The first season of Battlestar Galactica was foisted upon me by a friend who swore I had to watch it, despite the fact that I don't do sci-fi. Especially not re-made sci-fi. I let the complete five-disc series languish on my table for months. I then met three other people - all separately - who said I simply must watch it. Fine. Fine. It is a three day weekend, I'll watch a few to be polite and then I'll return the DVD set. I thought.
But, instead: hooked. Hook, line & Cylon. I just watched the last episode of Season One late last night and I've already rung my friend - any friend I can think of - to get Season Two now. Now. I don't want to wait. Why: it so closely mirrors what is going on in our government, our world, our increasingly reduced freedoms all under the guise of our safety. It perfectly describes our fear-mongering culture, where no one can be trusted and that's how they want us. Where information is guarded, secret inquiries and investigations are carried out in the name of our safety but they break all rules of fair game, bending the law to suit their needs. Fascinating. Prescient. Wow. I don't even like TV.
Further still: I just started reading Walter Kirn's The Unbinding (which is fascinating unto itself what with the web/print/hyperlinked word bit...so much to say about this and I'll do so properly in a separate post) which is about, ostensibly, humans who sign up for big-brother monitoring services to keep them safe. Yet the monitoring service (run by computers?) knows too much, manipulates the data. And the links! Kirn's links to outside sources and references are equally creepy - articles about the FBI, about our own non-fictional data gathering centers and secret law-bending efforts exposed.
Readers: If you have both seen Battlestar Galactica and read The Unbinding, would you agree that there is a greater connection here? That it is highly creepy and also somehow...brilliant...that I managed to dive into both of these stories at nearly the same moment? After months of putting both off? After having no idea what either was about? I love it when the book you are reading or a film you just saw enhances other immediately relevant experiences - amplifying both, extending the dialogue up and down and left and right.
Net effect: I'm quite suspicious of people at the moment. The poor Thai food delivery guy made me jumpy, ever so jumpy, when he arrived with two others to deliver our food and then to distribute menus (but I didn't know they were menus when he reached into his back pocket and moved toward me saying "...and one more thing...") I am reminded of when I first read Crime & Punishment and I couldn't sleep, twisting and turning in my bed, so sure it was I who had committed the crime, not Raskolnikov.
It follows, then, that I should step away. Move out into the world. Pick up something light, something frothy. Get my sense of humor back. But Season Two awaits. The Unbinding remains unfinished.
