BSG: How The Cylons Avoided Being Assimilated By The Borg

One of the reoccurring problems in serialized storytelling is Villain Decay. Your Big Bad appears, scares the bejesus out of the hero, who just barely survives the first encounter to fight another day for Truth, Justice and another sign post an the way to Earth. But by the sixth or seventh time the villain appears, the hero has figured out their week spots and they are easily defeated. If they keep coming back after that, this big bad scary villain devolves into a joke.

One of the most notable instances of Villain Decay are the Borg from Star Trek. In their first appearance, The crew of the Enterprise barely survive a brief encounter with one Borg Cube, and then only due to the intervention of the walking deus ex machina, Q. Picard and the crew of the Enterprise flirt with the Borg for the next few seasons, until the battle of Wolf 359, when one Cube decimates a Star Fleet armada, assimilates Picard and nearly takes out Planet Earth. They are thwarted at the last moment when Picard reasserts his autonomous humanity and stops them. There are a few one-off encounters with the Borg after that, but they quickly become just another villain of the week, until First Contact, when an infusion of Nanotechnology from Hugh the friendly Borg gives them an upgrade to badass status once more. But by the time Captain Janeway and the crew of Voyager are stuck in the Delta Quadrant, where the Borg live, they have become easy to defeat, to the point where one Star Fleet vessel can take out an entire Borg armada. Voyager even assimilates one of the Borg and makes her human again. Once the Big Bad Villain is a subordinate member of the Hero’s crew, they’re no longer a threat. Which means they are no longer interesting.

Traditionally, their are two ways around Villain Decay: The Big Bad gets a new weapon (like the Borg nanoprobes) or the villain is defeated Once And For All and replaced with an even bigger, badder Big Bad, according to the sorting algorithm of evil. This opens up a whole other can of worms. Evil, evil worms!* But Ronald Moore and the gang at Battlestar Galactica have managed to avoid Villain Decay in an interesting manner: by incorporating it into the plot.

When we first meet the Cylons, they commit genocide, eradicating 99% of humanity. This pretty much launches them into the top tier of Villainy. The Borg tried no less than three times to assimilate Earth and were foiled each time by a Frenchman and the reincarnation of Pinocchio. OK, Worf helped out a little. The Cylons succeed in decimating 12 Earths. That was day one.

But it’s kinda hard to top that. Not that they don’t try. Oh, they try! Infiltrating the fleet, planting a sleeper agent that almost assassinates Adama, interbreeding with the humans and even posing as some of them in an extended act of sleeper agency that is so deep, it takes a whole lifetime to uncover. But far from being just the diminishing returns of extended genocide, the Cylons have an agenda so labyrinthine, even they aren’t sure what it is. This is where superior storytelling kicks in: rather than suffering the decay of protracted villainy, the Cylons start to fracture. No longer a monolithic force with a singular goal, they have interior allegiances and conflicts that threaten to do the one thing that could really keep them from a final victory: become human.

It would have been easy and completely acceptable to either A) just keep throwing the Cylons at the fleet until they became harmless self parodies, B) give them a super weapon that grants them a temporary edge or C) introduce a new bigger badder villain that quickly defeats the Cylons and then goes after the human Fleet.

Not content to dick around with well-worn tropes, Moore and the writers did all 3. And that is why BSG works so well: constantly going that extra step to thwart expectations, pull that artful reversal and take the story where you didn’t expect it to go.

By the middle of Season 3, the Fleet had successfully evaded the Cylons, colonized a new world, been occupied by the Cylons and escaped. That last bit should have ended the Cylons as a threat and almost did: when the Fleet reached the algae planet, the Cylons came a knocking. But rather than using Baltar’s insider info to undermine the Fleet, the Cylons send a party over to Galactica for a sit down. OK, a really tense stand up and glare at each other. And this is where the reversal happened. The Cylons hand over Baltar in good faith and though negotiations over the Eye of Jupiter fall apart, neither side ends up the worse for it. The Cylons don’t loose and the humans don’t win. And the discovery of the Eye of Jupiter leads directly to the reveal of four of the Final Five Cylons, (who are so much more than just the Dragon, that the Seven don’t even want to think about them) and the Cylon schism that went beautifully catastrophic last week.

Part of what makes this work, story-telling wise, has been the artful subversion of the tropes. Our heroic humans are horribly flawed, petty and utterly human, with weaknesses that cost them dearly, even when they win. And our villains have grown from a monolithic killer robot army to a divided bunch of distinguishable characters† that are equally flawed in a shockingly human way. It remains to be seen where this leads us. We’re in genuinely unfamiliar territory here: a serial TV drama that has heroes that you think might just deserve to loose and villains you want to see win, because what it now means for them to win is not humanity’s defeat, but transformation into something more human.

_________
* The villains on Stargate SG-1 follow the sorting algorithm of evil to a ridiculous degree. Stargate Command encounters the Gao’uld villains in strict ascending order of badassitude, from wimpy Ra up to the granddaddy semi-immortal Gau’uld, Anubis. Once they defeat all the gods, save the galaxy and free the Jaffa from slavery, they then move on to defeat the Ori, who are all semi-immortal, half enlightened supper bad asses form another galaxy and so evil, it takes a magic device invented by Merlin to save not just the universe but this entire dimension of existence. And yet, George W Bush is still president. what’s up with that?

†This is due entirely to the nuanced writing and superb acting skills of the actors playing the three main Cylon models. We knew Dean Stockwell was good but his iterations of Cavil are villainous in a way that is Rumsfeldian in it’s slimy artfulness. Grace Park has the unenviable job of portraying not just a conflicted hero, but her evil twin and Tricia Helfer now has so many variations of her character in play it would give Patrick Stewart a headache. Not bad for a former underwear model.