Revising my work: BSG essay

Written two years ago, with some parts I'd like to incorporate into my dissertation. Perhaps for publication?


Starting with the End: Battlestar Galactica and Apocalyptic Narration

Early Science Fiction (SF) television had few successes—The Twilight Zone, The Outer Limits, Star Trek—and many (some memorable) failures—Space: 1999, Red Dwarf, Buck Rogers in the 25th Century, and Battlestar Galactica to name a few. These failures have, for the most part, fallen into obscurity. In 2003, however, the SciFi Channel produced a mini-series based on, but not identical to, the original Battlestar Galactica (BSG), spending the four hour special focusing on the first days of the apocalypse that frames the show. The miniseries was so popular that it led SciFi to create its own version of the 1970s series; unlike that series, BSG: 2003 received a Peabody award in 2006 for its “parallax considerations of politics, religion, sex, even what it means to be ‘human’” (http://www.peabody.uga.edu), and it has continued to show strong ratings.

BSG: 2003 raises two questions: How do you narrate the apocalypse in a pleasing way? And why would anyone want to “read” a dystopic future in the first place? Gary Wolfe, in his structural analysis of post-apocalyptic novels, admits that “Although in one sense the very notion of beginning a narrative with a climactic holocaust seems perverse, especially if the underlying tone of the novel is going to be optimistic, such a fantasy is very much in keeping with traditions of millenarian thought” (3). The relationship between “millenarian” thought—the dystopian, apocalyptic attitudes that appear during times of social uncertainty--and our own postmodern condition is such that a television show that “perversely” begins at the end is not only unsurprising, but well-accepted and hailed by critics. BSG:2003, as a product of our postmodern consumer culture, narrates the chaos and trauma of a future apocalypse while remaining a pleasurable text.

The possibility of narrating the future has been taken up by Fredric Jameson in his latest book Archaeologies of the Future. The name of the book points to the fundamental paradox of science fiction: any written artifact tells of events that have already passed or are currently passing for the author, and yet for the SF reader, these events belong to a time other than his or her own, a time that has yet to come. Scifi, as many theorists assert, is never “about” that future time, however. All “good” SF is in parable form, an insight into the reader’s present (Suvin 5). Narrating an imagined future that is really the present in disguise will always be a complex venture when done well, and, as Jameson acknowledges, that when attempting to outline the formal aspects of Utopia (literary and otherwise), one must “confront the way in which the secession of the Utopian imagination from everyday empirical Being takes the form of a temporal emergence and a historical transition” (85). Utopias are never present, either spatially or temporally, and therefore have a built in reliance on cause and effect relations: if we read a utopian fiction, then we will see our world as imperfect, else we will never reach the heaven on earth represented in the text. Jamison reminds us that the perfection of any written or imagined utopia, however, is limited by human imagination (288), and even the imagined perfect future is only the present reworked.

What BSG: 2003 excels at is making the imagined future not only an easily recognizable reworked present, but making that presence present, immediate, and highly realistic. However, the popularity of the revised series cannot be attributed only to this high level of realism made possible through sophisticated special effects; we must also consider the series as a narrative that takes into account viewer desires for a literal revelation (in Greek, “apocalypse”). What follows is an exploration of what allows this story of the end of history to be pleasurable. I argue that BSG: 2003 uses the relationship between the story of our future as its being told and the viewers’ present time and narrative order to both sate and inflame viewer desires for revelation of the story of apocalypse. Specifically, the series uses an untold “story” that is uncovered through a fragmented and veiling “discourse” that appeals to verisimilitude, and thus the viewers‘ sense of import.

The Postmodern Social Scene
M. Keith Booker responds to Jameson’s earlier work on postmodernity by examining a strand of postmodernity he calls the “post-utopian” or the fall of utopian imagination (Americas 4). For Booker, the post-utopian is most readily seen in SF, but he implies that the post-utopian condition has been overlooked because of the low-culture status of SF: “[…I]f Jameson is right about the status of postmodernism as a cultural dominant, then postmodern characteristics should be displayed in a wide range of cultural products, not just in The Recognitions or Naked Lunch” (Americas 3). As such, Booker takes as his examples popular SF texts from Ray Bradbury and the like. Jameon’s latest work does in fact address science fiction as part of the postmodern condition, citing everything from Ursula K LeGuin’s The Dispossessed to Star Trek, finding that even the wildest u/dystopias are nothing more than “chimeras” made up of pieces of our own time and ideologies (24).

