V and Sci-Fi’s Purple Landscape

If you’re like me, and I know I am, you were glued to your TV screen last week for the series premiere of ABC’s V reboot (and if you’re like me, you thought it was a fairly lazy pilot that all-too-quickly rushed through every major plot point of the original miniseries, from the arrival of the Visitors to the reveal of the Fifth Column of rebellious lizards who are on our side. By this rate, I’d better see a human/lizard hybrid baby being born in the first 20 minutes of tonight’s episode. But anyway …) And, if you’re like me, you also spent your workday last Tuesday chuckling at the Right Wing, they of the “entertainers like the Dixie Chicks have no business making political statements and should just entertain, unless of course they’re Ted Nugent, Fred Thompson or Ahnold” school of thought, while they crowed about how ABC’s new sci-fi series was an indictment of the Obama Administration:

As many, many readers have noted, the Visitors seem to share much of Barack Obama’s agenda. We bring you free healthcare! We bring you hope and change! But in reality, they’re a bunch of thugs from Planet Chicago. The comparisons are pretty obvious.

You can’t really blame conservatives for getting a little giddy when someone constructs a fictional allegory seemingly based on their beliefs; outside of Bibleman, it doesn’t seem to happen much in science fiction TV and film (even the jingoistic-on-the-outside Starship Troopers disappointed righties with its creamy, subversive, anti-fascist center. EDIT: Although, as I’ve been reminded by some pals, the Heinlein novel was a tad on the pro-military side). However, Republican nerds would be wise to recall the last time they attempted to claim a politically charged science fiction series as their own  — the reimagining of Battlestar Galactica.

Back when BSG arrived in 2003, right-wing bloggers were able to look past such shockingly progressive updates as Starbuck’s gender switch and a more racially integrated cast (including a Hispanic as the father of an Englishman, but hey, it’s science fiction — we’ll look past it) to focus on the pro-military, android-Cylons-as-sleeper-cell-terrorists angle. And, in fairness to conservatives, the show did raise a lot of issues that would give the typical lefty pause. The Season Two episode, Final Cut, was a stinging critique of what can happen when the media is given too much access to military operations (which happened to be defending humanity after a catastrophic terror attack) — not exactly an argument in favor of an unfettered First Amendment. The Captain’s Hand tackled an even hotter topic when President Roslin, leader of the dwindling fleet of human survivors, outlaws abortion out of concern for their civilization’s survival.

But those who watched the series religiously recall the delicious turning of the tables at the beginning of Season Three, when the Cylons occupied a human settlement, inspiring a human “insurgency” full of its own terrorist acts and suicide bombings. Oops. Suddenly the bad guys were mimicking Americans in Iraq, and conservatives were suddenly outraged at such blatant liberal proselytizing!

This is a disgrace. Brave American soldiers are dying for the moral infants who are portraying them this evening as the evil oppressors and their murderers as admirable rebels. Either that or they think they’re Subversing (sic–haha) the Narrative by helping us see how one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter. That’s what you do when you’re disconnected from reality, morality or consequences. That’s not what you do when you’re a free civilization that strongly prefers not to be annihilated.

What the righties didn’t notice, of course, was that BSG was never aligned with one political viewpoint; quality television rarely is. Battlestar Galactica excelled at making all of its viewers question their beliefs without pandering to one side of the debate (unless you count the overt spirituality in the so-so series finale, but let’s not discuss that today). Heck, way back in Season One, BSG sneaked a damning critique of George W. Bush’s 2004 reelection campaign under everyone’s nose with the fantastic Six Degrees of Separation. In this episode, unwitting human traitor Gaius Baltar is accused by a fleet member of causing the Cylon attack that destroyed humanity. The accuser goes so far as to present evidence that Baltar disabled the Colonies’ defense mainframe, directly handing the element of surprise to the Cylons. Of course, this is exactly what he did, but by the end of the episode, the evidence is exposed as fraudulent — planted by the Cylons to “frame” Baltar for something that he actually did. When the framejob is exposed, Baltar is exonerated and no more doubt remains about Baltar’s allegiance to humanity — which, naturally, makes him even more valuable to the Cylons who are manipulating him.

What does this have to do with Dubya’s reelection? Recall the forged National Guard documents that made their way into Dan Rather’s hands — the alleged smoking gun that proved true the rumors of Bush’s AWOL status during large chunks of his Guard service? When it turned out the documents were forged (by Karl Rove, according to some lefty conspiracy theorists), the entire story was dropped and Rather was disgraced.

It was sublime writing, and it flew under the noses of most armchair, pop-culture professors on both sides (but not this armchair professor!). And lo and behold, when V premiered last week, a sneaky little bit of writing once again ducked under everyone’s noses. When the leaders of the resistance explain to our heroine Erica that the Visitors are engineering our destruction, they make a point of saying the aliens have been engineering their Big Reveal for decades, manufacturing unwinnable wars and economic recession. Hey, wait! Weren’t those caused by … Republicans?

So, Republican aliens wore down humanity with war and economic strife, paving the way for Democratic aliens to earn our devotion by offering hope, change and free health care. Hey, man, don’t blame me — I voted for Kodos. If anyone should be crowing about their political views showing up in the mainstream, it should be David Icke.

So, as we watch Episode 2 of the rebooted V tonight (if you do decide to watch — like I said, the debut’s attempt to catch BSG‘s lightning in a bottle was pretty shaky. But hey! Wash from Firefly!) while the silly debate about V‘s politics continues, remember the words of Lewis Black from his comedy album Luther Burbank Performing Arts Center Blues, recorded before the 2004 election: “If you wanna elect George Bush, that’s the prick I’m gonna yell about. If you wanna elect John Kerry, I’ll be yelling about him. My problem is with — duh —authority.”

In the wake of President Obama’s historic health care reform package passing in the House with an amendment that will likely restrict abortion access for millions of women, that’s not a bad lesson to remember on both sides of the aisle.