Battlestar Galactica 1978 vs BSG 2003 smackdown: Part III

The ending we ultimately got threw out everything Moore and Eicke had espoused over the course of the show: the survivors unanimously agreed to throw away all their technology, fly their ships into the sun, and settle on what turned out to be the real earth, albeit in the distant past. Eventually, they would evolve into us. First, they would descend into primitivism and thousands of years of ignorance, savagery, disease, and early death. 

This is their righteous, back-to-the-trees happy ending. 

It was pathetic. 

First of all, the fleet always had a criminal element, and the idea that some of these psychopaths wouldn’t hide tech away so they could then take over and dominate the earnest, gullible pro-luddite masses is beyond belief. 

Previously, the show had always emphasized that you can’t get total agreement with large numbers (or even small numbers) of people on anything. Someone is always going to object, game the system, or find an angle that will allow them to dominate.

Second, Moore presents humans giving up all their tech to live off the land as a positive. 

Seriously? 

On an alien planet where they don’t know the plant life, what’s edible and what’s not, with a bunch of people used to living at the top of a complex, interdependent technological ecosystem of specialized workers, is insulting to the intelligence of the audience and an abandonment of the show’s earlier dedication to nuance.

The vast majority of the survivors would soon die from disease, all their knowledge would be lost, and it would take tens of thousands of years before our civilization evolved and even a small fraction of that knowledge would be regained. 

Even if you're anti-technology this seems like a very unrealistic and poorly thought out conclusion.

Rushed, limited by budget, run down by years of running a complex and largely superlative show, probably impacted the finale script. 

Who knows? 

Is Ron D. Moore a genius writer? Absolutely. BSG revitalized sci-fi, made it relevant and exciting and much watch TV. 

That does not mean, however, that his decisions were always flawless.

This was also during the beginning of internet culture, and plenty of viewers speculated on where the show was going. Moore wanted to keep people guessing, and according to some, altered the show's path to thwart their predictions. And yet, a properly set up show progresses logically, so some prediction is inevitably going to be correct. That shouldn’t change the show’s course. True? Not true? Hey, I read it on the internets, so...

Where the original Battlestar shone, for me, was in the big ideas: the lost survivors seeking haven on earth (very melancholic, wistful, and eerie), ruthless machines bent on exterminating organic sapients, and… controversially, the Beings of Light and good ol' Count Ibli-dibli. 

Moore’s BSG cut out the Beings of Light angle, as well as our classy count. This was one of the most fascinating elements of the original series: that higher beings with technology that could easily be mistaken for magic, existed; they even had an evil counterpart, possibly the devil himself, out to deceive and destroy the gullible. 

That really caught my imagination as a child.

Initially, Starbuck’s mysterious return in the re-imagined series hinted towards the Beings of Light, but this hope was dashed, and her return was left largely unexplored. 

The idea that civilization is cyclical was intriguing, and gave the show interesting places to go. 

Alas, it was not to be. 

For all its flaws, the cheesy 1978 version had wilder concepts than the reboot, which was more conservative and focused on verisimilitude. From one of the first pop culture warnings about killer AI to Chariots of the Gods, Holocaust and persecution references and ascended light bulb beings, BSG 1978 had it all. 

Moore's 'The Cylons (don't) have a plan' never panned out (there was no 'there' there), and the vague politicking within the Cylon leadership fell flat. There was some mystery around Starbuck returning, which they then didn't bother exploring because reasons. And that was it, as far as mystery and wonder went. 

On an episode by episode basis, Moore’s version is far superior and easier to rewatch. No question. The acting is phenomenal, the dialogue superb, the characters well rounded. 

But I miss the more intriguing elements of the 1978 version. I loved Count Iblis and his bright light nemeses. Same for the Imperious Leader, too (who had the voice of Count Iblis); he was usually squatting atop a ridiculously high plinth, which made me wonder what the heck he did up there all day, iconic as it was. When Baltar took the chair, I couldn't help but wonder how he got down to go to the bathroom. 

Funnily enough, I mistakenly thought the halo of mesh around the Imperious Leader's head was some kind of external neural net, but as it turns out, it was actually a cape collar. 

