As a commentary on US culture at the time the political storylines made a lot of sense, you never want to allow power grabs and elections to be cancelled over a terrorist attack and resulting national shock.
As it applied to the actual situation the fleet was it was laughable, 99.99% of everyone is DEAD. The only people and ships and resources that survived was what was in the air and by luck managed not to get nuked. All ships are dependent on the Galactica for protection and jump calculations, they are still being chased in no holds barred genocidal war.
And they keep harping about elections and representatives, the silliest thing was them retaining the twelve colonies representation system with a council of twelve with one representative from each colony, even after it is dissolved TWICE once by occupation and once by Zarek via machine gun. Are these people insane?!
Imagine the entire USA is nuked somehow and the survivors number a few hundred, they gather on a flotilla around the only surviving aircraft carrier. And quickly start demanding elections and continuity of government to be established and reconstitute the house of representatives with each state representative bickering with the others.:smack:
Well, we saw with the Pegasus what happens when the military commander has no patience for “insanity” - it just gets replaced with other forms of insanity.
There is a realistic medium, and it doesn’t preclude friction between the military and civilians and government.
Perhaps the thing in the show that made me the angriest was the handling of the coup and Tom Zarek, at this point the show drops nuance and grey morality and has Pappa wolf Adama retake his ship and kick ass. Why is Adama right and Zarek wrong? Because he is Bill Fucking Adama thats why! :rolleyes: After choking us in politics finally there is an actual interesting political storyline, there were very good reasons to be suspicious of the cylon defectors and very good reason to question Adama’s judgement(for one thing he appears to have developed either an opiate or sedative addiction, and to top it off he washes down the handfulls of pills with whisky LOL). I think Zarek and the coup members could have been played much more grey morally. with more public support. Remember the public doesn’t even know what cylons even are, they have not had the benefit of being married to one for years like one of Adama’s senior staff.
The political conflict between Adama and Roslyn, and then later Zarek, is a rather important part of the show; without it you just don’t have as good a story.
Is it believable? I think so. A lot of the civilian’s response to their situation does seem insane - insisting on democracy, having a media, even still classifying themselves along the lines of what planet they’re from even though they’ll never set foot on those planets again. But it seems not at all far-fetched to me that people would do that. They’re on the verge of total insanity due to the circumstances and are trying to hold on to some sense of normalcy.
Bear in mind, too, that the civilian ships hold a degree of power over Galactica (something Cain never got the chance to understand) in that they can withhold their support services and make it impossible, or at least very difficult, for Galactica to get the logistical support she needs to keep running.
I will admit it’s been a long time since I’ve seen it, but I do recall at the time there was a lot of discussion about how Adama WASN’T unreservedly good and holy shit, did he just do that? Lots and lots of grey, actually.
Perhaps you have the benefit of seeing the whole story and knowing where it’s going, but as it aired, there were some rather unsettling moments as viewers realized the characters we’d been rooting for (for, let’s face it, no reason except they are the humans and therefore “us”) were capable of some pretty horrific actions.
Yeah, I thought one of the most interesting things Ron Moore did with BSG was in holding on to political institutions that were arguably defunct. I can see the psychological value in it. If you have a populace who is as traumatized as I think I would be, maintaining even the illusion of a political structure they know gives some semblance of hope that humanity can rebuild somewhere, sometime.
Within the story, I maintain that the biggest mistake Roslin made was in not declaring martial law at the earliest convenient moment. Presumably some of the reason she didn’t was an inherent distrust of the military, but realistically Galactica was the linchpin of the fleet, and her Commander was better suited to the sort of tough decisions necessary to the survival of humanity.
Tom Zarek was a very nuanced character, right up until he went bonkers and held his coup. His points about tyrrany and freedom were uncomfortably close to the mark throughout the earlier seasons… but he also assumed control of the black market, and if not guilty of ordering murders had at least arranged for them.
And then at the end he was turned into a caricature villain, gunning down the Quorum when it finally found its spine. The coup made utterly no sense: Gaeta and Zarek had no chance of holding on to the Galactica; given their viewpoints and situation, they should have just jumped away with the majority of the civilian fleet (which was mostly on their side).
Ironically, that was one of the points when Bill Adama actually became a bit more nuanced. Circumstances normally proved Admiral Adama correct, but although his actions dealing with the coup were morally right, the aftermath was nonetheless disasterous – here, too, it would have been better to allow the dissidents to go their own way, rather than force them to stay with the fleet.
The aftereffects of the coup were probably the reason none of them would put up with staying together at the end; they all wanted to go their own way.
Yeah, though I thought it made Gaeta’s story better: here was someone who all along was trying to do what he thought was right, and somehow found himself suddenly working alongside a murderer.
Since IMO, the whole point of BSG was that it showed people in situations where there was no clearly right choice (morally or otherwise), having the coup turn extremely violent was great at putting Gaeta in exactly that kind situation.
I know this is a small thing, but what always bugged me about BSG was how many working reporters there were. I know that Roslyn was traveling with a bunch of reporters when the attacks happened, but you’d think some of them would kind of just stop being reporters once their home offices were vaporized.
But Roslyn would have a press conference and there would be like 50 reporters in the room, there was like one reporter for every 1,000 people. The people on the fleet must have been the most well-informed refugees in history.
I see that as pretty realistic, actually. You have thousands of refugees, none of them with a thing to do during the day. With no internet, the manpower needed to disseminate information drastically increases. Not only has everyone become a blogger, but those not actively seeking out information are roped into distributing that information to others.
This was also one of the things that irked me as well. You’d figure with the survival of the human race at stake, you’d keep maybe two or three reporters around to help disseminate information - and you’d train the rest to be mechanics or farmers or something. I can’t imagine why there still needs to be 10+ different news organizations, all competing for the “scoop”, and shouting over each other in the press conference.
I remember at one point in the series, Roslyn actually complaining how “The media is going to have a field day with this!” Utter ridiculousness.
There are a bunch of different news organizations, because there are a bunch of different factions in the ragtag fleet. They start out divided into the twelve colonies (the only point of “The Woman King” was to show how divided the different colonies still are). By the end, they’ve fragmented into even more factions – each ship is almost its own microstate (which is why Lee considers reforming the Quorum as a council of captains, before they just chuck the whole thing into the bin).
The different news organizations and their reporters are each serving one of those constituencies. They don’t trust each other, so of course they’re not going to trust the other guys’ news reporters. Think how likely it would be that American Democrats would be satisfied if Fox News was their only source of information. Now, multiply that by 12+.
Roslin wanted to hold pwer for herself; to declare martial law would be conceding much of it to Adama, even if she remained head of state.
Make no mistake; Roslin was as interested in power as anyone else. She had justifications but she was ambitious, scheming, and her natural tendency was an autocratic one.
Yeah the press conferences with dozens of reporters jocking for her attention to answer questions all holding up microphones. How many broadcast networks could there possibly be?
Also, you’d figure a certain number of the reporters (and the population at large) would be so traumatized by the attacks and the loss of all their loved ones that they would be pretty useless in any capacity, they’d just kind of stop giving a shit.