Distortion is Power in Battlestar Galactica
The terrorist attacks on the United States on September 11, 2001, and the subsequent war in Iraq provide the political and cultural context for the producers and writers of Battlestar Galactica to pose urgent, controversial questions about military and political issues for viewers to ponder. Battlestar Galactica challenges its audience’s core perceptions, beliefs, and values in ways that one rarely finds in commercial television programming.
Ronald D. Moore, Battlestar Galactica’s showrunner, manages, controls, produces, and often writes or rewrites the series’ episodes. He has stated that he uses a “different prism” through which stories and characters are “twisted” from the expected or anticipated norm in ways that few, if any, other television shows ever attempt.
Moore’s storytelling technique deliberately distorts what viewers may deem as “normal” or “expected” perspectives on people, politics, organized religion and moral issues. The specific purpose of this distortion is to serve a rhetorical process that aims to convince Battlestar Galactica’s audiences to look at individual political, religious, and human moral issues from a variety of perspectives.
By bringing the ambiguity of these issues into the foreground, Battlestar Galactica challenges average citizens to think about the potential merits of perspectives they oppose and the drawbacks of perspectives they embrace. In commercial television–the dominant entertainment medium in the United States–this is a relatively recent development.
You can preview this new examination of the persuasive power within Battlestar Galactica by Woody Goulart and Wesley Joe at Trekology.com ahead of its June 2008 publication in New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction from the University of South Carolina Press.
© 2008, University of South Carolina. This material is excerpted with permission from New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction, edited by Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, forthcoming in June 2008 from the University of South Carolina Press.