Such a disappointment.

Both shows fired my imagination, just in different ways.

Moore’s modernized iteration has influenced shows like The Expanse, and that’s a good thing. 

The Expanse is phenomenal.  

Battlestar Galactica 1978 vs BSG 2003 smackdown: Part II

Ronald D. Moore rebooted BSG in 2003 with a kick-ass pilot movie in two parts. They had some severe budget constraints, and couldn’t afford to even build robot cylon suits. Instead, they had to resort to CGI and using the robots sparingly. Instead, the Cylons were human androids. And rather than being the product of alien reptiles who run pizza parlour pedophilia rings, they were the rebellious product of humanity. 

The betrayal happens, same as before, except this time Baltar’s a computer programmer who undermines the Twelve Colonies defenses by accidentally introducing a virus into the defense systems. It shuts down all their advanced systems. Only the venerable old Battlestar Galactica has old fashioned manual controls, to avoid this exact scenario. It survives the initial Cylon attack, and again leads a rag tag fleet towards… Earth.

This time, Adama throws Earth out as a destination as a trope to inspire hope among the survivors, who are on the brink of despair. 

Moore once worked on an American aircraft carrier, and it shows here in the verisimilitude he conjures with all the military aspects of the show. They also try to portray space in a far more realistic manner than the original iteration, and even explored having no sound in space. Ultimately, they backed off that decision as it robbed scenes of impact, but they did emphasize logistics more than in the original program. 

Infamously, they presented every episode with the tag line, ‘and they have a plan.’ The Cylons, that is. It’s come out since that they didn’t, but David Eicke (co-creator) insisted on it. By the end of the show it was abundantly clear this was a load of horseshit. 

BSG’s first season was intense, gritty, politically nuanced, and a paradigm shifting sci-fi phenomenon. It tackled the War on Terror and other timely issues.

One episode, in which the human survivors tortured a Cylon ('Flesh and Bone'), was described by the show creators as something that will make who question who the good guys are. Seriously? The Cylons just wiped out over 12 billion or so people, and the traumatized survivors torture a Cylon infiltrator, and this is supposed to make them equivalent? I found this truly obnoxious; yes, torture is wrong, but let’s have a little perspective. Did some Holocaust survivors torture some camp guards after liberation? It’s possible, if they had the strength after being deliberately starved, but I don’t think that makes them the equivalent of the Nazis.

This was emblematic of the moral equivalence that lurked behind the show’s flashy sci-fi facade: one mustn’t judge, even in the face of genocidal enemies. It was diametrically opposed to the original show’s binary perspective. 

And yet, Moore and Eicke’s perspective has merit, in that, in politics, it’s all about compromise. There are always those who disagree and object, and you have to bring everyone (or almost everyone) along to move forward. Over the shows multiple seasons, politics were presented as a complex series of negotiations and compromises. And when one group pushed to far, another would rise in rebellion.

The show was very much a repudiation of the restrictive narrative framework that Moore experienced writing for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Rather than feel good stories of future Utopia, here the hard realities of power politics, resource limits, and suffering were explored without limit. Instead of paragons of professionalism and virtue, the characters were complex, flawed, and deeply human. 

All of that was great. 

Far better than the original, no question.

However, by season 3 Moore had become disenchanted with the original direction and decided to rewrite several characters, turning them into Cylon infiltrators, mostly for shock value. 

I initially hated the change, but then thought, maybe he’ll do something really interesting with it.  

In Moore we trust.

The midseason finale, where they found earth as a burnt out radioactive husk, would have made a fine series finale. 

Unfortunately, they kept going.

Next: The ending

Battlestar Galactica 1978 vs BSG 2003: Part I

Which is better: BSG 1978 or BSG 2003? 

Most people would say this is no contest, like pitting Mark Zuckerberg against Muhammad Ali. 

Okay, Ali is dead, so The Zuck would win by default. 

But you know what I mean.

The first Battlestar is steeped in Mormon theology, as show creator Glen A. Larson grew up as a member of that faith. Larson is a bit of a controversial figure, and has been sued for ripping off The Rockford Files, and was once punched in the face by James Garner.

