In Galactica, It's Politics as Usual. Or Is It?

Source: New York Times

With its attention to suicide bombings, insurgencies and the tenability and ethics of long-term military occupation, this "Battlestar Galactica" season looks suspiciously like an allegory for Middle East politics. And that infuriates people.

But it's not ideologues who get mad at "Battlestar." It's critics. For critics, allegories are a huge bummer. Who wants to be a translator of pig Latin? If - in a novel, say - there's a gang of hoods who stand for the world's disenfranchised, and a character who equals Jesus, and a nightclub that's the garden of Gethsemane, where's the pleasure in analysis? Reading becomes an umb-day ritual of cracking rote codes.

This notion of allegories as static and dull - an idea derived from 17th-century works of moral instruction like "Pilgrim's Progress" that featured characters with names like Everyman and Sloth - turned 20th-century critics against them. For many of them allegory was a lesser genre, didactic and prim, and lacking sophisticated literary features like ambiguity, irony, dissonance, verisimilitude. Readers, on the other hand, continued to embrace allegory in all kinds of popular fiction by writers as disparate as Ayn Rand and George Orwell.

Ultimately, genre discrimination is not good for anyone. And it has been particularly hard on science fiction like the newest "Battlestar," which has been snubbed by some critics who fear its didacticism and (scarier still) the ardor of its fans. The earliest practitioners of science fiction in literature, especially H. G. Wells, were known for clunky parables. With that as a partial excuse, many critics, including this one, have nervously dismissed the proselytizers who buttonhole them to rave about the importance of "Battlestar Galactica."

Still, it has to be granted that this latest "Battlestar" is a quantum-leap improvement of the campy franchise that began in 1978. The recent series, with its unexpected seriousness, first appeared on the SciFi Channel two years ago, having already had its world premiere in Britain. There, Sky One's confidence in the show, which had begun as an American mini-series in 2003, far outstripped that of SciFi's parent company, which waited until American fans had downloaded the show from sharing sites like BitTorrent (bittorrent.com) in huge numbers before committing to broadcasting it. Now it appears on Fridays, and the premiere of this third season, on Oct. 6, set ratings records for the SciFi Channel.

So what's it all about, this fancy "Battlestar"? The short answer is politics, whatever that means: genocide, abortion, torture, the clash of civilizations. In a deft opening move, "Battlestar" defined a race of genocidal creatures who are decidedly other: in this case, robots called Cylons who look all-too-human but are certainly not part of the brotherhood of man. These figures can't love, or die; in any case, they're definitely Not Us. Which in some sense is a relief: unlike races and ethnicities in the real world, the Cylons can be deprived of their rights without a second thought. They can be attacked and tormented because they're not even human. Or can they? Sound familiar?

"Battlestar," which is forever recapping its own plot, is somewhat anxious about getting into the tortured farragoes for which science fiction is infamous, so the plot has been reduced to a simple recitable creed. It's this: "The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. There are many copies. And they have a plan."

Having wiped out most of humanity and chased the remaining men and women through space, the Cylons have followed them through to their temporary safe haven, a habitable planet called New Caprica. The Cylons now occupy this makeshift civilization, interacting with humans in all kinds of morally dubious ways: seducing them, recruiting them, torturing them, befriending them. The humans, for their part, both collude and rebel.

A faction of insurgents, led by a Weather Underground-type, Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), has become increasingly bloodthirsty. Initially the insurgents enjoyed the backing of the leader of the humans - a onetime cabinet member named Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) who rose to the office of president when those ahead of her in the line of succession were wiped out - but lately she has found their suicide tactics insupportable.

A recent exchange between Laura and Gaius Baltar (James Callis), an oily human recruited by the Cylons to be their puppet dictator, was like a punch in the stomach. Audience sympathies are generally with Laura, a middle-aged woman and a seeming softie who may be a stand-in for the new sci-fi viewers, who are increasingly women; she's human, for one, and she's generally liberal, sympathetic to underdogs, a former teacher. But talking to Gaius, who is furious at the insurgents for their attack on the Cylon-collaborating human police, she becomes an extremist in defense of suicide bombing by humans. "Desperate people use desperate measures," she says.

Gaius then challenges Laura to say she supports suicide bombing in public places and, thus, the murder of civilians by naïve soldiers strapped with explosives. She cannot in good faith defend the practice, and she folds. Is she an American who might have supported the tactics of suicide bombers in the Middle East? Is the show's argument that resisting colonization is not only futile, but sometimes immoral? Should the Iraqis - that is, the humans - just yield to occupation?

Fortunately, it's not crystal clear. And that's what makes "Battlestar," week after week, riveting. The truth is, allegories don't really exist. Characters who initially seem to "stand for" figures in myth or current events eventually take on their own dimensions and - with any luck - subvert the symbolic system that was supposed to confine them.

That has happened in extraordinary ways with "Battlestar Galactica"; the exchange between Gaius and Laura is only the most remarkable recent example. The other characters - the morally bewildered leaders, lovers and warriors - have also outgrown their simple roles as Terrorist or Hawk or Diplomat, and their every action now has its own strange, engrossing logic.

By VIRGINIA HEFFERNAN

Newshound: SciFi