Respect Authority

This has been a long time coming and I find myself - despite months of opportunity on both our parts - feeling a little guilty for taking the honor away from Lou, but it has to be said, and it has to be said now: Battlestar Galactica is the most underrated show on television. 

You see, it’s Friday, and Friday means a lot of things to me: jeans and a T-shirt, donuts at work, happy hour  at the stroke of 5, and various theoretical social engagements after. Yet on this particular Friday — one on which the social engagements have advanced from the mere theoretical to the planned and actual — I find myself legitimately bummed that my evening won’t include the 10 p.m. Battlestar viewing I’ve managed to finagle for the past two weeks. 

Oh I can see you scoffing: “Friday night is for, like, drinking” or “Science fiction shows are lame.” Well, ye of little faith, for one, I totally watch BSG WHILE drinking. Secondly, science fiction shows are (generally) pretty lame, which is why Battlestar’s ability to cross genre boundaries and entertain everyone from Lou — who has a TiVo season pass to at least three shows about space — to myself, a stalwart proponent of any show that features scantily-clad former strippers vying for the affection of a washed-up musician, highlights just how universally (no pun intended) awesome it is.

The show’s basic plot: a group of disenfranchised (and as far as we know, the only remaining) humans are traveling through space in search of a home, having fled theirs after it was destroyed by roboty hybrids known as Cylons. In later seasons, the Cylons and humans have dovetailing interests (i.e. not living on spaceships for all eternity) and the dynamic between the two becomes more complicated. But all that — the stuff actually about outer space — constitutes only half of BSG’s episode content. The rest, through subtle and less-than-subtle allegories, deals with modern-day questions of morality and justice: abortion, war, immigration, religion. 

This, in a nutshell, is BSG’s undeniable strength. The closest equivalent I can think of is Lost - a rotating cast of periphery characters led by a handful of main ones, whose lives are intertwined at various points. Except the depth of thinking required by Lost rarely extends beyond “Why the fuck is that island so magical?” while an episode of BSG forces viewers to confront far more provocative issues, all through the lens of a post-apocalyptic space setting. If Cylons can help humans find a permanent residence, should all of their past transgressions be forgiven? In a time of perpetual war, how much authority should the fleet’s admiral have, versus its body politic? With an ever-dwindling human population, should women still have the right to choose?

I won’t hesitate to give credit where credit is due - Lou has endorsed BSG since its inception, and without his ceaseless enthusiasm I might never have gotten into the show at all, which is to say I might still be the kind of person who thinks Friday nights are for things like “friends” and “going out.” But thanks to Lou - and the undeniable fact that drugs make shows about space way entertaining - I’m now an avid BSG devotee, who as she sips her beers with peers this evening will perhaps secretly be wishing she was home on the couch.