In her autobiography Wishful Drinking, Carrie Fisher recalls her most memorable direction from George Lucas while playing Princess Leia in Star Wars: Forget about wearing a bra because "there's no underwear in outer space."
The women of sci-fi have come a long way since then, and for proof, look no further than Battlestar Galactica. Returning Friday night for the start of its final half-season, the Peabody Award-winning television series continues to blend current events and religion into its thoughtful story lines. Along the way, BSG has also conjured a gender-blind universe filled with female characters of genuine substance.
Admiral Adama (played by Edward James Olmos, pictured right with Mary McDonnell) still commands the battered Galactica and the rest of the ragtag fleet, but the women of BSG will have plenty to say about what lies ahead for the remnants of humanity, who landed on a wasteland during last fall's toxic-shock midseason finale
"Battlestar Galactica has gone out of its way to establish this environment where this sense of gender equality can be expressed," said women's studies professor Sue Brennan, who screened the show for a course called "Gender, Race and Sexuality in Pop Culture" at Ohio State University. "Battlestar Galactica speaks to a broadening of women's roles in sci-fi that we began to see in the '90s with shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, which introduced stronger female characters."
Prime example: The show's clever, cancer-stricken President Roslin as portrayed by McDonnell (pictured top left). Inhabiting the character full force, McDonnell has wielded more authority in BSG than she ever did in the Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves.
"There isn't this idea that women are going to be guided by their hormones," Brennan said. "With Roslin, she makes at lot of tough decisions that are not compelled by her feminine intuition. At the same time, in the second season, she had that whole weird mystic breakdown religious experience that sort of played into her femininity."
Time Line: 5 Femmes Fatales of Sci-Fi__Barbarella:__ 1968 kitsch spectacle cast Jane Fonda as a bikini-clad outer space explorer.
Princess Leia: Sporting the hair bun that launched a thousand Comic-Con imitators, Carrie Fisher brought some spunk to Star Wars' 1977-style take on the intergalactic damsel in distress.
Sarah Connor: In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, Linda Hamilton made biceps sexy as the Resistance's gun-toting rebel warrior.
Ripley: Starting with 1979's Alien, Sigourney Weaver emanated calm, fierce authority – until crew members' innards began exploding.
River: Summer Glau added a fresh, street-urchin spin to Joss Whedon's 2002 outer space series.
In a series filled with dramatic reversals, the most radical switcheroo on the gender front happened before filming ever began, when Galactica's creators decided to cast Katee Sackhoff (pictured above, right) to play the role of Starbuck.
"The whole notion of women in the [U.S.] military is a relatively new idea," series co-creator Ronald D. Moore told TV critics during a BSG press conference. "Making Starbuck a woman was a way of avoiding what I felt would be 'rogue pilot with a heart of gold' cliche."
Brennan calls the role reversal a bold move. "There was all this outrage: 'How dare they change this very masculine renegade character,"
she said. "How can they translate Starbuck into a female character? But the show has clearly proven that they can. Kara Thrace's competence is maybe questioned as far as her disregard for authority but never because of her gender."
Besides generating big buzz for BSG, Sackhoff's portrayal of Galactica's resident visionary/fighter pilot/possible final Cylon has galvanized viewers over the run of the show. She's come back from the dead, saved salty Col. Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan, pictured below right) from death and guided her people to Earth. It remains to be seen what Starbuck does for an encore, but the actress' rough-and-tumble take on the fleet's most mesmerizing fighter jock will doubtless continue to render gender utterly irrelevant.
Even Tricia Helfer
(pictured above, middle) has managed to evolve beyond the seductress version of Cylon
Number Six that gob-smacked drooling fanboys during the show's first couple of seasons.
"A lot of people expected my character to be the eye candy," she said, speaking Thursday by cellphone from her car en route to a Battlestar Galactica auction in Pasadena, California.
"That preconception was strengthened by the fact that I came from a modeling background and had just started acting. People went,
'model-turned-actress, in a red dress, blonde hair: great!' Luckily, throughout the season we got to prove that wasn't the case.... Reducing
Six to just a sex object would have been a little bit one note, and that wasn't what it was about."
Playing a "skinjob" Cylon capable of being reborn and copied, Helfer enjoyed playing multiple variations of Number Six. In addition to Caprica Six and the "Head Six" that only Gaius Baltar (played by James Callis) can see, Helfer portrayed the traumatized Gina in Season 2 followed by the Cylon leadership role assumed by Natalie in Season 4.
Helfer savored the opportunity to "get killed and come back for more."
"Looking back on it, I get pretty excited about all these different characters," Helfer said, "Each one didn't necessarily take as much of a journey, but through all of the characters together, I got to have quite a journey."
Other strong women on the show include Grace Park (pictured, right), who plays Lt. Sharon "Athena" Agathon and various other incarnations of Cylon Number Eight, and Lucy Lawless, on board as rebel Cylon commander D'Anna Biers (aka Number Three).
In her role, Lawless adds a fearsome chapter to her action babe resume. After helping to create the female ass-kicker archetype with her mid-'90s TV series Xena: Warrior Princess,
Lawless emerged last season from deep-freeze mode. Now that she's been
"unboxed," she puts out a don't-mess-with-me vibe that brooks no challenge.
Galactica has been particularly effective in shattering the mid-century sci-fi tradition epitomized by Princess Leia in Star Wars, according to professor Brennan.
"On Battlestar Galactica, these are not damsels in distress that the men have to save, and that's appealing particularly for women of my generation in their late 20s and 30s," she said. "We were raised thinking about equality and I think Battlestar Galactica
attracts women who maybe weren't interested in sci-fi in the first place but now watch the show because it has so many strong female characters."
Big questions remain for BSG fans as the series embarks on the final leg of its boundary-pushing four-season run. But beyond the
identity of the fifth Cylon, the outcome of the Cylon civil war and the fate of an apparently devastated Earth, one issue appears to be already resolved for the annals of TV history.
"Battlestar Galactica shows us so many women in positions of power," Brennan said, "which is unique not only for sci-fi as a genre, but for television in general."
The final, 10-episode run of Battlestar Galactica begins Friday at 10 p.m. EST on Sci Fi Channel. Photos courtesy Sci Fi Channel.
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