Over vacation I started watching Battlestar Galactica, which is one of those shows that I've been meaning to watch for a while but just hadn't gotten around to it. It struck me as a fairly obvious parable of the "war on terrorism," and just for kicks I went back and read Jonah Golberg's essay on how the show got terrible in its third season by going all LIBRUL.
The original miniseries was written and filmed in 2002, when the war on terror was a nearly universal cause. The show's first season was written and filmed in 2003, and the second in 2004. When it came time to make the third season, in 2005, the war on terror had become old hat, and the war in Iraq had become a grinding controversy. Moore and his colleagues felt compelled to move on from their analogical portrait of the war on terror to the occupation of Iraq—a decision that upended the direction the show had been heading over the previous 32 hours and that led inexorably to its self-destruction.
From the perspective of a new viewer, the show's liberalism is pretty apparent from jump. For one thing, one of the main characters on the show is essentially responsible for humanity's destruction at the hands of the Cylons, and yet the audience is expected to root for his survival in part because his intellect is irreplaceable. Commander Adama relinquishes authority over the fleet to civilian leadership, despite the fact that a military coup would have been easily executed. His son tells a captured terrorist that he's right to demand elections despite the fact that the human race is on the verge of extinction, even if his decision to resort to violence is indefensible, and promises him elections will take place.
The scene that most struck me, though, was in episode 8, where a Cylon is discovered who claims to have placed a nuclear bomb on one of the ships. Starbuck spends eight hours beating and basically waterboarding the guy, who gives up absolutely nothing. Then liberal squish President Laura Roslin shows up, plays a little good cop, and the Cylon admits there is no bomb and he was tortured for no reason. Then Roslin tosses him out of an airlock, commenting that he's not a person so it doesn't matter, but the preceding 40 minutes of the show are pretty straightforward about the ineffectiveness of torture. They even offer up the ticking time bomb scenario!
Goldberg seemed pretty bent out of shape over the fact that later seasons of the show are critical of the war in Iraq, but it seems to me that Battlestar Galactica starts off taking the perspective that even in the face of annihilation, some values simply can't or shouldn't be compromised. That's a pretty straightforward rejection of the entire moral premise of how many conservatives think terrorism should be handled, even if to make the show interesting the appeal of those options has to be well dramatized.
