The three hour and three minute miniseries came out in 2003. If you loved the original Battlestar Galactica like me, you probably tuned in. I first saw it on DVD via Netflix and got completely hooked immediately. I watched it twice more the same day. Yes. Nine hours and nine minutes of show.
Looking back, I don't know what exactly hooked me so thoroughly. But I can try to guess.
It's an apocalypse story. The Cylon attack means the end of the world. They drop nuclear bombs all over the inhabited colonies and presumably irradiate everything to the point where everyone will die. I'm not quite sure of that, since people do survive, at least on Caprica, but the cities and infrastructure are destroyed.
Anyway, apocalypse. Life as we know it is over. The people who were in space at the time are spared, but have to get out of there to survive.
That gives us a bunch of tasks:
1. survive the initial attacks
2. gather people together
3. get ammunition to fight back
4. get the hell out of there
The way the miniseries is structured, people have to deal with a stepped series of major conflicts in general. It's beautifully laid out. It's also full of truly excellent characters, so we care about the people themselves, not just the overarching sci-fi storytelling.
I'm generally hooked by character more than plot, though even I will pay attention to an apocalypse. The characters I liked immediately were the leads: Adama, Roslin, Starbuck, Apollo, Tigh, Sharon, Helo, Chief Tyrol, Dualla, Billy, Gaeta.
Thinking about how to introduce all of this when writing something makes me want to go lie down. But they do it in such a way that it's never overwhelming or confusing. Step by step by step. I should get hold of the script. (I may have the script, actually.)
Okay, the thing I worried about was that I'd absolutely freak out. Falling in love with a TV show is kind of terrible because it matters SO MUCH to you and it's completely out of your hands. And it will end. I fell crazy in love with this show. It was crushing to me when it ended. But I also got to be around a little bit of the process of it in a fringe way.
This is the part that's hard to talk about. It really was like falling madly in love with someone and having them say, "Oh, that's nice," and walk away. The show mattered to me. I did not matter to the show. That's in the nature of all fiction, though! As the Tumblrinos say, "Wuthering Heights is not going to f*** you." It's a one-way thing, even when you get to meet the writers and cast and various crew. It's still one way. You look at the screen. The screen doesn't look back at you, whatever Nietzsche might think.
Unrequited love hurts, right?
Anyway that's all wrapped up in Battlestar, such that certain episodes make me completely freak out because I watched them with the writers on the big screen at that place where one lived, or went to screenings at that mall, wherever that was, or on the lot at Universal.
I think it must have been pathetic on some level to see this person show up everywhere, madly in love with your show, when to them it was just their job. I was so into it. They were not.
They were so nice to me. Producers, effects people, actors, writers. Except that one guy, haha. Even the cheerful man from the network was lovely to me. Everyone was so nice to me. But it's excruciatingly embarrassing to remember because I was in love with the show and the show was not in love back, what with it being a show.
So that's why watching this show is never just watching the show for me.
You invest in fiction sometimes. That's what this is about, really. And I'm literature faculty, so I know too well how all of us invest in fiction--that's part of the job, that you pick an era and authors and you dig deep and write about them and know everything about them. Literature faculty are in fandoms. What others do with Chaucer (my old flame) and Shakespeare and Austen and Eliot and all of them, I did with Battlestar. I was a Battlestar scholar. I approached it the way a literature professor would, what with how that's who I am.
Except I got to go to screenings and meet all the people and whatnot. Like that one time I spent a couple of hours with the Ch manuscript at the University of Pennsylvania Library Rare Books Room, where I worked. I studied that thing. I looked at all the annotations and notes in the manuscript. The question always was: did Chaucer himself make these notes? People go back and forth. I studied the notes and decided, though did not bother proving to anyone, that he did. They looked like the kind of notes a writer makes on their own manuscript. You can probably find scholarship out there discussing this point.
That was me about Battlestar.
The miniseries was safe to watch because I saw it first, before I ever went out there and chased the dream. But look at what it did for me! It motivated me to go places and meet people who were so cool and smart and awesome. I had experiences I never could have imagined. I really had a fantastic time out there. One day I'll release that volume of The Geographic Cure. Like, volume two, The Battlestar Galactica Years. It's a killer story. Unless you know the ending. Then it just wrecks you. It's still wrecking me.
A friend and I were talking about how therapy for PTSD works, that what you have to do (I know this, but) is take the terrible thing out into the light and make it part of regular life.
I'm using all of this in the Becca book (that she won't shut up about) so I have to grapple with it. But ohhhhhhhh it's so hard. It's so hard. I don't want to. I didn't even want to watch the miniseries. But I did it yesterday and then watched it again with the commentary.
Good job, me.
I'm going to wreck Becca with this like it wrecked me, I'm afraid. But she will come out of it, because it's one of my books. I came out of it with the redirection to write books instead of television. And I stuck with it long enough to write books that were actually good. It takes a lot of books to get good, I'm afraid. Stay strong! And a LOT of rewriting. And looking at what doesn't work and finding better ways. Yes. It's a process.
It also occurred to me that I almost never got any flow state in Los Angeles, in my tiny apartment with people noise constantly intruding. I think I was in a panic the whole time I lived there. Except, you know, when watching MY SHOW.
Oh dear. It's good to love things. But when it all ends it hurrrrrrrts. Still, it was the right thing. It was! I was chasing the whole sacred cheese of life and that is always worth doing, even if it doesn't turn out the way you wanted. It was still the right thing! I wouldn't trade all those experiences and memories for anything. Well, maybe one thing. A spot on the team back then. But linear time doesn't work like that, hello! And writing now is AMAZING and glorious and a full time powerful good thing. The work I'm doing now is infinitely better than the work I was doing back then--also excruciating to think about, but you have to start somewhere.
I will exorcise this and foist it off on Becca and make her story turn out the way I wish mine would have, except she has to go through that hell first. Sorry Becca! You know I love you! I gave you rugby and my friend and a fabulous life-giving obsession with a show! And you get to meet FINN which I never will except that day he was in my kitchen commenting over my shoulder on my spinach salad. Stop that. You're fictional. Get back in the book.
Battlestar Galactica is a NET GOOD in my life, no question about it. There, we solved it. It's a net good.
Sacred cheese of life!