BATTLESTAR GALACTICA: “The Worst Ending in the History of Televised Science Fiction”

>>>But that rats in a maze analogy is spot-on as well.<<<

Thanks! It's off the cuff, just thought it up on the spur of the moment...as I was predestined to. <G>

>>>The tweakings of an interventionist deity only devalue man's involvement if you hold to the view that determinism/destiny is incompatible with man's free will.<<<

I'm sort of a romantic, so I don't really feel "Either/Or" are the only options here. As Straczynski said, for instance, "Faith and Reason are the shoes on your feet. You'll go further with both than you ever will with only one alone."

I believe in Free Will and not really Destiny, but I don't think that obviates the possiblity of Intervention. Rats have free will to go through the maze, or just sit and poop, but a behavioral scientist can yank rats out of the maze, and put them elsewhere - a cage, another maze, back in the wild, whatever - this doesn't remove their free will, it just occasionally makes it subordinate.

I suppose I'm saying "I believe in free will, and am very skeptical of destiny, but I recognize that free will can be limited on occasion."

Brad,

Wow! Thank you for taking the time to read all that and reply in detail. I had no idea our little site would ever come to your attention, and I thank you for taking the time and interest to join in the discussion, seriously!

As to the premise and setting of the original '78 Galactica (And it's bastard stepchild, Galactica 1980), the interesting thing (to me) about that show is that the behind-the-scenes folks kept going back and forth about when the show was actually set. Initially it had been conceived of as being in the far future (5999 AD), and they were heading back to Earth after the colonies got destroyed. This quickly turned in to the story being set in the antediluvian past when filming began, then most of the series seems to have been produced with the idea that it was taking place in the year we were watching it -78/79. Galactica '80 retconned this to it taking place in 1950 or so,and contradicted some of the original series internal details in the process. Really neither here nor there, I guess, but it interests me because at one point or another the concept for the orignal series entailed *all* of the ideas you've mentioned.

I would disagree that divine characters are always problematic. Obviously, we both agree that it's frequently badly done, and that it was spectacularly badly done in the case of the RDM Galactica, but I don't think it's always the case. The recent series "Kings," for instance, managed to do this very well, and made no bones about the fact that their fictional version of God was manipulating people's lives for His own ends, whatever they might be. Lost *may* be doing this as well. But even when done well, it's frought with peril because - in the case of Kings, for instance - you're taking a God that people believe in (Yahweh/Allah) and you're turning Him in to a fictional character to play with as the writers see fit. If one is a believer, this is perhaps like trying to capture an image of Jesus in a stained glass window at best, and at worst, it's just openly demeaning. And it's just this hesitance to turn God in to a fictional character that has tended to limit His use in fiction for the last thousand years or so, which, ironically, might be partially at root for your own umbrage of it. A "This sort of thing simply isn't done!" reaction, which a lot of conservative Christians had when God started showing up in Galactica. Both Galacticas, really, now that I think about it.

But, again, I think we're mostly on the same page here: Both of us agree the RDM Galactica did it badly, and whether or not it *can* be done well is perhaps beside the point.

As to whether or not the Cylon God is The Christian one, certainly a lot of people have taken Him to be. One of our own contributors wrote a lengthy essay called "Why I Love the Cylon God" and got it published in one of those companion-reader books you see on Amazon. This doesn't prove he's right or anything, but he makes a pretty compelling argument, and certainly the Cylon God seems to describe himself in Christian terms quite a bit. I don't know what RDM's current beliefs - if any - are, but I've heard him describe himself as a "Recovering Catholic" on several occasions, so it's only natural that if he's doing a story involving God he'd cop concepts from the God he was exposed to growing up.

BTW, Yahweh *does* intervene - a lot - in the Old Testament. He drives Adam and Eve out, He personally curses/protects Cain, He has dinner with Abraham, He wrestles with Jacob, He does all that smiting stuff with Moses, He appears as a whirlwind and screams at Job, and on and on it goes. Granted, that does settle down a bit as the book progresses, and He tends to work more through second parties rather than doing things Himself, but He's very much intervening throught the old Testament, and of course He sent Jesus in the new. I'm not arguing that you should believe these things, of course, just saying I think you're mistaking on that point: God is more-or-less constantly raiding the game and sending people scrambling in the bible.

Again, what's interesting (to me) in this is that if you watch the earlier, better episodes of the show, the whole "God" thing was clearly intended to be metaphorical. This was right after 9/11, when fundamentalist muslims blew up the twin towers, outraging our own reasonably multicultural, reasonably tolerant society. In the pilot miniseries, the Cylons were clearly, clearly, clearly depicted as creepy monotheists, and as such the bad guys. They were intended to be surrogates for fundamentalists - Muslims, the kinds of Christians who blow up abortion clinics, etc - and the colonials were obviously polytheistic pagans as a means of getting across that they tolerated a whole bunch of different beliefs and outlooks and what have you. It's interesting to me that as the show progressed, the monotheist view subsumed the pagan one, and the destruction of the colonies went from being this unfathomable evil perpetrated by those bad fundies to being equated with The Great Flood, a tool of God to redeem some remnant of humanity, or whatever. It's curious, and more than a bit disturbing that the show made that switch, and I can't help but feel they were selling out their own narative roots the closer they got to it. They started out effectively railing against the Judeo/Christian/Islamic/Baha'i tradition, and they ended up embracing and celebrating it in the most half-assed fashion imaginable (And DELIBERATELY wasting our time in the fourth season in the process).

