I Figured It Out

For two seasons, now, I have been bitching and moaning about the 20th century medicine portrayed alongside faster-than-light technology on Battlestar Gallactica. I just failed to understand how such a society could exist, and the writers of the show never saw fit to enlighten me.

Well, I found the missing link and have pieced together how it's possible.

Ron Moore, the creator of BG, also wrote the horrendous Mission: Impossible II, which featured such gems as accessing a Level 4 biohazard lab through a central airshaft and protecting characters from the experiments being conducted in said lab by having them pull on a ski mask and standing for five seconds in a decon spray. Oh yeah, and having the baddies sequence the DNA of an RNA-type virus in a microscope that miraculously produced data you can only obtain by exposing film to a radioactive gel (not to mention the whole process takes several days; even with the most advanced sequencing tech we have today--six years after the movie--it would still take at least an hour to obtain a sequence).

So the piss-poor medicine of BG makes sense now because the creator of the show seems incapable of doing basic research. Case closed. But the rationale that makes this OK seems to be that--as I sit here through all this debate on suicide bombings during the season premiere--the show is just a thinly veiled stream of political commentary and nothing more.

I'll still watch it for at least a good quarter to a third of the season to see where they go with this, but I'm not enjoying all the preaching at the moment.