So tonight is the beginning of the end for Battlestar Galactica.  If you've never watched an episode of this show, you should.  Even if you are not a science fiction fan or you are deeply aware of how cheesy the original series was, you should watch it.  It is one of the best written, best acted, and deeply complex shows to have graced the glowing box. 

I was watching a couple of the repeated episodes this past week and was once again struck by how good the show is.  I mean sure there have been a few weak filler episodes, as is the case of any show.  Overall though the pacing, the realism, and the complexity of it feels like what you'd expect of the last remains of human civilization trying to feel destruction. 

As the show revs up for the final conclusion, I've been thinking about what I've loved so much about it.  Some spoliers below if you've never watch the series, so be warned, but if you're all caught up there's nothing new here.  Anyhow, for me, it comes down to two things.

Moral Complexity

I can recall many episodes where I was watching the drama unfold and found myself aligned to the position of one character in spite of the clear knowledge I had that they were wrong.  For example, when the President was high on Kamala Root and talking about visions of their destiny, Adam initiated what was effectively a coup d'etat.  She was 100% right about what was going to happen, but I found myself seeing it more from Adama's position.  The President is high on drugs and launching into a bunch of spiritual crazy talk.  You'd damn well better lock her up before that ~50,000 survivors number rounds itself down to 0.

At the end of the last season, we had the trial of Baltar, and you knew that, ultimately, he was guilty for the obliteration of human civilization.  If anybody deserves capital punishment, he does.  But given that, within the bounds of the trial, he clearly wasn't guilty (at least not more so than any number of other people).  He was a puppet of the Cylons and ultimately, he might have said, "no more," and been killed, but only to be replaced by somebody else who'd sign on the dotted line.  He was found not guilty, and rightfully so, even though the sooner he gets thrown out an airlock, the better for everybody else. 

Furthermore, you add to that whole plot line Gaida committing perjury in an effort to seal Baltar's fate.  Gaida, in spite of that dishonorable act, is seemingly doing the right thing.  In the end, if his testimony had sent Baltar into the void, they'd have all been better off for it.  Yet I couldn't help but be disgusted by his actions. 

There are no pure saints and there are no pure sinners.  Baltar is as close as you get and even then he's clearly just a selfish person trying to find a way to survive.  He seems to be destined for becoming a cult leader, not because he necessarily wants to be, but it provides him temporary safety and keeps his ego well fed. 

Political Relevance

Repeatedly throughout the series, they've attempted to draw parallels between the BSG universe and what's happening here in the real world.  We see the tensions between law and order as practiced and what we perceive as justice.  We see the tensions between religious zealotry and secularism.  Finally, of course, we got to see what it looks like when the "good guys" become the terrorists and the suicide bombers.

I'm a hard core liberal, and so I tend to think positively of things like unions, democracy, the legal system, etc.  Yet we see within the bounds of the show how gray these things are.  How much of a mixed bag they can be.  You need to have workers having safe conditions, and so there's a strike, which, of course throws the whole fleet into chaos.  Did I mention, btw, that there's only 50,000 or so humans left and they are being chased by robots hell bent on their destruction?  Lousy time for a strike :)

It's easy in politics, to come to a very fixed position based on simplistic conclusions.  What BSG does well is to take those same situations and put them in a very different context and show you how it's not that simple.  All of our notions of what civilization is and how it's supposed to work quickly go to pieces when you're on the brink of destruction.  Yet, even while on that brink, everybody is still the same selfish hairless monkey they always were, and so in spite of the constant sense of impending doom, people still do terribly stupid things that could bring it all to an end.