Battlestar Galactica: all hail a cult classic of 21st-century TV
Earth, 2020: humanity faces an existential threat and, perhaps even worse, a slowdown in our TV content pipeline. So the BBC iPlayer box set debut of Battlestar Galactica (BSG) – a mid-00s reimagining of Glen A Larson’s 1978 discoball space opera – should be a cause for celebration. The initial 2003 miniseries depicts a thriving colonial space empire reduced to a rag-tag fleet of just 50,000 stricken souls, the result of a brutal terror attack orchestrated by a race of AI constructs rebelling against their human creators. How to survive in a state of seemingly perpetual crisis is BSG’s central, and regrettably timely, theme.
As well as featuring cool space dogfights with Cylon killbots and their inglorious Basestars, this hard-boiled sci-fi series asks thorny questions about the rights and wrongs of armed insurrection, and who or what should be sacrificed in order to avoid extinction. The push-and-pull relationship between the veteran military commander Adama (Edward James Olmos from Blade Runner, gravelly as all hell) and the fast-tracked new president, Roslin (Mary McDonnell), is also coloured by the fact that certain Cylons can pass for humans, creating a nervy background hum of paranoia. With such elevated stakes, no wonder a new sci-fi swearword – the versatile “frak!” – is so essential to the project.
When it launched, low expectations helped BSG become a talked-about hit. The showrunner, Ronald D Moore, had cut his teeth on various Star Treks, but no one really expected much from a thrifty US/UK co-production peppered with mostly unfamiliar faces. That Moore and his writing team managed to turn a cheesy 70s Star Wars homage into something gritty, thrilling and politically resonant became part of an irresistible underdog story. But, in 2020, everyone is aware that BSG is supposed to be some sort of 21st-century TV classic. Does it still hold up?
Some longstanding fans recommend newcomers should skip the three-hour miniseries altogether. Jumping straight to episode one is an easy iPlayer option, but you would miss out on some useful scene-setting and a priceless insight into the mind of Dr Gaius Baltar (James Callis), the self-regarding and deeply cowardly scientist whose libido dooms his civilisation. Armando Iannucci, no stranger to creating brilliantly craven characters, has cited Baltar as one of his favourites, which should be recommendation enough.
While the miniseries can sometimes feel a little plodding for such an apocalyptic tale, the full series hits the ground running. Adama and his crew on the creaky flagship Galactica are desperately trying to chaperone their enervated convoy of survivors beyond the reach of the Cylons. But every time the fleet makes a fasterthan-light jump to flee, their relentless pursuers turn up 33 minutes later with murder on their mind. It boils down to sleep-deprived human fortitude versus implacable Terminatorstyle ruthlessness. From that nervy, ticking-clock starting point, the emergencies just keep piling up. The refugee caravan is resource-starved, frightened, fractious and in dire need of the right leadership.
The headlong, cliffhanger-heavy plotting gives BSG its impressive momentum, not least because it is shot with a raw, handheld energy that still feels unusual more than 15 years later. But what will ultimately sell you on the show or not is whether you click with the characters. As the highly strung Baltar, Callis is a magnificent bounder matched at every turn by his poised scene partner, Tricia Helfer, vamping it up as Cylon sexbomb Number Six. Katee Sackhoff crackles with unfiltered emotion as hotdogging space cowboy Starbuck – originally a smarmy ladykiller played by a pre-A-Team Dirk Benedict – while the bullet-headed Canadian character actor Michael Hogan takes the creaky stereotype of the boozy bulldog colonel and finds heartbreaking new nuances within it as the abrasive Saul Tigh.
Despite the sprawling ensemble, everyone – from pilot-with-a-secret Boomer (Grace Park) to baby-faced political aide Billy (Paul Campbell) – seems messy and alive in a way that is all too rare. That emotional connection will keep you invested as the writers take bigger and bolder swings over the course of four seasons. The Cylon mythology and religion is deeply explored. A classic Bob Dylan song is audaciously co-opted. An abrupt timejump reframes the entire show.
