To Boldly Go, Where Someone Has Gone Before!

In case you missed the bootleg version that's been floating around the last few days, the full HD trailer for J.J. Abram's reboot of the Star Trek franchise is due to be released this morning. All I can say is, Wow!

Update: Here it is!

Gregory Wolfe on Pop-Culture and Battlestar Galactica

Gregory Wolfe (editor of the “highbrow” journal Image) offers some excellent perspective on the highbrow/lowbrow distinction and why "popular culture" is a bit of a misnomer (HT Jeff Overstreet):

The problem isn’t really Highbrow versus Lowbrow. That’s a simplification. The criticisms of pop culture I most resonate to are not the ones that decry pop because it’s not sophisticated and complex. No, the problem with popular culture these days isn’t that it comes up from the people. It’s that it comes from massive corporations, who produce it according to marketing statistics so that the end result is bland, lowest-common denominator schlock.

True pop culture came from the people; it was hand-made, plucked on guitars and sawed on fiddles. It arose out of common experience; it had a history, even a tradition.

He goes on to explain why, despite all this, he’s become a huge fan of shows like Battlestar Galactica, which defy that lowest-common denominator approach:

BSG has everything I’d always loved in sci fi—space battles, ethical dilemmas, and a certain grittiness that reminded me that those space-faring folks were still profoundly human. The retro elements of the series—the Battlestar is more like an aircraft carrier in WWII than a starship, there are no transporters, and they still use telephones attached to the walls!—keep it real. Moore has given us a series that contains three things that Star Trek had abandoned: politics, war, and religion.

Moreover, by having the rebellious robots (known as Cylons) evolve into biological entities indistinguishable from human beings, Moore came up with a perfect device to explore the ambiguities of the human condition.

Battlestar Galactica

To balance out yesterday's rant, here’s another repost from the defunct Situation Critical, first written before season two aired (I’ve reworked it somewhat):

Battlestar Galactica (produced by Ron Moore and David Eick) is what television should be – thought provoking, edgy, true to life where it counts but fueled by a fertile imagination and a talented cast and crew. This is a show that unflinchingly confronts some the toughest moral dilemmas in a way that is hugely entertaining, defies pat answers, and leaves an important place for the sacred and the spiritual.

The story centers on a rag-tag group of refugees from a Terminator-esk apocalypse at the hands of their robotic creations, the Cylons. Of twelve colonized worlds, less than 50,000 survivors have formed a small fleet of civilian vessels guarded by the sole remaining human warship (that they know of), the Battlestar Galactica. The Galactica herself is an aging cruiser that had been slated for decommission and only survived because it lacked the advanced electrical systems that were the primary target of the Cylon attack. On the run and short on supplies, this band of humans led by Galactica’s Captain William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and Secretary-of-Education-turned-President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) are in search of the mythical planet Earth. Desperate to hold on to some semblance of civilization but unsure if they can even trust one another, the last remnant of the human race (in that part of the galaxy at least) struggles to survive without losing their humanity.

Beginning with a 2003 miniseries, this “re-imaging” of the 1978 ABC space opera is quite unlike anything else on television. Despite its outlandish premise, this is a show brimming over with characters and stories that are true to life. There are no cut and dried divisions between “good guys” and “bad guys,” no cookie-cutter story-lines or simple solutions to difficult problems. Instead, we are faced with realistic, complex, imperfect people forced into an impossible situation, struggling to do the best they can. In the words of Ron Moore, this show, “dare[s] us to invest ourselves in flawed characters who face ambiguous choices in an imperfect world.”

Galactica also maintains a high view of organized religion that is almost unknown in contemporary television, especially science fiction (a notable but short-lived exception was Firefly). Even better, this is a show that allows not just a vague human “spirituality” in the tame Hollywood sense, but a truly active role for the divine: A priestess known as Elosha (Lorena Gale) is given a positive and recurring role as an advisor to President Roslin, and is sometimes called upon for prayer and religious ceremony. Roslin herself experiences prophetic visions and, on more than one occasion, risks the future survival of the fleet on her faith in these visions and the teaching of certain sacred scriptures. A working downed spacecraft is discovered just after a character offers a desperate but skeptical prayer for aid. A split-second “guess” is (apparently) used by God to secure fuel for the fleet. Such events occur both for the polytheistic colonists and the atheist-turned-monotheist Dr. Gaius Baltar (James Callis). What kind of a theology that presupposes is an open question, but that such things are even granted possibility is a vast improvement over the secular humanism that dominates so much of television.

Battlestar Galactica is by no means a Christian show. It is not for children nor the faint of heart. It explores adult themes, including wartime violence, torture and sexual promiscuity, in a style that draws more inspiration from Black Hawk Down than Star Trek. It maintains a deep belief in moral truth, but an unflinching honesty about the struggles and ambiguities real people face in the struggle to survive. The theology is certainly not Christian, not even allegorically. The original series was marked by strong allusions to Mormonism, and while this re-imaging has avoided that connection, its theology has at least as much in common with ancient Greek myth as with traditional Christianity. But that’s OK, because this is not a show that asks to be accepted unthinkingly, but one to be chewed on and debated.

