My quick thoughts about Battlestar: Galactica, which I have just finished catching up on:

Good:
1. So many strong female roles! A female president (even if she usually defers to the Admiral in matters military); several female fighter pilots; a female commander (even if she is morally, ah, misguided, her gender is clearly not the issue), at least one female surgeon…
2. Deft handling of the abortion issue.
3. One of the lead roles is a Latino - in a sci fi show?! Hooray! (I honestly can’t think of another show where this is true. Not one.)
4. The entire question of “am I a real being, or just a construct, a machine?” - applicable to any number of groups over time and extremely well done.

Bad:
1. Everyone’s last name is whitewashed, “normalized” in a way. While I respect the idea that race is less important than what colony you come from in this world, it seems to me that one could just have easily used last names which “read” as certain ethnicities, cross ethnicities (so, call Laura Roslin - oh - Laura Ramos; call the Adamas the Adachis; etc.). Then again, maybe I just “read” names like Roslin, Adama, Tyrol, and Biers as white, and no one else does?
2. In any case, why give Edward James Olmos such a very white son - especially since his actual son is also in the series, but playing another character? I’m not saying that Jamie Bamber makes a bad Apollo, but I feel like there’s a certain amount of “in space there are only white people or otherwise people we will now pretend are white because hey it’s space” going on. Would it really be so weird to have two Latino male leads?
3. There are no happy, normal family relationships until season 3, and that relationship takes a very gendered slant (Cally stays home with the baby and frets about the child’s health, while Tyrol tries to press them both into working too hard). I realize that we’re at war, etc., etc., but since the BSG world is clearly much more gender-equal than ours, would it be too weird to show us a family that works in that context?

Ugly:
1. There are only two black men with speaking roles. One is a Cylon working to harvest the eggs of (white) human women for their crazy breeding schemes, and one is traitorous (having been tricked by the Cylons). This does not seem… uh… equitable. Black women get by a little better, since they have both Dualla and Elosha, but that’s not a lot of screen time either.

All in all I think that BSG does unusually well with gender issues and clearly is making an effort when it comes to race, there’s still a long row to hoe…

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This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 13th, 2007 at 6:08 pm and is filed under Feminism, Body Image, Gender, Pop Culture, Race, Sci Fi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.