BSG

“There’s a dark cloud rising from the desert floor, I packed my bags and I’m heading straight into the storm. Gonna be a twister to blow everything down that ain’t got the faith to stand its ground. Blow away the dreams that tear you apart. Blow away the dreams that break your heart. Blow away the lies that leave you nothing but lost and broken-hearted.”

• Bruce Springsteen

Battlestar Galactica: A Rattlesnake Highway in the Stars

In the long history of human story-telling there are few motifs, if any, more prevalent and perpetual than a journey in search of some promised land. From the cradle of civilization to sunny California, such stories have shaped our world, typically to the benefit of one select group at the detriment of another. When empowered with zealous belief, such stories perpetuate old hatreds and arbitrary animosities – tragedies like dust storms, towering, black, and impossible to ignore – and yet we persist. With every generation we strive to retell and re-imagine these stories in the ever more futile seeming hope that this time the promise will amount to more that the limited desires of those who take it to heart. There’s nothing wrong with trying. There’s nothing wrong with hope.

When I started watching Battlestar Galactica, my expectations were limited. I expected to find the show well written, enjoyable, and, if the acclaim of critics and the far more important acclaim of my friends is any sort of reliable barometer, unafraid to take on weighty and unpleasant themes like social structures of power, war, and ultimately racial, ethnic, and ideological prejudices. High expectations for basic cable, even in this day and age, but limited enough that late in the second season, I was blindsided by the discovery that I was watching an expansive attempt to add to a powerful literary tradition as old as literature itself. I cast my earliest notes aside, the game had changed. By merit of their ultimate intentions, the re-creators of Battlestar Galactica were no longer batting against the likes of Joss Whedon and George Lucas, but John Steinbeck, Bruce Springsteen, and the god-damn bible.

“It’s your funeral,” I joked, preparing myself for the very real possibility that I would have to be cruel and profoundly critical to a series that I genuinely liked. Those are the stakes of the game. And while Battlestar Galactica is still a far cry from East of Eden, I can’t deny that it held its own in the biggest of the big leagues. Not without making a few missteps and leaving some lingering bones of contention along the way; but that is one of the great advantages to the medium of television, in its scale it is very forgiving. Just as a spelling error might be more easily overlooked in a 600 page tome than it would in a haiku, it’s easier to forgive a few marred details in the grand landscape of a story four years in the telling, provided the big picture comes together looking more or less right.

Of course, destiny, deliverance, and promised lands are not Battlestar Galactica’s only themes. Throughout the first two seasons of the series, those ideas are mostly hinted at and held in reserve. Such themes need to stand upon a strong foundation, and if your pouring it out of the ether, it must be carefully done. The alien universe being created must be made to seem undeniably familiar, the details must be tuned to resonate. In the early hours of Battlestar Galactica, this is achieved by tackling more immediate and tangible themes, and lending them a true human element. The society established in the first chapter of the story, the “backdoor pilot” miniseries, is an ingenious construct – a manageable microcosm of human society and republican government augmented by the presence of a hostile outsider – but it is a gift for telling the human story which makes the show such a success. The conceptual structure of the series lends itself well to tackling topics like terrorism, military ethics, and the separation of church and state, and Battlestar Galactica handles these sensitive issues with grace and guile, looking at them from a multitude of perspectives and rarely casting judgment. No matter how pertinent the issues, however, they amount to nothing more that objects for academic debate unless we see in a direct way how they affect the lives of individual men and women. With a flawlessly crafted ensemble of sympathetic and believable characters, and a cast which lends them uncanny life, Battlestar Galactica is able to take every abstract theme or issue it tackles, and fold it into a compelling personal drama. It is the story of a family, albeit a large and mostly metaphorical one.

Out of the chaos of socio-political concerns, one issue in particular ascends to central importance – the role of religion in society. Over the course of an ideological debate which spans most of the second season, the audience is primed for the grander themes to come. Ironically, this device was almost too well executed and it became, for me, one of the show’s most treacherous missteps. I was so invested in the conflict of ideas that, when the second season ended with the revelation of certain prophecies, I felt more than a little betrayed by the apparent abandonment of the ambiguity which had thus far been one of Battlestar Galactica’s greatest strengths. But as I picked apart my recollections of the second season while awaiting the arrival of those glorious red envelopes bearing the next chapter of the story, I began to see the role of belief and prophecy within the show in a slightly different light.

As it came to pass, I started watching Battlestar Galactica shortly after finishing John Steinbeck’s East of Eden, a book which has profoundly impacted my life in innumerable ways, not the least of which was elevating Bruce Springsteen’s Darkness on the Edge of Town to the very top of my heavy rotation. If you’ll pardon a little meta-textual joke, it seemed a convergence of texts which was destined to be – each influencing my reading of the others in unexpected ways. Belief and faith are cornerstones of all three texts, but none treat them as a matter of fact or take them from granted. Instead, they tread deeply and scrutinize, questioning even the hearts of their own stories. Fiction is the perfect tool for contemplating the power of faith and belief, and for dwelling on matters of the spirit. We’ve been conditioned by the whole sweeping legacy of literature to expect, accept, and perhaps embrace the fact that a story being told will have a symmetry in its fundamental structure not always found, or even sought out, in life. What we call coincidence in life, we see as a meaningful signifier when told to us in story. We’re invited by intuition and tradition to ask, what power is at work here? Is it the hand of deus-ex-machina or the natural shape of a story? Is it a story which has already been written – by the deliberate hand of a creator, or perhaps by cycles of self-fulfilling, self-promulgating prophecies empowered not by our belief in some god, divine and unknowable, but by our belief in story itself?

