Well, where to begin? Let's start with the cast and characters, and specifically with Edward James Olmos as Commander William Adama and Mary McDonnell as President Laura Roslin.
Olmos first caught my attention in his turn as Lieutenant Castillo on
Miami Vice, where his quiet, funereal demeanor contrasted starkly with the show's exuberant use of color and music. Even then, twenty years younger than when he first stepped into Adama's shoes, he projected no-nonsense authority. That quality in Olmos has matured superbly through his age and experience, and it's hard to imagine anyone else bringing it more powerfully or effectively to this role.
I wasn't familiar with Mary McDonnell, but she impressed me even more. The role of Roslin is leagues more demanding, in a way that "
backward and in high heels" only begins to suggest. Without the benefit of Olmos's craggy features or well-worn masculinity, she has to match him gravitas for gravitas. In fact, she often has to do so in moments of visible physical frailty, as her character bears the ravages of cancer and debilitating treatment. And even through all that, she has to project a luminous and very feminine beauty--inner, to be sure, but also undeniably outer (very few love scenes have ever felt more earned or understandable to me than the flashback of her much younger former student's eagerness to be with her, or Adama's spooning embrace of her in bed even as she's bald and at her most withered). Somehow, she always pulls off all of that at once. Every second she was on screen astounded me, and held me riveted to her presence and performance. What's more, Roslin has to grow more as a character, has to wrestle in her capacity as President with policy positions and her own thoughts and feelings about a vaster range of issues, has to go through more personal ups and downs in her journey of faith than agnostic Adama, and has to remain ultimately more sympathetic to the audience while reflecting greater moral complexity and forcing the audience to deal with some very alienating choices (she staked out a few positions that would have made me loathe a real-life politician, and yet I never could help admiring her, even in those moments).
Now, I'd bet a million dollars that at every stage of development, there was someone agitating for the show's primary focus to fall on younger, prettier characters, and to basically make it
Melrose Space. I'd bet another million that the single most important decision in the show's artistic, critical, and popular success was the refusal to go down that road, and to place the primary focus instead firmly on these richer, more compelling characters played by older, more accomplished performers.
Their love story is truly one for the ages. It's forged in the fires of an antagonism that runs through the entire first season, culminating in Adama's military coup and Roslin's refusal to blink in the face of it. By letting their hostilities reach this crisis point, they take each other's measure--and ironically, love what they find. Not so very long after that, Admiral Cain's arrival forces a very telling moment--one of the best-played, and one of my favorites in the whole series. The instant it sinks in for Roslin that Cain is Adama's superior, Cain remarks, "Madame President, you look like I just shot your dog." Roslin has grown by that point into a canny, self-controlled politician, and McDonnell strikes a pitch-perfect note of such a character having an uncharacteristically unguarded moment. Once Cain is out of the picture, Roslin promptly promotes Adama to Admiral, and I couldn't help feeling that underlying the objective circumstances that in fact qualified him for the promotion, she was doing herself a favor in elevating him to the position her heart wanted him to occupy. He senses this as well, and acknowledges it in the kiss he gives her before aide/confidant Billy helps the enfeebled President limp back to her quarters.
After that, we don't get many glimpses behind their professional facades with regard to each other until almost the very end of the show. When Roslin finally, at the end of season 4.0, confesses her love and Adama replies, "About time," I think he's echoing pretty much every viewer's thoughts. The intervening tension was well worth it, however. Their romance probably did work better in a slow-simmer on the backburner that infused and informed damn near everything else they did in any other capacity--which was a lot. Foregrounding their romance earlier could have swamped out many other fine occasions that tested and demanded everything the characters and actors had to give in each particular moment.
Their ending, with Roslin's inevitable death and Adama all alone, was as lovely as it was heartbreaking. I've seen a lot of criticisms leveled at the finale, but if I had to say that it committed any cardinal sin, that would be yanking focus off of this conclusion to a long, moving, satisfying and yet ache-inducing arc that arguably served as the emotional backbone of the show, in order to drive home a more philosophical/thematic point.
More to come, on other characters and casting choices . . .
