Oh, My Pop Culture Jesus: Religion in Battlestar Galactica

At the beginning of December, I discussed my problems with religion in Star Trek. I said that Gene Roddenberry’s view that religion would be unimportant in the 24th century was a tad near-sighted on his part.

Star Trek alumni and creator of Battlestar Galactica, Ronald D. Moore, took his reimagining of Battlestar Galactica in a completely different way. Instead of having religion deemed unimportant, he made religion a key point of the series, adding an additional element to an already-complex story.

In Brightest Day: Fracking Cylons

I originally wanted to write a column on Battlestar Galactica’s Starbuck (the re-imagined one), focusing on her emotional turmoil throughout the series. However, in doing research for this column, I found two key things that made that hard to do. For starters, there is a serious divide between fans of the original BSG and the re-imagined series, and because of that, Starbuck is extremely different between the two series. Also, there are a lot of geeks out there that still have not finished the re-imagined series, for whatever reason.

So I decided to not focus on Starbuck per sé, but instead focus on the emotional turmoil that comes with what happened in the re-imagined series.