Garner’s an island of integrity in a sea of narcissistic Hollywood egomaniacs, so if he’s punching Larson I imagine he had his reasons. 

That said, Larson did come up with a remarkable show (among others, like Magnum: P.I.): Battlestar Galactica is totally bonkers 1978 TV: it starts out in a solar system of 12 human colonies (or twelve solar systems… the show constantly confuses solar systems with galaxies and is never clear about scale), they get wiped out when unctuous political aide Baltar betrays humanity to the Cylons at a peace treaty which turns out to be a trap. 

Munich, where the West sold out Czechoslovakia to the Nazis, looms over the narrative, and Larson jabs peaceniks repeatedly in the eye not with a finger but a rapier, depicting them as guileless fools who inevitably lead their people to total destruction. 

Gee, tell us what you really think, Larson. 

Larsy’s a Churchillian, and he rams this home with all the subtlety of a two-by-four to the face, over and over again.

The enemies of humanity, the Cylons, are the robot creations of a reptilian race, who were then destroyed by their own creation. Shades of the AI fears that are all the rage these days. Truly ahead of its time!

After the Twelve Colony Holocaust, the Galactica leads a rag tag fleet to… a gambling planet, a subterranean Los Vegas, populated by mysterious insectoids. The survivors party like it’s 1999, until it’s revealed they’re all being fattened up for the insect hosts to lay their eggs in. Shades of Alien. Again, ahead of it’s time. 

So humanity flees again, after a spectacular battle where two Viper pilots (naturally Starbuck and Apollo) fake out the Cylon command ship by pretending their multiple squadrons, getting the Cylons to then move closer to the planet, which then conveniently explodes.

Originally, the show was meant to be a series of TV movies. The first was actually shown in Canada in the movie theatres. After that, network executives decided that rather than the planned TV movies, they’d turn it into a weekly program. 

Well, Larson hadn’t prepared for that at all. Everything then had to be rejigged, scripts hastily thrown together, and budget stretched over 24 episodes. 

This is one of the reasons why the original BSG descended into cheesy planet of the week ridiculousness (as if it wasn't already ridiculous enough) and ship bound episodes. 

There are a number that truly shine, even if they don’t always make much sense. There’s a rip off of The Guns of Navarone in spaaaaace (planets rotate, guys), the return of Admiral Cain, and the arrival of Count Iblis. 

Those are my favourites.

The dialogue across the series is often meh. That's understandable, as it was thrown together in a rush. But it means the episodes haven't aged well. There are other, even older sci-fi shows that still stand up in terms of the writing, even if the effects don’t, and are watchable to this day. 

Battlestar Galactica 1978… not so much.

Next: The 2003 reboot by Ronald D. Moore and David Eicke

David Brin's Startide Rising & the Uplift Universe

One of my favourite sci-fi writers of all time is David Brin. 

My aunt bought me a copy of Startide Rising as a gift in The Long Long Ago, back when we actually left our abodes and met in person (It happened!).

We now live like Isaac Asimov’s Solarians, each in a separate world...

Anyway, Startide Rising (published in 1983) is a mind blowing, magnificent journey into imagination. The science is fanciful, but backed by Brin’s expertise in physics and work at NASA.

I’ve been meaning to write about his work for some time, but never felt I could do it justice. Well, COVID-19 has me isolating and I’m going to write about it anyway, because if you’re also isolating this is top line stuff to read.

He sets the adventure of the startship Streaker in a universe of breathtaking scope: the galaxy has been populated for millions of years. In fact, it is a seven galaxy spanning civilization, or multi-civilization, composed of thousands of different species and loosely governed by Galactic Institutes. The nearest parallel would be The United Nations.

Of course do not have a copy of the book currently, as I’ve loaned it out to a friend. Again. I’ve bought multiple copies over the years as I often don’t get it back. Looks like I need to order another.

