★ An entry · No. 58

Battlestar Galactica, and the algebra teacher who got me into it

How a strict, very pregnant college algebra teacher who would not stop talking about her favorite show turned me into a lifelong Battlestar Galactica nerd. The characters I loved, the twists that floored me, and the ending that still gets me.

MARCH 10, 2008 10 MIN READ TV
The Battlestar Galactica title card: the show's logo in distressed red and silver lettering on a black background.
The Battlestar Galactica title card: the show's logo in distressed red and silver lettering on a black background. ✦

Heads up: this whole post is one big Battlestar Galactica spoiler. The show has been out for about twenty years, though, so if you have been meaning to watch it, stop living under a rock, go watch it, and come back. I will wait.

Blame my algebra teacher

I got into Battlestar Galactica because of a college algebra class. It was early 2008, near the end of my time at St. Charles Community College, and this was the first time in my life I had ever taken college algebra. I was genuinely there to learn it.

My teacher and I did not click. She was insanely strict, I don’t think she taught the material very well, and my biggest gripe was her whole attitude: you either already knew how to do this or you didn’t, and if you didn’t, you should fail. That is a rough posture to bring to a room full of people whose entire reason for being there is that they don’t know it yet. To be fair, I think underneath all that she could have been a genuinely friendly person, and she was also extremely pregnant the whole time she was teaching us, which I am sure did not help.

Here is the thing she is responsible for, though. She would not shut up about Battlestar Galactica. It was her favorite show of all time, the final season was about to premiere, and she talked about it constantly, every class, nonstop. I am a science fiction fan, so eventually I caved, went and downloaded the series, and started watching. It is a long show, and I was working a full-time job and taking as many classes as I could at the same time, so I never actually caught up to watch that finale live. I spent the whole time chasing the story, always a little behind, always trying to catch up. I have never stopped being grateful she wouldn’t drop it.

Going in completely cold

My first impression was, what is this weird space military soap opera? There is so much drama. There is so much going on with this woman in the red dress. I was also pretty naive about the whole thing. I went in 100% cold. I had no idea there had even been an original Battlestar Galactica back in the 1970s, so I knew none of the lore, none of the twists, none of the character turns that were coming.

It genuinely never occurred to me that some of the people I was watching were Cylons, the machines, walking around looking exactly like humans. It never occurred to me there was a hidden group who were basically the architects of everything. So when the reveals started landing, they landed hard. I still remember being completely floored to learn that Boomer, Sharon Valerii, the sweet Raptor pilot, was a Cylon sleeper agent, right before she put two rounds into Admiral Adama. I did not see a single bit of it coming, and that is the best possible way to watch this show.

The characters I loved

President Laura Roslin is the one who really got me. She starts the series as the Secretary of Education, something like forty-third in the line of succession, a nobody in the government. She is diagnosed with terminal breast cancer the exact same day the Cylons wipe out the colonies, and on that same day she is suddenly the highest-ranking official left alive and gets sworn in as President of what is left of humanity. Think about that. The day she is told she is going to die in a few months is the day she is handed the job of saving the species.

And she just does it. She is trying to hold humanity together by a set of rules and decorum that were written for a civilization that no longer exists, in a place where society has effectively ended. She is surrounded by adversaries the whole way, people who are robots, people who are lying, people who simply oppose everything she is trying to do, the way there is always opposition in any political situation. She genuinely tries to do it right, by the book, at all costs, with everyone pushing against her, and she mostly pulls it off. Her drive the entire series is: I have been called to fix this, and I will. Her cancer goes into remission for a while and then comes back, which makes the ending land even harder.

Mary McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin, smiling at a convention appearance.
Mary McDonnell, who played President Laura Roslin, smiling at a convention appearance.

Helo, Karl Agathon, was my secret little crush, and I was glad to see him survive and carry through all the way to the end of the story. I had a soft spot for him the whole time.

Tahmoh Penikett, who played Helo, at a convention appearance.
Tahmoh Penikett, who played Helo, at a convention appearance.

Meanwhile, everybody and their mother was swooning over Lee “Apollo” Adama, played by Jamie Bamber. There is that scene where he steps out of the shower absolutely jacked beyond belief, talking to Starbuck, and the entire fandom lost its mind over how good-looking he was.

Jamie Bamber, who played Lee "Apollo" Adama, at a convention appearance.
Jamie Bamber, who played Lee "Apollo" Adama, at a convention appearance.

