Sleep Deprivation courtesy of Battlestar Galactica

I can’t believe I haven’t managed to post anything here about Battlestar Galactica. Hardly seems possible given the amount of time and emotion I’ve poured into this damn show at this point. A few months ago I finally gave in to the urgings/encouragements of multiple friends who would know who kept telling me I should really watch this show…and, holy shit! What a completely awesome, mind blowing (in so many ways), emotionally draining show! I haven’t enjoyed anything this much since I discovered Farscape…and I think BSG (eek!) outstrips Farscape by more than an insignificant margin. Even the guilt I feel admitting that doesn’t keep it from being absolutely true. This show pulls you in with the story, the characters, the ideas it explores and does all of this so well it literally takes my breath away. Watching these people deal with running for their lives, an implacable, insidious enemy, each other and their own individual crazinesses all somehow married to startlingly relevent social commentary and kick ass story telling is…indescribably fascinating. I feel like squee-ing all over the place whenever I think about it too much, which is far too often, really. Last week’s episode (“Unfinished Business”) had me bouncing all over the place and disturbing my cats (and probably my neighbors as well) with my random, extremely inarticulate emotional outbursts…my ability to form more than amorphous, often overly loud or enthusiastic expressions of emotion was seriously out of commision for that hour and at least 30 minutes past it…and it isn’t the first episode even of just this season that affected me like this. From the first minutes of the first episode of the first season ("33"), I have utterly surrendered any attempt to pull myself out of the ride, have, in fact, done everything in my power to keep myself strapped in as tight as possible.

I recognize that I’ve probably stepped way past the edge of reasonable when it comes to this show but I love this feeling and I don’t really care. I love being so completely taken in by a story, an exquisitely well-told story, that what happens to these characters frequently makes me cry or laugh or spend hours trying to work out why I love them so much. Why the hell should Starbuck, who is a deeply frakked (squee!) up individual make me so happy that she exists at all? I love her, and that’s it. Even (maybe especially) after an episode that highlights everything ugly and tragic about her. Maybe it’s the tragic part that endears her to me – I want so badly for her to work it out, to get to a point where she can be happy, whatever that looks like…and I don’t know that I believe she ever will. Starbuck is a tragedy and a truly beautiful one. But that’s the thing, she’s my favorite but she’s not the only character that I care this much about, that has me completely hooked on their experience of their journey. I want them all to find a way to become the people they could be and I don’t have any idea if that’s even possible for them.

All this…thought and emotion and anticipation and frustration…and I’m hyper-inspired all the time…so much so I can’t get to sleep because I can’t get my mind to stop turning over ideas and stories – not necessarily ideas and stories that are in any real way related to/dependent upon the BSG universe (though there is some of that too), just that, what I see and think about in connection to the show leads me into places in my mind that have been standing around scuffing their bored toes in the dirt for far too many months now. I’m pushed to consider perspectives which may not have occurred to me otherwise. I mean, is genocide of any sentient species ever justifiable (I think not) or are suicide bombings only incomprehensible because of which side of the coin you happen to inhabit (I think so…ick)? To think about what it means and why this or that thing could be said to be good or bad or indifferent and suddenly all this brain activity is churning up my creativity…and keeping me awake when I really need to be sleeping…except…well, I like it.