The rhetoric of modern post-apocalyptic fictions depends on this tension between what is knowable (the present) and what can only be posited from our current conditions (the future). It also, however, plays on our fears of the collapse of the social order, creating a desire for fortunetelling so that we can brace for the trauma to come. By appealing to the audience's desire for knowledge and control of the future, BSG: 2003 and other exemplary SF texts invoke the "Utopian impulses," that occur when we are shown a world different from our own, as Jameson reading Ernst Bloch argues (xii). While there is a sense in Jameson‘s work that all imagined worlds lead to “utopian” desires, we should also note that many postmodern texts are aware of those impulses, and take them into account, creating the “dystopian” end of fictions of social criticism. Jameson’s focus on the utopianism is understandable--after all, many ideal communities have been set forth around a general desire for unity, peace, and equality. Few “real world” communities (although we might here name a few religious cults or militias) base themselves around a sense of an impending apocalypse. Hope is a far more pleasurable and sustaining organizing principle.

What Jameson fails to comment on is how these texts--not the communities themselves or the ideas they are based on--work with their readers to produce a pleasurable experience. It is easy to see that utopian (and dystopian) texts show us a reflection of our own world and ask us identify with the fictional extrapolation of our current conditions, but to do so effectively and with enough rhetorical force, the texts must be pleasurable enough to maintain the reader involvement needed to make the argument. BSG:2003 accomplishes this by making the future almost hyper-present, using the cinematic techniques that create reader interest and pleasure in the immediate here and now.

Starting at the End: Revising the Apocalyptic Structure
The real-time feel—the “documentary style” that the writers and directors of the series say makes BSG distinctive-- of the series also shows us our struggles with forecasting the future, with giving dystopic warnings to ourselves retroactively (“33 Commentary”). If BSG is a history of the future, it is one meant to warn us of our own pending apocalypse—but it can only show us what we already know and imagine. The discourse and rhetoric of apocalyptic stories is limited by our past and present.

Film theories and theories of narratology provide a way for us to understand the pleasure of a rhetorically successful apocalyptic text. BSG: 2003 avoids the pitfalls of its predecessors by forgoing a linear narrative in favor of a discourse which reveals as it conceals, never allowing the viewer to gain complete access to the complete story—the events of the apocalypse as they happened. Peter Brooks, echoing Russian Formalist theories, describes this as the difference between “story” and “discourse” or fabula and sjuzet (Brooks 12). Wolfe’s model of the structure of post-apocalyptic fiction has five parts. The original series was half space western, half space opera, with Star Wars as its implicit model, both stylistically and in narrative. The program was popular at first, but as the novelty of the special effects and space travel itself wore off, the show’s ratings dropped. It could not sustain its intrigue with “flat characters and [a] lack of imaginative plot” (Booker TV 89).

The new and improved version takes only the basic plot from the original, leaving the “western” feel behind in exchange for a documentary style and theme. While post-apocalyptic novels have a structure that can, in fact, be seen as a frontier story according to Wolfe, as a television seires, BSG deviates from the five part formula that Wolfe describes. In novels, there are commonly five large stages of action: (1) the experience or discovery of the cataclysm; (2) the journey through the wasteland created by the cataclysm; (3) settlement and establishment of a new community; (4) the re-emergence of the wilderness as antagonist; and (5) a final, decisive battle or struggle to determine which values shall prevail in the new world. (Wolfe 8)

Battlestar Galactica has most of these elements, but has rearranged the pieces and, as Wolfe allows, “The formula may be varied in many ways, with some elements expanded to fill nearly the whole narrative, others deleted, and new ones added” (8). While the miniseries can be seen as covering at least partially stages one through three, the series which begins with the episode titled “33” could be located at stage four.

The four hour miniseries briefly establishes the logic of the diegesis and the premises for the show: Humans have settled on twelve planets known as the “Colonies” and were living in peace and prosperity until their artificially intelligent machines, the Cylons, turned on them and began a civil war. The miniseries picks up forty years after “the Cylon wars” in the middle of a cease fire. We are introduced to the seven main characters (the newly instated President Laura Roslin; the Vice President and traitor Gaius Baltar; Baltar’s Cylon lover, “Number Six;” the captain of the Galactica, Adama; and his second in command Colonel Tigh; Adama’s son, Lee “Apollo” Adama; and pilots Sharon “Boomer” Valery and Kara “Starbuck” Thrace) and several of the minor characters on the capital planet Caprica before the Cylons attack, bringing a nuclear holocaust to all twelve planets simultaneously. The miniseries focuses on the crew of the dilapidated old Battlestar Galactica which manages to escape the attack because its outdated technology isn’t prone to Cylon viruses. The Galactica and a small fleet of the surviving military and civilian ships begin a long fight for the survival of the human race and the (relative) maintenance of civil order. When the miniseries ends, the “ragtag” fleet seems to have momentarily escaped the Cylons and are searching for a mythical 13th colony known as Earth.

