Holding down the number one spot in the conclusion of the Childhood Recovery Project Top Ten Sci Fi Shows ever. . .
1: Battlestar Galactica (reboot) - Hands down. The. Greatest. Sci Fi. Show. Ever.
Those of you who may have been following this list as it developed know I put "Star Trek" at number two. It had a stranglehold on the top spot until a few short years ago. Once "Galactica" had a couple of seasons under it's belt, it took over the top spot, and no other choice even entered my mind for this position on this list.
Where the 1978 incarnation of "Galactica" was informed by the cold war and featured a faceless "evil empire" as the enemy, the 2004 reboot took it's influence from the "war on terror," and played with the fear that "the enemy could be anyone and they are living among us." This led to a far more complex textured canvas on which to build the story.
This show made lots of bold choices from the very beginning and never let up. With full knowledge that comparisons to the original were inevitable, there was all manner of messing with the original format. They gave one of the main characters a sex change, fer cryin' out loud. The African-American Boomer character from the original was changed to an asian female in an era where political correctness led to many shows being especially severely criticized for a lack of representation of people of color. And they even turned Boomer to a sleeper agent bad guy.
I love the look to this show. The set design is "contemporary aircraft carrier." At first, I found myself a little distracted and confounded by the defiance of my expectation of Sci Fi set design and the lack of smooth, angular walls and fixtures and slick, glossy touch screen instrument displays. The sight of obvious, unmodified contemporary equipment, such as the corded telephone handsets, for example were jarring in the beginning. But as the story got moving, this seemed to settle into the background (where it belongs) and allow the characters and story to be front and center.
Finally a space show had the smarts to “shoot hand held” in the space battle scenes. Instead of the smooth, sterile video game look of most CG special effects, Galactica gave us a view that truly feels like WWII wing camera footage. With any other Sci Fi show, when a special effects scene comes on, my brain compulsively begins to evaluate technique. Is it CG or physical models? How is it lit? For the first time, my brain jumped past that nonsense and just reveled in what it was like to actually be in space.
I liked this show for what it did not have as much as what it did. This is a Sci Fi show with no aliens. What a concept? Just because you are in space doesn't mean you can't tell a HUMAN drama without the distraction of latex rubber foreheads. Alien cultures in Star Trek and other shows are so often 2-dimensional and defined by one single character trait. Vulcans are logical. Klingons are warlike. Ferengi are greedy. Producer Ronald D. Moore could have redefined aliens (like the original show's Borellian Nomen) in the same way he redefined so many other aspects of Sci Fi storytelling in this show, but he made perhaps the wisest decision of all. "Lets just not have any stinkin' aliens."
Technology had little to nothing to do with this show. In fact, one of the primary characteristics of the title "character" is that the Galactica has no networked computers. This is the main reason she survived the initial Cylon attack, which involved a computer virus. The weapons in the show, both handheld and heavy/aircraft-based, fire conventional bullets. Super-duper highly explosive bullets, to be sure, but bullets nonetheless. There are no laser beams to take us out of the atmosphere of realism.
There were no mysterious galactic phenomena, energy beings, or (for heaven's sake) holodeck malfunctions to put the characters in some kind of cute jeopardy for one episode only. Somewhat related to that, there was no technobabble. The day was never saved by "feeding a phase modulated graviton neutrino pulse through through the tachyon flux inhibitors to restore primary plasma coolant flow to the dilithium crystal matrix." Don't get me wrong. I love Next Generation. But there were just too many times when they had a great story that took characters in exciting new directions, but they didn't have a good ending, so they resorted grim faces, bombastic music, a lot of incomprehensible dialog followed by a big'ol slap to the reset button.
And speaking of that, there is no reset button in "Galactica." If you're dead, you're dead. (Well, except for Cylon resurrection, of course.) No waking up in the shower and realizing it was all a dream. If you lose an eye or a leg, there are no cloned or cybernetic implant replacements. Other shows put characters in different roles just for one episode or for a short arc, but Lee Adama handed in his rank insignia in a heated exchange with his father in order to become defense council to the foremost traitor to the colonies. That could have been a short detour, but it became a permanent change. "Galactica" had enough hot shot pilots and needed to groom a few statesmen, so the change was made without a flinch.
I have trouble getting into the anti-hero type of characters depicted in shows such as "Breaking Bad" and "Dexter," but I really dig it when characters have a dark side. Pretty much every character in Galactica does both heroic things and deplorable things. A primary example of this is the character of Gaeta, portrayed by Alessandro Juliani. In the pilot movie, he is a young, enthusiastic, hyper-efficient officer, almost in the Wesley Crusher mold, but through a long story arc, he becomes bitter and bigoted and ultimately the lever for some of the most grievous atrocities depicted in the show. But in the end, his character is not purely evil, but tinged with tragedy.
There is similar complexity another major character, Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes). Clearly, there is an aura of heroism cast over her by the mere fact that she and her crew survived the Cylon massacre, but we are subsequently forced to confront whether the ends are justified by her means. Similarly, in the "New Caprica" arc, our heroes were forced to become in many ways the same kind of insurgents and suicide bombers we were finding so reprehensible in Iraq at the time.
I love a story that grabs me by the 'nads and makes me look at something from the other side.
I think very actor in this show was excellent, and Olmos, Bamber and Callis were SUPERLATIVE.
So, there's my Number One, and my primary reasons for choosing it. As mentioned in the Fusion Patrol podcast, there can be debate over the religion and mysticism depicted in the show, and many folks seem to take umbrage at the finale, which I found quite good. But all of that can be discussed in future posts, as this one has already gotten quite long.
Now, I suppose I do have to acknowledge something else: Dr. Frakkin' Who. Of the four of us taking this opportunity to publish top ten lists (Newsarama, Ben and Eugene from Fusion Patrol, and me), I'm the only one who doesn't have Dr. Who right at the top of the list, or anywhere on the list for that matter. When one's view is so apparently outside the mainstream an explanation is probably called for. So, in much the same way as I might have to explain why I, for hypothetical example, think powdered pig shit is good on corn flakes, I here briefly provide my take on Dr. Who: I just don’t get it. I’ve seen maybe 6 episodes of different vintages, so while I will grant that I may not have given it a fair shake considering it's inexplicably lengthy run, the fact is I never, ever saw one thing in Dr. Who that made me want to fight through another episode. Sorry.
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