One of the most troubling and fascinating aspects of Steinbeck’s East of Eden for me (and one with obvious connections to Battlestar Galactica) is that, while retelling the story of Genesis in a secular context and composing what I suspect he consciously realized could stand as a piece of secular scripture – redefining the story for a generation of secular believers, like myself – Steinbeck himself seemed to remain ostensibly devoted to the story’s Judeo-Christian roots. The text itself is utterly ambiguous. Sin, redemption, belief in deliverance and in a promised land are presented as though both a part of a divine established plan and a pattern which repeats and re-invents itself among mankind, regardless of their belief in either the divine plan or the text which outlines it. There is a strong implication that belief, morality, and the search for some kind of Eden are, in fact, essential compulsions of mankind.

Look at American mythology. We are a society allegedly established on religious freedom which grew up in an age of scientific and secular thought – which is not to say that there isn’t a profound religious influence on every human culture, ours included, but the stories upon which American myths have been built have largely been a step removed from the religious trappings intrinsic to the myths of older societies. The foundational stories of older cultures, in search of explanation, took the unknowable and made it into something comprehensible – taking the abstract of the divine and forging it into an anthropomorphic deity. American stories instead deify the real. Loamy black soil and The West, The Road, fucking Fender guitars; we’re carving metaphorical totems, seeking to build up for ourselves things we can believe in, and which make sense in the world we’ve inherited.

Like America, Battlestar Galactica’s fleet is a creole nation, a blend of exiles faced with a new reality which they need to reconcile themselves to in order to survive. There are answers for such a crisis of culture and faith. For some it is to cling to old gods and for others it is to seek new ones. Some deify ordinary men and women, and others invest all their belief in themselves and reach for the reigns of their own destiny. Whatever their answer, everyone looks to the symmetry of stories in search of guideposts – whether it is being written moment to moment by every decision, or already etched in stone, every story has an end and everyone has a destiny. Promised land or boneyard, we all come to rest somewhere.

As a general rule, I find setting to be trumped in importance only by character in fiction, and when well done the two can almost be one in the same. A setting, be it an aging Battlestar or California’s Salinas Valley, is a composite – a random conception more miraculous than that of any one child. A place, when given life by being lived in, becomes an amalgamation of every soul within, every passion and every belief becomes a brush stroke, a part of a whole that is incomprehensibly complex. The juxtaposition between life in the fleet and the hopes of a promised land called Earth is a delicate composition of two such places, each character’s life makes a mark on the one, their hopes for the future a mark on the other.

I have a promised land, it takes shape slowly in my mind. It is nestled in the green foothills of a mountain range somewhere south of New Jersey, where the winters are gentler and the summers are purer. In my minds eye, I can see a small house with a long covered porch and a scattering of trees, but beyond, there is only shapeless green crowned with gray and blue. There are details missing because my eyes have yet to see them, and my desires have yet to conceive of them. If there is an imperative in life, it is not defined by the threat of death, but by the relationship between dream, desire, and reality. Our desires are always building on our dreams, and they solidify more and more with each passing day. If we falter too long in our search, lose too much time to the journey, our eyes can never see our Eden. We’ll have dreamed up a too fixed, too specific vision, and nothing real will ever compare.

Forget death. It’s out of your hands and beyond the end of you’re story. Fix your eyes on your dreams before they become impossible, or let your dreams be malleable. This is what Kara represents as the “Harbinger of Death.” When she finally leads the fleet to earth, the reality they discover shatters the dreams which encumbered them. Over the final episodes of the series we watch dozens of dreams die, dreams of homes and dreams of families, dreams of how life would be at the end of the exodus. For the dream of a promised land to be realized, the slate of collective desires must be wiped clean. In the words of a far better writer than I: “All impurities burned out and ready for a glorious flux, and for that – more fire. And then either the slag heap or, perhaps what no one in the world ever quite gives up, perfection.”

What makes this painful discovery all the more poignant in the final episodes is the cruel lens of hindsight. With the exception of a select handful of characters, it is only when the show’s eponymous vessel begins her final descent into a dying husk that her denizens begin to see her as the home she has always been. Cataclysms and promised lands, love and war, it is all just a grand stage for the asking of a very simple question – where is home?

We seek the answer to that question in stories because home too is an abstract, an idea. It may come to be embodied by a place, and for most of us it does, but ultimately it is always something different for each of us. Even day to day, the symbols which represent home can change. When I stumble in at 3 am on a Friday night, after 8 hours spent on my feet selling slices of pizza to inarticulate drunks, home is the sad sleepy face and wagging tail of a restless hound-dog; but the next morning it’s a cup of dark roast coffee and the NY Times Ken Ken puzzles. At this very moment, home is an open window, a typewriter, and a turntable; in another hour it will be a Fender Telecaster and the catharsis of pushing through the pain in my throat to lose myself in words breathed to life. The idea changes constantly, perpetually adapting to the gap between the grand scale of our conceptions and the narrow focus of our perceptions.

Ultimately, Battlestar Galactica comes to a conclusion found in any story of a journey, a point we retread and rediscover because we need constant reminders of its truth. A point best articulated by John Steinbeck, with his gift for putting what is elusive but should be obvious into painfully succinct poetry: “Living is people, not places.”