Bitterness, eh?

Lost in Castration

You may have seen this article a long time ago. I didn’t even know it existed, nor did I know Dirk Benedict had a website.

Here’s the thing: I’ve been watching both series. The lovable rogue of old came off to me as flirtatious all right, but you know, a cage match between him and the new Starbuck? He’d probably lose. He’d try to flirt with her, or totally misjudge her cause she’s a girl. In an actual military setting, Starbuck the lovable rogue would have washed out before the cylons ever arrived thanks to his habit of manipulating situations so he could break the rules. So would Apollo, who, in the 1978 series, rushed off willy-nilly and disobeyed orders on a weekly basis, getting himself and others into dangerous situations and out of contact with Galactica.

The women 1978-Starbuck flirted with were petty and one-sided, responding to their emotional urges in pretty much the same way a toddler would. In other scenes they are presented as being level-headed and professional. The characters had multiple personalities, depending on how the show’s writers and/or production crew wanted the plot to unfold, and the characters were sacrificed to their whimsy. It happened all the time in television and it still does. But, I have a lot of problems with that sort of writing. The main difference between the two series is that one is not character-centered, and the other follows a logical progression of incident-reaction-character growth/change, in which the writers have an idea of the main events and how characters will behave, and write the characters consistently. I’ll let you guess which is which.

Example: My initial reaction to a female Starbuck was disbelief. Then I watched, and saw that by comparison, female-Starbuck is actually more macho than male-Starbuck. She out-plays, out-bullies, and out-flies most of the guys. Which is not to say the guys are pansies - Helo, Apollo, Racetrack and others are fit, toned, athletic soldiers with attitudes, and certainly approach problems with the respect for discipline and chain of command that one would expect — except when Apollo goes against his father because Adama is moving against the president. Starbuck the girl is believable because her history, revealed to us not as her explaining it to someone but in bits and pieces, usually through others forcing her to reveal it - also consistent with her character. She is a tough, determined, and also somewhat broken person who is doing the best she can. We can hurt for her because we, or most of us, have known someone who was abused, know people who are compensating for deep personal hurts, know people who are their own worst enemy with flawed personalities. She’s the same character over and over, but she grows slowly, learns from mistakes, and we feel as though we know her because we see this happening. Whereas the old Starbuck was the same from episode one til episode last. You don’t need more than one episode to know he’s a lovable rogue with a charming smile and a hedonistic bent. He’s loyal to his friends, not afraid to leap into a fight, loves to fly. To an extent this is also true of new Starbuck - but she is not a lovable rogue. She’s a stubborn woman who’s gone into the military and loves to fly, but her willingness to leap into a fight may very well be tied to a deeper, unexpressed death wish. She’s complicated. She’s human, not a paper doll hero.

And then there’s Apollo, who firmly believes that the colonies’ best interests are served by preserving the government, which supercedes the need for him to follow orders. In other words, he disobeys orders because he believes he has a moral imperative to do so. Not because he wants to spare his fellow soldiers, out-macho anyone, or any of the other reasons old-Apollo had whenever he turbo’d off alone into space on some wild ride into danger. This is a character-driven plot choice. Apollo believes in a democratic government and will even buck the military to preserve it when the military shows signs of moving against it.

This isn’t to say that I don’t care for the older version; I loved the 1978 series, and I loved the characters. But I was also a kid then. I watch the episodes today and wince, and wish that the writers had done better. I don’t care about the special effects so much as I do about the characters. When Athena throws a hissy about Starbuck seeing Cassiopia, I wince. When Cassie shrugs off Starbuck’s wanton ways, I wince. These aren’t the adults I’m hoping to see now, years later, looking back at shows I watched in my formative years. These are high school kids playacting relationship dynamics. And while it’s certainly common for adults to act like kids - check out any divorce in progress for an example of regression - I’d hope that even if they were inept with relationships, even if they had emotional problems, they would behave differently. Part of maturity is learning to react with a balanced perspective - not ignoring emotional reactions but treating emotions as one of several factors that should influence decision making. Most of the characters in the old series are working out of the id, except for Adama, who is a fine example of the ego at work.

Mr. Benedict says that the newer version is female-driven. In a cast with equal numbers of females and males? The original had two regular female members, a revolving door of short-timers, and Serena gets killed in the first couple of episodes for the sin of marrying Apollo. (This is often called the Bonanza effect, wherein love interests of the main characters die because the guys need to be free to receive the adoration of the hoards of female fans.) Athena and Cassiopia (and later Sheba) have supporting roles. Athena sits on the bridge and announces things, even though we’re told she’s a pilot and a warrior. Cassie is a nurse, though originally a hooker. Sheba is one of the pilots - and why are all the new recruits female when they get around to recruiting? Just because there are females on the show does not make it female-centric; giving females names and speaking roles only evens out the playing field. Having a lot of women on the screen but having only two or three with speaking parts, then showing them being over-emotional and wishy-washy, does nothing for me. I am not a badge-carrying, all-caps FEMINIST who sees injustice in every instance of a female character in a supporting role; I merely appreciate well-rounded, realistic characters of all genders. So I’d have to say the newer BSG wins on that front, in that whether dealing with male or female, I can believe that the characters are people, rather than trying to ignore irritating bits while enjoying the good. The show is human-centric.

