For months, my boyfriend urged me to watch Battlestar Galactica. But a remake of a cheesy 1970s science fiction show, or anything on the Sci-Fi network for that matter, held about as much appeal to me as monster-truck racing or fantasy baseball. It was just silly boy stuff.
But on a bitter cold Friday night last winter, I relented. Immediately, I noticed there was something off about this show. There was a pretty blonde named Starbuck who drank too much and was frequently abrasive with her colleagues, and who was widely understood to be the best fighter pilot in the fleet. There was a power struggle in which Colonel William Adama enlisted the help of President Laura Roslin to cope with the fact that a higher-ranking officer, Admiral Helena Cain, usurped his command.
After the credits, I turned to my dear space crusader. "This is the most feminist show I've ever seen."
He looked surprised. "I never thought about that," he said.
He was, after all, a guy. And just as white people rarely look at human exchanges through the prism of race, men generally don't have gender relations on the brain when they watch a shoot-'em-up space show.
Also, nothing about the program is overtly feminist. This is not a drama about an Amazon race where women call the shots—that we've seen before. And it's not the far-more-common bullshit feminism found on shows like Lost, where one or two token tomboys are permitted to wield guns and go on the dangerous missions with the men. No, this is a world in which men and women are equally likely to wield power or respect, equally likely to be commanding officers or senior government officials. Equally likely to pull a comrade out of a burning ship or fix a complicated system malfunction. In other words, it's like nothing we've seen on television—or, I dare say, in life.
A few weeks ago, the show took a surprising and, for certain fans, quite devastating turn when Starbuck apparently died. If the character is truly gone, this will leave a large hole in the television landscape, for Starbuck has been one of TV's most complex female characters. A first-class soldier, Starbuck was definitely the gal you wanted sitting next to you in the cockpit. But aboard the mother ship she was frequently pig-headed and mean. But she was no cautionary tale—this was not The Devil Wears Prada's Miranda Priestly, whose hard-driven ways made her a career success and a domestic failure. Starbuck was adored by two men, whom she frequently treated carelessly. If she were a man, she'd have been called a womanizer, but of course we earthlings have no word for such a person.
Laura Roslin, the president of the colonies, is equally complex. A former schoolteacher, she has all the warmth and motherliness of a faculty advisor at a women's college. But Roslin also has a job to do—saving the entire human race from extinction—and so she can be a lying, manipulative S.O.B. A politician to the core, she tries to steal an election, unflinchingly orders executions and, in her scummiest move, tells the parents of a newborn that their baby is dead, secretly handing the child over to another couple. After a long hard day of political machinations, she kicks off her pumps and pours a stiff drink with Adama, with whom she enjoys a low-burning flirtation.
But what's most striking about the show's egalitarianism is not the extragender boxing matches—it's that male-female relations are never, ever discussed. When Starbuck clashed with old-school blowhard Colonel Tigh, he might insult her wildly, but he would never infer that her vagina precluded her from being a good soldier. Even the most benign acknowledgments of gender tension—men saying, "Women—go figure"; women shaking their heads at behavior that's "just like a man"—are absent. By the same token, there's no depressing up-with-women boosterism, no cheers about sistahs doing it for themselves. The women of Galactica aren't feminists—they don't have to be.
When I started watching the show, one of my only complaints was that the Cylon enemy was mainly composed of hot fembots, who orchestrated the destruction of the humans' home planet with their feminine wiles. But even here, there's something radical about the fact that the Galacticans' far superior opponent comes from a culture dominated by women. Again, this is never stated, but the Cylon men are mostly afterthoughts, minor characters—the power trifecta is Sharon, D'Anna and the sultry Six.
Last winter, my boyfriend also turned me on to the sadly defunct Deadwood. The HBO western did well by its female characters but was limited by the reality of the time period. Watching Battlestar Galactica, I've seen anew the limitations of my own.