http://featuresblogs.chicagotribune.com/entertainment_tv/2009/03/battlestar-galactica-united-nations-olmos-moore.html
Originally posted: March 18, 2009 'Battlestar Galactica's' trip to the United Nations It seemed fitting that the rag-tag fleet's journey ended at the United Nations. Since the debut of "Battlestar Galactica," which ends its run in spectacular style on Friday (8 p.m. Central, Sci Fi; four stars), the drama has depicted the remnants of humanity in a desperate struggle for survival. During the course of four seasons, they not only endured the worst that their Cylon enemies had to dish out, they discovered the darkest impulses that lurked in their own hearts. As a method of resistance, they used suicide bombers. To get information, they tortured Cylons. When they suspected treason, they turned on each other and tossed traitors out the ship's airlock. They constantly struggled to balance human rights with the precarious security of the fleet, which started out with around 50,000 survivors but lost thousands along the way. "We saw good people making really ugly choices," moderator Whoopi Goldberg said near the end of Tuesday's two-hour panel on the show at the United Nations. The panel, which included executive producers Ronald D. Moore and David Eick and stars Mary McDonnell and Edward James Olmos as well as four U.N. officials, was organized by the U.N. as part of a new effort to link the organization's concerns to the creative community. It was held in the Economic and Social Council Chamber, an imposing room full of rows of delegate seating facing a dais on one end of the room. In the audience were fans of the show, network executives, members of the media and more than 100 high school students, who were there representing Think Quest NYC, an educational outreach project. The audience members sat in the seats reserved for diplomats and delegates, but instead of nameplates listing the names of real countries, signs in front of each seat said "Caprica," "Gemenon," "Picon" and the names of the other nine colonies seen on the Sci Fi show. The overall effect made you feel as though you'd stepped onto one of the show's sets; perhaps "Battlestar's" president Laura Roslin (McDonnell) was about to pacify the restive Quorum of the Twelve Colonies. But this wasn't a set. And despite the fact that "Battlestar Galactica" is set in a fictional universe, the United Nations representatives on the panel praised the show for its depiction of the ways in which war, torture, deprivation and terrorism affect real people. Robert Orr, an anti-terrorism expert and the U.N.'s Assistant Secretary-General for Policy Planning, pointed out that a few months ago, in that very room, victims of terrorism attacks told their harrowing tales to an array of diplomats. Their stories had an effect: Orr talked about seeing those officials "throw out their talking points" and began to take seriously the idea of linking basic human rights to their nations' anti-terrorism efforts. Orr spoke after the audience was shown a "Battlestar" clip in which military leader Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan) defended the use of suicide bombers against the Cylons. In that episode not for the first time -- the show put viewers in an uncomfortable position. The grizzled Tigh is one of the show's best-loved characters, yet here he was advocating terrorist tactics and telling the president he didn't have time for her "pieties." "We don't like to confront these tough issues in our world. But they are oh so real," Orr said. "If a show like `Battlestar Galactica' can get us think about it and can get us talking about it It isn't easy. I've heard these words from people. But they weren't actors." Craig Mokhiber, deputy director of the New York office of the U.N.'s High Commissioner for Human Rights, talked about how the show, via the human-Cylon struggle for dominance, examined "this idea of the Other defining human beings as being the Other so that we can dehumanize them and ultimately destroy them." "We are all entitled to a social and international order in which all of the rights and freedoms of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights can be fully realized, regardless of race, sex, language or religion," Mokhiber. Linking the quest for basic human rights to the "Battlestar" characters' search for Earth, he said, "I would suggest that this is the mythical Earth for which we are all searching." Soon after that statement, Olmos' gravelly voice rumbled across the hall. "You should have never invited me here," he chuckled. While praising Mokhiber's efforts, he objected to the use of the word "race as a cultural determinant." "We've made the word race a way of expressing culture," Olmos said. "There's only one race, and that's what the show brought out that is the human race. Period." After expanding his point on how the construct of race had been used to justify oppression, he repeated loudly, "There is but one race! So say we all!" There was vociferous applause and chants of the "Battlestar" catchphrase reverberated through the august chamber. One of the high school students in the audience asked if she should be worried about the fact that almost most people these days, especially young people, are "addicted" to technology. As viewers saw over the course of four seasons of "Battlestar," letting technology get out of hand can potentially lead to, well, attempted genocide, among other unpleasant things. Moore responded that for older people, the idea of true artificial intelligence was "science fiction," whereas young people will deal with those kinds of developments as reality. The ethical dilemmas that come with creating life, even artificial life, will "rush up on us before" we're ready to confront them, Moore said. Goldberg had a few choice words for the over-reliance on gadgets. "Put the thing down once in a while," she remarked dryly. Later, McDonnell responded eloquently to a question about the imperatives of the military versus the rule of democracy and Roslin's role in executing the fleet's enemies. For a woman who had been perceived, early on, as a tentative former schoolteacher, President Roslin didn't blink when it came to tossing a fractious Cylon into space. In fact, in time fans started to call her character "Madam Airlock." "She can talk about how she was haunted by the airlock," Eick said. "But she's also the one who made it a verb." "The series is winding down this week," Goldberg said near the end of the session. "What do you want people to take away from it?" Olmos said he hoped that, on their deathbeds, those who had spent many hours of their lives watching every episode of the show would not feel that time had been wasted. And he gave an eloquent speech about how, at every stage, the scripts that the writers came up with had been elevated not just by the cast and crew and the post-production staff, but by the bloggers and the fans who obsessively analyzed every aspect of the show. "They took it to a level that was immensely further than we had ever intended," he said. "We had to give up our ownership and allow them to give us" their feedback, and in his view, the show was better for it. McDonnell said she hoped that people had absorbed the show's themes of "patience" and "forgiveness" as the means to "break the cycle of violence." Moore's first response was to say that he hoped that people were entertained. And indeed, the show would never have been a success had it not told these challenging stories of morality and ethics through the prism of compelling characters and emotionally nuanced relationships (not to mention some pretty cool space battles). "He creates from a place that doesn't seem to be conscious of what people need. He has an instinct for it. It's in his subconscious," McDonnell said of Moore at a post-panel cocktail reception at the U.N. "But because he isn't trying to teach anyone anything, he incorporates the human experience, which includes a great deal of humor and a great deal of complexity." "We challenged the audience in a lot of ways," Moore noted at the close of the panel. "We pushed a lot of tough ideas on the audience, we made them look at a lot of ugly things over the course of these four [seasons]. We made them question their heroes, we had them rooting for villains. We had them trying to grapple with really complex moral and ethical dilemmas in the guise of a weekly television series about killer robots in outer space." "I guess if you watched this series and you decided to think about some of the issues that `Battlestar Galactica' talked about, if what you end up believing at the end is the exact same thing you thought in the beginning -- at least you thought about it," he concluded. For more on "Battlestar Galactica," including a post-finale interview with Moore, come back to this site early Saturday, after the series finale airs.
