When Robots Attack

Several of my coworkers and I were at our usual table in the basement bar after work Friday when, as it often does, the subject of plans for the evening came up. Rather quickly, we realized somewhat horrifically that quite a few of us—the young, ostensibly cool kids (as much as there is such a thing amongst nerdy D.C. think tankers) —were, at least initially, headed home to watch Battlestar Galactica. You can take this any number of ways, including as a signal of my office’s geek-streak, an indication of how watching TV has become a prioritized activity rather than a time-killer, or maybe just another small sign of how utterly brilliant Ronald D. Moore’s Galactica remake really is.

The show isn’t always as consistent as I’d like, but at its best, it’s equal to any TV show ever produced. This weekend’s two hour season three premiere was the show at its best, totally gripping from minute one.

No show on air is more attuned to the political conflicts between societal institutions: Galactica opens up the hood of democratic society and gets dirty and greasy monkeying around with the gears and pistons that make human civilization run. It’s always working on at least two levels: the individual humans in question and the societal segments they represent.

But it’s not just broad social theorizing; the show engages with current politics, especially the war on terror, better than any other show on TV (as well as most of the recent spate of “political” movies). This is because Moore always refuses to let his show descend into polemic. Drama always works best when it exposes the way that things don’t work, the ways human nature inevitably fails, the way in which our lives are besought by uncertainty. Moore recognizes this, and instead of aiming for pat solutions or faux balance, he works to keep the show aware of the way in which every society and every person is bound to certain intractable ambiguities and uncertainties.

Last weekend’s show has already caused some controversy, with some seeing it as a critique of American war policy in Iraq. The Cylons, having opted to stop their attempts to annihilate humanity, have instead taken over the small human settlement on New Caprica, turning it into a tightly controlled police-state. The stated goal of the Cylons is to help the humans see “God’s will” (which, hopefully, we’ll find out more about soon). Many of the humans, of course, aren’t interested, and have started a violent resistance, even going so far as to engage in at least one instance of suicide bombing. Toward the end, the Cylons—fronted by humans recruited to police their own people—round up suspected dissidents in a scene shot through a shaky, night-vision POV camera distinctly reminiscent of footage taken from U.S. raids into local homes in Iraq.

Daniel Larison wants us to leave Battlestar Galactica out of the war debate. Like a picky eater, he seems averse to letting the two touch each other on his plate. He writes:

If you think Colonials fighting the Cylons = jihadis fighting Americans, you have your wires crossed somewhere. The Cylons are the inhuman religious fanatics, remember? Or maybe, just maybe, it’s science-fiction and doesn’t have to have an immediate political application. Maybe BSG is a more fundamental story of human survival and, as many good sci-fi stories have been, a study of human nature in the extraordinary circumstances of a fantastic alien situation.

I’m inclined to think he takes this a little too far. Regardless of what Moore intended (or says), there’s a clear connection between the show and the current war, and the night-vision sequence all but flashed the words POLITICAL ALLEGORY on the screen. And of course, the suicide bombing by the humans is tough to take without making political correlations in this age of suicide-driven terrorism. So, while I’m sympathetic to Larison’s disinclination to ascribe partisanship to the show, I’m not entirely willing to depoliticize it completely.

If Moore intended it as a direct comment on Iraq, though, then I have to say I’m not convinced. The humans on BSG come from a free, open, democratic, basically peaceful society that operates on pretty standard Western notions of individual rights and freedoms. The Cylon occupation puts them under the rule of an authoritarian outsider who rounds people up and kills them. To try to generate sympathy for Muslim suicide bombers this way stacks the deck by suggesting equivalence between Middle Eastern totalitarianism and Western democracy. Whatever problems I may have with the war, this seems clearly false.

So I don’t think that the show works as pure war-bashing. Instead, it recognizes that strong cultures, especially those under the duress of occupation, will defend themselves by sacrificing their lives. We saw this in World War II and Vietnam as well as Iraq. The French certainly faced it in North Africa. There’s something innate in humanity that causes us not to deal well with outsiders, even in the best of circumstances. Our country is, by most measures, about as inviting and open to those outside our cultural sphere as any, yet conflicts over immigration continue to erupt. For good and for ill, strong communities defend themselves, and the more put-upon, the more forcibly invaded and robbed of its identity a society feels, the more likely it is to take extreme action. Anyone who thinks an occupation of America (especially by non-humans who seemed to have some physical vulnerability) wouldn’t spur suicide attacks is kidding themselves. The rules of polite warfare go out the airlock when the basic integrity of your civilization is threatened.