So say we all
I found my thoughts drifting back to Battlestar Galactica again last weekend.
Is anyone getting into Battlestar Galactica for the first time in 2026? Or is it one of those things that you just kind of had to be there for? At the time, it felt like such a particularly Bush-era show, full of post-9/11 paranoia and thorny moral issues and Golden Age of Television buzz. I wonder how it reads now. Maybe we'd have different attitudes towards those frakking toasters in the GenAI-rotted 2020s.
For the uninitiated, the premise of Battlestar Galactica (rebooted from a much cornier 1970s show) is that humans invent intelligent robots called Cylons and then go to war with them. The Cylons vanish for decades, develop the capacity to disguise themselves as humans, then infiltrate humanity's Twelve Colonies and nuke the shit out of them. This leaves a ragtag fleet with ~50,000 human survivors travelling through space in search of the missing Thirteenth Colony, a planet called Earth.
More than anything else, BSG was a show with an enormous amount of ambition. It was complicated and thoughtful, a show about how we maintain hope in the face of what seems like all-consuming annihilation. It was concerned not just with how we justify our own survival, but with what makes us worth saving. It didn't always live up to its weighty aspirations, but it's still one of those things that I think will always hold a special place in my heart.
Maybe that's because of when I watched it. My love for the show peaked almost exactly 20 years ago. At the time, for complicated reasons involving school credit, I was required to go to the local YMCA for a certain number of hours every week. I didn't want to actually work out, so instead I'd just go to their running track and walk in a circle over and over again, listening to Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots on my iPod and thinking about the last episode of BSG I'd seen. I think I remember that more than I remember actually watching the show itself – walking and walking and just turning those first two seasons over in my head.
I haven't rewatched BSG in full since the series ended. Like a lot of people, I felt it went downhill after an incredible start to season 3. After being sucked in by the politics and gritty space survival stuff, I didn't know what to make of its growing emphasis on faith and spirituality and patterns greater than ourselves, even if all these themes had very much been there since the beginning. I stuck with it until the end, but by the time "All Along the Watchtower" kicked in, its early spell over me had broken.
I think it might be interesting to revisit those later seasons now that I know what path the show is on and am not a Reddit-style teenage atheist with a kneejerk disdain for anything that feels vaguely religious. Or maybe the plotting in the later seasons does actually just suck and I would dislike them anyway.
Some random things I still love about BSG:
- "33", which remains a perfect episode of television
- Bear McCreary's outrageously good soundtrack, which was the first time I ever really paid attention to the music for a TV show
- its cast of complicated, messed-up characters, many of whom I still get really weird about (Gaius Baltar! Laura Roslin!)
- Galactica as a setting (one of my favourite fictional spaceships)
- Galactica surviving the initial Cylon assault specifically because of her low-tech, supposedly outdated status
- the very silly production decision to trim the corners off every rectangle on the show
- Sharon and Helo running around together on Caprica (honestly kind of a blueprint ship for me tbh)
- "frak" as the network-friendly, in-universe substitute for "fuck", which is deeply cheesy but still kind of great
- the Adama Maneouvre
Should I rewatch BSG? Looking at that list makes me want to, but I'm not so sure. Maybe it would be great to revisit all those favourite moments and see how my views on it have changed over the last two decades. See how far the show and I have come.
On the other hand, maybe I'm better off not disturbing those happy teenage memories. Plus I'd have to rewatch "Black Market". I'm not sure anything is worth that.