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Either you are with me, or you are my enemy!” shouted a young Darth Vader in 2005’s Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, one of the execrable prequels to the original films by George Lucas. In response to this all-or-nothing provocation, a disgusted Obi-Wan Kenobi replies, “Only a Sith deals in absolutes!”

Siths are Jedi Knights who have given themselves over to the Dark Side by embracing the evil emotions of anger, envy, and revenge. Readers of Commentary can be forgiven for neither knowing nor caring about this. But it is worth noting that for millions of Star Wars enthusiasts, it was very serious stuff indeed. Lucas revived, if not reinvented, the entire genre of science fiction in the 1970s by embracing bold and mythic depictions of good and evil and the heroic battle of the former against the latter. For decades, the established premise of the Star Wars franchise was that the universe is divided into the Dark Side and the Light Side of the “Force.” Jedi Knights—champions of all that is noble and virtuous—were warned never to give in, even a little, to the Dark Side, lest they lose their souls. If all that is not about “absolutes,” then what on earth (or in a galaxy far, far away) is? And Lucas threw it all away to get in a dig at George W. Bush.

His swipe at Bush’s famous iteration of the doctrine that would bear his name—“You are either with us or against us”—in a few seconds unraveled the entire moral superstructure of the Star Wars franchise. Such gratuitous political self-indulgence saturated the popular culture during the Bush years, in fare that had absolutely nothing to do with the policies of the White House.

In the two (awful) sequels to The Matrix, a -science-fiction hit about humans being used as a fuel source by a world overtaken by machines, Bush is visually compared to Adolf Hitler. In the Pixar film Wall-E, the “global CEO” of an environmentally devastated Planet Earth apes Bush’s “stay the course” line. In -X-Files: I Want to Believe, Bush and J. Edgar Hoover are paired. On television, Bush hatred or liberal antiwar paranoia suffused the NBC series Law and Order like a metastasizing cancer. The hospital show Grey’s Anatomy, the attorney show Boston Legal, the cop show Bones, and even the mother-daughter show Gilmore Girls included notable and needless instances, some playful and others less so, of what Charles Krauthammer dubbed Bush Derangement Syndrome.

In most of these cases, political asides can be shrugged off. Hollywood is a very liberal place, Bush and the war were indeed very unpopular, so expecting producers and actors to escape the temptation to get their shots in would be like expecting them to treat global warming with skepticism. Denouncing the ideological intrusion into the dialogue of Grey’s Anatomy as a corruption of artistic integrity offers such televised junk more respect than it deserves. After all, few can look upon Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay and wistfully ponder what might have been.

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That is not the case with a cable-television series called Battlestar Galactica, a remarkable piece of work that nonetheless committed artistic and creative suicide owing to the intrusion of the political beliefs of its creator and writers, which eventually made a complete hash of their own show.

A remake of a campy 1970s science-fiction series made in the wake of the box-office receipts of the original Star Wars, the gritty, intelligent, and pensive Battlestar Galactica came as a startling surprise upon the premiere of the six-hour miniseries that began its run in 2003. The story line involves a futuristic human civilization spanning 12 planetary colonies. Robots (called Cylons) originally invented to serve as slaves evolve into sentient enemies bent on destroying their former masters. In the original series, the Cylons were depicted as fairly absurd tin men. In the new version, the evolved Cylons are human doppelgängers capable of infiltrating human society (the tin men, far more frightening this time, are still around but serve as shock troops). The doppelgängers are also essentially immortal—if one is killed, his or her consciousness is instantly transmitted into a new, identical body.

In the debut miniseries, we are introduced to a civilization very much like our own: open, decent, democratic. In fulfillment of a supposedly divine plan, the Cylons spread out among humanity’s 20 billion people, taking advantage of that openness and decency, as well as society’s boredom with military preparedness (memories of the last Cylon war have faded away). They orchestrate a 9/11 on a genocidal scale, murdering the vast majority of humanity in a perfectly timed nuclear cataclysm. An aging battlestar called Galactica—essentially a space-borne aircraft carrier—poised to become a museum exhibit narrowly escapes the -Armageddon with a tiny ragtag convoy of humanity’s survivors. Outmatched, outgunned, and outstrategized, they must all try to survive against a foe that needs no rest and has no conscience.

These premises gave Battlestar Galactica an ideal foundation to play off the headlines of the day. Indeed, as Newsweek’s Joshua Alston noted in December 2008, Battlestar Galactica captured “better than any other TV drama of the past eight years the fear, uncertainty and moral ambiguity of the post-9/11 world.” The tensions between security and freedom, civilian and military leadership, healthy fear versus debilitating phobia, were explored brilliantly. The series won Program of the Year from the Television Critics Association, as well as numerous other awards. Time hailed it as the best thing on television in 2005, and the series earned a ranking in its top 100 TV shows of all time. From National Review to Rolling Stone, the series was justifiably hailed for its gritty realism, superb acting, and deft direction.

Originally, the series was very difficult to pigeonhole ideologically. An avid student of martial culture, Ron Moore, its guiding creative hand, treated the military with deep respect. William Adama, Galactica’s commander, is not a coffeehouse philosophe indulging his cosmopolitan sensibilities (the way Patrick Stewart’s Jean-Luc Picard often did in the second iteration of the Star Trek franchise in the 1980s), but a gruff and stalwart leader. Laura Roslin (played by Mary McDonnell) is a saccharine liberal do-gooder accidentally thrust into the position of president who achieves a flinty toughness—and makes an unexpected ideological journey of her own when she decides that abortion cannot be tolerated with the human population reduced to a mere 50,000 souls.

Inevitably and justifiably, the show dealt with various “enemy within” themes, but unlike countless rehashes of The Crucible, Battlestar Galactica conceded that there actually was an enemy within. The enemy was very real, literally an existential foe guilty of murdering 20 billion people, not just the hobgoblin of alleged McCarthyite paranoia. Peace activists are depicted, at times, as deluded, dangerous, and even vaguely traitorous, giving the impression that at least some of the writers were familiar with Orwell’s writings on wartime pacifists. And the frightening nature of the relentless suicide-bomber-attack machine was indelibly captured by the sensational concept that any Cylon killed in battle could simply be resurrected to fight another day.

Though the show received raves from writers and critics associated with the Right, Battlestar Galactica was in no way a conservative document. Numerous subplots were congenial to liberal sensibilities, as when President Roslin’s breast cancer is cured with embryonic stem cells. But hawkish arguments and assumptions were portrayed with integrity. The regrettable trade-offs implicit in any war, particularly a war to prevent total extinction, were treated as real.

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