Slowly Going Bald

Tigh with both eyes, Boomer in chains, Gaius with no dialogue, and Tyrol nowhere to be seen.

Everything's crazy, but also pretty damn good.

Click here for the review.

P.S. I should also tell you that I agree with Beckylooo about Jamie Bamber's hotness. Does it make me less straight to say that? It does not. Bamber is one good-looking man.

Those of you with Facebook accounts can see more photos here.

In short: It was a huge, crazy event, and the crowds were often terrifying. And I want to go again next year.

UPDATE: There's a geek fight going on in the comment thread over at Pajiba. If this thing keeps escalating someone's gonna throw their TI-82, and then the gloves will be off.

"Battlestar Galactica" has always provided some of the best action on TV, not least because even though it's a sci-fi show, the guns still fire bullets and people still die in horrible ways. Similarly, the special effects are carefully constructed to tell the story but never override it; the beauty of the dogfights is partly that they're not just pretty explosions happening for no reason. The effects are remarkably detailed, too, right down to the "No Step" warning on the Viper cockpits. But the remaining humans have managed to stay mostly out of the way of the Cylons since escaping New Caprica, which would have made it understandable and even acceptable if the two-part finale of the show's third season had been a sprawling war arc that stretched from space to planet. But how did the show wrap up the season? Buckle up, kids:

Courtroom drama.

Of course, even when "Battlestar Galactica" isn't dealing with actual battles, it doesn't exactly slow down, merely trades the kinetic excitement of war for the deeper stories that explore the lives and motivations of the main characters. "A Day in the Life" was fantastic at this, reveling in the details of Admiral Adama's ongoing grief over his wife and the cracks spreading slowly between Chief Tyrol and Cally (but if she's willing to stay with him after he broke her jaw during a hallucinatory daydream, they can probably get through squabbles about who has to feed the baby). After setting up the show's mythology as the season's endgame — Tyrol's connection with the temple, Starbuck's connection with the, um, temple — the show made an abrupt left turn by doing two pretty huge things right in a row: Starbuck died, and Baltar got his trial.

The two-part finale, ominously titled "Crossroads" just to make sure we get that some pretty important crap is about to hit the fan, was nothing less than a 90-minute treatise on ethics and morality and how we define those very concepts that form the bedrock of our society. That's not to say it didn't do other things that TV dramas usually do (and do them pretty damn well). The strength of "Battlestar Galactica" is that it can do both: function as a tautly designed, structurally sound, emotionally resonant drama, and also reach for the bigger issues above the treetops.

It's a loose rule — very loose — that TV dramas thrive on change in a stable environment, while TV comedies thrive on stasis in stable environment. For one of many instances, the creators of "Friends" had to keep coming up with ways to keep Ross and Rachel in order to preserve the stasis of the group. (Chandler and Monica were allowed to hook up and stay together because of the corollary that allows secondary relationships to work out while the show's primary relationship continuously fails and succeeds in fits. This is why Tyrol and Cally are married, but Apollo and Starbuck will always have to find their way back to each other.) "Cheers" was 10 years in a bar, "Seinfeld" almost 10 years in a coffee shop, and both series thrived on the inherent unchangeability of their characters: Jerry is pretty much always going to be a germophobic prick, while George will always manage to repel women. The characters in a comedy stay, fundamentally, at the same emotional level throughout the series; Jim and Pam can try all they want, but it ain't gonna happen. However, characters in good dramas progress through an emotional arc over the sourse of the series, so that while their surroundings stay the same, they become different people as a result of their jobs, relationships, etc. The soapy on-again/off-again nature of TV relationships has a lot more gravity on dramas because they characters aren't simply marking time until the finale, when the leads can finally be together; these characters are actually experiencing all this pain, this heartbreak, and as a result they slowly become different people. Off the top of my head, "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" probably did as good a job as any show ever did of showing marked change in its characters from pilot to finale: The lessons learned in one season were applied to the next, which raised the stakes, and so on.

