sagawizard (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} sagawizard) wrote,@ 2009-01-25 21:22:00 |
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Thoughts on BSG's new season
Musings on the beginning of the final episodes of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA...
For a show that, last season, seemed to have run out of steam and had me eagerly awaiting what felt like a much-needed wrapup, I must say the first two eps of this new cycle have made me interested again.
Mainly because BSG continues to be on the cutting edge of contemporary political allegory, a wonderfully astute mirror of our own times.
Seasons#1&2 were all about the paranoia of a post-9/11 world, how you're hemmed in by the threat of attack from the outside and your own system that would rob you of liberty, privacy and life in a paranoid quest to "make you safe." Martial law, suppression of the press, prisoner abuse, xenophobia, it was all there, with the cardinal questions being both "can we survive" and "do we deserve to survive?" The Kobol arc was also about how you bring together a divided people.
Season#3, with New Caprica, was the Iraq War, forcing American audiences to take the perspective of the occupied people. Then, in the later episodes, it was about how you try and reintegrate a society that carries with it all that trauma.
Season#4, especially right now...it's about a people who have been stretched so thin they've finally, finally broken. It's about the dangers of placing your hope and faith in a charismatic leader, and what happens if and when that leader and the dream let you down. Ideas painfully, painfully close to home right now, and in their own way, as shocking and bold as seasons#1&2 when NO OTHER SHOW ON TV ('cept Farscape!) had ever dared to challenge our homeland security culture. Now, when the whole media is giving Obama halos, BSG is showing Rosalyn's promises shatter, and the crew shattering with it. And we see the flip side of being a leader everyone expects to be the messiah - she's had enough of that kind of responsibility. And in the face of the failure of her plan, far darker elements are trying to seize power.
Damned straight I'll keep watching. I don't much care who the final cylon is (seems frakking everyone's a cylon at this point), but I want to see how this all ends...
-SW
Musings on the beginning of the final episodes of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA...
For a show that, last season, seemed to have run out of steam and had me eagerly awaiting what felt like a much-needed wrapup, I must say the first two eps of this new cycle have made me interested again.
Mainly because BSG continues to be on the cutting edge of contemporary political allegory, a wonderfully astute mirror of our own times.
Seasons#1&2 were all about the paranoia of a post-9/11 world, how you're hemmed in by the threat of attack from the outside and your own system that would rob you of liberty, privacy and life in a paranoid quest to "make you safe." Martial law, suppression of the press, prisoner abuse, xenophobia, it was all there, with the cardinal questions being both "can we survive" and "do we deserve to survive?" The Kobol arc was also about how you bring together a divided people.
Season#3, with New Caprica, was the Iraq War, forcing American audiences to take the perspective of the occupied people. Then, in the later episodes, it was about how you try and reintegrate a society that carries with it all that trauma.
Season#4, especially right now...it's about a people who have been stretched so thin they've finally, finally broken. It's about the dangers of placing your hope and faith in a charismatic leader, and what happens if and when that leader and the dream let you down. Ideas painfully, painfully close to home right now, and in their own way, as shocking and bold as seasons#1&2 when NO OTHER SHOW ON TV ('cept Farscape!) had ever dared to challenge our homeland security culture. Now, when the whole media is giving Obama halos, BSG is showing Rosalyn's promises shatter, and the crew shattering with it. And we see the flip side of being a leader everyone expects to be the messiah - she's had enough of that kind of responsibility. And in the face of the failure of her plan, far darker elements are trying to seize power.
Damned straight I'll keep watching. I don't much care who the final cylon is (seems frakking everyone's a cylon at this point), but I want to see how this all ends...
-SW