When the series itself begins, the audience is dropped right into the middle of a new crisis (the Cylons have found them) without any explanation of what has happened in between. The first season focuses on the survival of the crew in the “wilderness” of space, with the Cylons on their heels—a continual chase scene. This chase is anchored by two main plot threads that eventually become linked: President Laura Roslin’s piecing together the lost history of the 12 colonies and her lost memory of the Cylon attack, and Gaius Baltar’s struggle with his betrayal of the Colonies. While these threads are the show’s main, controlling plot, as they were in the (slightly different) 1970s series, the events move slowly, giving viewers time to become invested in the seven “main” characters emotional developments and the slow revelation of what really happened the day the Cylons attacked.

The structure as I have described it here fits in with Wolfe’s fourth stage, but with an important change: the events of the previous three stages are returned to and retold again and again, as the characters come to terms with the trauma of the apocalypse. The focus is not on the events themselves, but, as creator Ron Moore says, on the “humanity” of the situation; we do not watch for the action, but for the characters’ re-actions.

In part, the series is successful because of its careful construction of plot. All of BSG’s episodes can be seen as following the model of narrative given by Peter Brooks in Reading for the Plot. Brooks, taking a Freudian model informed by narratology, argues that “Narratives both tell of desire—typically present some story of desire—and arouse and make use of desire as dynamic of signification. Desire is in this view like Freud’s notion of Eros, a force including sexual desire, but larger and more polymorphous” (37). Narrative is also dependent on beginnings and endings: “The sense of a beginning, then, must in some important way be determined by the sense of an ending” (94). The role of the end is so important that “All narrative may be in essence obituary in that […] the retrospective knowledge that it seeks, the knowledge that comes after, stands on the far side of the end” (94). Brooks’s narrative form, like that of apocalyptic fiction, begins with the end, and endings imbue meaning on the events that precede them.

To begin at the end, however, means that there must be a return at some point, to an earlier time, to a “primal scene” (Brooks 95). Like the detective story that begins with a murder then attempts to reconstruct prior events from deduction and clues, post-apocalyptic narratives begin with a scene of absolute destruction and attempt to re-cover human history and culture. Brooks, looking through a Freudian lens sees our drive toward narratives that retell primal scenes as a type of repetition compulsion, where “repetition works as a process of binding toward the creation of an energetic constant-state situation which will permit the emergence of mastery and the possibility of postponement” (101, emphasis in original). Each episode of BSG opens with a replay of the moment of apocalypse that must be bound: We are shown Gaius Baltar in his pristine home, ducking behind Number Six as a nuclear blast mows down the landscape outside. The shot is ambiguous—how did Gauis survive the blast? This shot of the nuclear blast followed by an exterior establishing shot of the planet Caprica covered with radioactive clouds. Even though the moment of apocalypse is given in the opening of each episode, but the reasons behind the apocalypse, how the humans of the Twelve Colonies are related to Earth, and the plans of the Cylons are left to be discovered through flashbacks and revelation.

The series also uses a structure of repetition and revelation in a strange, yet effective, montage that occurs at the very end of the opening credits sequence. A percussion-based soundtrack serves as the tension-building background to an otherwise silent montage of clips from the episode that is about to be seen. These images, have little meaning without their context, are not meant to provide clues to the episode, but to invoke the “end as beginning” structure within each episode: in Brooks’s words, “beginnings are the arousal of an intention in reading, stimulation into a tension” (103) which moves the plot forward and creates further desire for narrative. The montage for the final episode of the first season, for example, showed Adama being shot in the chest; viewers watched the show to find out how these events came to be and to contextualize the very brief images that serve as a beginning.