However, the trick is pulling those characters through arcs of change without violating the story's natural feel. Perhaps the most egregious example (again, off the top of my head and glancing intermittently at my DVD shelf) is the horrible way that Aaron Sorkin kept Dana and Casey apart on the second season of "Sports Night" by concocting Dana's Dumbass Dating Plan, which forced Casey to feel ashamed for loving Dana and encouraged him to pursue other women, which of course he did. The characters weren't kept apart as a result of any growth or change they went through or any kind of relationship problems; they were just kept apart.

All of which is a long way to say that "Battlestar Galactica" showed once again how smart it is at making its characters grow while also putting them through the relational ringer. Admiral Adama and President Roslin have been growing closer since the evacuation from New Caprica, which has been kind of cute: They're old, and slow, and Adama will look at Roslin and growl, and Roslin will look back at Adama like a playful librarian, and maybe they'll hold hands, and etc. But in order to keep them from getting together (ew) just yet, the show needed a way to keep them apart, and it did so the best way possible: It established their conflicting ideologies over the fate of Gaius Baltar.

The trial itself was masterful in that it forced Lee to test himself like he never has before. Sure, he's rebelled several times in the past, and was barely on speaking terms with his father when the series began. But his acts of independence have always been in line with a belief that the military he serves can and should be the best force of good for the struggling society that's slowly making its way to the promised land of Earth. He went with Roslin to Kobol because he believed her, not because he stopped believing in the cause. But he turned in his wings and quit the service because he didn't like where Admiral Adama was taking things, especially when Adama expressed his belief that Gaius Baltar didn't deserve a fair trial. Lee hated Baltar as much as everyone else, but he wasn't willing to let his distaste for the man color his loyalty to the ideal of a free society. Lee's impassioned speech on the stand was fantastic: He spoke of salvation, and atonement, and the hypocrisy of letting everyone be covered by Roslin's amnesty except for Baltar, who had been made to suffer. He doesn't attempt to excuse Baltar's crimes, nor does his speech quite falter and slip into the murky areas of relativism, i.e., we all made mistakes, so Baltar can make them, too. No, he's arguing the opposite: We've all been forgiven, and Baltar deserves the same pardon.

Lee's speech won over Admiral Adama, demonstrating the old man's ability to grow and change, to mature. And Adama's vote to acquit Baltar in turn pushed Adama and Roslin farther away in a heartbreakingly natural way. While they will probably work back toward a close friendship in the future — hey, they got through the civil war of the show's second season — it won't be easy. "Battlestar Galactica" doesn't cheat like that; reconciliations here are hard-earned.

All of which makes it so much harded to accept that, for now, the show is gone for a while. Instead of beginning its fourth season this fall, the series isn't returning until January 2008, which is just an ungodly amount of downtime for one of the best dramas on TV. The series deals with politics and religion and what it means to live in a free society and what kind of laws we give ourselves, and it does it better than anybody else in the game. The finale relied on "All Along the Watchtower" as a plot device and as the soundtrack to the impending Cylon attack that filled the episode's final seconds, and the use of the song was an effective way to emotionally tie the fictional world to ours. It's not exactly a new trick — Stephen King also used "Hey Jude" to eerie effect in The Gunslinger — but it still managed to lend the sequence a weight, a sense of foreboding, that drove home the revelation of the identities of four of the remaining Cylon models (about which I'm sure I will write at length over this long, hot, empty summer). It's enough to make me want to dive back into the show on DVD. I'm really going to miss it.

