For those of you who didn't catch it on Monday, SyFy (ha ha) is re-running their "Last Frakking Special" about Battlestar Galactica at 7PM EST tonight, just before the series finale -- and if you care at all about this series but yet didn't catch "The Last
Frakking Special" the first time around, we highly recommend you watch
it tonight.
Because even though you have to plow through a lot of the same ol'
slightly staged, overly earnest interviews with the cast and crew that
featurettes like this always have, there is one genuinely revealing and
intriguing moment to be found, one that kind of made us
rethink the show entirely. What this moment said to us -- the truth that it revealed -- is that Battlestar Galactica isn't perfect; instead, like Kara Thrace, it's a reckless, confounding, self-destructive, unforgettable mess.
("Frakking Special," btw, isn't online, or on iTunes, and we weren't taping it on Monday -- so bear with our rough quotes here.)
Anyway, speaking of Starbuck, the revelatory moment comes from Katee Sackhoff herself, who notes at one point that in somewhere in this, the final season, she began to actively despise her character. Starbuck's self-absorption and monomania as she tried to find Earth and, hopefully, uncover the truth about her return from the grave was making Sackhoff, as an actress and possibly as a rational human, crazy. "I [bleeping] hated her," she says, or something to that effect, the bleeps added by the producers to mask her apparently using something other than "frak".
Anyway, what's great about this, of course -- not revelatory, but just awesome -- is that this year, we kind of hated Starbuck too. Gods help us, but as much as we love the girl, Starbuck's basically been unbearable this season -- too weirded out by her apparent resurrection to have anything but fleeting, desperate connections to her fellow humans, and too consumed with getting at her "destiny" to have anything to do with Cylons unless they could help her out somehow. She'd always been obsessive; now she wasn't indulging in any of the fun vices that kept those obsessions in check. She'd always been self-destructive; now she was dragging other people down with her -- most notably Felix Gaeta, whose trip on the Demetrius led him to lose a leg and ultimately started him on the road to bloody mutiny, and Anders, her Cylon husband, who was wounded in the ensuing battle.
So where's the revelation? What's so great about knowing that even Sackhoff herself -- who can turn on a big eyed, big laughed impetuousness the way we turn on our lights -- was fed up with her own character? Because, after hearing that, the showrunners apparently said "Great, that's how we want you to play her."
Which to us is an encapsulation of everything that's great about Battlestar Galactica. This is a show so committed to the story of the self-destruction of the human race (who invented the Cylons?) that this self-destructive urge permeates every facet of its being -- even its very production. Fuck Jericho, with its homespun CBS archetypes and plucky heroes; BSG is the real apocalypse, borne in the wake of 9/11, years long and relentless in its cruelties, with only fleeting victories and the smallest dignities for even its most noble characters as their lives go slowly, surely, to hell.
Think of it -- what hasn't fallen apart on this show? The Admiral, for all his strengths, has become a drunk; the President is dying and has lost most of her idealism; their love, long in coming, is almost inexorably doomed. The alliance with the Cylon rebels is in tatters, with the Quorum ready to tear itself (again). Spirituality, such a vital and vibrant component of the first couple seasons, has been left to the delusionial and desperate. The final five Cylons, possibly humanity's final hope, are a jealous, unruly crew. There's not a family unit that hasn't broken down or been torn apart, not even Baltar's weird harem. Pegasus was a plague, and then, for Lee Adama, a kind of prison. Earth was a pile of rubble. And the Galactica could cave in on itself at any moment. There's not a single facet of this show that could count as a lasting victory for anyone. We like to think the world ended in the first episode but this is too simple, too comforting to be true. The fact is we've been watching the end spell itself out this whole time.
And it goes even further than mere character developments. We're reminded here, in a way, of Adaptation, and how
screenwriter (and main character) Charlie Kaufman told his audience
exactly the sort of simplistic, dullminded Hollywood movie that he
hates -- and then devoted the last 20 minutes of the movie to forcing
you to hate that movie too, as it slowly consumes everything that came
before it. Something similar is in play here. The real insight in Sackhoff's comment is that this is a show that has been so committed to playing out its initial end-is-nigh promise that it dares to be frustrating, messy, asymetrical, obtuse, unfinished, and at times, just plain sloppy. Characters have come and gone without rhyme or reason. Cylons, despite being able to observe countless versions of themselves making the same mistakes over and over, never seem to learn enough to really change their behavior.
And let's be honest for just a moment: how many plot machinations have been reused or abandoned without apology or regard for logic? We'd heard that early episodes were written without regard to an overall plan. We can't imagine that the final season worked entirely in the same manner, but there are enough bewildering things that have happened throughout the show to make you wonder. To wit: Man, that algae planet sure seemed more hospitable than New Caprica. So did Kobol. Hey, it's weird how that baby Cylon blood only worked once on Laura's cancer. Huh, funny how the first time a Resurrection Ship got destroyed it seemed like a big final deal -- and then they had to do it again later. Wow, what was all that about Earth being full of Cylons, and the final five are those Cylons, and what what what?
To be clear: we're not criticizing this series. It's probably our favorite TV show of the last 15 years, assuming that Lost doesn't edge out ahead of it in its own final arcs. And the show was always firmly grounded, in a way, by its emotional truths -- by the flaws and frailties of its characters -- and by its commitment to a gritty, relatively jargon-free depiction of life in space when the plots started to get loopy. All we're saying is: if part of the thrill of BSG has come from the acting, the mise-en-scene, and the spectacle of self-willed sci-fi genocide, part of it also came from never quite knowing what the frakking fuck David Eick and Ronald D. Moore and the show's writers were doing -- and suspecting they might not know themselves. Suspecting that this was a show that could be tearing itself apart right as we watched it.
Which brings us to the end. And we ask: are you really expecting closure from tonight's final episode? We're not. People will die, that's certain, characters that we've grown to care for over these past few years. But frankly, we'll be surprised and a little sad if this story ends neatly: if a boy gets a girl; if everyone makes it out alive; if we finally do know "the truth." If all 12 of the plotlines that io9 wants answered actually are. Some inevitably will wind up getting pushed on to Caprica, the prequel whose pilot will come out in April. But some, we hope, will never be answered. And If we do get some sort of truth, well, personally hoping for a jagged, weird truth, if any, one that sticks in our craw and threatens to destroy our every sense of all that's come before it. It's a tall order, to be sure, but from what we can tell, Eick and Moore are nothing if not consistent. (Except when they're not.)
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