Sam J. Miller
Battlestar Galactica vs. Star Trek
by Sam J. Miller - January 15, 2009 - 11:00 AM

Galactica.jpg“It’s not enough to survive. One has to be worthy of surviving.”
—Adm. Bill Adama, Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica presents a problem for me and my Star Trek-fan friends. Why do we love it so much? We call each other up after each new episode and ramble in nervous high-pitched voices, batting back and forth theories and questions and “OH MY GOD” moments… all the while feeling vaguely guilty that no Star Trek clash with the Borg or tampering with the time-space continuum ever engaged and obsessed and haunted us to such a profound extent.

Star Trek and Battlestar Galactica have wildly different aesthetics and ideologies, and both aspire to very different goals. Fundamentally, it boils down to this:

Star Trek is about who we want to be, and Battlestar Galactica is about who we are.

Star Trek takes place in a world where all the ugly things about human existence have been erased. Interstellar globalization has brought us new technologies to make transportation and translation effortless. Machines called replicators can produce absolutely anything you want, so the economics of inequity are gone. The injuries of race and class and gender have been surmounted, if not forgotten altogether. Scarcity, borders, money, and culture have all ceased to exist. Interpersonal tensions are relics of a more savage age. No destructive love affairs, no chafing under authority, minimal arrogance to put your fellow crew members at risk. There’s something nice about visiting a world like that—just like it’s nice to pretend that institutional racism and violence against women and poverty are getting better instead of worse. Much of mainstream fiction is built on this kind of wish-fulfillment.

That’s why the world of Battlestar Galactica feels so fresh, and so challenging. People still drink too much, and beat their spouses, and work too hard, and hate their bosses, and distrust the government, and fear death. The crew of the Galactica is not boldly exploring the universe for exploring’s sake, learning about fascinating new cultures and inviting alien species to join the benevolent Federation of Planets. It’s running away from a race of genocidal robots bent on their complete annihilation, while trying to maintain some shred of humanity and civilization.

Star Trek revels in its geekiness. Physicist in-jokes and gleefully incomprehensible technobabble are found in every episode. People say things like “The secondary gyrodyne relays in the propulsion field matrix have just depolarized.”

As a nerd, I find this fun. It’s part of Star Trek’s fantasy appeal. It’s part of the idea that science and reason and the intellect will prevail. But we’ve been telling ourselves that lie for a long time now.

BSG2.jpg

In a very concrete sense, Battlestar Galactica descends from the sci-fi community’s realization that darker and more complex times demand darker and more complex science fiction. Ronald Moore, the developer/writer/executive producer of the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, has a Star Trek pedigree that makes him the idol of Trekkies everywhere. He scripted 27 episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation, and was promoted to co-producer and later to producer. On Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, he was a supervising producer and a co-executive producer, writing several of the series’ most controversial episodes. He co-wrote the scripts for the films Star Trek Generations and Star Trek: First Contact. And while he was hired as a producer of Star Trek: Voyager, he left after only two episodes. In a January 2000 interview with Cinescape magazine, he outlined some of the frustrations with that show:

“I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true. Voyager is not true. If it were true, the ship would not look spic-and-span every week, after all these battles it goes through. How many times has the bridge been destroyed? How many shuttlecrafts have vanished, and another one just comes out of the oven? That kind of BSing the audience I think takes its toll. At some point the audience stops taking it seriously, because they know that this is not really the way this would happen. These people wouldn’t act like this.”

Galactica is sci-fi without that BS. Sci-fi with all the anger and stupidity and sadness that real people experience. Sci-fi without the conviction that we will conquer our own ugliness. Sci-fi for the age of 9/11 and natural disasters compounded by climate change to the point where they can completely destroy major cities. Galactica’s message is that unless we come to terms with our own history, we are doomed. Mankind created the Cylons to fight our wars and to do our grunt work for us. Eventually they rose up and wiped out 99.999% of us. This basic lesson is one we still haven’t learned: that exploitation leads to exploitation, that if you oppress someone you sow the seeds of your own oppression. “You can’t play God and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created,” says the Galactica’s commander, William Adama. “Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done anymore.”
* * * * *
The apocalypse obsesses us. The idea of society’s total collapse has broad traction across the political spectrum. Even Oprah’s worried—that’s why she picked Cormac McCarthy’s The Road for her book club. No getting around it: we’re afraid. We want to prepare ourselves mentally. We buy batteries. We lap up every new zombies-destroy-humanity movie. All of a sudden, it’s disturbingly easy to imagine the human race reduced from billions of people to tens of thousands.

