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My dad has officially given up on Battlestar Galactica

Spoilers for season two and RAZOR, if you haven't seen them yet.

I tried to get my dad into Battlestar Galactica last year around the time Razor came out, because I love it so much. I gave him the miniseries but he refused to watch it, and instead he Netflixed season three and started watching that because it was the newest one.

After watching Razor last week he came to me and told me he gave it enough of a chance, and that's it's a horrible show. I asked him why and he said it was the incident in Razor where Kendra Shaw shoots a woman in the head on a civilian ship after her husband refuses to let the Pegasus take crew members and supplies. He said it justified the act as being necessary, and said the show supports the military's importance over the lives of civilians.

Now, obviously, I believe he is completely wrong. In season two we saw the aftermath of this incident through the eyes of the Galactica crew (which my dad has not seen), and this movie merely shows us the events that lead to this happening, so we can understand why it occured.

My dad's complaint was that the show should have come out and explicitly told its audience that this is wrong. It got me thinking, though, and one thing I like about BSG is that the characters on the show are never perfect. The morality of the show is not black and white, there are many shades of gray, and the characters frequently make mistakes. People do good things for bad reasons and bad things for good reasons, and that's how it is in real life too. The humans aren't always right, the cylons aren't always wrong, and sometimes humans kill humans and cylons kill cylons.

I think my dad wants a show where the good guys always do the right thing, the bad guys are villified, and there's a moral at the end of every episode. I find that idea incredibly boring.

posted by Scott Ewen at

1 Comments:

Rian said...

I watched the first 5 episodes of BSG season 1 and just couldn't retain an interest in the show.

You should tell your dad to watch Scooby-Doo. To my knowledge the good guys get the bad guy at the end of every episode.

9/11/2008 12:28 AM

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