As to Arks: I wouldn't call it a 'conspiracy' - conspiracies have to be hidden, and the whole literal interpretation of Noah's Ark school is fully out there for everyone to see. They've definitely got an agenda, they want to prove for the whole world that the bible is literally true, but there's no conspiracy in this. I've known some of these people quite well - I went to college with a guy connected to several Mt. Arrarat expeditions, for instance - but I've never know any of them to plant evidence, or fake stuff. Disingenuously misrepresent circumstantial evidence as fact? sure! Absolutely! Outright build a boat and burry it in Turkey? Nah.

But what I was trying to get across - and I could have phrased it better - was that there are, by conservative estimate, 1.3 Metric Assloads of Flood/Ark myths in the world, and obviously most of 'em aren't related to the Judeo/Christian/Islamic one. Check here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deluge_myth Some of these - Noah, Utnapishtim, Ducaleon, Zisudra - are clearly related, but others clearly are entirely independent standalone legends. Obviously, the reason for this is obviously that humanity *likes* the idea on some level. It makes for a good story, it's exciting, and you can apply it to any kind of moral value you like. It wouldn't keep spontaneously popping up in unrelated human cultures if it didn't fill some psychological need. As such, not only has it turned up a lot in the past, but it's going to continue to turn up, even among our descendants ten thousand years from now, who (presumably) will never have heard of The Bible or (If we're lucky) Earth.

I do totally agree that it was overdone in the 50s in genre literature, and in the teens/20s in spiritualist literature before that (Madame Blatavsky and all that atlantean hoo-hah), and I do agree that it's become a tedious cliche. I wouldn't urge writers to 'avoid giving it credence', however. That makes it a taboo, and I rail uncomfortably against people saying 'you shouldn't write this, or you should only write that.' (Which, as we speak, a major Christian ministry in Texas is urging their members to do. I don't like that kind of thinking.) Personally I'd like to see someone reinvent it in some fashion that undercuts its obvious meaning. For all I know, RDM might have been attempting that with Galactica, but if that's the case, he utterly failed.

Great Endings:
The Prisoner: It worked for me. I was completely aware the whole way through the series that it was intended as an allegory for the different kinds of rebellion (I mean, hell, MacGoohan gets elected leader of the village while his followers are chanting "666" [pause] "666" [Pause] "666," it's not like you have to be fellini to figure that out), but for people who can't distinguish between Gilligan's Island and Playhouse 90, I can see how the idea that one thing might actually mean a different thing might be sort of confusing. I say, "Screw 'em if they can't figure it out." This is a smart show, it's about something. They should either try harder to understand, or they shouldn't watch.

The TNG ending: I'm not going to argue too emphatically on behalf of this, since it's been more than a decade since I saw it, and I don't want to give the impression that I like Trek. (I don't, really.) Suffice to say that I was overjoyed with it at the time, and that it was better than the two seasons that came before it, and the movies that came after it, which migh thave shaped my judgement. If you say it's crap, I'll believe you on this one.

Babylon 5: I do feel they fumbled the ball a bit on the abrupt ending of the Shadow War. It was, well, abrupt. JMS has said that the reason for this is because the show wasn't ABOUT the shadow war, it was about how major changes in history affect the lives of people who survive them, and I think he's right. It wasn't just Cowboy Bob against Black Bart, it was "How does Cowboy Bob find meaning for his life after Black Bart is finaly defeated?" That said, it could have been handled a bit better, but this was made up for by the brilliant Civil War with earth arc, which filled out the season, and I'd say that's the true climax of the series - "We have come to place President Clark under arrest." Season 5 is deneument, easily the weakest year of the show, and it doesn't get going until the last 8 episodes or so, but I was refering to the final episode - "Sleeping in Light" - and not the climax of the story. "Sleeping in Light" was intimate, true to the characters, touching, hopeful, quiet, and sad all at the same time. It puts a lump in my throat every time I see it.

I agree that it works better if you see it at the end of Season 4, though, and without seeing season 5.

And that's about it, Brad! Again, I thank you for taking the trouble to register and point out where I missunderstood you, and for allowing me to clear up some of my own points as well, and suggest some new ones. Thank you! I do hope you'll stop by and visit us again sometime, it was fun talking/typing to you.

Ah.

Actually, the first Lensman book was written in 1934. You must have a reprint.

I agree, though. Mr. Templeton goes on longer than he needs to to make his points (I'm very guilty of doing that myself. A lot.), but his points don't really compliment each other.

Point 1) The RDM Galactica ended up being so bad of a turd that it devaluated the entire series: Agreed.
Point 2) The Religion angle of the show grew increasingly tedious, and was used as a sloppy deus ex machina (Literally!) to wrap everything up in a lazy way that didn't really follow the style of the show: Agreed
Point 3) Religion has no business being in SF: Disagree.

Point 3 is especially silly given that we're talking about Battlestar Galactica here, which has always, from it's inception, been a very religious show. It was created by Glenn Larson, who's a Mormon Bishop, and who deliberately wove a ton of his own religion's elements in to the show, along with a ton of stuff that he got from Von Danikin, which we could also argue is a new religion of sorts. I mean, hell, they're hanging out with the devil and a bunch of angels in the last third of the original show!

Bitching and moaning about how there shouldn't be religion in Galactica is like saying "Star Wars is great, except for all that 'force' nonsense," or "The New Testament would be a great story if it weren't for that really preachy guy in the first four books..." It's just stupid, and Mr. Templeton is really writing more about his own hangups here than he is about the show.

He is right, however: In the end the RDM Galactica sucks worse than I could have ever imagined.