Battlestar Galactica‘s warning that technology and progress will bring us to the brink of total annihilation is far more resonant than Star Trek’s hope that technology and progress will solve all of our problems.

Star Trek doesn’t pretend that human beings are perfect—prior to the discovery of the Warp Engine, Earth had been brought back to the edge of the Stone Age by the “Eugenics Wars”—but it does take for granted that human beings are good, and that history represents a fumbling messy sort of progress towards perfection. What makes Battlestar Galactica so haunting is the existential question it poses to all of us: “Do we deserve to exist?” In light of Auschwitz and Darfur and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study, Tibet and 9/11 and Abu Ghraib, can we honestly say we don’t deserve total destruction? That we’ll learn? That we’ll change? Early on, Galactica’s commander wonders: “When we fought the Cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question: Why? Why are we as a people worth saving?” And while Star Trek plotlines frequently boil down to a search for the best solution to a problem, the “best solution” on Battlestar Galactica is likely to raise all sorts of thorny moral questions. Is it acceptable to rig an election, because you know that your opponent’s policies will lead to disaster? Can we assassinate a rival officer whose actions put the fleet at risk? Where is the line between a mob and a society?

I wish I could see the show as a clear sign that we’re ready to own up to the narratives of hate and violence and oppression that comprise our history, but that feels like a stretch. At the very least, I think Battlestar Galactica has been an overwhelming critical and popular success because we’re ready to be challenged. As we enter the final part of the final season, the survival of the human race clearly hinges on whether mankind will come to terms with what it has done. And while it’s simplistic to reduce the Cylons to an allegory for racism, or our oil addiction, BSG offers us a rare opportunity to examine our own culpability, and our own power to change.

This article originally appeared last June. Sam J. Miller is a writer and community organizer. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, anthologies, and print and online journals. He lives in the Bronx with his partner of six years. Visit him at samjmiller.com.

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Comments (22)

  1. Thanks for re-running this today! This was one of my favorite Mental Floss articles last year.

    posted by Jon on 1-15-2009 at 11:19 am

  2. I didn’t even know there was a new Galactica.
    So, each show relected the times of its creators/writers. Even in the choas of the ’60s people were still optimistic. Nowadays…

    One thing, ““You can’t play God and then wash your hands of the things you’ve created.”
    Of course you can. If I believed in one that’s how I’d define it.

    posted by BassMan on 1-15-2009 at 12:27 pm

  3. I’d have to disagree with the perspective of this post. Albeit my knowledge of BSG (as I’ve so often heard it called) is not nearly as extensive as Star Trek, especially given that I have watched to completion 3 series of Star Trek (Star Trek, TNG, and Voyager, and various DS9), I just felt like BSG didn’t compare to Star Trek because it tries so hard to be like Star Trek. I will say, I do like how “humanized” the characters are in BSG, and the circumstances the series has put itself in makes for a more, let’s say, uncivilized code of behavior. And the OP is right in that it’s a fresh and unique way of dealing with futuristic sci-fi.
    But what was so unique, original, and poignant about Star Trek, with respect to their “civility,” let’s call it, was the juxtaposition of the Federation and it’s agents with all the other races and factions of the Star Trek universe. The Klingons, the original primary adversary, were presented as barbaric (compared with the Shatner or Picard, even more so) even though the Klingons’ behavior is fairly characteristic of present-day humanity’s– highlighted even more by the Klingon’s ability to adapt and give up their barbaric ways. The Borg, from TNG, were the Anthem-by-Ayn-Rand-like-society, collectivism gone wrong, which showed how important it was for humanity to retain it’s sense of individualism, but, almost ironically, how important it was for humanity to remain bonded together (in a very collective sense) to fight the common enemy of the borg.
    I suppose another point I’d disagree with the poster on is characterizing ST as sci fi with “BS”. To state that Star Trek (or for that matter, BSG) is, for some reason, believable to begin with is an absurb notion. So to state that the loss of shuttles or repairs to the ship are what really pushed their suspension of disbelief over the edge is ridiculous. It’s like saying you were OK with the Lord of the Rings until you read about the Ents in the 2nd book, even though you could accept wizards, magic, orcs, balrogs, and elves from the first book. At any rate, for anyone who watched Voyager to completion (instead of leaving after two episodes) they know that the ship has a replicator the size of a shuttle dock (which would explain the massive repairs to the hulls, and the seemingly continuous supply of shuttles), and that the materials for the replicator are farmed from the systems Voyager encounters. The show very specifically addressed that issue. So whoever said that about Voyager was uninformed, and obviously a casual observer.
    I also blame the advent of Sci-Fi’s CGI team for partially ruining BSG for me. It’s kind of like the difference between Star Wars Episodes IV-VI and I-III; with IV-VI representing TNG/Voyager (obviously the original ST’s FX were horrible) and I-III representing BSG. I would argue that Episodes IV-VI (and by analogy TNG and Voyager) look better because instead of relying so heavily on CGI gloss, actual space ship models were used, which gives those movies a much more realistic and gritty look. The FX in Episodes I-III (and in BSG) look like computer generated cartoons to me.

