The podcast: Meagan McCain, Afghanistan and Battlestar Galactica

Ben and Joel are joined in this week’s podcast by Macworld Editor Jason Snell for a lively discussion of:

• Meghan McCain and the pros and cons of “sickening bipartisanship”;
• How Dungeons & Dragons may be an apt metaphor for political polarization in these crazy times;
• Whether President Obama’s new Afghanistan policy really advances America’s strategic interests;
• Why the Battlestar Galactica series finale still disappoints Joel a week later and why Jason thinks Joel is all wet;
• And what’s in everybody’s Netflix queues.

Music heard in this podcast:

• “Taxi Driver: A Night Piece for Orchestra-Prelude,” by the Los Angeles Philharmonic (from Bernard Herrmann: The Film Scores)
• “H.T.,” by Tsuneo Imahori (from the Trigun: The First Donuts OST)
• “Starman,” by John C. Reilly (from the Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story OST)
• “Meet The Flintstones,” by the Monty Alexander Trio (from Triple Treat, Vol. 1)

Listen to the podcast here.

Taking suggestions for a new television obsession

Now that Battlestar Galactica is over, I’m looking for a new show to obsess me. I already pay close attention to Lost and 30 Rock, but I think I’ve got room for one more. Is there something on TV right now that deserves my attention? Or is there a series that I need to go back and check out on DVD — and I’ve already seen Arrested Development, The Sopranos, Deadwood and The Wire.

Anything? Anybody?

The end of ‘Battlestar Galactica’

Warning: Spoilers ahead.

I’ve just watched the finale of Battlestar Galactica, and I’m a little bummed. Bummed, because there’s no more story to be wrung from characters and a setting I’ve followed slightly obsessively over the last few years. And bummed, because the finale did a lot of things right — but also a couple of things so wrong, so at odds with the series’ long-term storytelling logic, that it feels a bit compromised.

I’ll dispense with the full-blown recap. You can find that here.

What the finale did right: The final battle between the BSG crew and the cylons, of course. Yes, this show was always about more than explosions and the space fights, but it never transcended the thrill of a computer-generated dogfight. We got all we could’ve wished for in the final faceoff — including a twist ending to the battle that illustrated, once again, that good intentions can be sent devastatingly awry for the most benign of reasons. That’s Battlestar for you, a reminder that it’s always easy to frak things up.

What went wrong: Angels.

Turns out that Baltar’s Head Six and Caprica’s Head Baltar that we saw throughout the series were neither delusions, nor were they communications sent through an implant. They were angels. And Kara Thrace, who had apparently died, only to return to help guide Galactica to Earth? Well, she was probably an angel too.

Good gods. Talk about your deus ex machina.

One of the things that made BSG so refreshing after the various Star Trek series had exhausted themselves creatively was its merciless storytelling logic. Creator Ron Moore had vowed to stay away from an “alien of the week” show model — there never were aliens — and he eschewed other conventions like time travel. Galactica was, within the admittedly expanded boundaries of science fiction, relatively real. Its universe was our universe, only with better technology. And to paraphrase Chekov (the Russian playright, not the Enterprise navigator): If you saw a gun in the first act (metaphorically speaking) you knew it would be used in the third act. Probably on a character you’d grown to love over two or three or four seasons.

So to find out that Galactica’s entire voyage — the series — was steered by angels literally sent from God … well, that seems to fly in the face of the series’ own adherence to realism.

MacWorld’s Jason Snell points out to me, via Twitter, that the show has long talked about the existence of a Cylon God who has a plan. True enough. But as in real life, the actual evidence for such a god was ambiguous, to say the least. And there was plenty of reason, as in real life, to believe that the frequent mentions of God served as justifications for patently self-serving acts.

Understand, I’m not saying there’s no such thing as angels. I’m not saying there isn’t a God who has a plan. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody does, really, and while I don’t begrudge anybody whose faith leads them to such a belief, the truth is that faith is, well, a leap. We’re never presented in real life with actual angels who explain that they’ve been working with you to achieve God’s plan for the human race. Where we discern the presence of angels in our life, it’s always as inference, not a revelation. We’re left to guess at and hope for the existence of ethereal guardians. In the finale, though, the ambiguity of real life was made insultingly literal. Galactica was usually much, much better than that.

I’ve said before that Battlestar Galactica is one of the better meditations on post-9/11 America that existed in popular culture. The finale doesn’t change that for me — at least, not yet. More than many shows, Galactica was about the ending: The crew had to search for a new home, and when they’d found it we’d know the show was over. And that’s what happened. But the series departed from its own ground rules to get us the final step of the way. That’s a disappointing way to end such a great show.

UPDATE: I just figured out what ELSE bugged me about the finale.

The final scene features Angel Six and Angel Baltar in modern day New York looking over the shoulder of series creator Ron Moore — and isn’t that a telling cameo? — to read that the remains of humanity’s first ancestor from 150,000 years ago (a Galactica survivor) had been found. They chat about the “real” meaning of the news and what humanity’s future has in store. The camera pulls back on the two walking down a New York Street, holding secrets about the world that passerby will never know.

In fact, the scene looked almost exactly like the final scene of Men in Black. Seriously. I can’t find online video of the BSG finale to post here, but trust me when I say it doesn’t look that different from this:

The Ben and Joel Podcast: Can anybody talk intelligently about Israel and Gaza?

