First off, when creating anything on the computer you should always hit “save.” I wrote this entry yesterday and somehow never saved it so about 750 words went down the intertubes. Doh.
Second, if you Dear Reader are my friend on FB, you should be used to reading status updates that mention how much I frakkin love the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. It’s not just a television show: it’s special, it’s art.
I am quite overjoyed that some serious art is being made for the Sci-Fi genre. If you did not know, I have always been a fan of science fiction.
Star Wars is still my all-time favorite movie and I fondly recall my Grandfather’s exasperated tone when, planning to take me to the movies, he asked me why I needed to see “Return of the Jedi” again instead of something new.
I have read all of Asimov’s Foundation novels and could recite his Three Laws of Robotics long before Will Smith popularized them and have read many, many, many more sci-fi novels – way too many to list out here. I should note though that I did use a quote from Stranger in a Strange Land in the “Goodbye from the Editor-in-Chief” column I wrote in “The Vanguard” (my high school newspaper) when I graduated. The quote? “Age doesn’t bring wisdom, only perspective” – Jubal Harshaw.
During my youth, I spent many, many Saturday evenings at home babysitting my sister and, after I put her to bed, watching back-to-back-to-back episodes of classic Star Trek – commercial free (thanks to Cap’s Comic Cavalcade) on Scranton Wilkes Barre’s PBS station (which I got through LI Cablevision at odd times – I still have no clue why).
Something about the USS Enterprise’s five year mission “to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no man has gone before” just grabbed my imagination and never let it go. I loved the promise of the show and the themes that were much larger than the episodes that contained them. For instance, I learned tolerance towards my fellow man and to never wear a red shirt. At the end of “Wrath of Khan,” when Spock, dying of radiation poisoning, palms the blast proof glass and says to Kirk “I have been and always shall be your friend, Jim” I seriously almost tear up – every time without fail. I’m a Trekkie – it’s true.
Sam Miller is also a Trekkie and on Mental Floss he compares Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica and has some very keen insights about the differences between the two shows. He writes,
“Battlestar Galactica presents a problem for me and my Star Trek-fan friends. Why do we love it so much? We call each other up after each new episode and ramble in nervous high-pitched voices, batting back and forth theories and questions and “OH MY GOD” moments… all the while feeling vaguely guilty that no Star Trek clash with the Borg or tampering with the time-space continuum ever engaged and obsessed and haunted us to such a profound extent.
Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica have wildly different aesthetics and ideologies, and both aspire to very different goals. Fundamentally, it boils down to this:
Star Trek is about who we want to be, and Battlestar Galactica is about who we are.
That is a great way of putting it and the rest of the post echoes many of my thoughts. If you like BSG, I suggest you read it.
Via Neu