It feels like Christmas morning for sci-fans tonight. Guests are arriving in a few minutes for our Battlestar Galactica finale party. They are bringing their own concoction of neon green ambrosia.

Okay, we’ve just entered a deeper concentric circle of geekdom, didn’t we?

Well, like Christmas, we will soon be experiencing withdrawal, a wave of sadness as we realize the party is over.  But we’ll also be left with a great gift — a sci-fi series that, at its best, had the guts to reflect, on an individual and geo-political level, the complications of life.

We’ve talked a lot about Battlestar over the years at PopPolitics– especially the power of its allegory of a post 9/11 world order.  No need to rehash it here.

But it’s nice to hear that this past Tuesday there was a Battlestar summit of sorts at the UN.  In fact, it’s stunning.  Rarely does a complex allegory like Battlestar have to opportunity to make such a direct impact on its time.

Mary McDonnell, who plays President Laura Roslin, explained the show’s simple but profound goal:

“People who are taking these actions — that are unacceptable — are sometimes in positions where they don’t see the solution,” she says. “The experience of that is what we wanted to expose to our audience.”

McDonnell hopes that dramatizing the way decent leaders can come to wrong decisions intough situations will create more of a dialogue about other ways to use power.

Writing for NPR, Lara Pelligrinelli then wonders what that dialogue might look like:

Although debates about terrorism and human rights have receded to the background for many Americans, Battlestar Galactica may help the U.N. meet the challenge of reaching a broader audience.

Naimah Hakim, a 16-year-old sophomore from Westchester, was one of a hundred New York high-school students in attendance. To her, the show brings home issues in a way that most of her classroom lessons don’t.

“When you’re watching the show, you don’t question why you have to learn it,” she says. “You understand because it’s something that hits the nail on the head.”

Funny how a multi-layered allegory can help us see so clearly.