I was never a huge fan of Admiral William Adama himself. He is kind of a hard-ass and kind of full of himself. He wanted to retire and never gets to. Yes, he steps up to the plate when it counts, but he is also carrying all this raw grief over his dead son Zak and the fact that his other son, Lee, sometimes acts like a delinquent, partly just to prove he is his own person. And then there is Kara “Starbuck” Thrace, who is sort of his adoptive daughter, because she had been engaged to Zak before he died. So Adama is constantly pulling strings to keep her out of trouble and keep her flying, because she is the best Viper pilot left in the fleet.

Edward James Olmos, who played Admiral William Adama, at a film festival.
Edward James Olmos, who played Admiral William Adama, at a film festival.

My two absolute favorites, though, are Colonel Saul Tigh and his wife Ellen Tigh. Tigh is Adama’s second in command, a drunk, and the way he cusses and the jokes he gets are some of my favorite bits in the whole series. Ellen is right there with him, a lush and a drunk too, but also brilliant. I love her backstory: she turns out to be one of the Final Five, the original five Cylons, and is essentially the mother of the entire Cylon race. She is a genuinely smart engineer and a smart person who also just wants to have a good time, and she wants the best for both Cylons and humans, because she sits right on the line between the two. The whole “humans and Cylons are not as separate as you think” idea runs through her.

Kate Vernon, who played Ellen Tigh, at a convention appearance.
Kate Vernon, who played Ellen Tigh, at a convention appearance.

There is also Felix Gaeta, the nerdy officer down in operations. He could have gone down in history as one of the good guys. Instead he holds on, gets more and more bitter and more ambitious, and at the very last minute leads a mutiny and switches sides at exactly the wrong moment. He gets himself executed for it. His arc is almost a thesis statement: not everyone is cut out to be a leader, you cannot force it, and the moment he tried to force it, he doomed everyone around him and himself.

And I cannot forget the two biggest pieces of the puzzle. The woman in the red dress is Number Six, and the man she is wrapped up with the whole time is Dr. Gaius Baltar. Baltar is a brilliant, deeply selfish scientist who sees a version of Six inside his own head, and he spends the series torn between doing what is right and chasing whatever brings him pleasure, which is mostly Six. He will do almost anything to make that happen. He gets roped into the survival of humanity anyway, swinging onto Roslin’s side and then off it, all while carrying the darkest secret of all: he is the one who, however unwittingly, handed the Cylons the keys and helped them destroy humanity in the first place. And he is still walking around as one of the last survivors.

Tricia Helfer, who played Number Six, at a convention appearance.
Tricia Helfer, who played Number Six, at a convention appearance.
James Callis, who played Dr. Gaius Baltar, at a convention appearance.
James Callis, who played Dr. Gaius Baltar, at a convention appearance.

The music

I love the music. The composer is Bear McCreary, and the score is tight. The piece that always gets me is the show’s take on “All Along the Watchtower,” because the notes of that song turn out to be the jump coordinates to Earth. It just has to come back to Starbuck, like a melody echoing through time that she had played on the piano as a kid, until she finally understands what it is telling her. I also love her arc of dying and then coming back, because the universe was not done with her: she was not supposed to stay dead, she had a mission to finish, so she comes back to lead everyone home.

Composer Bear McCreary speaking at the Game Developers Conference.
Composer Bear McCreary speaking at the Game Developers Conference.
Katee Sackhoff, who played Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, at an awards show.
Katee Sackhoff, who played Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, at an awards show.

The ending

And then it ends the way it has to, sad and fitting. They finally reach Earth. After everything Roslin does to drag these people to safety and hold some kind of peace together, after the cancer and the remission and the cancer again, her last scene is flying low over the new Earth, seeing for the first time how green and alive and beautiful it is, and then dying. She got them there, and that was the whole point of her life, and she got to see it.

Then we get the flash-forward, the glimpse that says all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again. That is the real moral. History repeats itself, and almost nothing any one person or group does actually changes the outcome. Even if the Cylons had won, even if the humans had wiped out the Cylons, even if they had reached a real peace or a permanent stalemate, it all happens again. Earth gets populated and destroyed, Cylons get created, the desperate race to save what is left of humanity plays out one more time, over and over and over. Or so we are told.

Worth it

Battlestar Galactica is one of those once-in-a-lifetime series. It does not have a ton of rewatchability, and not because it is bad. It is the opposite. So much of what makes it great is the not-knowing, the twists and the reveals and the rug-pulls, and once you have all of that in your head, you can never get that first watch back. I have tried rewatching it without much success for exactly that reason. But I would love to watch it all again someday with Nicholas, who has never seen it, just to get to experience it through someone else going in cold, the way my pregnant algebra teacher accidentally sent me in all those years ago.

Image credits

The photos above are of the actors themselves, not stills from the show, shared under Creative Commons licenses from Wikimedia Commons. Thank you to the photographers:

Until next time, Todd
FILED UNDER #tv#school#nostalgia