Race and Battletar Galactica

At times, Battlestar Galactica reminds me of the Rudy Giulianni campaign. It's not just the militaristic themes that they both embrace. Mostly it's the fact that if not for 9/11, no one would be paying much attention to either. But also there's this: they are both so pleased wiith themselves that they can't be bothered to acknowledge their own racial blinders.

Dualla, the pretty African American communications officer on the Bridge (oops; I mean "CIC") of the Galactica, had a pretty good scene in the Miniseries when Billy gives her good news and she spontaneously kisses him. Nice. After that, they gave her very little meaty to do, and the actress did nothing meaty with what she was given.

The "Death of Billy" episode (not its real name – "Sacrifice") finally features Dualla being given something to do besides saying the equivalent of "Hailing frequencies open." She, Billy, and Lee are among the hostages in a bar where the hostage takers are demanding the death of the Sharon Cylon. She’s not the first, second, or third most important cast member in the episode, but she makes a strong bid for "tied for fourth," so she’s doing pretty well. After watching it, I read through the Wikipedia entry on her character, so I see where they are going with her–married to the male romantic lead, and XO of Pegasus Apparently, after a few seasons, someone saw the Dualla / Uhuru comparison; and since there is no chance for another "First interracial on screen kiss," they realized they had to do something to prevent her being Uhuru-lite.
So they made her Executive Officer of the Pegasus. Quite a promotion, from Chief Petty Officer, but in wartime, with thinning ranks, these things happen.

Presumably, if this population is the supposed to become the original human seed of Earth, their descendants will, over generations, scatter, to populate the earth of pre-history. What about evolution? It will be interesting to see if they deal with that. Are they going to land on earth and wipe out Neanderthals? Can’t you just hear Mary McDonnell as President Roslin warmly cooing, "throw them out the airlock"?

At any rate, because of the pre-historic setting, one can tsk tsk about tokenist approach to racially diverse casting, but having done that, there is little to be said about race IN the show. All one can say with certainty is this: it solidly reflects the racial aesthetics of mainstream hollywood (and "Blockbuster SF Hollywood"), which presumes of a racially "white" world with allowances for racial inclusions–one African American, one Asian American, one Mexican American. The word for this type of inclusion, by the way, is tokenism. Where is Whoopi Goldberg?

It may be a little unfair to hang the weight of Hollywood America around their necks, but one reason for wanting to do so is that the series deals explicitly and thoughtfully with identity politics, especially nationalist politics, a related issue.

One of the most interesting things the producers Moore and Eick have done is to allow the civilian population to maintain and assert their historical planetary identities, even though the planets they come from have been destroyed or depopulated–as immigrants and displaced persons do, for several generations. These don’t seem to to concur with contemporary racial and cultural identities, but they do reflect the same issues–ie. The Geminis are a traditional, religiously fundamentalist culture, who first accept Laura Roslin as their prophet, and later excoriate her stance on abortion. –And interestingly, it is when she equivocates (Mitt Romney style) that she loses political support.

But more directly, the show reflects the us against them mentality of a country at war, particularly of the U.S. at war against violent Moslem Extremism.

What to make of the 9/11 analogies?
Analogies like this can come in two varieties, intentional and unintentional. For an example of the second, look at the AIDS analogies in Interview with a Vampire. The novel was written before the AIDS epidemic was diagnosed, but took extra levels of meaning because the events that followed. The cold war analogies behind the original Star Trek were entirely planned, and they reek of it--this exemplifies "ham fisted." Somewhere in between are Tolkien's WWII analogies; he always denied they were intentional, but come on! How unintentional could they have been? But no doubt the execution of the novel prospered because the author was NOT trying to plan it out.

Galactica picks up on the blatant cold war analogies in the original (good humans battling the reptillian sired Cylons) and "reimagines" them for a post 9/11 context. First, there is the context of a civilization having been struck a devastating blow by an enemy they knew but weren't paying attention to. Then there's the state of emergency and all out war, and the crackdown on civil rights, fed from time to time by acts of violence. Mostly, though it's the paranoia about who might be a Cylon.

Television is one of the most evanescent forms of drama. Despite the fact that it is now captured on DVD, the half-life of great tv seems to be about five years. No television show was better than Hill Street Blues, but when it was over, it was over. The ongoing tap dance that writers and directors have to do to keep the audience the same show while at the same time find every possible twist to keep it interesting, usually means that each show will mine the same vein until it is clean. It’s ridiculous to talk about the permanent value of a tv show, as the academics who have been championing the enduring value of "Buffy" for years are slowly finding out. (I would even go so far as to say that a truly great stage performance can have more permanency than an equally great performance captured on the tube; the first has a large as life majesty that is swallowed by the night; the second is shrunk to the size of your living room wall and digested with nibbles and spit).

It is ridiculous to talk about "timeless" or transcendent television.

Having said that, BSG is not "about" the post 9/11 world the same way "24" is. The latter assumes a world full of ticking time bombs and effective torture. Torture in the BSG world produces blowback. In contrast to the world of "24," in which a disaster might be averted through the ruthless application of torture, the ruthless torture of Gina in Season 2 of BSG results in her suicide bombing of Cloud 9.

What BSG does, however, is to provide a mirror which too often shows the follies of our own times and leaders in high relief. At the end of season 2, a presidential election is highjacked. Instead of ordering the man who discovered the malfeasance to be sent out an airlock, or raising distracting but irrelevant issues about the voter roles in other districts with names like "Richard Tracy," or claiming that no systematic efforts have been made to purge the cylon vote from the rolls--and then vowing to make voter reform a national priority by coming up with a computer system that can be readily hacked–instead of doing the things real politicians do (not just in America, but here too) Roslin and Adamo agree to set things right.

Similarly, although they both have a blind spot when it comes to dealing with Cylons – in real life, the character played by Dean Stockwell at the end of Season 2.5 would have been much too important to kill–both Adamo and Roslin are constrained in their actions by the moral paradox that sometimes the ethically right thing to do is not the thing that produces the greatest good for the greatest number (with the least pain), and that, as in the case of allowing Baltar to assume his disastrous presidency, taking refuge behind a cocoon of moral correctness might be, ultimately, indefensible.

But then there is the issue of the ethical status of nationalisms, those not entirely meaningless nodes which connect and define and therefore also separate us. The "Downloaded" episode makes a point of looking at the moral complexities of the Cylon world, but never lets us think that we have understood their reason for so doggedly pursuing the extinction of the human race at all cost. In this way, they have set up the perfect "inscrutable" enemy, one who resembles "us" in thought and action but who ultimately views life and death so differently as to desensitize us to their pain, because we "know" they are desensitized to ours.

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In about a month, season 3 is due to be released on DVD. I’m sure I’ll watch it, and I can’t wait for Season 4, when the crew arrives on earth, Adamo gets a guest worker pass to pick cotton for 1.17 an hour, while Roslin puts her elementary school teaching experience to work supervising a sweatshop of 8 and 9 year olds who manufacture parts for a Nokia iPhone ripoff.

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Last thought about BSG season 2: Near the end, Chief Tyrell is given a union speech which doesn't quite seem to relate to the circumstances which surround him. According to the pod cast, they lifted it, hand gestures and all, from an anti-vietnman war speech a Berkeley union organizer had delivered in the 1960's. Except Chief Tyrell doesn't seem to be protesting the Cylon war, or any war. --An example of why this show is both better than you think and not as good as it could be.