After my rough start with Battlestar Galactica, I'm now so totally into it that I can't bear to miss an episode, and even though my DVR is piling up with episodes of Heroes and Jericho and House and Medium and I'm so behind on everything else, I'm not letting BSG get away from me.

Now, I'm not quite as worked up as a lot of other folks over what just happened with Apollo and Starbuck in last week's episode, but I do find myself increasingly intrigued by Starbuck: she is simply not like any other female character on television at the moment, maybe not like any female character on TV ever -- and she's got few peers in movies, too. (Ripley. Maybe Ripley comes close. Maybe.) She is just so ... frakked up. Like women hardly ever are in fiction. She's frakked up like men in made-up stories are allowed to be: huge chips on their shoulders, wracked with angst and pain and rage, howling mad at just about everything, lashing out at everything and everyone that tries to get close to them. Female characters with issues like that tend to have some extra crap to deal with: they find themselves butting heads with matters of sexism, of trying to prove themselves either as something different than men, or better than men, or as good as men. So much so that whatever other stuff they're bitter about becomes subsumed into a battle of the sexes, and that never gets resolved, so their other anger never even gets to the forefront.

But not Starbuck. One of the beauties of BSG, from my perspective as a woman, is that there simply do not seem to be any hangups about gender haunting these people (and boy, that's some potent science fiction right there). Starbuck is not facing constant rumbling about women doing jobs they weren't meant to do, or taking jobs from men, or any crap like that. If and when there is resentment directed toward Starbuck, it's because she's arrogant or takes foolish risks -- it's about her as an individual, not her as a representative of half the human race. She's not a woman -- she's a person who just happens to be female.

And no matter how progressive or how enlightened other fictional universes are, there's always that battle-of-the-sexes thing hanging over it all. But not here. All the female characters are first pilots or presidents or patriots, and then, maybe, women (many of the characters on the show, male and female, could easily have their gender switched without greatly impacting the dramatic purpose of the character). The question of "who qualifies as a person?" has been fobbed off onto the Cylons. And the rancor that that debate generates among the characters becomes, in turn, quietly, sneakily illustrative of just how far we humans on 21st-century Earth have to go when it comes to answering that question for ourselves, too.

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