Questions considered in this podcast:

• Can anybody talk intelligently about Israel and Gaza?

• Will the Democratic Congress be the undoing of President Obama?

• Is science fiction a legitimate art form?

• What impact can a mentor have on your life?

Music heard in this podcast:

• “Halfway Home,” TV on the Radio
• “I Know What’s Best,” The Anniversary
• “Get Better,” Mates of State
• “Acknowledgement,” John Coltrane

Battlestar Galactica: The George W. Bush years

Newsweek asks critics to pick art “they believe exemplifies what it was like to be alive in the age of George W. Bush.” TV critic Joshua Alston’s answer mirrors my own:

An orchestrated terrorist attack. An inexorable march to war. An enemy capable of disappearing among its targets, armed with an indifference to its own mortality. It sounds like a PBS special on Al Qaeda. In fact, it’s a synopsis of the Sci Fi Channel series “Battlestar Galactica,” which—for anyone who manages to get past the goofy name—captures better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world. Yes, even better than “24,” with its neocon fantasies of terrorists who get chatty if Jack Bauer pokes the right pressure point. Of the two shows, “Battlestar” has been more honest about the psychological toll of the war on terror. It confronts the thorny issues that crop up in a society’s battle to preserve its way of life: the efficacy of torture, the curtailing of personal rights, the meaning of patriotism in a nation under siege. It also doesn’t flinch from one question that “24″ wouldn’t dare raise: is our way of life even worth saving?

I wrote about this earlier this year, on the eve of BSG’s fourth season premiere. If I can be allowed to plagiarize myself:

“Battlestar Galactica” is perhaps the smartest and most comprehensive artistic meditation on life in post-9/11 America that exists in all of popular culture. Also, it has sexy robots, which is pretty awesome.

OK, OK, I know I sound like some kind of sci-fi fanboy who secretly wishes his wife were a Vulcan. And that’s not entirely unfair. It’s easy to dismiss me. And it’s also easy to dismiss a show that has its roots in the 1970s, Dirk Benedict and feathered hair. But today’s “Battlestar Galactica” is not yesterday’s “Battlestar Galactica.” Yes, they share a name and a premise — the last remnants of humanity flee a genocidal race of robots in search of Earth. But where the former opted to use that premise as a launching pad for Trek-lite “adventure of the week” excursions to the Casino Planet and sexy fun, the newer show is gritty, dark and maybe a little bit fatalistic. In a good way. The result has been praise from lots of non-genre quarters — a Peabody Award, a perch atop Time Magazine’s “best shows” list, and obsessive examination from the likes of Jonah Goldberg and Spencer Ackerman.

It’s a crime this show hasn’t been nominated for a major Emmy. It’ll have to settle, instead, for being one of the greatest shows of all time.

But let’s go back to the beginning. You can get a recap of the whole series in the eight-minute video above, or maybe check out this overview from Salon. The series opens with, essentially, the end of the human race — the robot race of Cylons mounts a nuclear attack on the 12 human homeworlds. There are fewer than 50,000 survivors, spread out among a “ragtag” fleet, led by President Laura Roslyn (Mary McDonnell) and Admiral William Adama (Edward James Olmos, in all his quietly gravelly voiced glory).

The robots don’t look like robots, though. They look like humans — really attractive humans. And the humans have no problems with torturing and murdering what Cylons they find in their midst — because the enemy, after all, is just a soulless killing machine undeserving of the same moral respect that humans might give each other. Sound familiar?

But these Cylons, it becomes clear, have feelings and ambitions. They believe in God. They bicker among themselves And over time, some of them choose to help the humans. And the humans — some of them, anyway — choose to give those few Cylons a bit of grudging trust.

The humans, by the way, don’t look anything like the perfect (and boring) people we saw in “Star Trek: The Next Generation.” Some of them are drunks. Some of them make morally suspect choices; all of them make horrible personal choices. And when they’re cornered by theCylons and put under occupation, some of them choose to strap on a bomb vest and go blow themselves up in a public square crowded with the robot enemy. Again: Sound familiar? Who, exactly should we be rooting for here?

Along the way, the crew of the Galactica wrestle with whether abortion should be allowed — the species needs to grow again, after all. They have to decide if democracy is compatible with war fighting. They have to decide whether to forgive each other for the sins they have committed. There are moments when you detect a conservative sensibility at work; others when it seems that liberals are running the show. Just when you think you’ve got it figured out, though, something comes along to upset your perspective.

At the end of Season Three, in fact, Lee Adama — the admiral’s son — gives a rousing courtroom speech. Everybody, he says, has committed awful mistakes in the course of trying to survive the end of the human race. But those sins should be forgiven, he suggests, because everybody is trying their best in the face of unspeakable evil. Left and right, we all need to give each other a little grace.

This is profoundly human stuff that disregards the typical black hat/white hat template that dominates so much of our movies and television drama. It’s difficult to graft onto the real world and our considerations, say, of John Yoo’s memo saying the president has the authority to authorize “harsh interrogations.” And the truth is: “Battlestar Galactica,” despite that season-ending speech, doesn’t offer many easy answers. But better than any other show in prime time — with the possible exception of “Lost” — it is asking all the right questions.