Lost In Space

Moore, a veteran of the Star Trek franchise (he worked on The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, and Voyager), has used the term naturalistic science fiction to describe his approach to Battlestar Galactica. The vibe is grim. The camera wobbles. The sound track is heavy on loping percussion and chilly pokes of piano. Is the dialogue finely wrought? It is, for the most part, not. It is stunted, sleep-deprived, 21st-century: “I can’t live like this!” “I worked my ass off defending this fleet!” Frak, the show’s patented profanity, gets plenty of use: “Frak you!” “Frakkin’ A!” “Talk to me, you motherfrakker!!” The characters announce themselves not as heroic starmen but as pissed-off human beings—the hulking Helo (Tahmoh Penikett), with his gum-shield frown, husband to a Cylon wife, father to a hybrid child; or Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), Adama’s executive officer, boozing and snarling like a rogue priest. Incest thickens the air: attractions and enmities abound, and there’s always some sinewy scuffle or mating dance happening below decks. The battlestar churns on, pathologically spawning its subplots. Loyalties shift; marriages break up; roles are redefined; crew members who considered themselves more or less human make the nasty discovery that they are Cylons.

This last story line demands some explanation. The Cylons in the original Battlestar Galactica were not man-made—they were just violent robots from outer space. It was Moore and Eick who gave the Cylons a human provenance and, what’s more, the power to re-create themselves in human form: there are still plenty of violent robots, but 12 exquisitely bioengineered humanoid models now lead the Cylon race—battery-farmed people, with personalities, indistinguishable from the real thing. They bleed, they feel. Pure nectar to the sci-fi buff, who loves to whir his wings in these realms of ontological vexation: Who is real, after all? And what does it mean to exist? And is it nice to have sex with a machine?

Former model Tricia Helfer plays Cylon Number Six—a glittering and sibilant entity in high heels. She spends a good deal of time snaking around inside the mind of the treacherous human Gaius Baltar (James Callis), making suggestions; Baltar has trouble working out whether she is an implanted Cylon chip or simply his subconscious frakking with him. In a further twist, the Cylons of the new breed are devout monotheists, full of inflated talk about “God’s plan,” while the benighted humans mutter prayers to the Twelve Lords of Kobol. The Cylon position vis-à-vis the meaning of life is complicated by the fact that they have no experience of death: should a Cylon’s mortal frame by some mischance perish, it simply “downloads” its essence to another body and wakes up full-grown, naked and gasping, in a birthing pool of cybernetic sludge.

Whither “naturalism” in all this? Can one be realistic about the religious intuitions of robots? Post–Battlestar Galactica, a certain sort of space opera will no longer be possible: the sexless pomp of Star Trek: The Next Generation has been laid low by the frakking and the wobble-cam. But the interesting thing about the show as it space-hops toward its conclusion is that, for all its proclaimed engagement with post-9/11 discourse, it is actually getting freakier and more far-out by the minute. Visions are driving the plot: through seizures and weird gnostic prompts, Earth has been located, but somebody appears to have gotten there first and set off some rather large bombs. And who, for frak’s sake, is the 12th and final Cylon? Eight, Nine, Ten, and Eleven have all revealed themselves, tormented into self-awareness by a frazzled psychic broadcast of Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower” (clearly an error in transmission here—it should have been Queen’s “We Are the Champions”). But Twelve goes incognito.

It could be Adama. It could be God. It could be Ronald D. Moore. Why not? The point is that Battlestar Galactica is presenting all the symptoms of an extended-run high-concept TV series in its decadent phase. An oracular mood, an obsession with identity, a sensation of multiplying meanings—it’s the paranoid style in American TV writing. A casual viewer parachuted into the final chapters of this show would be as clueless as if he’d joined David Lynch’s Twin Peaks in the second season or J.J. Abrams’s Lost in the third. They start strong, these projects, on power chords of auteurist entitlement—they grip the mind, at first. Dispensed from the obligation to deliver a crisp narrative arc and a prescribed dosage of thrills with each installment, today’s TV hit-maker is riding his own wild license across the ranges of space.

But now he’s way out there, Daddy-O. Can he ever come back?

In their latter, breakdown stages, these shows become the culture’s homage to vertigo—to the suspicion that we live in a universe of surfaces, pointlessly arranged, whose invitations to depth or transcendence are all red herrings, shaggy dogs, wild goose chases, and decoy ducks. For Battlestar Galactica, the hunt is almost over. The finale looms; annihilation snickers outside the air lock. Time to find out whether that Snark is really a Boojum or not. What if, in the last reveal, it were to be disclosed that the human-Cylon showdown already took place, aeons ago, before our beetling progress toward the stars had even begun? That the Cylons are our ancestors, with their wires coiled in our DNA? Behold: he approaches, striding blindingly out of a golden haze: the 12th Cylon. See his smile. Feel his heat. He has the face (surely you’ve guessed it by now) of L.Ron Hubbard.