"According to sources in the White House, President Barack Obama has been uncharacteristically distant and withdrawn ever since last month's two-hour series finale of Battlestar Galactica."
I totally feel the same way. While I still loosely follow Lost and have a guilty pleasure in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles (which just keeps getting better), I just find myself listless and distracted without BSG.
Once Firefly was canceled (which still remains unrivaled in my opinion) I thought there would never be redemption for televised science fiction. I thought I was condemned to watching Andromeda or Stargate forever. I thought that I would eternally dwell in a universe created by Gene Roddenberry.
For me, BSG was the antithesis of Star Trek: Next Generation. All the Star Treks were really just a liberal, multi-cutlural fantasy giving us an image of what we aspired to be as a society without calling us out everything that hindered us. Not to be too crass, but it was basically cold war propaganda which then shifted into celebrating inclusion and tolerance. As someone said, Star Trek was a symbol of what we hoped to be while BSG expressed what we really are: all messed up and barely hanging on. For the most part BSG unflinchingly dealt with the tragic aspect of humanity, that we are simultaneously cylons and humans, uh, I mean sinners and saints.
I was out at dinner and I started talking with a friend whom I hadn't seen in a while. He mentioned that he'd heard I like BSG. We could have talked all night, as I could here. But I will end with this: I hope and pray that churches could function, well, but that is the wrong word, that churches could exist like BSG, describing the world as it really is and in that process opening it up to something more. Let us not as churches project a fantasy that soothes our consciences, but rather to boldly go where no few churches have gone before: the place where we deal with our actual humanity.
pardon me? haha. you had me really wondering up through the fourth paragraph.
Posted by: brad | April 06, 2009 at 12:27 AM
I am bereft with the end of BSG :-(
Posted by: Jason Clark | April 06, 2009 at 12:58 AM
firefly... sigh.
Posted by: Bryne Lewis Allport | April 06, 2009 at 05:55 AM
"She's broken her back, Bill. She'll never jump again." [lump-in-the-throat time]
Even as a long-time trekker, I couldn't agree more with your post, Geoff. BSG's portrait of humanity as stumbling on the edge of the abyss speaks more to (and from) us than Star Trek TNG's ideal of the 19th century dilettante as ideal human (think of Data's attempts to understand humanity). I did wonder, though, about the last hour or so, as the tragedy turned abruptly to comedy (actually something like a return to Edenic paradise, which was like a slap in the face after the first hour). Even great, late-modern "secular" writers like Ron Moore struggle with "endings". Perhaps that's why he winked at us with those contemporary robot ads in the last scene?
Posted by: Steve Martin | April 06, 2009 at 09:55 AM
Amen! Nice to find other voices who find theological meaning in both Battlestar (about which I've written as well) and Firefly. Here's to Caprica saving us from more Roddenberry ... or maybe Abrams' reboot will be less cheerily utopian?
Posted by: Brad E. | April 06, 2009 at 12:32 PM
But don't get me wrong. I'm definitely going to see the next Trek movie. I just have low expectations.
but steve, the ending has grown more and more on me. At first the last hour was unsatisfying (and even when John blew his head off...which I thought was implausible, but maybe he calculated the possibility of survival and decided he wanted to die on his terms). But then I thought that rather then the heroic gesture of TNG finale with Q performing a final test (which of course humanity passes), BGS ended both with the possibility that all the carnage would happen again, but also distinct possibility that a) either there really was some sort of god at play (which the Trek universe never really acknowledged), or b) that eons ago some form of cyclon actually evolved into mystical like protects (angels) of humanity (or whatever iteration of human/cyclon cross breeding there was).
I also like the relationships that were in a sense consumated: Ti and Helen finally really get together, and the Six and Baltar, but Apollo and Starbuck don't, and really neither does the Adama or Roslin b/c she dies in "Eden" without ever living there (much like Moses). So, sure the time warp at the end is a comedic wink, but for the characters it is a mixed bag.
Or in a theological twist, the finale offers us a mixed eschatology of hope and tragedy.
Posted by: geoff holsclaw | April 06, 2009 at 05:19 PM
Battlestar was good. Too much God stuff for my liking though.
Posted by: Pat | April 07, 2009 at 05:18 AM
but pat, that's the point. it didn't shy away from the return of the religious in contemporary thought.
sure, BSG wisely never came down on either side of monothesism or polytheism, but it raised the issue skillfully and persistently.
Posted by: geoff holsclaw | April 07, 2009 at 09:46 AM
T:SCC definitely has some shining moments.
Posted by: Scott Savage | April 07, 2009 at 06:20 PM
Yes, "Terminator" has been surprising. I watched it just out of curiosity, but then I got hooked. The writing if pretty creative, and it doesn't try to do too much (unlike Lost or Heroes). it started small and in some ways its is staying small. The main characters are the main characters and the secondary ones, well, they get killed off.
Like the cylon/human exploration of what is really "humanity" in BSG, T:SCC is exploring artificial intelligence and what constitutes the "image of God".
Posted by: geoff holsclaw | April 07, 2009 at 06:53 PM
Scientific-technological revolution and the historical consciousness.The way how the mankind developed through last 40 000 years,expressed in terms of semiotics.
Posted by: Miroslav Miskovic | September 23, 2010 at 08:21 AM