And ‘enjoy’ isn’t necessarily right. ‘Appreciate’ is more like it. New BSG is rather more like the HBO series, in that it doesn’t idealize. But I never really believed, in the old series, that the characters were really suffering so much - Apollo mentioned his dead wife a number of times but only when the plot demanded, and while he and Starbuck were always racing off to spare each other whatever consequences going on the long patrol would cause them (”you just got married, I’ll go”). There were no real consequences for them. Starbuck took the patrol, crashed, went through a lot of whatever, but always came back in the end with no real price paid for taking the mission instead of Apollo. Heroes in 70s tv were predictable that way: 1) no consequences for breaking rules or disobeying orders (unless it was a cop show, then the chief would chew them out and then do nothing) 2) no marriage/long-term romance 3) no permanent disability or injury with consequences that last longer than one episode. New BSG chops those rules up and spits them out. Heroes are injured and on crutches, and struggle with recovery. They die. They stay on Caprica to send a scientist back to the fleet, because they believe said scientist is more useful to the common good, then suffer through hunger, radiation poisoning, and long runs through wilderness to escape the enemy. No, it’s not very enjoyable to watch. But life is like that. You struggle. Maybe not with cylons, but with work schedules and sick kids and idiot bosses who make you stay long hours. And if there’s one thing that keeps a human being sane, it’s knowing that we’re not alone in struggling, and spacemen fighting robots is only given effective emotional connection for us when the struggle is in terms we understand. There’s a lot riding on every shot of a viper’s laser, but the more visceral, less CGI shots of Starbuck in a hospital bed hating life, of Helo in the rain panting and limping - they connect us so when the viper does fire it has more impact. The viper fights are more visceral in the new series because we aren’t shown stock footage of the same four maneuvers over and over again; we see the pilots in the cockpits, sweating and swearing, collisions and palpable fear, and interspersed shots of how vast space is and how distant the Galactica, how nukes strike panic into them. I never get that space is vast in the old series. I don’t buy into the idea that the cylons are that much of a threat - we only see three of them at a time. No wonder the fleet can hold the cylons at bay with one squadron - yeah, there was red and blue squadron, but why do we never see them all? We see two or three vipers. The limits of budget, yes. But.

It’s not the special effects that do it. Are we more interested in the Matrix or in BSG 2003? Which one connects us with the characters more? Matrix is pretty and neat and waaaaay cool special effects - and one-dimensional, when held up to a show that allows us to feel with the characters. One of the things that jars me (today) out of old BSG is that the props/special effects department tries too hard. Women in spandex, plastic props, irritating and difficult names for everything (resorting to scientific names for some animals and fake time unit names based on metrics really throws me for a loop), and all that reconstituted myth couched in Lorne Green’s lugubrious delivery — too much. New BSG shows a civilization not much different than our own. Alien, but familiar. It works very well. Adama wears glasses, as do several others. The clothes aren’t wild polyester and foil attempts at futuristic. Not having CGI doesn’t have to be a drawback.

I suppose the upshot of what I’m trying to say is that re-imagined isn’t un-imagined, as Mr. Benedict insists. Different isn’t worse, or better, it’s simply different. I can suppose there might be others who believe the first version was superior — in presenting idealistic and one-sided characters, yes. In character development and presentation, no. The original Star Trek had more primitive special effects and some pretty hammy acting, and yet I can watch the most wince-worthy of Trek episodes and be less annoyed than I was by The Gun on Ice Planet Zero or The Lost Patrol because the plot had some sense to it. Sure, someone stealing Spock’s brain to run their air conditioning was a hare-brained excuse for sticking a widget on Nimoy’s head, dressing a few women up in fur bikinis, and letting McCoy and Spock crack wise, but at least they made a passing attempt at science, and the characters were consistent. At least we weren’t expected to believe a single star system had 12 life-sustaining planets, that every asteriod and moon has a breathable atmosphere despite total absence of plants or some artificial means of creating one, or that a random prisoner on a forgotten planet will draw maps to Earth on his cell wall to be discovered by a pilot who just happens to be thrown in the same cell and remember the pictographs accurately enough to correct a drawing of the Earth system rendered by a small child.

There’s a thing called ’suspension of disbelief.’ Mine was a lot more durable when I was a kid, apparently. It certainly withstood crap like that much better before I had a clearer understanding of science and statistical probability.