SPOILERS for Battlestar Galactica and Lost ahoy.
Battlestar Galactica and Lost are two nerd-worshipped television classics with large ensemble casts that mix sci-fi and spiritualism. While no geek worth their salt would tell you they’re the same, the similarities between the two shows make them a handy illustration of two contrasting ways that writers can work a jump forward in time into a complex show. What makes a jump forward work? Why would you skip through time when you created the events on that timeline yourself? Is this narrative time travel just an excuse for your male leads to grow beards?
To answer these pressing questions, let’s look at the jump forward of a year in the season 2 finale of BSG (“Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II”, s2e20) and the subsequent jump of four months in the first episode of season 3, “Occupation”. Then, for contrast, we’ll take a look at Lost’s flashforwards at the end of season 3 (“Through the Looking Glass”, s3e22&23), and the flash-sideways (which end up being flashforwards) at the end of season 6.
On BSG, the jump forward is set up by the moral ambiguity and political maneuvering that is business as usual on the Galactica. However, what makes the jump gasp-worthy is the fact that one shades-of-grey situation generally leads into another in the plotting of this show, but in “Lay Down Your Burdens”, everything stops. Backed into a corner, nobody has any choices left. Roslin allows Baltar to take the presidency even though she remembers seeing him with Six on Caprica, because Adama convinces her not to cross the line of stealing the election. Baltar wins by promising everyone that they will settle on the newly discovered planet that he brands New Caprica, on the grounds that it will probably be full of puppy dogs and rainbows since there’s air and stuff. The Six model that Baltar helped escape from Pegasus sets off the nuclear warhead that he gave her as an adorable romantic gesture, destroying Cloud Nine and several other ships.
On this rather bracing note, we jump a year into the future, skipping almost all of the fallout. Why skip the year in which New Caprica is colonized? Because everyone already knew it was going to be a disaster. It has been pointed out by several characters that the planet is rough and Baltar isn’t fit to lead a Boy Scout troop, let alone the remains of humanity. But once Roslin makes her decision, she essentially forces everyone to unhappily go with the flow, which is tense but not rife with conflict. Even the relationships that evolve over the course of the year, which are revealed in such a way as to provoke gasps, have evolved organically upon a second look - the groundwork for them was all laid before the jump. It allows us to pick up on what we missed:
Both battlestars are in orbit, staffed only by the bare minimum crew, one commanded by Admiral Adama and his new Mustache of Loneliness, and the other by Apollo, who has acquired a pissy attitude which he inflicts on Dee . . . his wife (dun dun dun). Down on New Caprica, Baltar sports some haggard stubble and ignores his aide (Gaeta! [dun dun dun]) in favor of pills and prostitutes. Roslin has donned a sensible sweater and some intense regret and returned to her teaching roots. Chief Tyrol has grown a Serious Beard, as he is now head of a disgruntled workers union and responsible for his pregnant wife . . . Cally. Although Anders remains mercifully free of facial hair, he’s come down with pneumonia, much to the dismay of his long-tressed bride . . . Starbuck. She only gets a few tense words into contacting a chilly Apollo for antibiotics before the Cylon fleet arrives. Lacking the resources to defend the colony, the battlestars jump away. Baltar, who is starting to think this whole president thing is not that much fun after all, surrenders. Everybody watches as the Cylons march through the marketplace.
So here we are, in the midst of the action, when suddenly we jump again. It takes a certain amount of chutzpah to almost completely skip the rise of the robot overlords in a show about the battle for humanity’s survival despite their robot overlords. But again, it makes sense to elide the next four months at the beginning of “Occupation” because the humans have no choices to make in the face of the Cylon occupation, so they have nothing dramatic to do but be pushed around. The interesting thing that we want to know is what happened to everybody, and the jump allows us to find that out almost immediately and get them back to the point when they can start to make choices. So when we pick up the story, Adama is planning the rescue, newly doughy Apollo is fighting ennui, one-eyed grizzled sea captain Col. Tigh is being let out of prison, Starbuck is trying to outsmart/stab her jailer, and Anders and Tyrol are leading the resistance. We haven’t missed anything, really, but we get the fun of finding our footing.
While BSG jumps forward in time because it knows that you can fill in the blanks yourself, Lost does the same thing because it knows that you can’t. Lost doesn’t skip parts of its narrative because there’s no conflict at that point on the timeline, it skips because there is definitely conflict at that point on the timeline and the writers would like you to go nuts trying to figure out what that might be.
For more time-jumping narrative fun, check out Jumping Forward In Time on BSG and Lost, Part 2.
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