me: if i had to shoot you in the gut and blow your blood across the wall so you could die and download into a new you just to save our baby...
me: i would do it
RMS: thank you
RMS: If you crashed over a hill 2 clicks away, I'd send sarah out for you
me: thank you
me: if you were stuck on the surface, i would act like i would nuke you to save the world, but i would be bluffing. i would let you live
RMS: thx
RMS: if you defied the authority of the group, I would tranfer your sentience to cold storage
me: i appreciate that
me: if you kept killing yourself to see the face of God, i would encourage you to follow your dreams
RMS: thanks
RMS: if you tortured me, I would imagine I was having sex at the time
me: good
me: if you got shot by a robot, i would totally kill her in cold-blooded vengeance
RMS: thanks
RMS: if I was really mad at you, i would have an intense boxing match then hug it out
me: aw, thanks
me: if your wife wanted to sleep with me, i would wait until she divorced you first
RMS: thx
RMS: If you betrayed the resistance, I would poison you
me: you'd better
me: if your wife was wounded a couple miles away, i would force you to stay with me at gunpoint
RMS: good
RMS: if you lost your eye and were embittering the crew, I would tell you to shoot me or get the hell out
me: if sarah was being held captive, i would go with you and help kill the guys who were about to hurt her
RMS: thx
RMS: if we got stranded with the rest of a sports team, I would lead us in the resistance
me: thanks
me: if you sided with the enemy during the occupation, i would consider throwing you out the airlock once we escaped
RMS: thanks
RMS: I you were under my command, I would speak in low tones and not look at you until things were bad and I started to growl
me: thanks
me: if i were captured and asked about you, i would let them pull out my eye, since i would never give you up
RMS: thank you
RMS: if they killed you in a raid on the temple, I would blow myself up at graduation
me: if you were shot in an away mission on the surface, i would lie to you and say the ship was here, so that you would be happy when you died
RMS: thank you
RMS: if you were captured and held prisoner by the cylons for years, I would admit that I lied to you
RMS: about being shot down by me
me: thanks, man
me: if you were a mean commander of a rival ship, i would arrange your assassination

My sister told Entertainment Weekly about how "Battlestar Galactica" was unfairly snubbed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association when it comes to Golden Globe nominations. She even threw in a dig at "Heroes."

I don't know what to say. I'm just proud, is all.

--------

[As always, discussions of TV shows currently airing are likely to contain, you know, spoilers. If you're not quite smart enough to figure that out, this is your warning. If this warning doesn't work, please have your home health care provider turn off your computer and take you out for ice cream.]

I've been writing about the wonder that is "Battlestar Galactica" for a while now, and this season I've become more convinced than ever that it's one of the greatest shows on TV. And it's not just the show's willingness to explore the dark side of humanity that keeps me riveted, but how the stories manage to marry that darkness with a sense of honor, and hope, and unrelenting struggle against impossible odds.

In only the first 11 episodes of its third season, "Battlestar Galactica" has gone through more upheaval and turmoil than other shows would dare pack into an entire year. The seires could have spent the entire season focused on the New Caprica settlement established at the end of Season 2, which was accomplished with a one-year jump forward in the show's chronology. But no; after four episodes, the settlers had been rescued from the Cylon invasion, Baltar had cast his lot with the Cylons, the men all changed their facial hair and then changed it back, and Tigh lost an eye before assassinating his own wife for betraying the cause.

So, things have been eventful.

Yet I find myself moved again to praise the show, despite the fact that my repeated mentions of the show probably bore some people¹, because it continues to bravely explore such relevant issues as the role of military in the government and the place of religion in public society, and it does it with flair and grace and downright beautiful storytelling. After the fleet was restored and had fled New Caprica, the show dealt with the treacherous nature of insurgency fighters and vigilante justice by having a cabal of crew members dispense private retribution for war crimes. And then there was Starbuck and Tigh's personal quest to sow discord among the ranks just for the hell of it. And who could forget Apollo's argument in favor of genocide?

But it was the ninth episode, "Unfinished Business," that again raised the series' bar for pure sweep. Tying together most of the major characters' stories in an episode that relied purely on backstory and relational history to drive the plot, it ostensibly revolved around a boxing match for the officers. The structure of the episode is moving, as repeated images and scenes become expanded until the full plot is revealed. The episode takes place during the year of action the viewer never saw, between the discovery of New Caprica and the later retreat from the planet. It built on the festering Apollo-Starbuck relationship and showed in greater detail just why he hated her so much, and letting them beat each other up in the ring was a sadness only matched by Apollo's look of heartbreak when he discovered Starbuck had literally abandoned him at dawn.

