Signposts to Battlestar Galactica Season Four: Occupation/Precipice

[With Battlestar Galactica’s 4^th Season starting on Friday night, it’s time to take a look back at some of the important parts of the 3^rd Season as I rewatch it in preparation of the premiere. We’ll start with the opening two episodes, and progress with four more signposts from there.]

When I finished watching Season Two of Battlestar Galactica, my response was quite simple: “That was ballsy.” Jumping forward over a year in time created a lot more questions than answers, and if I learned anything from Alias it was that sometimes you risk overwhelming your audience. And, inevitably, what Ronald D. Moore did was, in fact overwhelming…but for all the right reasons.

The occupation of New Caprica by the Cylons was supposed to be overwhelming, both on a visual and intellectual level. When Col. Tigh emerges from the Cylon prison missing an eye, you get a sense that bad things are happening, and that there isn’t going to be an easy out from this scenario. We’re stuck in this occupation, as the viewer, but can escape to Galactica and avoid the struggle directly.

The result is an opening to a season perhaps amongst the best in television, the intellectual equivalent of 24’s four-hour openings of the middle seasons. It wasn’t action-packed in a traditional sense, rather using dense plotting and challenging situations to interrogate our understanding of our own lives and of the lives of these characters.

The episodes follow the story of how Admiral Adama comes to terms with leaving humanity behind, and how the settlers on New Caprica are dealing with their occupation through the Resistance movement. The latter story is the focuses, painting an allegory for insurgencies across the world. Most telling, of course, was its connection to the Iraq war, and its portrayal of our heroes as the insurgents.

However, to pull directly from my thesis, Moore isn’t just grandstanding for the world to see with this development:

“As the internet and news outlets debated the level to which this allegory designated the series as a political statement, they failed to address the inverse relationship. The relationship between New Caprica and contemporary American politics does not fundamentally alter the political landscape of North America, but rather heightens the impact of this colonial exercise on our understanding of the binary between humanity and Cylons…The political power of a science fiction television series appearing on basic cable is fairly limited. Rather, the real value in this instance is that the political allegory further complicates and emphasizes the actions of humanity within the show.”

Occupation/Precipice is about consequences – how are the actions of humans different from Cylons in this instance? Just a few episodes later, in “A Measure of Salvation,” this question re-emerges, but it really begins when humans start killing other humans in their quest for freedom. When this happens, the series’ dynamic fundamentally changes, and the third season is off to a hell of a start.