    posted by Joel on 1-15-2009 at 12:52 pm

  4. Boy I just have to add to my post this (I noticed this after reading and had a laugh):

    “I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true,” he says before going on to slam Voyager.

    Oh… I see– so the audience, who knows when things are true and not true, know BSG as true, because…? Come on. It’s fiction. Everyone knows fiction is not true. It’s the inventiveness and creativity that everyone is watching for– not it’s factual accuracy. If he wants to make shows that the audience will think are “true,” I’d suggest leaving the science fiction world and working on documentaries.

    posted by Joel on 1-15-2009 at 1:01 pm

  5. I missed this the first time around. Well said.

    posted by gwdMaine on 1-15-2009 at 1:03 pm

  6. If you compare DS9 to BSG, the similarities become a lot more pronounced. Especially amongst the later seasons of DS9. To suggest all the Star Trek shows have the same moral clarity as the original or TNG. But then, I guess it goes to figure that most of the lead staff on BSG came directly from working of DS9.

    posted by Dunc on 1-15-2009 at 1:15 pm

  7. My husband, a biiiiigggg Sci-Fi buff, loved watching BSG the first season and a bit, but it paled on him precisely because he found it “too predictable and the same”. Even a program that takes a “fresh take” on something becomes stale if it never ever deviates from that attitude. Star Trek and its family at least varied tones of episodes – funny, romantic, adventurous, tragic, whatever! But BSG? To quote my husband’s riff – “The one that I liked was the one that was really dark and everybody was yelling at each other and whispering behind each others backs with a lot of sullen stares and cryptic sighs and in the end the robots won. THAT one!”

    posted by VM on 1-15-2009 at 2:23 pm

  8. I understood him to mean ‘true’ within the context of the program. Even if not well presented I think most of us get the idea.

    I agree that special effects can detract. Without them the writers, actors, etc had to be a little more imaginative.

    posted by BassMan on 1-15-2009 at 2:26 pm

  9. Seems like the writer missed the ultimate difference between the two shows. One is episodic (ST:TNG), the other serial (BSG). I love both shows, but I prefer serial shows in general. When I watch reruns of ST:TNG, one of the only ways to differentiate among seasons is by the cast. Is Dr. Crusher in this one? Does Riker have a beard? You could miss five episodes in a row and not miss much of anything. I think that’s what Moore was getting at with his comment about Voyager. Some people enjoy shows like Lost or soap operas that keep on building, some people like procedural shows where most of the plot is wrapped up in an hour. I don’t really think you can compare the two. Both have merit.

    In this day and age of DVD and Netflix, it’s much easier to plow through a season or an entire series in a few sittings (imagine how expensive it would have been to try that with VHS). People can follow along with an ongoing story much easier than they could back when you relied on your VCR to record your show if you were going out for the night.

