‘Galactica’ stories hit close to home
In the years since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, movies and TV shows have pondered how America has changed, how the world has changed, how perceptions of safety and liberty and law and faith and war have changed.
One TV show, though, has managed to do all of this without ever mentioning Sept. 11 or, indeed, America.
That’s because it’s set in outer space.
At 10 p. m. on Friday, on Sci Fi Channel, “Battlestar Galactica” returns for its final run of 10 episodes, the back half of a season interrupted by last year’s Writers Guild of America strike.
Of course, it’s a bit of a different world than it was last year at this time. The strike had Los Angeles pretty rattled in January 2008. This January, the whole planet’s got a bad case of the economic shakes.
“It’s like the world has caught up with our apocalyptic vision,” executive producer Ronald D. Moore quips. “We’ve led you all to no good.”
As the story ended last year, the few thousand humans that survived a devastating attack on their home worlds by their robotic (now android as well) creations, the Cylons, had just reached the fabled planet Earth.
What they found is far worse than Al Gore’s most hyperbolic nightmares — a smoking, ruined, deserted wasteland.
Says Moore, “Galactica’s second half of the season essentially says, ‘What happens to people when you take their dreams away, when you take away the thing they’ve hoped for and counted on, the thing they’ve worked so hard to get to?’ . . . What becomes of them?
“Where do they find hope again, and can they find hope again?”
“That’s the question, how will it resonate?” says Edward James Olmos, who plays Adm. William Adama, commander of the spaceship Battlestar Galactica. “I think the planet would probably grasp at it more and realize how poignant it is.”
Mary McDonnell, a Fredonia State College graduate who plays the colonial president, Laura Roslin, said that “As a bookended collection, the show’s implications resonate with an even greater power than the innocent first viewing.”
If you’ve never seen “Galactica,” you could go to the Web site and watch the 13-minute “Catch the Frak Up” video (“frak” is an all-purpose curse word in the show’s universe). But Olmos has another suggestion.
“The last moment of what we ended off with was the destruction of humanity on Earth. Then it spirals, keeps going down,” Olmos says. “This is the kind of situation where I hope people who are intrigued by it by chance are now trying to catch up, because it would be unfair for them to jump to the final chapters and experience it without going through this whole thing.”
While Fox’s anti-terrorism thriller “24” is often cited in conversations of how television copes with the changes in the world, “Battlestar Galactica” was reimagined from the short-lived original 1970s space opera to do just that.
“I just wanted to deal where we are as a people today,” Moore says. “I wanted to deal mostly with the world we live in, the things we were experiencing in the post-9/11 world.
“Then the invasion of Iraq happened, and the things that were being tested in our country, with Guantanamo and civil liberties and issues of terrorism and how you deal with that and survival,” Moore continues.
“I wanted a forum where we could grapple with these things in a realistic way. We definitely were able to do that. That’s all I wanted from the project. I just wanted a forum to go and ask a lot of questions in a science-fiction context that nobody had really done in a while.”
On the cover: From left, James Callis, Tahmoh Penikett, Jamie Bamber, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, Katee Sackhoff, Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos.
