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2003 was a dark and bitter time. 50 Cent and Evanescence were on the radio, sometimes back-to-back. Bruce Willis guest hosted The Late Show. And we were all genuinely excited to see The Matrix Reloaded.
Firefly was fading from memory like a dream so wonderful, you mourn waking. Farscape was clawing desperately and futilely for one more season. Buffy and Angel were coming to merciful, it’s-okay-if-it’s-anti-climactic ends.
A barren sci-fi wasteland awaited us. But what’s this? Could it be an oasis for our nerdy hearts? A new show that maybe just maybe could slake our thirst for geek TV? (Remember, oh my sons, that being a nerd wasn’t cool, yet.)
Lo, there, on the horizon: a reboot of Battlestar Galactica; a certified sci-fi classic that ran its concept so far up its own ass that everyone decided to forget that Galactica 1980 ever existed. But this wasn’t going to be your daddy’s Battlestar! This was a sci-fi series that fuuuuuuuuucked.
But not really, hahaha, this is basic cable.
Battlestar Galactica launched as a mini-series because no one was sure anyone would actually watch hard sci-fi, anymore. But the nerds were still jonesing and this was all we had. The miniseries didn’t suck, either. It was a thoughtful origin story that teased a tense and paranoid drama to come.
When the series launched, the writers began weaving threads of loyalty, ideology, and practicality into a web of intrigue like over-caffeinated spiders. It was a mess, but it was trying to do something really cool and maybe if we stuck with it, the writers would figure out how to build stakes and give characters different personalities.
Instead, they decided to make four random characters secretly evil and shove a bad cover of All Along the Watchtower into a show where Earth was treated like Shangri-La.
It was jarring. It was bad. It was this or Star Trek: Enterprise.
BSG slumped along for a few more seasons eventually sort of learning to make its political intrigue intriguing, but never quite succeeding in making any of the characters likable enough for you to emotionally engage in their potential rise to power.
Yet, the series is remembered as one of the greats of “The Golden Age of Television”. The New York Times lauded it as the only true sci-fi series on its 20 Best Dramas Since the Sopranos, completely ignoring the objectively superior series The Expanse.
The Expanse is everything that BSG wanted to be. It has politics that make sense and have stakes. The backbone of its tension is the drama of surviving in space, something it accomplishes with actual science rather than a vague sense of “we’re the last of our species”. The characters are distinct and likable enough that the politics matter to you without anyone being framed as right—though some people are definitely wrong. And there’s plenty of sci-fi weirdness that doesn’t involve left-field plot devices.
Yet, The Expanse will never be remembered as a cultural touchstone. Instead, generations of TV list writers will dredge up the sloppy, adolescent corpse of Battlestar Galactica, waxing wistfully—over and over—about all the great things that sci-fi could be. If only this. If only that. If only.
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