Saul Tigh and the Cylons In My Dreams

The sun’s blue fingers seek their way into the night sky. A cardinal sings to wake the imaginary dog sleeping at my feet, and he wakes me. It’s Sunday morning. Feist Dog says I have to work.

They say that if you can hear a cardinal’s song, it means somebody loves you. This cheerful fellow telegraphs his happy tune from the eve above my bedroom window nearly every day. Wearing his vermillion jacket, he earnestly sings for a drab girlfriend who has yet to appear. There are lots of trees in Woodland Hills. I suspect she’ll find him one day.

When I was a child, Jim Neal didn’t broadcast on the weekends, so I watched AG USA on channel twelve, waiting for my father to emerge from his bedroom. In the mornings, I usually had about fifteen minutes alone with him before he went for his run and left to open the mail at “the company” with his father.

I asked him if I could raise a pig or a goat like the kids in FFA or 4H. He said we didn’t have room, so I made a scale drawing of our yard and house to prove that we did actually have room. My argument was not effective.

Disappointed in Star Wars Accolyte, I’ve begun engaging in the 2004 reboot of Battlestar Galactica twenty years after the first time I watched it. Some people say that BSG is the most important science fiction program ever made. One of those people is Damon Lindelof, who wrote Lost and the acclaimed 2009 reboot of Star Trek.

The last time I engaged with BSG it lasted longer than a good seven-tenths of my human relationships. My wife once asked me why I found it so easy to watch this show and so difficult to find time for her. I said that I found the company of Cylons relaxing. She didn’t understand what that meant, and I didn’t explain it. I regret saying it now.

Knowing how much I loved her, my wife thought loving me would be easy. It was not. She needed someone with far less hidden clockwork than myself. Despite the surprisingly large number of women in my past, I still believe that we each have just one great love in our lives, even if we don’t end up with them.

Surprisingly, I’ve only once been asked who it was. I answered honestly, but it never made any difference, and no one ever asked again. I’m pretty sure the creature herself was aware of this at the very moment it happened. She had the good graces not to ever mention it. Ultimately, she found someone else, married, had a child, a career, and a life, all without my input. She doesn’t know how lucky she was.

While Sigourney Weaver in Aliens kicked open the door, BSG forever changed how Sci-Fi portrays women and uses them in the plot. Katee Sackhoff, Tricia Helfer, Grace Park, and Mary McDonnell reinvented roles played by men in the original series and changed how feminine strength and sexuality are portrayed on film.

In 2004, I recognized how much BSG reflected post-9/11 America. Twenty years later, it’s even more evident. I define science fiction as a narrative that uses scientific principles to explore social and political ideas from a new perspective. Mary Shelly invented Science Fiction when she was just eighteen years old, in a book that was probably a letter to her husband and his lover. How much she was aware of Frankenstein’s subtext is hotly debated. I’ve always believed there wasn’t much that escaped her view. She wasn’t a subtle person.

The original Battlestar Galactica was “Wagon Train in Spaceships,” using Greek and Latter-day Saints mythology as its worldview. How much producer Glen A. Larson practiced Mormonism is debatable, but he was born into it and remained a member his entire life.

A veteran of over two hundred episodes of Star Trek, the Next Generation, and Deep Space Nine, Ronald D. Moore parlayed his considerable street cred and sometimes-contentious relationship with Harlan Ellison into a pitch to a new independent network known as the Sci-Fi Channel. It was a huge risk, ten times more expensive than anything Sci-Fi Channel had ever produced, but it paid off once the awards started rolling in.

In 2004, I was deeply engaged with the inter-generational conflict in BSG. At that time, my sympathies were with Apollo. Twenty years later, I find myself much more aligned with Adama.

Both in 2004 and 2024, I found myself deeply sympathetic to the characters played by Grace Park as Boomer, who didn’t know if she was a Cylon. In the original series, Boomer was one of my favorite characters, and Park's reimagining of this previously male character was fascinating. She was still the buddy character, but now with some sexual politics and a deep inner conflict. Inner questions of “Am I good or evil?” resonate with me.

Michael Hogan played Saul Tigh, the most interesting character in both viewings. A career military man, Saul Tigh, has to face the end of the world with a monkey on his back. Other than soap operas, you don’t see a lot of television that deals realistically with alcoholism.

In 2004 and now, watching Tigh struggle on television reminds me that “there, but for the grace of God…” In my twenties, I became aware that I was becoming dangerously close to being an alcoholic. Nearly everyone I knew rode that razor’s edge. I finished most work days having a drink with my father in his office, then having four or five more at Scrooges or some similar establishment. Splitting up who I drank with and where made it seem like I was doing it less.

I don’t consider myself a reformed alcoholic because I do still have a taste now and then. I haven’t quit. Not entirely.

My people didn’t invent whiskey, but you can’t prove that. Although Scotland is one of the most beautiful places on earth, something about living there makes people want to keep one foot in the world and the other foot drunk enough to see the fairies if they come by. It took a lot of whiskeys to invent a bagpipe.

Rather than kill the beast, I decided to cage him deep inside me. Don’t be alarmed, ladies and gentlemen; you have absolutely nothing to fear. Those chains are made of Chrome Steel!

My doctor says I have liver damage, and if I keep going like I was, I’ll finish it off. I’d rather not finish it off, so I now drink mainly to remember drinking. A taste brings back more memories than you can imagine.

With the world ended, Saul Tigh had no new source of Whiskey. What remained of the human race depended on him being sharp and doing his job, so he measured what was left in his bottle by holding his fingers to the side and seeing how much the level had left before it was gone.

Richard Hatch, who played Apollo in the original series, spent thirty years trying to get somebody interested in continuing episodes of BSG. He plays a political dissident in the reimagined series, often with the new Apollo as his acting partner.

There are seventy-six episodes of the BSG reboot. At my age, there’s a fair chance I won’t live to finish it. I’ll take that chance, though. I’m tougher than I look. Science fiction is important, not just to me but to the world. It changes how we understand ourselves.

In 2004, I don’t think anyone expected the “war on terror” to last longer than all seventy-six episodes of Battlestar Galactica, but it did. I’m not much of a conspiracy theorist, but I am a pretty good student of human nature. What you see in BSG is a pretty good exploration of how we did this to ourselves.