What Does Battlestar Galactica Have to Say About the Present Day?

What Does Battlestar Galactica Have to Say About the Present Day?

A new game in the Galactica universe has arrived, but there’s a bigger place in the world for such a prophetic tale.

It’s flown a bit under the radar, but a new Battlestar Galactica game called Scattered Hopes launched on Steam this week. By all accounts, it’s pretty excellent, essentially taking the strategic ship management simulation formula of FTL and applying it to the Galactica universe. Between this and Star Trek Voyager: Across the Unknown, we seem to be living through a modest renaissance era for classic sci-fi franchises as video games breathe new life into them by putting players in the midst of a meaningful sim-style management role. (Just try not to think too hard about how Across the Universe was delisted before its time. R.I.P., little guy.)

Viper, Viper, burning bright/Against the Cylons of the night

You could argue that video games have to take up the slack for those franchises, since grand space operas are very expensive to produce, and the major streaming platforms seem to have run out of their once-bountiful piles of production cash. Outside of Apple+ shows like Pluribus, Severance, and Foundation, streamers seem to be moving away from big-concept shows, which doesn’t bode well for vintage sci-fi properties like Trek, Galactica, Doctor Who, and even Star Wars. Fans expect certain things from those shows, and they probably wouldn’t be too keen to revert back to the hokey effects and computer graphics that those shows employed in the 1990s and 2000s.

Still, there’s value in the Galactica name, and the time just might be right for it to make a bigger return. Battlestar Galactica debuted in 1978 as a TV pilot elevated to theatrical format, which was then followed by a season of some of the most extravagant and expensive television drama ever produced to that point. In fact, the scale of Galactica proved too rich for the network’s blood, and after a deeply disappointing half-season of the basement-budget Galactica ’80, it disappeared. But fan enthusiasm and the devotion of its creative team (especially lead actor Richard “Apollo” Hatch) kept Galactica alive until Universal revived it in 2003 with a new series that blurred the line between remake and sequel. (In fact, it did the Final Fantasy VII Remake / Rebuild of Evangelion thing years well before either of those projects got underway.) The modern Galactica soldiered on in various forms for nearly a decade of shows, spinoffs, movies, and prequels, with the main series offering a definitive conclusion to the saga.

Any resemblance to Sith lords either living or dead is purely coincidental

Well, mostly definitive. As the show loved to remind us: All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again. It’s been nearly 25 years since the 2003 series premiered, which in turn made its debut 25 years after the launch of the original television series. Plans to continue or re-reboot the saga have been kicking around for years (efforts to launch a streaming Galactica series fizzled as recently as 2021!), and considering the state of the world, a new Galactica could have a lot to say.

The original Battlestar Galactica was, in some respects, little more than an attempt to capitalize on the Star Wars mania of the late 1970s, with hero ships that looked a lot like X-Wing fighters and bad guys who resembled a shiny hybrid of Darth Vader and a stormtrooper. The 2003 series offered a more grounded take on the premise, removing all of the alien worlds and races from the picture and giving more screen time to the politics and the pressure-cooker reality of a dwindling human race forced to live in exile and constant terror of a final extinction event.

Look beyond the series’ adoption of their respective periods’ trends and tropes, though, and the core tension of Galactica feels very much in tune with the present day. Both series dealt heavily with religion, exploring the good and the bad of faith. The 21st-century saga provocatively gave the villainous Cylons a monotheistic religion that strongly resembled Christianity, one of many ways the show runners deliberately challenged a lot of American sentiments and status quo in the immediate aftermath of 9/11! More significantly, though, the Cylons themselves embodied our ongoing fascination with (and fear of) artificial intelligence. The Cylon race, if you can call robots a race, are a “species” of mechanical creatures who seek the subjugation of all life. When the human race pushed back too forcefully against the prospect of slavery, the Cylons shrugged and decided it would be easier to just eliminate humanity altogether. Eventually, humans and Cylons forced an uneasy peace that they largely maintained for years, until the robots suddenly returned in a new biological form that was almost impossible to distinguish from a human body, sharing a sort of networked collective consciousness that amounted to immortality.

Can you count the robots in this image?

An awful lot of story details in both Battlestar Galactica sagas resonate uncomfortably in the 2020s, where you can’t escape the letters “A.I.” The helpful utility of simple machine learning has been pushed aside in favor of predictive text and generative content recreation that (we’re told by people who stand to make a lot of money from the adoption of those technologies) will radically change our way of life. So far, those radical changes mostly seem to amount to massive tech layoffs and unsettlingly mediocre pictures and videos clogging our social media feeds... not necessarily the exact existential threat painted by the Galactica saga, but a threat all the same. What happens when people are replaced by machines? What happens when the boundaries between real and artificial become so muddled that the average can no longer tell the difference between the two? The Cylons themselves originally began as a reptilian race that increasingly augmented themselves with machines until at last their drive for efficiency purged the lizard bits altogether. And then there are people like Baltar, the man who eagerly sells out humanity to the Cylons in pursuit of personal advancement and power, a character who feels depressingly prescient today...

For the moment, Battlestar Galactica lives on through spinoff media like Scattered Hopes, but it would be interesting to see the saga return with a new, updated tale for the present day. The 2003 series ended with humanity and the Cylons (or at least some of them) coming to a true understanding, along with a sense of hope that the cycle of conflict would end... followed by ominous real-life footage of Boston Dynamics robot demos and the like. And let’s not forget the way both sagas offered parables inspired by tense Western relations with the Middle East (the 1970s OPEC embargo and the Gulf War). As the saying goes, all of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.