And while "Unfinished Business" featured the show at the peak of its character-driven melodramatic power, the latest episode, "The Eye of Jupiter," was another great marriage of the show's tangled relationships with its increasingly complex mythology. Having the humans and Cylons clash over the latest signpost on the way to Earth is inevitable, but the series keeps the conflict fresh by making it a political standoff and an observation of the power of religion. It's infinitely more unsettling when, instead of simply engaging in a firefight with the enemy or running away, the Galactica hosts Cylon representatives for an uneasy discussion of a possible temporary truce. Seeing the opposing sides come to an impasse over the newly discovered holy temple has an odd grounding effect on the conflict, and instead of casting one group as inherently good while the other is irredeemably evil, the humans and Cylons are simply portrayed as having two different approaches to survival. It's a nice move to make the "bad guys" so fascinating and relatable, and it's one of the many things that helps the show transcend its narrow genre and become a beautiful, compelling drama.

^{1. Deal.}

--------

[Permanent disclosure: Any and all TV shows or films discussed here will inevitably contain minor spoilers. Deal.]

I think it was the moment when Leoben the Cylon revealed to Starbuck that her excised ovary had been salvaged and used to create a human/cyborg daughter that I began to understand that "Battlestar Galactica" is one dark, sad show. The sci-fi drama's third season kicked off in high gear on Friday, picking up after last season's cliffhanger pretty much imploded the show's universe by jumping forward a year to show the struggle of the human settlers on New Caprica and the return of the Cylons, who invaded the fledgling colony and established their own rules. The show is simply amazing.

It's nothing new for a series to walk the line between light and dark; ever since "The Sopranos" bowed in 1999, darkness has been in vogue, especially on cable, with "Deadwood," "The Wire," "Rescue Me," "Nip/Tuck," and "The Shield" going all-out to show the inner horrors of the human psyche as their characters fell to impossible depths of loneliness and depravity. But "Battlestar Galactica" is different from most of those shows because it features likable, relatable characters, whereas most of the other series are just crazy for the sake of being crazy.

Take "Nip/Tuck." It's a visually stimulating show, but absolutely pointless. It does dark better than most — Sean's recent drug-fueled hallucination of his personal demon banging his personal angel was attention-getting, to say the least — but the darkness isn't tempered by any kind of genuine emotion. It's not that I want the show to be lighter; I want it to make me care about the characters who are dealing with such hard, dark times. And I don't. Sean is a whiny punk, his wife is a bitter wreck, and Christian is a soulless husk of a man who sees the futility of his ways and doesn't so much refuse to atone as much as he just lets thoughts of atonement drift away like a bad hangover. Let them suffer.

Conversely, the rough road that the denizens of the "Battlestar" universe walk is heartbreaking precisely because the writers, producers, and actors put so much energy into making me care for the characters. The stunning casualness with with Col. Tigh loses an eye serves to underscore the colonists' dire straits, reinforce the image of the Cylons' murderous ways, and instill sympathy for Tigh all at once. The show isn't in a rush to show how dark and crazy it can be, as in the story line on last season's "Rescue Me" when it seemed like everybody was raping everybody just for the hell of it. And "Battlestar" stands in dark contrast to Showtime's new series "Dexter," which is so busy trying to look cool you forget that it doesn't matter who lives or dies; you just don't care.

So many shows are wallowing in pointless vice without having it smack up against virtue, which is what creates genuine conflict and memorable relationships for a series' characters. The physical violation of Starbuck is that much more horrifying because we've already come to identify with her and relate to her, to sympathize with her struggle to balance the coldness that keeps her alive and the love (lately for Anders) that keeps her going. Tigh isn't some cartoon villain, but a man who wants to do right and has a blind spot a mile wide for Ellen, his duplicitous wife, and the series even tempers her acts of betrayal with emotion: She does what she does to save her husband from the Cylons. The plots develop from the spark between people's basest interests and purest intentions, making the darkness something we recognize as our own.

--------

I know it's only been a week since I talked about "Battlestar Galactica," but in that time I watched Season 2.0, the DVD set of the first half of the show's second season (the rest of it won't be out on DVD until the fall, which is an unholy and criminal thing for Universal to do, but whatever). And I'm stunned at how good it is.

