 

Charlie Jane: [00:45:25] Me neither, I don't like it. It's not my favorite. Yeah, so, watching the final season, there's a lot that I love about the final season. I actually thought it feels of a piece with the rest of BSG. It actually holds up really well overall, but I got so sick of seeing Starbuck being tortured. And she’s just having these weird, like she has this weird music that she can hear that's leading her to Earth. And then Earth turns out to be a burned out cinder.

[00:45:53] And she's just, if she's an angel, she's a really fucked up tortured angel who's really unhappy and miserable. And just getting drunk—

Annalee: [00:46:02] Toxic angel!

Charlie Jane: [00:46:02] And painting weird paintings. And she keeps screaming.

BSG Clip: [00:46:10] WE’RE GOING THE WRONG WAY!

Charlie Jane: [00:46:11] And you want all of that suffering that Starbuck goes through to have a huge payoff, and then basically in the final episode, she's like, after insisting that she's not an angel. She says even a couple episodes earlier I know for sure that I'm not an angel. She finally kind of accepts that she's an angel and that's when she leads everybody to the new home world that's going to be the new Earth.

[00:46:32] But it doesn’t feel like all of the misery we saw her go through is really justified when it's just like all she does is put some numbers into the navigation thing that she got from some sheet music and then boom, we're at the new Earth.

Annalee: [00:46:46] I’m just saying that doesn't seem like a very polytheistic way to be an angel. That feels more monotheistic. It’s giving Old Testament. It’s giving Job. It's like, no, this is like… and maybe that's the point. But the other thing that kind of happens at in that last episode, basically, really follows on from what you were saying about how this is kind of a mediocre fantasy show, which I thought was such an interesting point. Which is that, basically, the final episode is all about, yep, we're just in fantasy land now. There's no more technology. We're just on this planet and it's like the Paleolithic or whatever, or maybe even before the Paleolithic. I don't know. It's unclear. And it’s like this—

Charlie Jane: [00:47:40] It’s 150,000 years ago, or something.

Annalee: [00:47:42] Okay. So it's the paleolithic and all technology is going to be gone. We're going to just, that's what's going to happen. We're just going into the mythic era. 

Charlie Jane: [00:47:52] It’s going to be the paleo diet forever.

[00:47:53] And they kind of talk about how this will give us a chance to start over and a clean slate. And it does feel very much like the show has just finally embraced that it is a fantasy show and that we're giving up our technology. And it’s interesting because one thing that I really thought watching the final episodes is that the show's ultimate villain is Brother Cavil, who's one of the creepy dude Cylons who has consent and boundary issues.

Annalee: [00:48:19] And daddy issues and mommy issues.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:22] And Brother Cavil is the villain of the show because he's the only character by the end who still thinks he's in a science fiction show. He's a very determined rationalist. 

Annalee: [00:48:31] Oh, interesting.

Charlie Jane: [00:48:31] He rejects religion. He rejects superstition. He rejects, even the Cylon religion. And that's why he has to be done away with because he's the one person still standing in the way of the idea that we're all just going to embrace the supernatural and let go of rationality.

Annalee: [00:48:51] We're gonna dive back into the past, and dive to a time before anything that could be described as civilization, basically. That's so funny. It really is true.

Charlie Jane: [00:49:03] Basically.

Annalee: [00:49:03] It's like he's the atheist of the show. Even though, yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:49:08] He’s the science guy, kind of.

Annalee: [00:49:12] Other than Baltar cause like Baltar starts as a science guy, but very quickly becomes—

Charlie Jane: [00:49:16] Baltar, by the fourth season—

Annalee: [00:49:16] Yeah, yeah, yeah, no, I agree. He becomes this religious figure and he immediately is having visions. He very quickly goes from science guy to religion guy. 

Charlie Jane: [00:49:27] He's basically Jesus by the final season. It's kind of amazing. I actually love Baltar's arc in that show. 

[00:49:33] And my thought is, I kept thinking, like, the show borrows a bunch of story beats from the original Battlestar Galactica, like the Battlestar Pegasus showing up and a bunch of other stuff, and I kept wondering, like, what if they had just gone ahead and done what the original Battlestar did which was have a sequel show called Galactica 1980. And I'm not saying that they should have arrived on earth in the year 1980 because that would have been kind of weird but what if the Galactica had all the other human fleet show up on earth and it's 2008 and human earth politics, like our politics, are being intertwined with the politics the show has had to deal with all along. I was like I don't know. That would have been interesting. 

Annalee: [00:50:14] I mean, I think that that's what the show wanted to back away from. Like you said, that it wanted to retreat from realism, retreat from those politics that approach too closely to our own and go completely into this Old Testament mindset.

Charlie Jane: [00:50:36] Idyllic, pastoral, it's very pastoral. And you know, it’s still arguably the most successful science fiction reboot on television.

Annalee: [00:50:46] Oh, yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:46] After BSG, we got reboots of Flash Gordon, Knight Rider, The Bionic Woman, and V, all of which felt like they were trying to recapture the, the magic of BSG. 

Annalee: [00:50:56] Yeah. 

Charlie Jane: [00:50:55] I’m using “magic” in the sense of storytelling, now. But none of them had the careful character work, the attention to detail and just the kind of thoughtfulness of BSG.

[00:51:04] And that's why, despite all my complaints, it is still one of the best science fiction shows of all time. And the way that it can pivot between radically different tones, like grounded political drama, to campy silliness, to nail biting action. This show should not work as well as it does and it's really a tribute to the quality of the writing as well as the acting that it is so successful.

[00:51:28] It's truly an amazing achievement. I just want to leave on that note. 

[00:51:33] Okay. So, thank you so much for listening. And, if you just stumbled upon us, you can find us wherever podcasts are found. Please leave a review, it really helps. You can find us on Mastodon at wandering.shop. We have a patreon, patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. We're on Instagram as @OurOpinions.

[00:51:53] Thanks so much to our incredible producer Veronica Simonetti. 

Annalee: [00:51:56] Yeah!

Charlie Jane: [00:51:56] And also, thanks for the music to the wondrous Chris Palmer and Katya Lopez Nichols. And if you’re a patron, we’ll be seeing you in Discord and we’ll have a mini episode next week. Everyone else, we’ll be back in two weeks.

[00:52:10] Bye!

Annalee: [00:52:10] Bye!

[00:52:10] [OOAC theme plays. Science fictiony synth noises over an energetic, jazzy drum line.]