Battlestar Galactica has been hailed as "the best television show ever!" but that's what they said about The Sopranos and Mad Men and what they'll be saying in the future about some other show. More modest proponents have said "it's the best science fiction show ever!" But I'm not sure it's "science fiction" at all, because…It's Not Rocket Science: It fact, there's very little science on BSG at all. They're on this big aircraft carrier in space but everything behaves as if it were on the ground. (At first I said it was the “gravity” of their predicament that kept them weighted down…) Some of you may be saying, “Well, what about the Death Star?” but "A long time ago, in a galaxy far away" was just George Lucas's way of saying, "Once upon a time…" “Okay, what about the Enterprise?” They had gravity plates. True, it took 30 years for them to come up with that, but it's not a big leap to assume that if you have the technology to disassemble an object, you also figured out how to make it stay put when you reassembled it.BSG offers no explanation for anything in its universe: "Spool up the FTL, we jump in five" makes as much sense as "We can reach Omicron Ceti III in four hours at Warp 6," but a dedicated Trekker can tell you to the meter how far away that is (1.684 light years, in case you were wondering). When the Colonial Fleet jumps, we don't know how far they've traveled or how they keep from bumping into each other when they get there.BSG's writers have very cleverly not let science, real or made-up, "get in the way of the story" and they sprinkle in enough jargon to make it sound "plausible," like when they talk about "GSR" and "LUDs" on CSI (or Law & Order): Whatever. But it's science equivalent of Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness:” things that a person knows intuitively without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.(Continued…)
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