For all the flaws that the Star Trek series had, including usually predictable plots and less than inspiring last film and television incarnations, the one thing the series did its best to stick to was Gene Roddenberry’s rule that there would be no supernatural elements.

Sure, alien beings could seem to be like gods who could perform what even the humans of the 23/24th Centuries might instinctively consider to be magic, but in the end, the “deities” and their abilities had mortal explanations. The ancient Greek “god” Apollo in the original ST episode “Who Mourns for Adonais?” is a prime example here.

I will be the first to admit, though, that the series makers often played fast and loose with both science and their bevy of seriously advanced beings – but gosh darnit, they at least knew the difference between a solar system and a galaxy, which was something the original 1970s version of Battlestar Galactica and plenty of other television and film SF did not.

The reimaged BSG, the series that went out of its way to be taken seriously by the mainstream by showing us how grounded in gritty reality each week for four years, ended on a note of virtually pure fantasy on several levels wrapped up in a not terribly original idea. Of course it could be argued that BSG was not original to begin with.

First we have what Tom B. rightly called one of the most hoary old clichés in science fiction, the astronauts who land on an unknown alien planet that turns out to be our Earth and the space explorers are Adam and Eve. This was done in an original episode of The Twilight Zone in 1963 with “Probe 7, Over and Out” as just one example. Apparently this plot device is also called the Shaggy God story.

I thought it was more than a little balzy that BSG dared to take the main goal of the series – to find Earth so that Colonial humanity might survive – and have them find what was assumed to be our planet only to discover it was wrecked by the very beings and war they were trying to escape from. From that point on, it would not have surprised me if the series ended with the Galactica and its ragtag fleet being destroyed and the Cylons going on to own the galaxy, just to put the standard happy ending on its head.

Instead we have the Colonials whisked off to Earth seemingly guided by supernatural intelligences (more on that shortly) to spend the rest of their days on an eternal camping trip.

I can certainly understand the surviving 38,000 humans wanting to take a nice long break from all they have gone through, having lost their home worlds and being stuck on a bunch of spaceships for the last four years with the threat of death or worse constantly at their heels.
But to dump all their technology and creature comforts to spend the rest of their days living a “simple” (read primitive) life on an unknown world?

These folks came from a technological culture somewhat more advanced than our current one. It can be fun to get out in the wilderness for a few days to get away from urban life, but after a few weeks of no utilities or hot showers, I bet more than a few were regretting they dumped their spaceships into the Sun.

I have been camping for a few years now (a hardtop camper, nothing fancy but nice), and it is amusing to see all these folks who presumably want to get away from it all arrive in RVs the size of aircraft carriers with washers, dryers, plasma screen TVs (with satellite hookup, of course) and just about every other amenity I thought they were supposed to leave behind. And they all park right next to each other to boot. This is the kind of thing that makes me think at least in America, the days of being able to live like our “simple” forefathers are long gone.

I also wonder how many of the Galactica crew knew how to build a log cabin or live off the land? Did they retrieve any data on this from their computers, or did that too get trashed in the excitement of this perceived Eden? To top it off, as the series displayed many times over, just because this humanity went through dramatic changes in their lives, that did not stop more than a few from continuing to harbor pre-war issues and agendas and acting on them.

It has been a fantasy for a long while, now that we have a technological civilization and billions of people all over the planet, for the desire to shed our human-made problems and go back to nature, when things were supposedly so much better. I am willing to bet that many of our prehistorical ancestors would have gladly traded in their caves, spears, and short life spans for our relatively easy lifestyles in a second given the choice. After all, isn’t this what we all seem to be working for, a better life for us and our children? And by better, we don’t mean living in a hut on the savannah grubbing for food each day while trying not to be lunch ourselves.

At the end of the final episode, we saw real-life examples of robots performing a number of feats and functions. This was the series warning that if we don’t watch out, we’ll make our own version of the Cylons and then we’ll be the ones flying through space for our lives, if we even get that lucky.

While I was happy to see BSG take on the issue of what might happen if and when we create AI that is truly aware, the whole thing devolved into a complicated soap opera and, along with everybody wanting to live the simple life in Africa, ended up with another hoary SF cliché: The superior beings that want to be human.

Just like I have trouble with seeing our whole modern society chucking technology and going back to live in the trees and plains, I have even more trouble with beings who are smarter, faster, and stronger than us on multiple levels wanting to be like us, usually to experience those supposedly superior things called emotions. It is the same fantasy of a superior alien race conquering the galaxy and we puny humans are somehow the ones who will defeat them.

On a related note, it would be interesting to see what the Centurions they set free to live their own lives will do. I can bet you they won’t be settling down in a green field and strapping on a loin cloth.

As this post has become longer than I intended, I will stop here and put the rest of my thoughts on the series in a following post.