20 Years Ago, The Best Sci-Fi Show Of The Century Went Darker Than Ever Before
Battlestar Galactica’s third season began with one of the most hardcore storylines ever, which holds up like it aired yesterday.
While it may sound like hyperbole, the truth is, we never really knew how good we had it when Battlestar Galactica was still airing new episodes. Launched as a reboot for the 1978 series of the same name, the Battlestar miniseries in 2003 proved that a new version of an old concept need not be too precious with its source material, and by the end of its second season in March 2006, Ronald D. Moore and David Eick's Battlestar Galactica had eclipsed the original series in both creativity and cultural relevance. Season 2 also delivered one of the show’s greatest cliffhangers, and perhaps one of the best cliffhangers in TV history: After finding a meh planet to settle on, humanity elects corrupt scientist Gaius Baltar (James Callis) as the new president, and the series about a fleet of spaceships suddenly became about a bunch of people living on a depressing planet, now occupied by the robotic Cylons.
And then, on October 6, 2006, with the launch of its third season, Battlestar Galactica had to pick up the pieces with a double-episode premiere “Occupation” and “Precipice.” And in those episodes, what the show did was somehow even bolder than that famous cliffhanger.
Today, Battlestar Galactica is often lumped in with a post-9/11 kind of cultural discourse. The destruction of the 12 Colonies at the start of the show is a direct 9/11 reference in many ways, while the Cylons’ religious zealotry is central to why the genocide against humanity is carried out in the first place. It’s all heavy stuff, but what Season 3 did with the double-debut episodes “Occupation" and “Precipice” is to blur any direct analogs to real-world events while still making clear social commentary. And 20 years later, much of this could be read as sadly prescient for some of the most controversial issues in the world today.
The big storyline of these debut episodes is concerned with the insurgency of humans fighting against the Cylon occupation, and what lengths former Galactica officers and crew like Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan), Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), and Sam Anders (Michael Trucco) will go to in order to fight back. This storyline is extremely unflinching and doesn’t let anyone off the hook in terms of who's doing the right thing. In fact, if you contrast this with Andor Season 2 and its depiction of an on-the-ground insurgency in a sci-fi setting, Galactica looks like a gritty documentary about something that could be real, while in comparison, Andor looks like a romanticized dream of what a gritty storyline like this might look like.
Mary McDonnell, Edward James Olmos, and Jamie Bamber in 2006, at a New York screening of Battlestar Galactica.
This is why BSG is the real deal: It presents characters who you sympathize with on both sides of this conflict, in meaningful, uncomfortable ways. The Cylons have division in their ranks: Caprica Six (Tricia Helfer), Boomer (Grace Park), D'Anna (Lucy Lawless), and their various copies are pushing for a peaceful coexistence with the humans, or at the very least, an attempt to not wipe everyone out. Other Cylons are more extreme, like the various versions of Brother Cavil (Dean Stockwell), who would rather just start publicly executing humans and decrease the population to almost nothing.
While a lazier show would have just depicted the insurgents as a united front against the Cylons, BSG went for something else: The humans are divided on how to fight back. While Tigh pushes for humans to become suicide bombers, other humans have joined a Cylon-sanctioned police force. Meanwhile, civilians like former President Lara Roslin (Mary McDonnell) struggle with the ethics of all of it. BSG also gives a face to the polar opposites of the extremism among the humans: Jammer (Dominic Zamprogna) has joined the New Caprica police because he thinks it could help keep the Cylons from terrorizing humans. Meanwhile, Tigh, one of our flawed heroes, is okay with human casualties, and Tyrol expresses zero mercy for anyone who is a collaborator. Early in the two-part premiere, the infinitely corrupt Gaius Baltar confronts Roslin with the concept of humans killing innocent people, and she can’t look him in the eye.
The easy read of scenes like this is that Baltar is bad, and happens to be right about this one thing, and Roslin is good, and happens to be endorsing bad things because she has to. But it’s way more interesting than that, and there’s no clear reason why a real person in this world would automatically agree with one position or the other. “We were able to subvert the idea of who’s the good guys and who are the bad guys in terms of our guys being essentially the suicide bombers,” BSG producer Mark Verheiden said in Ed Gross and Mark A. Altman’s 2018 BSG oral history book, So Say We All. “I don’t think we were trying to say any point of view was morally better or worse — suicide bombing is not good — but that was where they had been driven to by the desperation of the situation.”
Ronald D. Moore and a Cylon during the run of Battlestar Galactica.
In other words, the brilliance of Battlestar is that somehow, against all odds, it provided nuance to topics that are still extremely complex and provocative today. There are no clean, easy analogies in BSG, which is why its tackling of the issues, and much of the imagery, remains arresting to this day. But beyond the real-world implications, these episodes also changed the characters in ways that put the show on a different path. “The experience of New Caprica really scarred a lot of the characters in pretty deep ways,” Ronald D. Moore was quoted as saying, also in So Say We All. “When suddenly a big traumatic event like this happened midway, it just felt like the characters were more deeply wounded.”
Battlestar would take two more episodes, “Exodus Part 1” and “Exodus Part 2,” to actually get all the characters off of New Caprica, but the show was never the same. Some might say this storyline was, oddly, the highlight of the entire series, and that BSG had a hard time getting as close to this level of humanist and complex storytelling again. That said, the character twists that would occur following this storyline were all incredible, and 20 years later, the double-episode journey of “Occupation” and “Precipice” proves that Battlestar Galactica is still one of the greatest science fiction dramas of all time. Frak it. One of the best TV shows of all time, period.
