omg bsg
Last week’s episode of Battlestar Galactica impressed me as it showed heroic human resistance fighters on Cylon-occupied Caprica blow up a café full of quite possibly innocent human-looking Cylons. Show creator Ronald Moore and his writers are no dummies - they took the characters we sympathize with, that we understand, who have been almost driven to extinction by the unspeakable aggression and brutality of the Cylons, and put them in the position of a Palestinian terrorist. We never saw what any of the Cylons killed in that explosion had done before. They may have been administrators or accountants - at least one was a barista. But the human resistance didn’t care if they had had a direct hand in the attempted genocide of the human race - they were complicit, guilty by association. And brilliantly the show puts us in the mindset of a terrorist. That's the beauty of what art can do, and how it can present to us new ways of looking at issues we thought we had already covered.