Some genre background: I admit to liking "Star Trek: The Next Generation" when I was a boy, and looking back, it makes perfect sense. That show was made for boys: Effects-driven, flat characters, and a stunning lack of arc, drama, tension, direction, themes, and pretty much everything good you can ask from a TV show. It was like an interstellar version of a police procedural in its relentless sameness: Watching the pilot episode and watching one from four years later is almost the same experience. It's a shame that the show is one of the first things that springs to mind when people think of sci-fi, because in a way, it's one of the poorest examples of the genre. It's like a war film that focuses on explosions and bad characters instead of the nuanced lives of the troops. But I loved that stuff as a kid: The whiz-bang action, the fact that none of the main characters was ever for one moment in any kind of real peril, the fact that it was not only unnecessary but impossible to imagine the life experiences or emotions of the characters to have any impact on their present actions. The show was undone by its timidity in approaching its premise: It meekly went where no one really cared to go.

But when I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man (or at least a much older male), I put childish ways behind me.

"Battlestar Galactica" (again, any and all references are to the new version unless otherwise noted; as far as I'm concerned, the original show never happened) is a gut-wrenching, adult drama with a political, spiritual, and emotional resonance too rarely seen on TV. The show packed more drama, tension, and heartbreak into the first 10 episodes of its second season than a lot of other shows do all year, or ever. A plot line that sends the fleet spiraling into possible civil war could have rightly taken up an entire season, but this show moves faster than that, and by the season's midpoint, the ragtag fleet of humans who survived the massive alien attack that began the series has been restored, only to face greater challenges.

The second season of "Battlestar Galatica" was, impossibly, even better than the first. There's a track record of truly great second seasons, and this one's up there. It heightens the drama, pushes the characters to new heights and depths, and amps up the pain big time. I'll admit, I even got a little choked up a few times. It's one of the best shows on TV right now, hands down. More than once, I thought, "Now this is what 'Lost' should be like." After all, "Lost" is a genre show, too, just heavier on mystery and woefully lighter on character. But whereas the entire point of "Lost" is to watch more "Lost" (the show is like "Twin Peaks" in that way), "Battlestar Galactica" is rewarding for its growth, change, and progress.

Granted, the show's dialogue is nothing stellar. It lacks the punch or inherent wit that are hallmarks of other great modern showrunners. But neither is the dialogue useless exposition focused on worthless technical jargon that sacrifices character for the sake of gee-whiz technology. It always serves to enhance and grow the characters. In one of the best signs of a good TV drama, the characters show marked change over time. People aren't the same as the were in the pilot episode, and that's a good thing.

For a futuristic show, it's also amazingly grounded in reality. The phones on the ship are wall-mounted and rely and cords; high-tech radar exists, but none of the impossible "on-screen" tech on "Next Generation"; the ships have a gritty, lived-in feel, pioneered by Ridley Scott almost 30 years ago and beautifully continued to this day; but best of all, nothing comes too easy. That's the thing that bugs me most about "Next Generation." Shot? Sick? Hungry? No need to worry, the ridiculously outfitted Enterprise, complete with sets borrowed from a mid-'90s Chevy Suburban, is here to help. Food appeared out of nowhere, diseases and wounds were healed almost instantly by the bored doctor, and those freaks has so much free time that they used a phenomenal amount of computing power to play Robin Hood with holograms. That show presented a utopian, bizarrely idealized version of the future, during which mankind has apparently decided to get together and end all war and economic dispute in the interest of exploring space in matching jumpsuits. But in the much more engaging world of "Battlestar Galactica," guns still use bullets, and people still die. The second season begins with a major character suffering a gunshot at close range, and it's a life-threatening wound. The stakes are legimate here.

The series runs deep with questions of justice, law, ethics, morality, and what it means to be human. There are fewer than 50,000 people left in the universe, and the show depicts the small society struggling to hold firm to the laws that have guided them for years, laws that have even greater meaning now that there are so few left to uphold them. After all, who's to say what's a crime? What does it mean to live in a just society? The characters in "Battlestar Galactica" are never more than a few steps from slipping over the edge. At one point, military officers rape and torture an enemy agent, citing its inhumanity as grounds for the treatment. The Cylon is an enemy, true, and is one of the refined models of robots originally created by humans before the Cylons rebelled and ignited the war. (In another brilliant update from the first show, having the Cylons be man's creation tightens the dramatic structure immensely, moving the antagonists from merely just another group of aliens to physical representations of our own sins visited upon us.) But their behavior is shocking, not in spite of the nature of the enemy, but because of it: Presented with an opportunity to display their humanity, the humans reverted to animals.

