Newsweek asks for cultural critics to pick a work that “exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” Matt Yglesias agrees with the TV critic who picked Battlestar Galactica, saying that “really nothing else has done nearly so much to capture the dystopian nature of the Bush years.” I find this to be completely backwards.
BSG was great when it wasn’t trying to comment on Iraq and the war on terror. When the premise was a much larger rumination on the basic question of “do humans really deserve to exist?” it was fantastic. The reason the show worked is because there really wasn’t a clear answer to the fundamental question. The tension of having to wonder whether the Cylons were right to do what they did, of wondering if the true fate of humanity was simply to be relegated to the past as a historical artificat, wiped away by our progeny in the same way that we swept aside the Neanderthals…all of that is what made the show so excellent. The darkness wasn’t tied to some incredibly blunt and boring allegory to current events – it was intrinsic to the very notion of the human condition.
By the end of season two, and particularly in season three, however, all of this was brushed aside. The Cylons were now depicted as stupid conquerors, occupiers with no plan or goals, bumbling around for no reason. It made zero internal sense with what had already been established and appeared to exist as a plot development solely so they could tell the most boring of stories about the war on terror.
The only reason the show worked was because you had some reason to believe that the Cylons were letting them live for a reason. It never made the slightest bit of sense that a military force capable of wiping out 99.99% of humanity in hours would be so utterly flummoxed by one ship. So you were left to wonder: what is “the plan” that the opening credits keep promising? What was the real meaning of the attack? Can we re-orient ourselves and find a way to see the Cylons as the protagonists of the story rather than the enemy?
When those questions were possible to raise, there was a delightful ambiguity. All of that collapsed, however, once they went for the boring “oooh, isn’t the war on terror icky” approach in season three. We discover that the Cylons are exactly as clueless as anyone else.
In that sense, I guess it could represent the Bush years in the sense that eventually the curtain was pulled aside and it was revealed that no one actually had any idea what they were doing – making for a pointless muddle of back-and-forth among people who you don’t care about. The difference is that BSG actually WAS really good for a while. It was only ruined in retrospect.