Here’s the description of the book, taken from the Wikipedia page. I believe it is partly pulled from the old back cover, but I can’t be sure anymore (The Amazon book description is not as compelling as what I remember from the book jacket):

In the year 2489 C.E.,[3] the Terran spaceship Streaker — crewed by 150 uplifted dolphins, seven people, and one uplifted chimpanzee — discovers a derelict fleet of 50,000 spaceships the size of small moons in a shallow cluster. They appear to belong to the Progenitors, the legendary "first race" which uplifted the other species. The captain's gig is sent to investigate but is destroyed along with one of the derelict craft — killing 10 crew members. Streaker manages to recover some artifacts from the destroyed derelict and one well-preserved alien body. The crew of Streaker uses psi-cast to inform Earth of their discovery and to send a hologram of the alien.

When Streaker receives a reply, it is in code. Decrypted, it says only: “Go into hiding. Await orders. Do not reply.” 

And we’re off!

The book starts In medias res, with the Streaker already in hiding and The Five Galaxies going batshit trying to find them.

The way Brin describes the thinking of aliens (and animals) here is compelling, really getting across as sense of ‘other'. The dolphin crew members use Haiku, for example. Little things like that, different ways he uses language (poetry, sentence structure, punctuation), go a long way to establish that these beings think different and probably buy Apple.

And yes, dolphins! Startide Rising is part of Brin’s Uplift Universe, where space faring species scour the galaxy for pre-sentients to raise up into civilization. They take them under their wing, tailor them genetically to whatever task they wish, demand indentured servitude for 100,000 years as payment for this ’service’, and then let them go so they too can then scour the galaxy for species to uplift, and the process repeats.

Such a fascinating idea! Talk about scope and thinking long term.

Humanity, for it’s part, upsets the entire system by uplifting dolphins, apes and chimps before even coming into contact with Galactic Civilization, meaning we don’t have to spend eons in service to one of the senior races. Which pisses them off no end, and gets humanity labelled ‘wolflings’.

Some of the aliens are reasonable and noble, others rapacious and predatory (Jophur, Soru). The Jophur are a favourite: collective organisms made up of living 'rings'. They always came across to me like ambulatory fungus. The description of them from Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uplift_Universe#Other_clans_(of_aliens) :

The Jophur are a fictional extraterrestrial race in the Uplift Universe. Physically, they are a stack of waxy, living rings. Each ring serves a different purpose, and they connect to each other to form a single being by chemical means via an electrically conductive, sap-like substance that flows down the center to bind the stack together. A "master ring" provides a strong sense of individuality to each stack and enforces this with corrective electrical shocks to non-compliant rings.

The Jophur were originally the traeki, intelligent but often indecisive because of internal debates between the rings that formed each individual. Their patrons, the Poa, asked the Oallie to engineer the traeki further to increase their effectiveness. The Oailie created "master rings", shiny black rings (often described as "silvery") that created a strong sense of self-identity. The newly invigorated Jophur, as the traeki with the new master rings were called, quickly became a strong, vigorous force in the Five Galaxies.

Who comes up with this stuff? Brin! He has some of the best aliens you’ll ever encounter in fiction. Honestly, he should make a few Pokemon.

Better yet, the Uplift Universe comprises six full novels, in two trilogies. 

The first trilogy books (Sundiver, Startide Rising and The Uplift War) are not a continuous story; they’re set in the same universe, but do not directly flow from one to the other, and none of the same characters appear. The second trilogy (Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, Heaven’s Reach), however, is a three novel arc, compromising a massive cast of humans and aliens.

Brightness Reef is set partly on the planet Jijo, which has been illegally settled after having been declared a fallow world. The whole idea of fallow worlds is awesome: it shows the time scale these civilizations operate on.

Infiinity’s Shore ups the ante:

...The Streaker, with her fugitive dolphin crew, arrives at last on Jijo in a desperate search for refuge. Yet what the crew finds instead is a secret hidden since the galaxies first spawned intelligence—a secret that could mean salvation for the planet and its inhabitants … or their ultimate annihilation.

Heaven’s Reach (published in 1998) brings it all to a soaring conclusion. It even features fractal worlds (where Retired species go to play cosmic yahtzee. I’m making the yahtzee stuff up. It’s way more exciting than that).