    I’m surprised people don’t talk about this change in TV culture very much.

    posted by Shasta on 1-15-2009 at 3:52 pm

  10. i’ve never been into Star Trek, but BSG is one of my favorite shows on TV right now. I will be sad when it ends

    posted by andy on 1-15-2009 at 4:52 pm

  11. As long as you bring up McCarthy’s ‘The Road’: I was woefully disappointed with that book.

    It only made sense in his contrived, nothing-but-people-survive world. We humans do not have it within our power to destroy all life on earth the way the book describes.

    Seriously, how could you possibly have a world where a human can live and where there is enough light to see a mile, but it is unsuitable for all plants? And wouldn’t the cannibals find dogs useful? Why would they eat all of the dogs when the doges would be a huge help in hunting their victims and they would be satisfied eating the heads and guts that the roadmen always seemed to be discarding anyway.

    And, wouldn’t some smart person figure out how to cultivate edible bacteria cultures that fed on the rotting materials that were everywhere.

    I could go on-and-on (I already have). I found the whole thing just too implausible to take seriously. To me, the world was so imaginary, that it nullified the point McCarthy was trying to convey.

    posted by n2y2 on 1-15-2009 at 6:59 pm

  12. “Truth” may not have been the right work, but scifi fans do expect a continuity and consistency within a work. If you’ve established that a ship’s top speed is warp 5, you can’t just decide to go warp 8 the next week without some explanation.

    posted by PartiallyDeflected on 1-15-2009 at 11:26 pm

  13. By “true” he means true to that world. To use Joel’s example, ents, as fantastical creatures, fit into the world of Middle Earth because that is the kind of world it is and they are part of it, whereas a giant replicator sounds like a deus ex machina, which writing textbooks say are evidence of poor narrative planning – you are partway through something when you realize it needs a reason to happen, or, as in the ancient greek plays, the only way things are resolved is by bringing in the gods, who can do anything. I am not sure how much this applies to Voyager because I do not know when and in what context the super replicator is introduced, having watched the show when I wasn’t old enough to care about such analysis.

    I do agree with Joel about special effects and Star Wars – as a film student, I love low-tech special effects, including the great ones you can’t see in LOTR (like how the kitchen table in Bag End was built in two parts so that it is too small for Gandalf and just right for Bilbo) and the slightly ridiculous R.O.U.S.s in The Princess Bride.

    The idea of examining humanity (which is ultimately what good sci-fi does) brings to mind Joss Whedon’s Firefly, which is set in space but has no aliens, and is really about the characters as people.

    @Shasta – my coworkers happen to have been discussing this difference between Trek and BSG yesterday. Also, the multi-platform availability of programs is something greatly discussed in my communications class, especially dvr and accessibility online and the ability to choose when to watch a show.

    Great article, thanks for re-posting it!

    posted by Cait on 1-16-2009 at 12:12 am

  14. I enjoyed this post. I myself have never gotten info BSG. However, this adds to what I have always stated is the technology will be the downfall of man.
    Dont get me wrong, I love technology and what it has done for me, but there is a line that should not be crossed and inevitably it will be.

    @Joel:
    “I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true,”

    I am pretty sure this statement is not that the audiance knows the truth of reality and fiction, but more along the lines of the reality of the show and keeping with the story line.

    posted by Jennifer on 1-16-2009 at 9:39 am

  15. Very well written and well put, I think the realness and grittiness of the show is what makes it so relevant. BSG in my opinion one of the best shows that’s ever been on TV.

    posted by Ann Droid on 1-16-2009 at 11:33 am

  16. @Jennifer:
    I understood what he meant, and looking back I could have been a little clearer. My point is that in science fiction, unless the work goes into the details of everything involved the viewer has to assume some logical explanation of the events. For instance, since your iPhone works, you assume that there are some electronics behind the screen. Has anyone actually taken apart their iPhone to check?
    In the same respect, since you see new shuttles every episode of Voyager, you assume there must be some way for them to replicate shuttles. And with Voyager, you don’t have to assume anything! You know there is a way to replicate them because that issue is specifically addressed.

    @Cait:
    The replicator is the basis of their “civility.” Without the need for competition over food or other material goods, humanity changed. Call it deus ex machina, which it is to be sure, but it isn’t in the way you seem to mean it. I am not sure offering the existence of a large replicator is evidence of poor narrative planning or not. There are examples of inconsistent shuttle supplies in the other ST series as well.

