I finally watched the finale of Battlestar Galactaca. It was good, but… disappointing.
(Warning – this is more of a series review than an episode review. It’s long, and very spoily.)
Technically speaking, the finale was breathtakingly perfect. It was exciting. The special effects were gorgeous. The emotions were powerful. The final outcome (Would they rescue Hera? Would they all die? Would Cavil get away with his plan?) was always in doubt. Tory was finally punished for killing Callie, Boomer for, well, everything. Anders finally amounted to something. Starbuck fulfilled her destiny. Most of the plot lines, and all of the recent ones, were wrapped up in a nice little ball. And when Roslin died, I broke down and cried for the rest of the episode.
So BSG ‘worked’, if you will. It was an emotional, powerful story. It had strong, interesting characters. The plot was coherent, for a TV show at least. The music and cinematography were beautiful. But in the end, it all came down to the biblical book of Ecclesiastes. “There is nothing new under the sun.” = “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” Yeah, yeah. History repeats itself. Life is a cycle. Can we break the cycle? And since they intentionally forgot their history, we’re probably doomed to repeat it too. Oh – and the god who is “beyond good and evil” still conveniently wants to stop violence. They took the easy way out.
I’m not sure what I was expecting. BSG was like a big mystery novel, or perhaps like a serious Hitchhiker’s Guide. The question: What is life? What is its meaning? What defines humanity? Throughout the series, they kept dropping clues. Prophecies. Harvey Six and Harvey Baltar. The time capsule/disease thing. The ‘final five’. Starbuck generally. The Eye of Jupiter. The Arrow of Athena. The magic cave, complete with its star chart. Kobal. The opera house. And on and on. They were building up endlessly, each new discovery a piece of the secret, a new revelation, enough to provide insight while still building up the importance of the final discovery. I expected some incredible revelation, some insight into what it really means to be human. And all we got was “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.” All of that buildup, all that tension? It was nothing but a big red herring, with a slight hint of Deus Ex Mechina.
I had honestly thought that, “All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again,” was the red herring. After all, that’s not interesting, is it? If you can’t affect the future, if it’s all futile, then why even try? Yes, there was some indication that they might have changed something (via the Harveys), but then they showed an extended shot of a dancing robot (we’re doomed). And so, the potent images of the previous seasons amounted to nothing. The opera house scene had been so strange so threatening. Caprica Six and Baltar were taking Hera, taking her away from Athena and Roslin, and from the human race. All hope was lost, it seemed. The replay/projection of the opera house scene, running through Galactaca, was beautiful, provocative – but Six and Baltar were on the same side as Roslin and Athena. They just didn’t notice them. The scene didn’t mean anything, and lost its bite. The same with D’Anna apologizing to the image, and the Arrow, the ramblings of the hybrids, even Starbuck’s death, came to little or nothing. Leoben’s obsession with Starbuck was apparently nothing more than his realizing that Starbuck was some sort of angel. It was all just so… pointless.
I suppose I had hoped, foolish computer scientist me, that the series would try to provide insight on what it means to be human, and the Cylons relationship to that. Why are the ‘humans’ human, and the Cylons not? What defines it? Do humans have souls, and Cylons not? What is emotion, do Cylons really have it, and is that the humanizing factor? In the end, the humans accepted as human only those Cylons (Athena, Caprica, and the final five), for whom they had developed emotional attachments to before they knew they were Cylons!
Now, they certainly tried to make the Cylons humanized to some extent – the Cylon repair crews, the Cylon seat on the Quorum, the Cylon acceptance of human military leadership, the Centurions being given their freedom, etc. But all of this fall under the category of ‘telling’ rather than ’showing’. We didn’t ever see anything from a Cylon perspective. In the end, they were still ‘other’, still machines. Humans are still the ‘real thing’, and we still don’t know what that even means!
