It begins with an act of war. Years ago, humanity and the Cylons fought a destructive war to a draw, so the Cylons withdrew. For forty years, nobody heard a peep from them, this rebellious robot race that humans had created. Each year, the armistice dictated they would meet at a distant outpost, a lonely space station hanging in the void. Each year, humans sent a representative, and the Cylons never showed. As the pilot to the brilliant reboot of Battlestar Galactica begins, a military attaché finds himself nodding off, probably for the tenth year running, sitting at a desk contemplating the empty hallway where the Cylons have again failed to appear. He glances at a folder of specs, centurion designs, the robot soldiers familiar to viewers of the original 1978 series. With a pneumatic whoosh and a clang, the far door opens. The startled attaché stares agog as two strange new centurions march into view, forbidding machine-guns protruding from their fists. They come to attention and the guns transform into only slightly less disturbing long fingered hands. But they’re not the strangest sight. For what comes through the door next is a beautiful human woman, in a captivating red dress suit. She draws uncomfortably close, studying him intently, and asks “are you alive?” “Yes,” he says breathlessly. “Prove it,” she demands, coming in close and they kiss. Outside, the station is engulfed in the titanic shadow of a Cylon base star, a missile arcing toward it and exploding. As she kisses the now terrified man, she says “it has begun.” The deadly hook is baited, and we’re plunged into the genocidal hell of Battlestar, in my book right up there with The Wire for one of the best series of the 2000s.
Better than his pedigree was his ambition for the new series. Speaking recently at the Hero Complex Film Festival, Moore said “It was extremely important to me that the show was relevant to our time, that it was commenting on our time, that it was asking hard questions about it, and that it was asking the audience to sort of challenge your ideas about peace and freedom and security and liberty.” In the wake of 9/11, a show about humanity in a war-torn existential crisis was immediate in its impact. Moore’s brilliant conceit was that rather than simply being a race of chrome anthropomorphic robots, as they were in the original, the new Cylons had evolved and innovated to take human form. Entirely synthetic, these Cylon models were perfect human replicas, indistinguishable from their human counterparts at the organic, biological level. Now a race of replicant spies, the twist raised the series to another level. The miasma of fear that followed the 9/11 attacks was omnipresent, and Battlestar Galactica capitalized on that fear with targeted intelligence. The enemy was among us, and the enemy could be anyone. What lengths would a society in such mortal jeopardy go to, in order to protect itself? What freedoms would people sacrifice, desperate and on the run? In the face of dire existential threat, would we lose the very things that make us human?
To anchor big questions like these, the show needed a compelling cast and seamless realism. The show’s stern beating heart is Commander Adama, played by Edward James Olmos with gruff intelligence and steely determination. His counterpart is the President of the Colonies Laura Roslin, captured by Mary McDonnell with an equal backbone and a moral compass that almost never fails. Merely the Secretary of Education when the pilot begins, the slaughter on the home-world Caprica raises her up to the level of President, and she’s forced to take on a challenging job in impossible circumstances. As if that wasn’t enough weight on her shoulders, she’s dying of cancer. Sounds melodramatic, but Moore builds the layers gradually, letting the pieces assemble themselves. Starbuck, a cigar-chomping mischievous pilot and fan favourite from the original series, is reinvented as a woman here, and Katee Sackhoff easily tops Dirk Benedict’s winking take. She’s wild-eyed, a gifted pilot, messed-up and rebellious, and she still chews a mean cigar. Jamie Bamber essays Adama’s estranged son, the pilot Apollo. Starbuck, Apollo and Adama form a tortured triangle, torn up by the accidental death a few years back of Adama’s other son, Apollo’s brother Zak. Starbuck was involved with Zak as well as being his flight instructor. The lingering tension in the way she and Apollo look at each other makes a complicated stew of mixed-up emotions with plenty of guilt and blame tossed around for Zak’s poor flying skills, old man Adama bearing the brunt of it as far as Apollo is concerned. The original bad guy Baltar, a hammy creep in John Colicos’s portrayal, is more nuanced and complex here too. James Callis is superb as the slippery scientist who unwittingly sells out humanity for steamy sex with Tricia Helfer, the Cylon agent Number Six. Completely lacking the ethics Roslin and Adama have in spades, Baltar’s contortions deceiving the rest of the crew and even himself in the wake of humanity’s slaughter are one of the show’s many perverse joys. His hallucinated conversations with Number Six on the Galactica add another layer of narrative complexity, leaving us to wonder if they’re beamed transmissions, guilty visions, or something even stranger, some kind of eerie spiritual visitation. Plus they can be pretty hilarious, like when the invisible Six starts to give Baltar a hand-job to the incredulous looks of those really around him.
All that would make any dramatic series proud, but Battlestar goes even further, contrasting the polytheistic beliefs of the human Colonial society with the monotheism of the Cylons. The contrast is a wry one, making the enemy the one who shares the beliefs of our own Judeo-Christian society, or Islam, for that matter. And the show is not afraid to wade into theistic questions, or philosophy, or ethics, even as it delivers blistering action and enough relationship machinations to leave a soap opera cold and shivering on the floor. The series espouses a stylized realism, too, which grounds its headier moments. Battlestar has a grainy, documentary look, relying on jittery camera-work at a time when the convention was still pretty new to dramatic series. The ship is grimy and industrial, and you witness it breaking down over the course of a few years of flight and combat. The dogfights in space fail the realism test, opting for zooming space gyrations and pummelling machine-gun fire, but my childhood self wildly approves, waving his hands like fighters in the air and making battle noises.
