Uncle Ben is my cool uncle. He lives in New York City, plays guitar and “Fight Night,” and gave me my first shot of tequila.

Imagine my shock when he told me I just had to watch “Battlestar Galactica.”

A Sci Fi Channel series based on the 1970s flop and coming up on its final episodes, “Battlestar Galactica” tells the story of a small band of humans fleeing the Cylons who wiped out most of humanity. Cylons are a machine race with twelve models that look so much like humans that several of them don’t even know they aren’t.

The show should be God-awful. Text flashes across the screen holding out hope of a mysterious “place called Earth,” an elusive planet imbued with all kinds of mythological significance. The title ship’s colonel looks startlingly like a one-eyed John McCain. The curse word of choice is motherfracker. Not exactly “The Sopranos.”

But somehow it works.

For one thing, it’s great entertainment. The writers have developed a quasi-religious mystery about the “final five” Cylons that keeps getting more intriguing. Ships whiz by raining nuclear weapons on their enemies.

And did I mention that Cylon babes are smokin’ hot?

Beyond that though, “Battlestar Galactica” talks about issues we’ve all heard and talked to death- racism, the benevolence of God, the tension between civil liberties and security, what it means to be human- in an entirely new way.

The show is interested in the role of democracy in wartime. The humans’ military leader, Admiral Adama, and their president Laura Roslin, claim for themselves extraordinary executive powers in the interests of the species’ survival. They treat the legislative branch with contempt and frequently use military power to stymie its proceedings. If they didn’t, paralysis, splintering factionalism, and even outright civil war might set in. “Battlestar Galactica” weighs in at a time when wiretaps, waterboarding, Guantanamo Bay, and Abu Ghraib are a constant source of debate. In “Galactica” at least, it’s not at all clear which side is right.

This season, the line between Cylon and human keeps blurring. Characters we’ve known to be humans for years have suddenly discovered they’re actually machines. Some of the machines act far more humane than some of the humans, and “Galactica” reminds us of a side of ourselves we’d rather forget. The side that led ordinary people to turn a blind eye to Jews sent to their deaths and to argue that one man is worth only three-fifths of another because of the color of his skin. We’re offered both a critical look at our darkest recesses and hope that we can rise above them.

It’s this duality that makes “Battlestar Galactica” great. People are both good and bad. They do things they should and things they shouldn’t. More often, they do things that we can’t say for certain are right or wrong.

We live in a confusing world. Aside from Bill O’Reilly and Keith Olbermann, very few of us know for sure where we stand. Many views, especially the most controversial, have much to be said both for and against them. Unlike the reductionism that characterizes so many shows, “Galactica” embraces the complexity of human-and non-human-existence. Every episode challenges you to think seriously about yourself.

Despite its special effects and fantastic elements, “Battlestar Galactica” has more to say about the real world than just about anything else on television.

Nathaniel French is a sophomore theater studies and math double major. He can be reached for comment at [email protected].