Documenting the End: “Real” time and “real” trauma
It is this discourse of revelation and re-vision (as we literally “see” the episode in montage before it is aired, and we re-see many of the events of the apocalypse each week) that prevents the new BSG from failing like its predecessors. The documentary style allows the program, as a whole, to invoke a sense of real-time and immediate presence. BSG’s attention to the relationship between real time and diegetic time creates an invitation to audience involvement and identification, which we see emerge from the first episode after the miniseries, “33.”
Cinematically, the passage of time is felt by long shots, large jump cuts, and a plot that revolves around time in general. Laura Roslin is dying—she has about six months to live at the beginning of the series, and her progression notes the passage of time. Additionally, many episodes in the first season begin with noting how many days have passed since the Cylon attack. In the third episode, for example, three of our weeks into the season, we are told that only twenty-four days have passed—roughly the same amount of time in our world.

In part, “33” and the episodes of BSG argue for the series’ verisimilitude by its stylistic treatment of suture. Suture, according to Kaja Silverman’s explication of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” is a “slight-of-hand” which “involves attributing to a character within the fiction qualities which in fact belong to the machinery of enunciation: the ability to generate narrative, the omnipotence and coercive gaze, the castrating authority of the law” (232). By “suturing out” two of the three possible gazes Mulvey identifies—that of the camera and that of the audience—we are asked to identify with the third gaze, that of the (male) character. Fictional television and cinema work to make us forget the mediating technology of the camera and our own subjectivity as audience.

BSG:2003’s distinctive cinematic style, however, might be described as journalistic or documentary. This real-time feel comes from the denial of suture and a minimal use of montage. The camera’s presence is difficult to ignore: Creator Ron Moore states in his blog that he is attempting to create a cinema verité on television by using handheld digital cameras. This “verité” style leads to bobbing, constant motion; the camera is never still, especially during action sequences. In discussing the traditional cinematic techniques that create and maintain the primacy of the male gaze, Laura Mulvey argues the the camera becomes the mechanism for producing an illusion of Renaissance space, flowing movements compatible with the human eye, an ideology of representation that revolves around the perception of the subject; the camera’s look is disavowed in order to create a convincing world in which the spectator’s surrogate can perform with verisimilitude. (26) Battlestar Galactica’s movements are hardly “compatible with the human eye” and the despite the show’s attention to character development and human emotion, the “perception of the subject” is difficult to define in the series. The camera is always present, and it is difficult for the audience to forget their own position as audience.

The effect of the documentary or verité style can be best seen in two scenes in “33.” As the tired and increasingly ragged-looking Adama attempts to give orders to his pilots, the camera moves from side to side, never allowing viewers to see Adama’s still face conducting a gaze. While it is obvious Adama is looking at some screen to get information, we are never given a reverse shot of what he is seeing—only his half-open eyes which the jerking camera movements do not exactly focus on. In a scene where Adama is making life and death decisions, it is natural for an audience to want to know what he is looking at, and to establish a commanding gaze through his character. Both of these are denied, and we cannot identify with his controlling gaze because the camera’s unsettled gaze gets in the way.

While it is “nothing new,” as Ron Moore says, the authors of BSG: 2003 use an explicit split between objective and subjective shots to establish identification and to complicate the plotline. While many of the shots are handheld camera long shots that imply an objective, journalistic gaze, scenes with the psychotic Gaius Baltar rapidly switch between objective shots (which show Baltar talking to a wall or hugging himself) and subjective shots which show us that he is “really” interacting his Cylon lover, Number Six. While this often adds humor to the series, it also tempts the viewers to identify with Baltar as the traditional male gaze.

Montage, the use of cuts which sutures out the camera and allows our look to move around the fictional space, is used limitedly in BSG: 2003; instead, the show is comprised of several long shots strung together. The long shot is broken up by the constant movement of the documentary camera, which pans dizzyingly between characters instead of using a traditional shot/reverse shot technique which sutures out the camera and allows us to see more of the space in the scene. Instead, despite the viewers’ desire for more of the story, BSG: 2003 limits our gaze and our knowledge.

As Sharon (“Boomer”) sits in her cockpit, for example, she faces out toward the hangar. “The Chief” approaches her from behind, and the two stare out the window together. The camera remains on the pair as they talk about the missing commander Helo; despite the panning, bobbing, and weaving of the verité style, there is little movement of the camera around the space of the cockpit or what the Chief and Sharon are staring at. The lack created by the camera is made evident in these long shots, and the longer the camera denies us the reverse shot, the more difficult it is for us to identify with any one gaze. The “reality” of the verité camera work pairs up with the long shot to create the real time documentary or journalistic effect that gives exigency to the topic of the episode.

