As you may or may not have figured out, the Chef is an avowed and avested science fiction fan, for the most part preaching the virtues of that canceled little show named after a ship named after a luminous insect. However, he does every so often condescend to watch lesser franchises (well, okay, it may be more than “every so often”, but they’re still lesser than The Great Gawd And Master Joss’s pinnacle series). To that end, I just finished watching season 4.0 of the new Battlestar Galactica. For years now I’ve been trying to get my friends into this series so I’d have someone to discuss its nuances with. Sadly, BSG is one of those shows which you really have to sit down and watch from the beginning, or you end up having absolutely no idea what the hell’s going on. Whenever I do talk them into watching an episode, I spend half an hour trying to explain what’s happened in the previous dozen or so episodes to set up for whatever non-event is going down on the screen.
But I’m getting sidetracked. As I was watching the first half of season 4 (and yes, I’m aware that the second half is airing now, but I was waiting until I had finished the DVD set to pick back up watching new episodes), I realized, “Hey, this sucks…we’ve got people following peyote-induced visions for no discernible reasons, people having mysterious (and completely nonsensical) backgrounds for no discernible reasons, people double-crossing each other for no discernible reasons (aside from just to be a jerk – and let’s face it, BSG has always had more than its fair share of assholes), and people returning from the dead (with brand-new ships, to boot) without even so much as a Genesis device or other piece of science-fiction wonderflonium to explain it away.
Considering that the show has always had such things as robots (well, biological androids) debating the meaning of life and the existence of God, you’d have to get pretty far out there to move into irredeemable mystical territory. But they’ve gone and done it. Battlestar Galactica has jumped the shark.
There, I’ve said what everyone was thinking. A wonderful and moving show, a (mostly) realistic, gritty war story and political drama, has this season evolved into a hokey drug-induced, meandering religious vision quest that makes no fracking sense. The show as it exists now bears no resemblance to what it was at its creative height – season 2 and the first half of season 3 (although the first season gets an honorable mention for its sheer simplicity and grunginess). Watching through season 4, I can’t help but get the feeling that, like the people behind Lost, the creators of BSG have driven the bus out into the middle of nowhere (metaphorically speaking) and have no idea how to get to where they were going in the first place.
The discovery of Earth fits neatly into that conception. I can see the writers and producers in a meeting:
“So, what are we gonna do this season? We can’t have ’em wandering around looking for Earth forever. It’ll look like Voyager, and we all know how much that sucked.”
“So, how about they find Earth, and it’s today, and they get to ride around on flying motorcycles? And we can get Wolfman Jack to guest-star. It’ll be great!”
“Oh, fuck no, man. We’re not going there. And isn’t Wolfman Jack dead?”
“I’ve got it! They find Earth…and it’s destroyed by a fracking nuclear war! And the dead people on Earth – they’re all Cylons, too! And remember how we made Tigh a Cylon? He was there 2000 years ago in a past life!”
“Hmm…not bad…I’ll send Ron a memo. So how did Cylons get to Earth if they were made in the Twelve Colonies?”
“…”
In that spirit, I’ve made a list of “remember when”s to commemorate ye olde Galactica flying off into the sunset.
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to rewatch the first two seasons. You know, when it was a good show.
The Chef was born 856 years ago on a small planet orbiting a star in the Argolis cluster. It was prophesied that the arrival of a child with a birthmark shaped like a tentacle would herald the planet's destruction. When the future Chef was born with just such a birthmark, panic ensued (this would not be the last time the Chef inspired such emotion). The child, tentacle and all, was loaded into a rocket-powered garbage scow and launched into space. Unfortunately, the rocket's exhaust ignited one of the spectators' flatulence, resulting in a massive explosion that detonated the planet's core, destroying the world and killing everyone on it.
When the would-be Chef awoke from his torpor, he looked around at the new world he found himself on. His first words were, “Hey, this place sucks." Disguising himself as one of the planet's dominant species of semi-domesticated ape, the being who would become known as the Chef wandered the Earth until he ended up in its most disreputable slum - Paris, France.
Taking a job as a can-can dancer, the young Chef made a living that way until one day one of the cooks at a local bistro fell ill with food poisoning (oh, bitter irony). In a desperate move, the bistro's owner rushed into one of the local dance halls, searching for a replacement. He grabbed the ugliest can-can dancer he could find, and found himself instead with an enterprising (if strange) young man who now decided, based on this random encounter, to only answer to the name “Chef".
His success as a French chef was immediate (but considering that this is a country where frogs and snails are considered delicacies, this may or may not be a significant achievement). Not only was the Chef's food delicious, it also kept down the local homeless population. He rose to the heights of stardom in French cuisine, and started a holy war against the United Kingdom to end the reign of terror British food had inflicted on its citizens.
When the Crimean War broke out around France, the Chef assisted Nikola Tesla and Galileo in perfecting the scanning electron microscope, which was crucial in driving back the oncoming Communist hordes. It would later be said that without the Chef, the war would have been lost. He was personally awarded a Purple Heart by the King of France.
After that, the Chef traveled to America, home of such dubious culinary delights as McDonald's Quarter Pounder With Cheese. He immediately adopted the Third World nation as his new home, seeing it as his job to protect and enlighten it. When the Vietnam War began, he immediately volunteered and served in the Army of the Potomac under Robert E. Lee and General Patton. During the war, the Chef killed dozens of Nazis, most of them with his bare hands.
Marching home from war across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, stark-naked and freezing, the Chef wound up on the shores of Mexico. He spent several years there, drinking tequila with Pancho Villa and James Dean. He put his culinary skills to the test when he invented the 5,000-calorie Breakfast Chili Burrito With Orange Sauce (which is today still a favorite in some parts of Sonora).
Eventually, the Chef returned to his adopted home of America, where he met a slimy, well-coiffed weasel who was starting up a new kind of buffet - one dedicated to providing the highest-quality unmentionable appetizers to the online community. The Chef dedicated himself to spreading the word of his famous Lard Sandwich (two large patties of fried lard, in between two slices of toasted buttered lard, with bacon and cheese), as well as occasionally writing about his opinions on less-important topics than food.
Every word of this is true, if only in the sense that every word of this exists in the English language.
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