Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) remains the best science-fiction series. Ever.

Word started trickling out earlier this year: Universal is preparing to relaunch Battlestar Galactica.

All this has happened before and all this will happen again.

It was a little over ten years ago that the previous relaunch of the franchise ended its four-season (six-year) run. When Universal last announced a reboot of the show, fans of the original were up in arms. The new BSG would feature an entirely new cast, a new story, new Cylons, new Starbuck, new everything. Well, not everything. In fact, if you look at it with an unbiased viewpoint, the fact is the whole skeleton of the original story was still intact. Show creator Ronald D. Moore (longtime Star Trek TNG and DS9 alum) likes to call it, not a remake but a “reimagining.”

I approached the show without any bias, except perhaps for an appreciation for Moore’s Star Trek episodes. The man wrote the book on the Klingon “honor” culture, scripted some of the very best episodes of the franchise (including Tapestry, Yesterday’s Enterprise, Redemption 1-2, Chain of Command 1-2, All Good Things…, Trials and Tribulations, In the Pale Moonlight, and many many more). After DS9 ended, Moore moved over to write for Star Trek Voyager but, by his own admission, found the work unfulfilling. He only has a few credits to his name on the show and left after only a few months on the job. He would later describe his frustrations with the show and how it failed to live up to its premise.

Now, let’s just pause for a second and consider what the “premise” of Star Trek Voyager is…

It’s a show about a lone ship, stranded away from home, on a mission to find earth, with a crew comprised of Starfleet and Maquis, who are forced to come together and coexist if they’re to survive their long journey.

Does that sound at all familiar?

Moore thought Voyager would, obviously, age with wear and tear over her seven-year journey. The ship would break down, the diverse crew would have infighting, people would start making babies, the stuffy federation ship would start to look more like a home, with pictures hung around, potted plants peppered throughout the corridors, etc. Instead, Voyager (the show) was under strict orders, from Star Trek executive producer Rick Berman, to remain wholly episodic. “You should be able to jump in at any time and just enjoy the 45-minute plot.” That was his vision for the show. Moore, having come from the more serialized DS9, tried to push back, but found the clout he had on the other show didn’t carry over.

So he left.

A few years later he wrote the two-part miniseries for a reimagined Battlestar Galactica. Here’s the premise…

It’s a show about a lone military ship, stranded after its home is destroyed, on a mission to find earth, guarding a civilian fleet and its very different-minded President, who are forced to come together and coexist if they’re to survive their long journey.

The difference is in the details but you can see how the show would provide Moore a creative outlet. Eleven years later, Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) remains, in my opinion, the greatest science-fiction show ever put to air. Voyager is good for several fun little forty-five minute plots, but BSG tells a true story, filled with drama, adventure, humor, horror, gravitas, heroism, villainy, treachery, and tremendous pathos. It’s a show that is elevated by incredible performances, powerful musical arrangements, and an eighty-part story that consistently surprises and always entertains.

I first watched the show in the fall of 2008. The first half of the final season had just ended and everyone on sci-fi forums was going bananas over it. I hadn’t given the show any thought before then but decided to give the first few episodes a shot to see what all the fuss was about. The two-part miniseries serves as a proper introduction to the show. It’s a three-hour movie that introduces us to the universe, the heroes, the villains, and the stakes. It also plants seeds that, in some cases, won’t be paid off until the final minutes of the final episode. After the miniseries, I was hooked. I binged the show in a matter of weeks, then re-watched it just before the final batch of episodes aired. When it was over, I cried.

I hadn’t done that during a show’s finale since DS9 ended.

A year later I watched it again (cried again too). A few years later I watched it again (cried). I watched it again in 2016 (yep). I’ve been busy since then, but then I found myself quarantined. With little else to do with my evenings, I decided to put my favorite show on and watch it again for the sixth time.

This time, as I watched, I decided to take notes. I jotted down thoughts on the show’s key themes and character arcs, rated the episodes, and reflected on its legacy.

On that last point, I am disheartened to say the show has not risen to the pantheon of other TV shows often hailed as the best ever: The Wire, Breaking Bad, Mad Men, etc. That’s sad because, in my opinion, it belongs right there with them. Unlike other shows that wilted and failed to stick the landing with a satisfying finale (Game of Thrones), Battlestar Galactica told its story from beginning to end, and wowed audiences every step of the way.

Of course, some fans weren’t happy.

Fans of the original were furious at key changes made from the one-season OG show back in 1978. Among the most notable include Starbuck being a woman, names like Apollo, Boomer, Athena, etc, were turned into “callsigns” and the Cylons were depicted either as computer-generated robots (as opposed to the original “men in metal suits”) or as human-looking undercover robots (dubbed “skinjobs”). The latter decision is actually a stroke of genius as it allowed for the enemy to be depicted without costly CGI (or cheap looking suits), and it introduced a whole new dynamic to the good guys vs bad guys dynamic: When the enemy looks like you, the enemy could be anyone.

Since I was not attached to the original show (to date I’ve still never watched a second of it), I wasn’t bothered by any of the changes. I first watched the show and judged it on its own merits. What I found was one of the purest forms of science-fiction ever put to the screen.

