Short musings on Battlestar Galactica (and a few questions)

When I was much younger than I am now, I wrote a post on a blog that has long since passed away (something I reposted later on) about Battlestar Galactica, the reboot series that aired on what was then the SciFi channel during my senior year of high school (the first episode aired in October 2004) and the first few years of my postsecondary education.

I reflect on that series often. It was, for those of us alive and aware during the early/mid-2000s, one of the few (if only) places on TV where we saw a normatively polytheistic society, even if it was viewed through the lens of Hollywood and ignorant of some of the implications of a polytheistic worldview. It was also a place with gutsy commentary about war and brutality, with some of its episodes directly responding to things happening in the USA’s wars at the time, including the torture of prisoners in Iraq and Afghanistan. Finally, it remains one of the few commentaries on artificial intelligence where AI is allowed to be complex and messy and ambiguous and personal.

From a Platonic standpoint, one of the lenses through which we can view the Cylons is by comparing them to the Giants or the Titans or any of the other divisive, materializing and pluralizing divinities who create strife. There is a way in which, through their material reincarnations into exact duplicates of their bodies and the commitment to an exact number of types, they are an ultimate atomization of a series of a God, with too many material attachments and a strong commitment to division (as displayed in their attempt to wipe humanity out). It is only once they lose that ability that things begin to change, and ultimately (thinking especially of the final few episodes), there is such a blurring between the Cylon and the Human that it becomes less relevant where someone started than who they are becoming in life and what kind of moral fiber they develop. The questions about morality and what to do when things get rougher than rough are woven into the series from the beginning.

I (mostly) wrote this post so I could share a video clip of one of Adama’s speeches, one which my mind has often gone back to over the past few years as tragedy after tragedy unfolds in the news: disasters driven by climate change, the famines sweeping the globe as our food supply continues to crack under climate strain (the rice situation is terrifying), the armed conflicts and the genocides, the social and psychological aftermath of colonialism, the smaller-and-closer-to-home tragedies. (I’ve seen the miniseries more times than I could count — when I was younger and much more social, I kept trying to get other people into it. I have visual recall of many of the scenes in the pilot miniseries episodes as a result.) Despite its tone, I’ve often found it challengingly optimistic, like a lead-in to the Alcibiades where the title character learns that he is the soul and should act in its (his) best interest. What is the best of who we can become if we actually deal with things instead of letting them fester or blaming others? What about us is worth saving? Who are we without our enmities and addictions and calcifications? What do we look like when we as individuals are sound, and what does a healthy society look like? Or — to turn this towards piety — how do we root ourselves in what is godlike over what is titanic or gigantic, and how do we become wise enough to truly know the difference?