Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Legacy of the Twelve Colonies Volume III: Battlestar Galactica... The Occupy New Caprica Movement

In the wake of 9/11, the Terrorist became the bogeyman de jour. One of the most defining characteristics of this new threat was their propensity for using suicide bombers. It's a difficult mindset to understand and one typically associated with the evil hordes threatening to kick down our front doors. So it was all the more striking for a sci-fi show made by Western Devils just a few years after the single most iconic terrorist act in modern history to empathize--quite effectively--with what amounts to a terrorist movement employing suicide bombers against the enemy.

Granted, Battlestar Galactica does give us more meat to sink our teeth into in terms of contextualizing the extreme measures the survivors of humanity are willing to resort to in order to fight back against their cybernetic oppressors than, say, nobodies favourite real-life assholes in al-Qaeda. At the outset of Season 3, we're presented with a scenario and point of view that makes such methods more easy to swallow, but that in itself is a pretty incredible feat considering the political landscape both then and now. Ask anybody in the Western world--especially residents of the good 'ol US of A--in the wake of the 9/11 attacks whether they could ever fathom what it would take for somebody to consider going to such extremes, and what few answers you would have been able to remember after waking up in the hospital three days later probably wouldn't have offered much insight into that sort of mindset. For most people living in modern times, it's a nearly unfathomable thought experiment. So to have it tackled in a mature and nuanced way in a sci-fi show about humanity's struggle against annihilation at the hands of usually pretty sexy murder-bots is a feat unto itself.