The Wisdom of Galactica

With the conclusion of The Wire, the mantle of "best show on television" falls on Battlestar: Galactica, which bows for its fourth and final season on the Sci-Fi channel tonight. Like The Wire, Galactica features exceptionally strong writing and acting, and has been freed by its relatively small cable audience to explore issues with a depth and sophistication that you never see on network television. Galactica is similarly sustained by focusing on a single, defining theme. On The Wire, it was the dehumanizing effect of modern institutions. On Galactica, it's the absolutely corrupting influence of war. 

There are few more dangerous illusions than the notion that people can survive war unscathed as long as the cause is just. The humans on Galactica are fighting the most just war imaginable: a race of evil cyborgs ambushes a relatively peaceful human society living on a group of planets in the distant future, annihilating billions of people with nuclear weapons and chasing a small band of survivors through space toward the only refuge left to them: the long-lost homeland of Earth. 

Yet instead of making the show about the triumph of the human spirit, Galactica's creators show how that spirit is crushed, sometimes slowly, sometimes not, under the weight of the impossible moral decisions war inevitably brings. That was the essence of Lee Adama's defense of Baltar's collaboration in the final episode of last season. "It was an impossible situation," he says. "When the Cylons arrived, what could he possibly do? What could anyone have done?" You see it in Sol Tigh, who rejected collaboration and ended up promoting suicide bombing, executing his own wife, and was left ruined as a result.  You see it in the pointed contrast between Adama's pilot-episode speech to the troops and Admiral Cain's parallel speech from the between-season movie, Razor, where she gave into the need for revenge and was ultimately undone by it. 

Like any show, the beats and themes on Galactica have started to become more obvious as time goes on; it wasn't hard to guess where Kendra Shaw came from on Razor and where she would go in the end. So while I'll miss the show, I'm glad they're wrapping it up this year. As the creators have made clear, even the best of women and men can only survive war's inhumanity for so long. In this day and age, that can't be said enough.