“33’s” real time sensation is added to by the subject of the episode itself: “33” refers to the number of minutes between each Cylon attack; the episode catalogues the crew’s fatigue, personal struggles with the recent apocalypse, and the relationship between the initial attack and Gaius Baltar’s relationship with Six. The episode begins with an echoing of a clock ticking, and a close-up of Baltar’s sleeping face. We are asked initially to identify with Baltar’s gaze and his experience of time, but as the episode unfolds, the focalization is complicated by continual shifts among the seven “main” characters. The clock continues to tick throughout the episode during moments lacking dialogue. The white face of the gear-work clock is grainy, and is a stark contrast to the crisp shots of beeping digital clocks that act as transitions between scenes. In “33” the clocks hold together the separate storylines, but also give us a point of reference for each significant “space” in the series: the Command Information Center (CIC), Roslin’s ship Colonial One, the hangar, the cockpits, and Commander Adama’s quarters.

Foreshadowing as Temptation: Engaging the Audience
Recovery and discovery of the “story” behind the Cylon apocalypse forward the plot more than any other element, however. Fans often note how offhanded remarks from earlier episodes turn out to be major plot twists in later ones. A specialized viewer-knowledge is created in these moments where memory of past events in the series gives the viewer a sense of being an insider, real member of the Galactica universe. For example, in “33” Apollo draws our attention to it in a lighthearted banter scene about Starbuck being “on drugs” and the squadron being “100% stimulated.” Sharon downplays her lack of exhaustion, but Starbuck interjects a brief “joke” that later turns out to be true: “That’s because she’s a Cylon!” Boomer is, in fact, a Cylon, and this scene is replayed in her mind as she comes to realize that she is not human a few episodes later.
The last episode of the second season of the show is a ninety minute episode that “shocked” viewers and left the series on a seven month cliff hanger. As more of the Cylon’s plan and Baltar’s betrayal became evident, however, the series began to forward the plot of finding Earth; little revelation was left. Many fans refer to this jump as “hitting the Reset button,” but it does not seem likely that the show’s writers simply gave up.

No doubt the audience responded as they did because their genre knowledge was violated. The series had established its own logical progression, but with the “One Year Later” move, seemed to break those conventions. Brooks’s claims of the inherent human need for narrative and the structures which facilitate playing out those desires (such as the detective story) provide a way to understand Battlestar Galactica’s narrative techniques and the final episode’s sudden shift of time. If, as Brooks claims, “[…n]arrative stories depend on meanings delayed, partially filled in, stretched out” (21), a narrative story ends when those meanings have been filled in completely, when the meanings have been “unfolded” (21). Through the first two seasons, BSG: 2003 effectively delays meaning and “stretches” the plot by returning to the apocalypse to “bind” the energy of the chaos. Because readers/viewers constantly desire a recital of the events around a trauma (here, the destruction of the human race), Battlestar Galactica (successfully) tells and retells the events around the apocalypse, discursively moving slowly through diegetical time in order to satisfy readers’ desire for disclosure.

“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II,” is the second of a two part season finale which revolves around the Presidential election. The episode resolves at least one question of the first two seasons. Laura Roslin reveals to Adama that Gaius is “working with the Cylons” or at least Number Six, a memory she recovered midseason during a near death experience, but had not yet related to anyone else. The betrayal is kept quiet, however; Baltar has somehow been elected President. What is notable about this is not the surprising election result, but that a science fiction television show could present two entire episodes centered on something as pragmatic as an election. The show, however, is not “about” the election; instead, it focuses as usual on the main characters’ emotions as they consider settling on a new planet.

The twist in the plot which shocked fans came at the end of the first hour, where the episode would normally stop. At this point, Baltar lays head down in frustration on his desk: settlement, apparently, is not going well already. The camera starts at one end of the room, then it moves toward Baltar, focusing inward and zooming eventually to the top of his head, actually in his hair. The extradiagetical music becomes percussion-heavy; and the camera remains instead still, for once, in Baltar’s hair. This position on his hair is held for a few seconds, then the screen goes dim. When it lights again, we are “still” focused on his hair, but he is being woken up for the morning, still at his desk. As the camera pulls back, we notice that the office has changed; this is not the next morning at all, but sometime in the future. We are unaware of how far in the future for nearly a full minute, when the digital text appears in the middle of the screen, covering Baltar, letting us know that one year has passed. The delay in positioning the audience in time compounds this uncharacteristic plot move, making it a disorienting moment on several fronts. Because this new time takes place outside of the usual hour-long episode format, the year seems doubly extended. Still, there is another eighteen minutes of show, including five minutes that overlapped into SciFi’s next time slot at 11:30 p.m.

