Max Headroom's "War"

I rarely review individual episodes of a series, but Max Headroom is so good that I did want to talk about one particular excellent episode: War. In this episode, the lead character Eddison Carter starts covering a terrorist group (the White Brigade) which is launching attacks on the lower-end parts of Eddison's city. In a stunning twist, however, the terrorist is being funded by network tv to provide "entertainment terrorism", in order to keep the ratings up for certain networks. "War" is an exceptional episode, even if I do detect a certain amount of traditional Brit anti-Irish bias here. The idea of the media literally funding terrorism, of terrorists using special effects demonstrations in place of actual terrorist demolitions, etc. is truly mindblowing. Obviously, there are parallels between the White Brigade and groups like Fox News, that provide the same sort of terrorist "media events", which later turn out to be nothing. I think Max Headroom could do a slightly better job of paralleling government and corporate interests, but that's no fault of Headroom. In fact it's a tribute to the series, one of the few sci-fi series that imagined the future would be even worse than it is now. So, friends, if you get a chance, check it out.

Will the new Battlestar Galactica be Remembered

I am closing in on the Fourth Season of the New Battlestar Galactica, and I am wondering what the long term impact of the series will be on televised science fiction. An article here argues that BSG still deals with relevant issues. I am a little less sure of that myself, to be honest. Terrorism, while a pressing political issue, has always varied in the amount of press coverage it received. It was "in" in the seventies and the 2000's. But will it be so forever? I think the new BSG broke new grounds in character development and provided some more radicalized political characters, such as Tom Zarek. But compared to Blake's 7 or Babylon 5, it wasn't particularly daring for its time period. Both Blakes 7 and Babylon 5 dealt with terrorists, and sympathized with them far more than BSG did. Both Blake and Captain Sherdian were in a sense terrorists themselves. I don't think that BSG is a genre shifting show in the way that the original Star Trek, Blake's 7, STNG, and Babylon 5 were. Worse, it did not stop the decay of the genre that has been occurring since the advent of reality television. Today, outside of Caprica and the new Doctor Who (and sundry spinoffs), there is very little in the way of good science fiction. Ten years ago, we had a nearly fully functional Sci-fi channel, that ran series like Farscape and the new Outer Limits (relatively decent), as well as Andromeda, which was at least decent for a few seasons. There was Firefly and Dark Angel and a host of inventive programs coming out in the wake of the digital revolution created by the Lord of the Rings and Star Wars franchises. Now, there's literally nothing out there. BSG wasn't the first of a new breed. I fear it may be television science fiction's swan song.

Battlestar Galactica and slave labor

(Image from Wikipedia) The rebooted Battlestar Galactica is one of the first sci-fi series to address slave labor in a meaningful way. Other shows had attempted to show the brutality of such systems, notably Babylon 5 and Blake's 7, but these shows could only mention that brutality in passing. But in the Battlestar Galactica episode "Bastille Day," the connection between the U.S. labor force and the use of prison populations as indentured servants is made graphically clear. Zarek is a terrorist\freedom fighter who is opting to oppose the government, purportedly out of principle, but his opponents claim he is a man obsessed with power. Here is a description of Zerek's political platform, from the episode "Colonial Day"

"If things weren't so serious, I'd say that was funny. Look, there's no economy. There's no market, no industry, no capital. Money is worthless. And yet, we're all held hostage by the idea of the way things used to be. Look where we are. This man wakes up every morning, tugs o­n his boots and goes to work in this garden. Why, because it's his job? What job? He labors, but he gets no benefit! And he's not the o­nly o­ne. Many of us are just still going through the motions of our old lives. The lawyers still act like lawyers but they have no clients! Businessmen still act like businessmen but have no business! President Roslin and her policies are all about holding o­nto a fantasy! If we wanna survive, we need to completely restructure our lives. We need to think about the community of citizens. The group, not the individual. We need to completely free ourselves of the past, and operate as a collective. "

Hmm, sounds suspiciously like a Commie to me, or perhaps some form of anarchist. Collectivized thinking has never been popular in science fiction television, at least since Patrick Mcgoohan's famous Prisoner series, where he proclaimed "I am not a number, I am a free man." While the New Wave made Marxist thinking marginally more palatable to science fiction readers (see the left leaning works of Norman Spinrad and China Mieville ), science fiction has generally leaned right-libertarian, with an increasing emphasis on the libertarian aspect since the sixties (Gordon Dickson, H. Beam Piper, Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Jerry Pournelle, Larry Niven, etc.) Therefore, its encouraging to see a sci-fi series at least discuss socialist ideals in a close to neutral setting, though the series always tends to imply that Zerek's acts of terrorism are unjustified, a position I do not agree with. Terrorrism correctness hampers the whole Zerek plot thread, as Adama and company always have to have the last word in defining why and for what reasons Zerek is in the wrong. At least that's my impression so far, about a third through the series (Hey I didn't have cable).

So, what hot button issues do you wish science fiction television addressed?