When reviewing Picard, I referred to a scene in the TNG episode “The Measure of a Man…”

What I said was this:

what I love the most about it is how purely sci-fi it is, despite there being no crazy aliens, no space ship battles, no technobabble. The episode’s climax simply features two actors debating over whether a machine should be considered alive and what the moral implications are for whatever decision they reach. That’s about as “Isaac Asimov” a sentence as I’ve ever typed. That’s sci-fi. It’s not about the window dressing, it’s about the things it makes you think about. Even a popcorn blockbuster like First Contact still bothered to explore the damaged humanity of the man, Picard. That’s the “human condition” element that Gene Roddenberry wanted to set his show apart

Much like that scene, the whole of Battlestar Galactica is a show without aliens, without phasers, without force fields or photons. There’s no technobabble (except when the very idea is mocked), the phones have cords, the guns have bullets, the ships have nukes, and the doors have handles. It’s gritty, it’s raw, it’s real, and it’s done that way to keep the focus on the people in the story. The result is a supremely satisfying character-driven science-fiction show, one that stays excellent long after its special effects appear antiquated. A 2004-era CGI robot is only going to look so good in 2020, but good acting is timeless. Good music is timeless. A good story is timeless.

Battlestar Galactica is timeless.

This is just the first of a series of articles looking back on the show. I have much more to say, but until then, if you’ve never seen Battlestar Galactica, you simply must. If you’re a sci-fi fan, it should be a no-brainer. Even if you’re not, the show is simply too good not to enjoy. My wife hates science-fiction, but she loves this show because good stories, well-acted and well-told, can’t be denied.

And what I realized on my most recent rewatch is that it’s also as relevant and needed as ever.

Battlestar Galactica is as relevant and needed as ever

Battlestar Galactica—a show about humans on the run from killer robots—is a show that needs to be seen in 2020 just as much as it needed to be seen in 2004. To understand that, let’s first consider the power of science-fiction as a genre.

Science-fiction at its core is not about aliens and phasers or lightspeed-jumping or any of the other stuff that’s often associated with it. That’s all window dressing. What sci-fi really is about is exploring the human condition. It’s about asking hard questions, forcing us to reexamine our preconceptions or to debate ethical quandaries that we might’ve previously ignored.

Let’s be honest about humanity: The problem with a lot of people is we tend to have our biases and our pride, making for a dangerous combination. People like what they like and hate what they hate and we’re often too self-righteous to be told we are wrong.

What sci-fi is able to do is take the questions and debates we should be asking and having and recontextualizes them in a fantastical setting. A person who might never open his mind to consider he or she is wrong about a topic might jump right into that exact debate if it relates to a character(s) on his favorite TV show. That’s what sci-fi pioneers like Heinlein, Dick, Serling, Roddenberry, and others understood.

If you dumb down your sci-fi so that it’s JUST about the gadgets and spectacle, the experience becomes hollow and ultimately worthless.

eh hem…modern Trek…

Good science-fiction is about things. It’s about story, not plot. It’s about characters, not contrivances.

So what is Battlestar Galactica trying to tell us? What does it want us to consider about ourselves?

It’s important to remember that Ron Moore’s BSG was made in the shadow of 9|11 and the opening days of the Iraq War. If you weren’t alive or if you weren’t old enough to remember, it was a VERY politically-polarized time. Sure, it still is today, but this was the outset of the modern era of hyper-politicization. The idea of a show that plainly exposed various extremist dangers that might stir up in response to 9|11 and the Iraq War was hard to fathom. It was too sensitive a topic unless you were willing to toe the line and always show “our” side as good and “their” side as bad.

BSG dared to show the shades of grey. It used sci-fi’s greatest tool—the genre’s ability to hold up a mirror and tell you it’s a window—to tell stories about what it means to be human, what it looks like when you’re sucker punched as a race, how you respond, how easy it is to become an extremist or to let personal feelings cloud judgment. It talked about martial law, the role of religion, rigging elections, the thin line between seeking peace and colluding with the enemy, about suicide bombing, and so much more. And that’s just the first two and a half seasons.

Let’s also not forget the idea of skinjob-Cylons, the enemies that look like people. Talk about a fantastic allegory for the terrorists who entered “our” country, stood in lines at “our” airport, and boarded “our” planes, without anyone thinking twice about them. The show “goes there.” It explores not only the fear and paranoia that would naturally arise, but dares to show how easy it would be to go too far in the other direction.

The thesis of the show, written in the shadow of those two wars, is stated in the final minutes of the miniseries. Commander Adama makes the statement: “It’s not enough to survive, we have to have something to live for.” Later, that idea would form the show’s moral code: “We survived the Cylon Holocaust, now what kind of a people are we going to be? Are we going to be worthy of survival?”

The show used science-fiction to warn us in the post-9|11 world—those of us who survived the attacks and the wars that followed—that it’s very easy to have our survival be in vain, and that we must be a people worthy of the gift of life.

Now, twenty years later, the show is as relevant as ever. Look at the list of topics it tackles in its eighty-episodes: political extremism, military extremism, martial law, religious extremism, election-stealing, sending soldiers to combat civilian unrest. BSG tackled all of that. They took the headlines and fears of today and showed us the dangerous road we were on fifteen years before we got there.

Science-fiction is needed now more than ever if you ask me. And I don’t mean “boobs and explosions and laser beams in space” (modern trek). And I don’t mean convoluted plots that make no sense but don’t think about it because look, mindless action! (modern Trek)

I’m talking about real science-fiction, the kind that asks hard questions and doesn’t bury those questions under convoluted technobabble, but grounds them enough for the common person to watch, to contemplate, and–potentially–to be changed by.

BSG is fifteen years old, more or less, and it’s never been more relevant…or needed.

This was part two in a series looking back on this incredible show. Next, we’ll dig into the episodes themselves and look at what makes the individual shows and the larger story arcs so great…