Law & Society Blog

With the third season opener for Battlestar Galactica, Ron Moore firmly lays claim to the best series on TV since the West Wing. No program has explored the connected and conflicting themes of freedom and security more intelligently than Battlestar. With the third season, Moore decisively takes the series out of the SF mainstream. The Cylons, technologically sophisticated, overwhelmingly powerful, and deeply religious in an unmistakably Christian way, have occupied New Caprica, not to destroy the surviving humans, but rather to find a way for some kind of peaceful (but not necessarily equal) coexistence. In a strange way, which has not yet been fully explained, the humans possess a resource that the Cylons need, maybe biological fertility, but whatever it is, it is sufficiently important to keep the hard-liners among the Cylons from wiping out the humans once and for all. The humans, of course, resist in part and collaborate in part, as is our nature, and it is here that the obvious parallels between New Caprica and Iraq are most striking. The collaborators form the human/Iraqi police force and the resistance, split into secular and religious insurgents, targets them. In a particularly disturbing scene, one of the insurgents blows himself and 30 other human/Iraqi police cadets along with a handful of Cylons to pieces after having lost his wife to a Cylon attack on a human temple — in which, of course, the secular insurgents had stored their weaponry. (This subplot is explored in a series of Webisodes.) What’s most disturbing about the show is that — in Moore’s fictional world — we find ourselves emotionally attached to a group of people who, in the political discourse of the last four years, we have only encountered as insurgents, terrorists, and enemies of peace and freedom. Moore is taking a huge gamble by going so completely against the cultural mainstream. But that’s what artists should do, so bravo to him and his team!

UPDATE (10/8/2006): Ben pointed me to this very interesting post on Crooked Timber by Scott McLemee, which includes a link to the Battlestar Wiki.

Technorati Tags: Galactica, Ron Moore, Iraq, terror, security, freedom

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