Moments

Full disclosure before you get too far into this...this is going to be a pretty balls out love-fest for Battlestar Galactica. It's going to get nerdy up in this piece. Be warned.

Drama isn't plot. Drama isn't characters. Drama isn't themes. All of those are important in their own ways, but true drama is moments. It's the moment when your brain *knows* that you're seeing a person faking something but you buy it anyway. It's when you accept artifice as something emotionally true. It's this moment when your personal emotional experience transcends your actual experience that drama really occurs. To put it bluntly, the best, the truest drama is tricking you into feeling things that haven't happened to you.

It's a truly unfortunate fact of our modern society that art has been so soundly categorized. There are people that are deeply affected by opera. There are people that are deeply affected by painting. There are people that are deeply affected by movies. At the bottom, however, all of these people are affected by the same thing: the feeling that something real has been shoved into their perception even though they haven't directly experienced the event which causes the emotion.

All this is to say that drama happens in the reimagining of Battlestar Galatica. This isn't a post for nerds obsessed with the tech in a show about the future. This isn't a post for people that are interested in sexy aliens. This is a post for people that look for shows that get down to something true; something real. It's here if you're looking for it. Like most shows of the highest quality Sci-Fi, the first season is merely a primer for what has turned into one of the most arresting shows on television. I'm two seasons and change in, and I'm hooked. Forget the space battles. Forget the clones and the artificial gravity. This show has made me think and it's made me feel, and that's the absolute best that a fiction can hope for.

Space ships are incidental to the emotion that is evoked in this series. It's a pity that some people will never give this show a chance because parts of it require a an environmental suit. There are moments here as emotionally true as any great piece of drama.

Roger Ebert once said that a film is not about it's subject, it's about how it's about it's subject. I wish more people would give this show a chance to see the moments where it shows how it's about.