Writing on the politics of the show, Ron Moore stated that the point is “to raise questions in the minds of the audience, and make them think.” Questions like: Is it ever justifiable to sacrifice some lives for the sake of others? Is lying to and torturing a known spy acceptable if it might save thousands? Is political intrigue warranted if it is necessary to prevent a charismatic terrorist from taking office? Does a positive result justify the questionable risks accepted to achieve it? And is the survival of the human race even worth the trouble if we must abandon everything that makes us human to accomplish it? You will find no easy answers to these questions here, nor will you find characters who always choose correctly, but you will be forced to consider all of them and more. There are no pious platitudes and this is no morality play, but it is a powerful human drama that presents a realistic (though fictional) theistic worldview through a great script, some fantastic acting, and feature-film quality special effects.

The Dark Side of Sci-Fi

The following is an modifed version of the very first post I ever wrote, originally submitted to the old Crux Project blog Situation Critical (no longer available online). This is admittedly one-sided, so please read John's piece for the other side of the coin:

John Colman has written an excellent post defending science fiction’s ability to ask deep questions and point us toward the supernatural. I wholeheartedly agree with him. Ever since I was a kid watching Star Trek: The Next Generation with my dad, I too have loved science fiction. Besides the positive aspects he mentions, I also love the adventure, the dream of exploring the unknown and fighting wicked villains. But most of all, I love the camaraderie that so often characterizes these stories--a tight-knit group of friends facing the future together, come what may!

But our favorite genre also has a dark side that John neglected to discuss. The more I watch these shows, the more I realize just how many of them fairly drip with naturalistic philosophy. Indeed, much of the sci-fi genre is based on thoroughly materialistic presuppositions. And while a lot of mainstream television and film shares these assumptions, sci-fi is uniquely suited to showcase them in that it expresses, more than any other genre, the hopes and fears of a society.

Consider the Star Trek universe, for instance: Here is depicted a future when humanity will finally see past its differences and live in peace and harmony. Of course, there is still war and violence, but not generally among humans or the United Federation of Planets. If every worldview must tell us who we are, what’s wrong, and what's the solution, then Star Trek tells us we are the product of evolution on one of many planets that have evolved life--not the least advanced, but certainly not the most either. What’s wrong with the universe is not human rebellion against her creator, but interspecies strife among the various races in our galaxy. The solution? Not the final victory of God, but the victory of the Federation against all who oppose peace in the universe--whether they be Klingons, Romulans, or the Borg.

Or take another favorite of mine: Stargate SG-1. Where Star Trek generally ignored religion, Stargate tried to reinvent it in light of modern science. The ancient gods were really just powerful aliens who visited earth throughout our history--some, like the Goa’uld, in hopes of enslaving us, others, like the Asgard, to bless and protect us. In this universe, science is king, and God has no real place. Humanity is a fledgling species, teetering on the brink of either a major evolutionary step forward or complete destruction by our own or some malicious alien’s actions.

Just consider the one episode in the show’s ten-season run which included the word “God” in its title ("There But For the Grace of God," Episode 119): Through a “Quantum Mirror” we are taken to an alternate earth (one of the infinite universes that exist alongside ours, we are told) where things have not worked out so fortuitously--earth has been invaded by the Goa’uld Apophis and faces slavery to a false god. In the end, this alternate earth is saved by the intervention of another alien, the Asgard Thor (note the Egyptian and Norse mythology lying behind their names), but it is clear that “the Grace of God” had nothing to do with it. The show does admirably remind us that we cannot save ourselves, but when God is barred from that role, an alien or superhuman is forced to take his place.

For, in the end, shows like Stargate teach that our universe could just as well be overrun with evil as saved by good. Indeed, the fact that there are an infinite number of universes means that an infinite number have been overrun by evil, and there is no good reason why ours shouldn’t be one of them. For sci-fi is not without its pessimists.

Where the ancient Jewish apocalyptic writers maintained an unwavering faith that even their darkest dreams of worldwide catastrophe would be tempered God’s grace, today’s secular futurists have no such assurances. Whether we are threatened with destruction by our own technology (as in Terminator), an alien race (as in Independence Day), or a killer virus (as in Resident Evil), there are no guarantees that human life will survive. Only God could promise that, but he is too often dismissed as a figment of our imaginations, a relic of bygone days when primitive men still believed in a universe controlled by spirits. Now, apart from alien intervention, we must trust our own resources to overcome such dangers and charge ahead to a glorious future, unless of course this is one of those universes that ends badly. I’ll have to watch next week to find out.