    At any rate, the OP and Ronald Moore seem to contend that BSG is a superior show to ST, ST:TNG, Voyager, whatever– I’m merely saying that it isn’t (which doesn’t mean it’s bad). I’ll let the combined 28 years on television and 11 full length movies speak for themselves. When BSG (which is going off the air after 4, maybe 5 years?) has those kind of credentials, then we’ll talk about which one was better.

    However, he can have Enterprise. That show did suck.

    posted by Joel on 1-16-2009 at 5:02 pm

  17. I did a Battlestar Galactica/Voyager that explained why BSG is an attempt to fix the story problems of Star Trek.

    livebythefoma.blogspot.com/2006/10/battlestar-voyager.html

    posted by yellojkt on 1-16-2009 at 10:49 pm

  18. How appropriate that I read this while on a commercial break from the Sci-Fi marathon run -up to the premiere. It was this post that originally got me to cross that line and check the show out dvd style. Gotta get back to it, now! Love you, Kara!

    posted by Johnny Cat on 1-17-2009 at 12:05 am

  19. This is a great philosophical follow up to the 2 recent comparisons of The Enterprise vs The Galactica over on DVICE and SCREENRANT earlier this month.

    Neither site went where this post went and I find it rather insightful on the humanity level of things.

    It’s true that star trek is more episodic vs bsg. Each method of story telling has its pros and cons.

    Each society has it’s pros and cons for that matter.

    All in all, it’s a great comparison of the shows themselves rather than the technologies of war.

    posted by Bruce Simmons on 1-26-2009 at 4:34 pm

  20. Thanks for this comparison which made me laugh and wince. I am addicted to BSG but will always prefer Star Trek for that optimism, however delusional. If our science fiction does not arouse in us an aspiration to be more and do more, then it’s failed in its potential. When released, this last season of BSG should include in its packaging an SSRI for those of us not yet on them.

    posted by freemind112 on 1-30-2009 at 8:29 pm

  21. @ Joel

    First of all, Voyager is easily the worst of the Star Trek series (with the possible exception of Enterprise which I’ve never seen). That’s not to say it was horrible. It had it’s good moments. Indeed, the two-parter “Year of Hell” is probably one of the best episodes of Star Trek in any of its incarnations.

    But I agree with Ron Moore. The problem with Voyager was that it almost immediately abandoned the concept on which the show was founded. Think about it: there really was no point in having Voyager lost in the Delta quadrant because it never really seemed to be more than a minor inconvenience to them. It should have been a catastrophe. Oh sure, Janeway missed her fiancee and her pregnant dog, Kim missed his mom and dad and so on… it was like they were away at camp or something. And they totally dropped the ball on the finale. “Oh, we’re home. The End, buh-bye now.”

    @ Jennifer

    “However, this adds to what I have always stated is the technology will be the downfall of man.”

    No. Man will be the downfall of man. Technology is our only hope of survival. Just how many people do you think this planet of ours can sustain? We have two futures to choose from: one in which we strive to improve quality of life for all mankind through heavy investment in science and technology or one in which quality of life and livability continue to decline until something (war, disease, famine, natural disasters, probably all of the above) dramatically reduces the population, possibly reversing the trend. An easy choice I should think. I for one agree with Gene Roddenberry. And, despite what the author of this article and some of the commentators seem to think, I’d bet Ron Moore does as well.

    posted by Chris on 2-3-2009 at 11:11 am

  22. I think you can’t generalize about the Star Trek franchise about presenting the ideal future. The ‘dark horse’ Deep Space Nine shows more complex face of the show and it is unfortunate that the show is underestimated. Moore worked both on DS9 and BSG, and in my opinion, I want to say that BSG is inferior to the DS9 in quality of writings, character development, and the overall passion for addressing something important. I feel Moore degenerated, not moved forward, with BSG — stooped more to what sells (sex, drug and violence) than to what matters. BSG is overrated; DS9 is underestimated. DS9 is an epic, the best in the television history, with a diverse cast and the most touching story development. BSG tanks and even does not compare to DS9.

    posted by Ijeyi on 7-21-2010 at 2:37 pm

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