In the opening credits sequence, the patient Cylons are said to “have a plan”, but the show often feels fleetfooted, instinctive, almost improvised. Maybe it went a little too far: opinions certainly vary about whether it stuck the landing or not. But it is never less than boundary-pushing sci-fi with immensely relatable characters, which is what makes it still so frakking great.
Battlestar Galactica is on BBC Two and iPlayer from 5 September
Despite the sprawling ensemble, everyone seems messy and alive in a way that is all too rare
thanks to a pandemic that Trump refused to admit was happening, and for which his proposed remedy was self-injected bleach. The US economy lies in tatters, racked by mass unemployment. And yet, despite that record of lethal failure, this inadequate, malignant man still has the support of 42% of the American people.
That fact alone makes this an abnormal election. But that’s not the exceptional circumstance I have in mind. Rather, it is that the critical contest on 3 November is not so much between Democrat and Republican as between democrat and anti-democrat. It is that nothing less than the US’s standing as a democracy is at stake.
Consider the evidence. This week, the president urged his supporters to vote twice. It wasn’t a joke. It was a message delivered in earnest. In a series of Twitter messages that the social media company hid from view for violating its rules on “civic and election integrity”, Trump told his followers to vote early by mail-in ballot and then turn up in person on election day to vote again. Here was the self-styled law-and-order candidate urging Americans to break the law.
He claimed he only wanted people to test the robustness of the system – because if the system worked, then his supporters shouldn’t be allowed to cast that second ballot – but that’s the logic of the bank robber who insists he’s only emptying the safe to help the bank improve its security. Besides, there’s a pattern here.
Little more than a month ago, Trump suggested that, since postal voting – set to increase massively because of the pandemic – was bound to lead to “the most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT election in history”, it would be best to delay the election, even though the constitution bars him from making such a move. At his convention last month, he urged the crowd, who had been chanting for “four more years” to call instead for “12 more years”, even though that too would violate the constitution. Most troubling, he has repeatedly refused to say whether he will accept defeat and leave office if that’s what the voters decide.
This is what his now-constant attacks on mail-in voting are about: Trump is preparing the ground to challenge the electorate’s verdict, arguing that the result cannot be trusted because postal votes shouldn’t count. He has seen the data that shows mail-in voters are more likely to lean towards Biden, and so wants to be able to argue, come 4 November, that tens of millions of postal votes should be chucked out – leaving only the votes cast on election day, from which Trump reckons he could achieve a narrow victory.
That’s why he installed a Republican
donor as head of the US Postal Service, a man who has set about gutting the service’s ability to process mailin ballots in time. And that’s why he’s starving the post office of cash. This is not guesswork, or the analysis of hostile commentators. Trump has admitted as much. Explaining why he was seeking to cut off two sources of postal service revenue, he said: “If they don’t get those two items, that means you can’t have universal mail-in voting because they’re not equipped to have it.” With Trump, he always says the quiet part out loud.
Given that the polls suggest he cannot win a straight fight, Trump’s next best scenario is a cloud of confusion and doubt hanging over the November result. Sackfuls of uncounted ballots stuck in postal depots; his base crying fraud, groundlessly suggesting that the mail-in votes are forgeries: this is the context in which he reckons he could argue that the election was disputed and therefore there was no good reason for him to leave office.
And who would stop him? Note that the attorney general, William Barr, supposedly the most senior law enforcement officer in the land, this week refused to say whether voting twice was against the law. Trump’s enablers have come this far. Why would they change course now?
The danger is clear, even before you reflect on the decades-old Republican effort to suppress the vote, especially the Black vote – an effort whose motive Trump brazenly disclosed when he told Fox News that if voting was easier and turnout went up, “you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again”. Not for nothing did Barack Obama, a man not prone to hyperbole, warn last month that Trump is willing to “tear our democracy down if that’s what it takes to win”.
Consider all that Trump has been willing to do already. Imagine what he would do if he received the mandate of re-election. Except there’s no need to imagine it. Trump’s contempt for democracy is in plain sight.
• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist