The cult of specialness

Having spent a few hours ranting and raving about BSG to my poor ringbearer he persuaded me to write it all down.

Battlestar Galactica is one of my favourite shows, I have never missed an episode and live the nerd dream of discussing it a little too much with my friends. I have however, found the show’s last 6 episodes or so unsatisfactory and although I enjoyed seeing the finale I felt that something was missing. BSG had its strengths and most people point to the excellent characterisation and the delicate balancing of space action with political/social tension that illuminated our own. Something else which BSG did very well (for a sci-fi show) was realism. When people were injured, they stayed injured, the whole crew pretty much had post traumatic stress disorder, unhappy people mutinied, they ran out of fuel, water and food, the worst of human nature was as apparent as the best and generally if it could go wrong, it did. For a show with robots, angels and prophecy it managed to show us ordinary people doing and reacting the way ordinary people would. If a chunk of the fleet thought a woman with breast cancer was a mythical dying leader who knew the way to the Promised Land, enough of the fleet were sceptical enough to shake their heads and propose another less religious based course of action. I think that this sense of reality was starkly missing from BSG’s final season and in particular the final half of that season.

By season 4 BSG had a large cast and it would be hard work to summarise them all here. Briefly, Adama, Roslin, Baltar, 8, 6, Starbuck and Apollo were the above the title names that got their own promotional photos with every new season. Supporting characters who rose to join them in prominence included Helo, Tigh and Tyrol and to a lesser extent Dee, Gaeta, Sam and Tory. There was also a host of named recurring characters who turned up every so often to repair vipers (Cally, Seelix ), shoot cylon raiders (Kat, Hot-Dog), attack Galactica (the other cylon models), act as lawyers or rival politicians (Zarek, Romo)or tell you your cancer had got worse (Dr Cottle). All the characters were well written, developed appropriately with every new piece of suffering and many had been in the show or on the ship since the beginning. For nearly 3 seasons the supporting characters did a wonderful job of supporting the leads. From the moment the colonies were attacked, all you only needed to do was to pan to Gaeta or Dee in the CIC to know what the crew were thinking. Power grabbing as Zarek was, he made some excellent political points about the distribution of power and Roslin’s administration (Episodes: Bastille Day, The Woman King, Guess What’s Coming to Dinner). For all his suffering Tigh had a fantastic ability to bring things into perspective;

Tigh: I've sent men on suicide missions in two wars now, and let me tell you something. It don't make a godsdamn bit of difference whether they're riding in a Viper or walking out onto a parade ground. In the end, they're just as dead. So, take your piety, and your moralizing, and your high-minded principles, and stick 'em some place safe until you're off this rock and you're sitting in your nice, cushy chair on Colonial One again. I've got a war to fight

and let us really see William Adama the old war horse. Tyrol and Helo were the everyman stuck in a nightmare and trying to make the best of it.

The nature of Galactica’s journey meant that along with all the ‘reality’: politics, social upheaval and conflict both internal and external there was a sizeable element of prophecy, religion and special destiny. By the end of season 3 of the big seven characters Athena, Roslin, Caprica, Baltar and Starbuck had all been shown to be ‘special’, with special visions and destinies. This left the two Adamas, who whilst not special, were very important. But then what is the point of main character if not to be special or important? But in the season finale, 4/5 of the final cylons were revealed. Suddenly most of the cast were ‘special’ with a ‘special’ destiny or past. Of the 14 cast members who were deemed important enough to appear in season 4 promotional photos a mere 4 were non-special ( Adama, Apollo, Gaeta and Dee plus Helo if you don’t think he was anything more than a sperm donor). Less than a third of the cast were someone we the non-special human audience could identify with. As season 4 continued I found this development to be troublesome. Early episodes were nearly entirely dominated by Kara’s visions and search for Earth Faith/The Road Less Travelled and the final five’s attempts to come to terms with their cylonicity Escape Velocity/The Ties that Bind. Where were my touchstones of reality? I found that I only cared about the poor souls (the crew of the Demetrius, whiny Cally) who were about to get killed whilst these selfish special characters tried to work out their own personal glowing, vision based path and not the other way around. Sine Qua Non saw Apollo, following Roslin’s kidnap attempting to wrestle political power from Zarek. This was a wonderful reminder that the fleet reacts rather badly to alliances with basestars and missing presidents. Of course it accounted for a quarter of the episode and the results were pretty short-lived once dying-leader-Roslin returned after her special chat with a glowing lady in a bath.

In the final half of season 4, post Earth, the writers decided to trim the cast. I believe Dee died because the actress had other commitments and whilst Gaeta was given a beautiful tragic story line to go out on, the fact remained that following their deaths the last 5 episodes or so (4.15-4.19) of the show had a cast that was nearly entirely ‘special’. They tried to use Hoshi, Hot-Dog and Cottle to remind us that the rest of the fleet was out there, but it failed. And it is these episodes that I struggled with the most. Pre-Earth the cast and the episodes still contained references to the rest of the fleet and the normal humans, after Blood on the Scales they were starkly missing. When Daybreak’s opera house was finally fulfilled William Adama was left standing in his own CIC like a confused bystander as everyone else glowed or fulfilled their destinies to a beautifully constructed and prescient soundtrack. I believe he may have been just about the only recognisable *human* apart from special Dr Baltar.

For 4 seasons of the show, the scenes with Roslin reminded us that there were approximately 40000 more people in the fleet. That 40000 people had rights, had hopes, opinions and a voice that could not be ignored. With Roslin withdrawing from power, Gaeta’s mutiny in episodes The Oath / Blood on the Scales may have been the last time we saw political intrigue or in fact any thought given to the rest of the fleet. While the mutiny was clearly just as much about dissatisfaction and old grievances it was also about Roslin failing to lead and Adama acting as a military dictator. Here were the normal people who hadn’t had visions telling them to trust cylons and fate, quite rightly objecting to a weak and probably corrupt leadership. I think it is no coincidence that the mutineers mostly consisted of supporting characters and named pilots who we hadn’t seen in a while. People, who were not on the specialness loop, people who Adama didn’t hypocritically forgive and forget because they were family and/or special. The mutiny failed and the fleet and the normal people disappeared into the background. It was the last hurrah for the BSG episodes of old, the last time we saw conflict within the fleet. Conflict that had helped make BSG the wonderful strangely realistic multi-faceted show it was. In No Exit Apollo managed to become defacto president and a cylon alliance was undemocratically pushed through without another peep of objection. Following that the only time we heard from the fleet was to see them squabble over Galactica’s bones (Someone to watch over me) and to show us fleetingly that Adama couldn’t police his own ship and that special Baltar was still having visions (Deadlock). In the words of Adama himself to Kara Thrace (now extra special writer of the special notes as heard by other special people)

Adama: ‘I've had it up to here with destiny, prophecy, with God or the Gods. Look where it's left us. The ass end of nowhere; nearly half of our people are gone; Earth, a worthless cinder; and I can't even walk down the halls of my ship without wondering if I'm gonna catch a bullet for getting us into this mess’ Islanded in a Stream of Stars

But by then we knew that Adama’s love of Starbuck, Tigh and Roslin made these words meaningless. He was going to follow the special people’s special opinions on their special destiny. And at this point there was no-one left to object.

In season 2 Adama and Roslin split the fleet over prophecy and a return to Kobol. Even in the beginning of Season 4 Helo, Athena, Gaeta and the crew of the Demetrius were objecting to crazy-Kara’s less than logical destiny based plans.But by the end of season 4 the non-special characters saying the logical thing were gone. Over the series we saw any number of normal often un-named human crewmen/officers/pilots/civilians being killed, looking worried or making tough decisions. These groups were very present in person and dialogue in the mini-series, and whilst the finale tried to mirror the mini-series these groups were barely present. The space battle was awesome to behold but the people who died during it were barely noticeable. Apparently several Raptors and vipers were destroyed (only Racetrack’s was recognisable though) and were subsequently only mentioned in passing. Tigh declared there to be ‘a lot of red lights’ but gave no body count. All those dead marines littering the Galactic and the colony were pretty much just expensive stage dressing. Compare this to earlier in the series where every life has counted, when Kelly stalked among the dead carrying dog-tags or the survivor count was pretty much all that mattered. In Daybreak what mattered was that the special people all played out the special opera house. Maybe that is the point the writers were trying to make, the survivor count didn’t matter, fighting for the dream of human-cylon peace did. But who we saw driving forward this noble dream were the special people, not the destiny-less, cylon mis-trusting people who had taken everything the BSG world could throw at them and were dying in Galactica’s corridors.

From a writer’s point of view I’m sure the removal of the logical objectors and audience interest in the normal crew and people speeded up the process of bringing the season to the closure of Daybreak, but it sacrificed the realism. The wonderful realism that made the mini-series so great, which kept the fleet squabbling, acting like humans for nearly 5 years and made brilliant television. BSG stopped being BSG and became a sci-fi show about visions and destiny. It is writing 101 that you need identifiable characters and in Sci-fi that means ‘human: like-us’. But in its final season BSG killed off or elevated its audience connecting characters. BSG left us with a few ‘normal’ characters who we had seen occasionally over the years such as Cottle and Hot Dog, but no-one we had followed from week to week. It killed off it’s political/social commentary with the mutiny and left us with episodes and people overly absorbed in their own specialness. Apollo looked like a tolerated child every time he tried to discuss the other people left to humanity.

Whilst the finale was a great pleasure to see, the previous five episodes were a chore to watch. As fond as I am of these special main characters, I wanted to see ordinary people fighting to survive to the end. I wanted to see people getting to their happy ending by being normal and human and not driven by a mystery ‘It’ with an interesting choice in sexily dressed messengers. I was left happy that the characters completed their journey but less than certain that the fleet they were with had completed theirs.