One of the greatest problems I have with sweeping, epic fiction is that so often the pay off to the mysteries the author sets up are so... lacklustre. This is especially true with television, where the whole idea is to hook people with a mystery and then keep them hooked in perpetuity. An ending is not necessary, or even wanted. The big thing is to keep people coming back and continue getting advertiser money, so the crew stays employed. Everyone’s gotta eat. But it doesn’t lead to satisfying endings (I’m looking at you BSG, selling out your complexity theme for a simplistic let’s all throw our technology into the sun with no dissenters nonsense finale).

Brin, however, pulls it off. The second trilogy is mind bending, getting into memetic worlds and galactic drift and more. it’s a truly epic conclusion. Others may (and have) disagreed, but they don’t know what they’re talking about. This is smart, imaginative, unique stuff.

One down side is that it is so way out there it’d be hard to film, and Hollywood is notorious for being unwilling (in general... The Arrival is a great exception) to depict truly alien aliens. Even the Borg, who started out very different (at least psychologically, as a collective), got a ‘Queen’ in order to make them more relatable.

Of course, aliens are usually just a way to talk about ourselves. I don’t think that’s always the case with Brin: he genuinely puts thought into how a species with a certain ecology would behave differently. And he gets that across.

He did have his novel The Postman turned into a film starring Kevin Kostner. The book, in my opinion, is far better, with greater depth and complexity and a solid theme that isn’t conveyed as well in the film. This book has some of Brin’s hardest hitting emotional moments.

Earth, another stand alone novel he wrote, is about, well, the future of life here. It’s also got some mind expanding ideas, which I don’t think I have the scientific knowledge (or memory) to really explore, given how long it's been since I read it. He was ahead of the curve on a lot of issues (oligarchs and the effect of cameras proliferating).

Existence is the last book of his I have read, and I admit it wasn’t my favourite.

Heart of the Comet he wrote in collaboration with another author, Gregory Benford, some time ago. I confess was a difficult, yet truly rewarding read. I had to go over some passages twice (or more) to truly understand what he was saying. It’s hard science sci-fi. Like reading Stephen Hawking, only with nail biting adventure, suspense and high stakes.

Brin also contributed to the Foundation series, writing Foundation’s Triumph, which ties Asimov’s books together, including Pebble in the Sky. It’s just awesome. I have no other words. Read it!

Brin's in the same class as sci-fi greats like Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Frederick Pohl, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, Frank Herbert and Ray Bradbury.

It amazes me how brilliant our scientists and theorists are, to imagine mind bending yet plausible scenarios. I can imagine all kinds of stuff, but the majority of it falls into sci-fantasy / satire at best.

We all have our strengths?

Brin has also written extensively about transparency (see The Transparent Society) and currently writes a lot about politics in the United States, which he obviously cares passionately about. If he buys into something, it always gives me pause.

There are some threads about Donald Trump, for example, that I thought were so out there they had to be conspiracy theory, yet there is an unsettling amount of evidence that they are actually true.

Brin also surfaces how Republicans, who talk a good fiscal conservative game, are actually dreadfully profligate spenders. I find it incredible this is not more widely known.

Anyway. Enough about politics. This blog is about sci-fi.

If you have a true love for sci-fi, I suspect you’ll love his work. His imagination is truly epic in scope and scale, like rock candy for your brain. If there’s any series in sci-fi I would recommend (along with Foundation and Ringworld and Heechee and Hitchhikers, and okay, well, there are a lot, but this is right up there, you can start with it), it’s Startide Rising.

Give it a read, you won’t be sorry.

And his guide to aliens is also good. Not as in depth as I might have liked, and painted illustrations would have been preferred (just being picky). 

There are even some old GURPs books for the Uplift Universe.

I’d love to see some lushly produced coffee table volumes covering Uplift, with detailed paintings, like a Barlowe Guide. Or graphic novels. That would be cool.

One can dream…!

Joh Wimmer reviews Startide Rising for Gizmodo here. He delves into the book in more detail, and while I don’t really agree with his criticisms, it’s good to get another point of view.