By Your Command...

Ms. Z's responses to the "Battlestar Galactica, I don't get it" post below, where she registers her loathing of the new series being a presumably ardent fan of the old, kind of left me inspired to share my thoughts on the matter in a manner more suited to a post rather than a comment.

While Z claims to be such a fan of the old series that she can't process the new one, I don't find myself in such a quandary, for some reason.

Here are my best guesses as to why...

First, let me just say that I am a fan of both. In my opinion, both series are meritous in the annals of sci-fi. Most of the complaints that I've heard regarding it tend to mirror the one I've mentioned, that the old and new series aren't spun the same way and that people who have come to love the old series, campy warts and hackneyed plots and all, will find themselves disappointed in the plot and betrayed by the characters.

Let's put aside the basic story line for another day, in which both series exhibit similitude at the outset but have diverged greatly since (and thus the most obvious difference), and discuss what I feel to be the greater stumbling block towards liking the new series: the characters.

The first "betrayal" that one will note is obvious from the very first episode: pilots Boomer and Starbuck are played by women.

Well, I suppose back in the late 70's you could get away with male dominance in the fighter ranks, but I doubt that this would fly now (please ignore this pun... please). The original series even took on this idea to laughable end when the entire pilot corps got sick and they needed to train fighter pilots out of the (entirely female) shuttle pilot corps. I was left with a feeling that the writers made a concerted effort to say, "Hey, she just banked left when she should have banked right! Oooh! Women are so cute when they try to fly Vipers." while watching that episode. Bleah.

The second "betrayal" that one will note it that, quite unlike the original characters, which were archetypically heroic and well principled, these new characters are flawed.

Perhaps, again, in the late 70's, coming off the heels of Star Wars and Star Trek, we became accustomed to the heroic swashbuckler archetype, but such an over-the-top caricature would be ill-received now.

So +10 to the new for not being limited in characterization by the older medium either in manner or gender.

Now several dings:

While I appreciate the lack of limits, the failure to create the "cohesive trio" with Apollo as the hyperprincipled leader, Starbuck as #1 sidekick and ladies man, and Boomer as the straight man to Starbuck's comic relief damages the interplay which was probably the original series most laudable asset. By diverging too much from that recipe, you lose something important.

Apollo, still the leader, isn't particularly idealistic, has issues with his father, and has a love-hate-love relationship with Starbuck. While this allows for some interesting interplay between the two characters, you're left with the idea that the Galactica pilots don't have a center they look to for direction.

Starbuck is a complete mess from a standpoint of characterization. Easily the most troubled of the pilots (not so easy a trick when one pilot has discovered her Cylonity), I think that the complete divergence from devil-may-care huckster and horn-dog was a disservice to the character. I would have preferred a female version of the original Starbuck. While Kara Thrace is certainly a pilot who takes chances and gambles quite a bit, both within the cockpit and without, I find her unlovable because she has, by far, the lowest self-esteem quotient of the entire cast... always aggressive, always something to prove, and never happy about much of anything, a complete departure from the original character.

Now some specific kudos:

Boomer was always a bit nondescript in the original series, really just serving as a tag-along for the Apollo and Starbuck characters. Duty-bound, often exasperated, but really having no real character to call his own. That's just sad. So make Boomer a Cylon, a sexy female one at that. I love it. Have her shoot the Commander at close range. Fantastic. Let her have a Cylon-human hybrid. Excellent. And let's keep one copy of her around and put her back in a Raptor. Genius. Boomer's character went through an entire scope of exploration in three episodes what the original couldn't achieve in two entire seasons.

Colonel Tigh, in the original, was another character whose primary function, it seemed, was to consume oxygen on the set and whose secondary function was to be alternately astonished and exasperated with both Adama and the three pilots. So let's make him a gruff, curmudgeonly, happy-to-see-his-career-nearly-over, highly-functional alcoholic with an enabling, selfish, jerk of a wife who will turn out to be a Cylon collaborator. The success of this character can be seen in my ever-growing ability to hate his guts. I say success, because I firmly believe that this is entirely intentional.

Commander (now Admiral) Adama, once an over-the-top, father figure, wizened Jedi Master sort, comes down out of the rarefied atmosphere of near godhood to become a more reasonable character, questioning of his own decisions and actions as both commander and as father, as one would expect of a person grunting under the weight of responsibility in his position.

And Baltar. What can't I say about the new Baltar. I never really ever bought the original Baltar character. Firstly, with a personality so insipidly and obviously evil, I would think it difficult to near impossible to accomplish the destruction of the Twelve Colonies without someone becoming suspicious. You can't perfectly hide a personality like that. And I really doubt that I'm believing that a person as brilliantly villainous as Baltar would be as stupid as to expect that the Cylons would keep their promise to spare his colony and install him as leader. And the fact that once he got his own Cylon command, he had three base ships, entire regiments of centurions, and a free-and-clear from human justice, and what did he do? He spent the rest of the series in a Keystone Coppish vendetta against his nemesis, Adama. The comic-book villain archetype, done to ridiculous end.

The new Baltar is a brilliant man who harbors within him the soul of a sniveling coward, and as you'd suspect of someone of such ilk, preoccupied with his own survival and the continued reinforcement of his own ego. He bears no foolish grudgery... he hasn't got the time... he's got his own ass to save. Baltar represents the villainy of the real... the sellouts... the selfish... the craven. There are hints of him being Cylon. That would be nice, because I believe that is the thing that will bring his true self to the fore, after all, being granted Cylon "immortality", and thus no need to concern himself with the pedantry of survival, what will he become? What threat will he finally pose? The possibilities are certainly interesting.

I could go on, but suffice it to say that, in a world where depicting epic space battles no longer gets the ooh's and ahh's it used to back in 1979 (due to the proliferation and, in my opinion, overuse of CG) it is the characters that make the story. The new BSG is strong in this regard, and does it in fine fashion, minus a few hiccups here and there. The old series is also strong in this regard, but in a more prefabricated, plastic manner more befitting the polyester, disco-bound, late '70s entertainment ethic.