This Is The Question
In the latest Battlestar Galactica, Baltar, preaching over the radio , mentions "the undiscovered country."
I suppose it's possible he came up with it on his own, but it sure seems more likely, though he's never been to Earth, that he was quoting either Shakespeare or Star Trek.
posted by LAGuy @ 12:48 AM
2 Comments:
The thing is ridiculous on so many levels. When they are in a boxing ring, they follow rules that didn't exist before the British invented them just a century or so ago. Many crewmembers have radios in their rooms that look like 1970s USA radios (except for the bright red one from the season finale, which looked 1950s).
And when the do try to be "different", it's usually silly. Like their eight-sided paper. There are 39,000 humans left, and how many of them must have a full-time job of cutting the corners off of rectangular paper? (I presume their paper is manufactured -- it certainly looks manufactured -- and if you cut a large sheet into pieces, you get rectangles. You could get hexagons if you prefer -- but not eight-sided figures. Ever.)
I also think that the sort of cult where one guy is the Messiah and women sign up to have sex with him cannot draw from the general population. There's a certain type of insecure and overly dependent person who joins such a cult. That's why, in a country of 300,000,000 people, we probably have no more than a couple hundred people in the USA who belong to such cults. But with 39,000 people, they have plenty of joiners.
The writers proudly boast "We aren't normal science fiction -- we are relevant." What they mean is that they take American television cliches ("Sorry, Madam President, but you can't respond to candidate Baltar's last comment; the debate is over, since the networks have to get on to next hour's programming") and put them in space without modifying them. True science fiction would address the more difficult question of just how human society would change if it were composed of 39,000 people, who have been in mortal terror for three years, each of whom has seen 99% of their loved ones killed.
Indeed, one of the most interesting questions is friendship. If I move to a new city where I know nobody, and I want to make friends, I look for existing social infrastructure. But, aside from the military itself, everyone in the fleet is in that situation.
But instead we get repetition and love triagles.
I remember when Baltar thought about going on a book tour. And, more recently, when Lee thought about going into politics because he was getting "feelers" from some people. This is stuff that happens in an organized society that isn't on the run, fighting for its life. It's true, the producers keep acting like it's not just Life Goes On at an individual level, but also Life Goes On at several levels or organization about that. But that's just the point--this is a show about a society that's almost completely been destroyed, and is on the verge of losing everything; so how do they respond, not how are they so much like us, is what should matter.
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