One of the sharpest bits of dialogue comes in a throwaway exchange between two Galactica officers who intervened and stopped what was about to be the rape of another prisoner. One of the men says, "I thought the Cylons were the enemy." His friend replies, "Yeah, well, now it's us." The show is uncompromising in its intent to mine the painful truths of life, and that places it far beyond most other shows on TV.

--------

A few weeks ago, the trades shipped issues with hard black covers bearing critical blurbs praising an unnamed TV show. The gist:

"One of the best shows on TV. … [T]he toughest smartest show on television …" — Rolling Stone

"… one of the best shows on television …" — The New York Times

"… much much better than you can possiby imagine …" — Salon.com

"… one of the most original and provocative programs on television …" — Newsday

And so on in the same vein. The hard covers contained a perforated circle in the middle, behind which was an Emmy consideration DVD. I was curious as to which show could draw such praise from so many critics and have its title go unmentioned anywhere in the ad. I punched open the cardboard and pulled out the contents, which turned out to be a disc with three complete "Battlestar Galactica" episodes and a few selected scenes.

My knee-jerk response was one of mild disappointment, which was exactly what the nameless ad had been so desperately trying to avoid. The marketing department behind "Battlestar Galatica" surely knows this: You can't just go spring a sci-fi show on somebody, especially if you're trolling for mainstream awards. No, you have to slip it in the back door, make people read the critical acclaim before opening the box. And that's a shame.

It's a shame for many reasons, because after viewing the first season of "Battlestar Galactica," I can tell you honestly that it's an amazing show, full of drama and pain and heartbreak and sex and violence and betrayal and death and death and death and everything you could want in a drama. And it happens to be set in outer space. This reborn version of the 1978 series has nothing in common with the original except its name. I saw a few episodes of the original when I was younger, and even back then I knew it was campy, cheesy, and unbelievably stupid. (Now that I'm older, I can also see how it was really, really gay: Men with feathered hair who wear capes and pilot phallic spaceships into long metal tubes all day. I mean, come on.) But this reimagining of the show is infinitely superior to the first, so much so that it's impossible to even compare the two. The first doesn't even exist, as far as I'm concerned. Think of the creative leap between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back and multiply it by something like 19 and you'll begin to understand how much better the new "Battlestar Galactica" is compared with the old one.

But I was reluctant to check out the show at first. For starters, it's an original production from Sci Fi Channel, and their raison d'être seems to be creating and airing some truly godawful programming. Their made-for-TV movies are a joke in everything from effects to casting to story, and their original shows tend to err on the side of alienating anyone who wants a sharp drama in favor of people who prefer cold facts and random scientific-sounding jargon. I therefore figured that "Battlestar Galactica" would surely fall into the latter camp. I've found myself writing off a lot of sci-fi sight unseen — I'm almost reluctant to do all this talking about sci-fi, period — but that's a dangerous habit to have.

Every genre has its successes and its failures, and to wall yourself off from a certain type of film because of prejudice toward the genre just doesn't make sense. A lot of dramas suck. A lot of action movies suck. A lot of romantic comedies suck. I'll save us all a lot of time: A lot of movies just plain suck. But it would be foolish to avoid all films because some of them were of low quality. No film is automatically good or bad by virtue of its genre. That's like saying "All Westerns suck" or "All World War II films are great," and those are the kind of broad, sweeping statements best left to wayward undergrads, and I think we're all past that.

So I gave "Battlestar Galactica" a chance, and discovered a truly great show. It's a tightly woven, compelling drama about what it means to live in a free society and the importance of justice in the presence of chaos; the sci-fi setting is the backdrop, not the focus. It's shot in a hand-held, documentary style, and the sets have a wonderful lived-in feel, as if the characters actually inhabit that fictional universe, as opposed to the clinically sterile feel of better known but vastly inferior shows. It's already been proven that an honest, character-driven drama set in space can work. "Battlestar Galactica" is another entry in that field, and it would be unfortunate if people avoided it just because of its genre.

--------