Just to make this point, here’s an off-the-top-of-my-head chart of noticeable Human characters vs. noticeable Cylon characters, ordered very roughly in order of importance. I’m not including the final five – although they’re really humans, just in Cylon bodies. X’s mean the character is dead, ?’s mean I wasn’t sure if the character merited inclusion.
| Humans | Cylons |
|---|---|
| Bill Adama | Caprica Six |
| X – Roslin | X – Natalie Six |
| X – Starbuck | X – Gina Six |
| Lee Adama | Shelly Six? |
| Baltar | X – Boomer |
| Helo | Athena |
| X – Cally | X – D’Anna Five? |
| X – Zarak | X – “Downloaded” Five |
| X – Cain | (Starbuck-obsessed) Leoben |
| Lampkin | Station Two? |
| X – Gaeta | X – Cavil (They all act identically) |
| X – Dualla | |
| X – Kat | |
| X – Billy | |
| X – Zak? | |
| Cottle | |
| Paula | |
| X – Seelix? | |
| X – Racetrack? |
I know I’m missing some other important humans, but here’s the point. Except for Caprica, Gina, Boomer, Athena, and D’Anna, there aren’t any real Cylon characters. They are as faceless as the Centurions, or as the red-shirt deck hands (who usually at least had names!). And this is where I think BSG missed the boat. In the beginning, it worked – the Cylons have a sort of shared existence, per model. Then Caprica, Boomer, and Athena ‘broke away’, and then D’Anna (who was still working as a hive mind, just often at odds with the other Cylons). And that was it. D’Anna was the only Cylon not defined by her relationship with humans. Sure, they had the random scenes with the repair teams, and the Six in the council, but it was too little, too late. They didn’t give any names, any numbers, we couldn’t distinguish them, they didn’t seem. well, human. The question of defining humanity, or even worth is left almost untouched.
To be sure, there were flashes. The group scenes with the Cylons on New Caprica, Adama bonding with Athena, Baltar interacting with Gina. But it all fell short. Here’s what I think: instead of those endless dead-weight episodes about Lee, Lee and Kara, Anders and Kara, etc. (You know – the I want to be a lawyer bit), etc., they could have introduced some different Six characters – some who weren’t defined by having been mistaken for a human. Tricia Helfer looks so different with different hair, it would have been easy. And we all know that Lucy Lawless can portray an amazing array of characters, even when they all look alike – why didn’t they write that? Leoben, too – I really would have liked to understand his perspective. All we have now is that he’s creepily obsessed with Starbuck. Was is just one Leoben? All of them? If just one, what do the others think about it? What do the Leoben group discussions sound like?
In other words, the Cylons started out as machines. The humans saw them that way, they saw themselves that way. As time went on it became clear that either it was more complicated than that, or that it didn’t really matter (and in that case, what does? They never tried to touch that either.) But all we got were exceptions. A few humans fall in love with a few Cylons, and vice versa. There was no universal ’sentientizing’ (for lack of a better word) of the Cylons. Even more, by the Significant Eight having been created by the Final Five, the eight were robbed of much of their remaining individuality.
At the very end, they free the Centurions – thus recognizing them as having worth as well. But none of the Centurions had names or were individuals, so this just doesn’t have any impact. BSG simply missed it. They missed the question of strong AI, of defining humanity, of discussing why we think it’s important to treat people as people.
You know what would be interesting? Instead of this Caprica prequal series, what about a series about the Centurions. Make them individuals, and take it seriously. Not like a Wall-E, etc. or like the robots on Star Wars, but make them real characters, with real problems. I don’t know what changes that would take (voices, perhaps?), but it would be very interesting and enlightening.
I think that individualizing the Cylons, even to the point making the series half Cylon would have been so much more interesting. For one thing, it’s never been done before, not so far as I know. For another, it would help with this complaint about the fate of the women on the show (they’re either dead or coupled, if you didn’t notice). A dozen named Sixes and Eights, would have changed the demographics of the ending dramatically.
One more example of how individualizing the Cylons would have been interesting: The Gina/Cain story. Gina was mostly interesting first as the rape victim who impacts Baltar, and second as having dramatically influenced Cain to be a horrible person (and they messed that up too). But they constantly refused to let us see it from Gina’s point of view. She was just – well, not a machine, but more of a creature, something to be pitied. I always felt like Gina really loved Cain, but felt she had to ‘do her duty to her people’. She didn’t want to betray Cain, and thus felt betrayed in turn. Sort of a mirror of the Baltar/Caprica Six relationship, if you will, only more tragic. But we missed all that (if that was indeed the intention), since Cain was portrayed as a monster and then killed, and Gina was completely opaque. For that matter, even Caprica was mostly opaque – we mostly see Baltar’s side of the story.
I’ll stop rambling now. I think I’ve made my point.
In the end, BSG was an excellent series. It was well made, riveting, and at least a bit more equitable than most series. But I just can’t help but wish that they had been a bit more groundbreaking, that they had tried to answer the hard questions, instead of falling back on a trite theme.
I sorry, but I don’t believe that repetition is the meaning of life. If it is – life’s pretty stupid.