All along the watchtower and Battlestar Galactica

A special thank you to edgeNridge for some interesting and sometimes funny analyses of BSG on some Friday nights. :)


This week, many "Battlestar Galactica" fans will bid farewell to the series they have been following faithfully for the past four seasons. I was not able to be faithful to it from the beginning as moving from place to another, I didn't always have access to a television or a computer, and no one I knew watched the series, but I tried to catch up almost a year ago when during the first week of my move to Boise, with my job not beginning until the second week of April, I spent much of that time watching the BSG marathon on the Sci-Fi channel that was to lead up to the beginning of the final season.

"Battlestar Galactica" is the story of a group of human survivors on the run in space, after having engaged in battle with the Cylons, human-created machines who in somewhat Frankenstein style (not the best analogy) revolted against their "masters." The war between the humans and the cylons continue, as well as the distrust and hate between the two groups, but as the series continues, past Cylon domination at New Caprica, there are changes. There are Cylons who show greater humanity than humans, and there are humans who discover that they have been Cylons all along. The line gets blurred between good and evil as well as human vs. machine and in the search for "Earth", those virulently against Cylon "toasters", and vice-versa learn that they must depend on one another in order to survive, as well as reach their destination: Earth.

I recall a couple of years ago, listening to those who talked about "Battlestar Galactica" being an allegory for the Iraq war. I think it's dangerous to call it a direct allegory and the creator of the show, Ronald D. Moore talks about how uninteresting it would be if it were a direct allegory:

What is interesting to you?

It's interesting for me as a writer when we can move the chess pieces around a little bit, when you're dealing with suicide bombing on the show but suddenly it's not those other people who are doing it, but your characters. You're able to examine the moral questions of it in a different context because you're not burdened by the direct analogy of saying, "If Laura is George Bush and the cylons are the enemy, how do you deal with it?" That to me isn't great drama because everything is so loaded and so apparent. Science fiction gives you the opportunity to mix and match the elements and the circumstances. You can deal with the deeper themes and issues because you've scrambled the chess pieces. You're coming at it from a different point of view.

I get the impression you want to avoid parroting a boiler-plate political position, whatever your own politics might be.

I do try not to do that. I'm not naive enough to think my politics don't influence the show. I'm certain that they do, but the show's mission is not to present answers to what I think are really complicated, difficult questions. One of the mistakes TV often makes is that it tries to tackle complicated moral and legal issues and wrap them up in an hour and give you a neat, tidy message by the end: "And here's the way to solve Iraq!" I don't think that's helpful, and I don't think that's good storytelling or great to watch. Our mission is more about asking questions, asking the audience to think about things, to think about uncomfortable things, to question their own assumptions.

I like the show best when you get to a place where you're not sure who you're rooting for anymore, you're not sure whose side you're on. And you're confused and you might even be angry about what we're doing but at least it's forced you to a place of trying to define your own point of view on something.

I like what Moore is saying here and it speaks to my own thoughts regarding the show. There are no easy answers to the moral issues that come up with creation, revolution, us vs. them, patriotism, although in this case it would be just plain loyalty. And like Moore, I liked this show best because I could look at the Cylons a little differently than I did in the first Galactica series made in the early eighties. And even in that series, the Cylons were being commanded to attack humans, by a human.

Every character is flawed in this series, some more than others. And there are very few speeches about superior morality or holding someone up to a higher standard as there were in some of the Star Trek sequels like The Next Generation. There are degrees of humanity in various characters, including the "toasters."

***
Bob Dylan's "All Along The Watchtower" has figured prominently as backdrop music for the series since the end of Season three. It was the music that brought four humans together to the confusing realization that they were Cylons. It's become the theme song of sorts for the Cylons.

"There must be some way out of here. . ." Hera, the half human half cylon daughter of Hilo and Athena holds the key to the "salvation" of what remains of both races. Held hostage by an embittered cylon, we can only speculate what is to become of the characters in Battlestar Galactica. ana hopes against hope that there is no anti-climax.

Jimi Hendrix, in my opinion does the best "Watchtower" rendition, so much so that it inspired the man who wrote and performed it to begin with: Dylan, to do it more the Hendrix way. He does flub a bit here, but words cannot adequately express the awesomeness of a Hendrix performance.



and the one performing the song here with clips from Galactica, is Bear McCreary who does the music for the show.



* the source for the Ronald D. Moore interview is: http://www.salon.com/ent/feature/2007/03/24/battlestar/index.html

** cross-posted in my "other" blog.