Pandagon

It seems, so far, that injecting the failure of the Earth mission into "Battlestar Galactica" has reinvigorated the show, which was going slow at some parts in the first half of season 4. Last night's episode was kind of shocking to me, because for the first time, the struggles that put the Quorum at odds with Roslin and Adama finally started to resonate emotionally. Even though I know what the creators are trying to do---inject some gray areas, and make sure that Roslin and Adama don't lapse into saints---it's never quite worked, because it asks you buy into two assumptions that just don't work. One is that humanity wouldn't immediately accept martial law under such dire circumstances. Considering that our nation happily re-elected itself an obviously malevolent wannabe dictator because of shockwaves from an attack that killed .001% of our population, I fail to believe that they wouldn't go even further when the actual survival of the human race is on the line, and the leaders are benevolent and repeatedly demonstrate that they're going out of their way to save everyone. Hell, even people like me who think they have to close Gitmo down and release all the prisoners immediately would accept some form of martial law under the circumstances, especially with a duly elected executive. Most representative government is supposed to move slow, and that's at cross purposes with the majority of decisions made under fire by Adama. The other thing is that a lot of disputes would have easily been cleared up if Galactica was more communicative, and I don't believe that Adama or Roslin would have a major problem with transparency, as a general rule. Adama's story about Earth doesn't quite fall under that, because that goes into the bucket of National Mythology, which gives people something to strive for even if we haven't achieved it. (Like the way we call ourselves a people that believes in equality and justice.)