In the summer of 2006, SciFi.com made the final five minutes available to download. While all of the episodes are available to download to iPods for a small fee, the “extra” five minutes and six seconds have been made available free of charge in easily accessible formats, as though these five minutes really were “outside” the normal narrative flow. This supplement to the show is both and ending and a beginning: it ends the former plot line (the Cylons have won the war) while beginning a new cycle of repetition and recovery—we do not really know why the Cylons have tracked down the remaining humans or what has happened in the one year of peace on the new planet. This jump was almost necessary, from a Brooksian point of view. The ends of narrative do eventually happen, despite the delays and twists offered by the “discourse:”

Our most sophisticated literature understands endings to be artificial,
arbitrary, minor rather than major chords, casual and textual rather than cosmic
and definitive. Yet they take place: if there is no spectacular dénouement, no
distribution of awards and punishments, no tie-up, through marriages and deaths,
of all the characters’ lives, there is a textual finis—we have no more pages to
read. (Brooks 314).

The series’ main narrative “ends” when Baltar is elected and the surviving humans settle on their new planet. Wolfe’s formula of post-apocalyptic literature says as much when it names a final ideological battle between good and evil that will decide the value system of the new world (12). Gaius, whose mind is controlled by the Cylons, wins the “battle” of the election and forces the humans to settle; staying in one place for a year is what allows the Cylons to locate the new planet. Once the narrative has ended and there are “no more pages to turn,” we would expect the series to end as well. Fan loyalty and market pressures, however, have forced the show to move on beyond its initial premise, and the final two seasons have moved on to searching for “the thirteenth colony“ (Earth) in earnest, and revealing the Final Five Cylons supposedly hiding in plain sight. To maintain the same structure of revelation and mastery of trauma, a new trauma and new unsaid events must be presented.

Conclusion: Concluding an Apocalypse
What is eye-catching about BSG, what is pleasurable and thus popular, are also what helps the show accomplish what all good apocalyptic/utopian/dystopian narratives do: invoke the reader’s present and present a causal argument. BSG is remarkable for its breaking of conventions, its trust in its audience’s ability to “keep up”(as Moore says in his commentary) and its narrative risks, but these remarkable moves are also sound rhetorical moves. Because the series is still in progress, it is difficult to say exactly what arguments about American society are being forwarded, but it is easy to recognize that something is in the process of being offered. Unfortunately for viewers and fans, the quick leap ahead in time in the show will be followed by eight months of time passing in the real world. The real world was given a chance to catch up with Galactica’s time and to contemplate exactly what is being said in all those gaps and spaces. Now we await the final episode, due out “sometime in 2009,” a promised conclusion to the post-apocalyptic scenario. The lengthy delay in producing this end may be that writers are struggling with how to conclude a post-apocalyptic narrative--thus far, this “final” episode is being filmed as a four-episode miniseries, probably to mirror the series’ beginnings. What we do post-post-apocalypse is a question rarely answered; the Book of Revelation gives us a new heaven and a new earth. It is unlikely BSG will do the same. Stay tuned.


Works Cited
“33.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005.
“33 Commentary.” Battlestar Galactica Season One. Writ. Ronald Moore, Christopher Eric James and Michael Taylor. Dir. Stephen McNutt. SciFi Channel. 14 Jan 2005. DVD. Universal Home Entertainment, 2005.
Battlestar Galactica Podcasts. http://www.scifi.com/battlestar/downloads/podcast/. 14 July 2006.
Booker, M. Keith. Alternate Americas: Science Fiction Film and American Culture. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2006.
---. Science Fiction Television. Westport, Conn. : Praeger, 2004.
Brooks, Peter. Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1992.
Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.
“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.” Battlestar Galactica. SciFi Channel. 10 Mar 2005.
Moore, Ron. “Blog.” http://blog.scifi.com/battlestar/
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989. 14-26.
Silverman, Kaja. The Subject of Semiotics. New York: Oxford UP, 1983.
Suvin, Darko. “Narrative Logic, Ideology, and the Range of SF.” Science Fiction Studies. 26:9 (March 1982): 1-25.
Wolfe, Gary K. “The Remaking of Zero.” The End of the World. Eds Eric Rabkin, Martin Greenberg, and Joseph Olander. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. 1-19.