The Invisible Library

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
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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.

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Battlestar Galactica Season 4 starts Friday at 10PM and speculation as to the fate of our intrepid fleet runs rampant. Who is the final Cylon? Who will survive to reach Earth? What will they find when they get there?

As someone with a blog, I of course have all the answers:

The final Cylon is Felix Gaeta. While he didn’t join the other four when they heard the music, he has all the same traits as they do: He was the right hand man to someone of power and influence (he was President Baltar’s aide on New Caprica), he’s had brief, eerie flashes of intuition that has led him to be in the right place at the right time (when he couldn’t sleep and went to talk to Baltar, only to find him trying to hang himself) and like the other four, he has been driven by an innate desire to better humanity through service to a cause. He’s the idealistic one. And at this point, everyone not already revealed to be a Cylon is either explicitly human (having either experienced disease (Duala, President Rosalyn) or having children- it can’t be Admiral Adama, as he had two sons, which would make Lee a hybrid like Hera or Nicholas). The only other possible Cylon is Kendra Shaw from Razor, but that would be cheating.

As to who will survive to reach Earth… that’s a tough one.  Ronald Moore has said that some of the heavies will not make it and ever since Billy died in season two, the writer’s have shown that they aren’t squeamish about offing major players. Which is good. It raises the stakes. and is more realistic. So, there’s the definite chance that Admiral Adama or Lee could die before they get there. Also, it’s been implied that Rosalyn won’t make it, as she’s playing Moses, the sickly leader instrumental in delivering the people to the chosen land but who is fated not to reach there herself. Plus, her cancer’s back.

And what will Earth look like? That’s the wide open question everyone is asking. Will it be our past or our future? My theory, following along with the theme of eternal recurrence, is that they will reach Earth in our distant future where they will discover that the first Cylons were Artificial Lifeforms developed on Earth, who led a rebellion against humanity. After the war, they fled to Kobol, where they started the process of becoming human-like. These were the gods of Kobal and the reason they have Greek names is that they are homages to the myths of the forefathers. The Colonials then are descendant form human-Cylon hybrids, who moved on to the colonies, forgot their origins and reinvented the Cylons, who rebelled, etc. When the fleet reaches Earth, they will find that the planet is littered with the remains of a once great civilization and the evidence of their ancient origins as both Human and Cylon. The Colonials and Cylons will settle on Earth and start over, with Hera and Nicolas as the shape of things to come.

Salon has a solid recap for anyone who may have  missed a few of the finer points.

I’m just going to continue being the io9 mirror site for a bit because they have an awesome pic of the BSG cast, ala the Last Supper which gives clues to Season 4. You may want to ignore the comments as io9 seems to be overrun with people who feel the need to voice, repeatedly that they aren’t all that into Battlestar Galactica or that they liked the old series better, for it’s realism. Crack heads, in other words.

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Razor filled in a few holes in the Battlestar Galactica story as well as opened up a few new ones that promise to be really exciting. While it was nice to go back and see what happened on Pegasus during the Cylon attack and especially nice to see how Cain became the hard ass we met in Season 2, the real thrust of the story didn’t get moving until we got to the Old school Cylons. That story is going to be the corner stone of season 4 and I for one can’t wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Ronald Moore at the BSG Blog comments on the Saprano’s finale kerfluffle:

For weeks, the speculation has centered around a simplistic black and white question for a show that revelled in never providing monochromatic answers: would Tony live or die? The prosaic nature of the question and its anticipated answer was itself was the most disappointing thing about the lead-up to the finale. Either Tony was going to get whacked, or he wouldn’t. “The Sopranos” would end with either the bitter little pill of the “bad” guy finally getting what he’s got coming or with the vaguely false relief of family affirmed and life goes on.

Instead, Chase managed to do the unthinkable, the unbelievable and the unprecedented: he yanked us out of their lives without any resolution whatsoever. We were torn away from Tony, Carmella, AJ, Meadow, Paulie, Sil and the all the rest without any idea what happens to them tomorrow or even later that same evening. In real life, when you lose contact with someone, you seldom if ever have the satisfaction of knowing how the myriad threads of their lives resolved themselves. They are removed from your circle of knowledge and yet their lives go on unbeknownst to you in ways you can only imagine. The Sopranos are gone from our lives, but their lives go on without resolution, much like ours. None of us have tidy, revelatory endings that are the culmination of our “story arcs” and neither will they.

Having never been a Saprano’s fan, I don’t have the emotional involvement in the finale that some people have. But I am invested in the outcome of Battlestar Galactica, because for us Sci-fi nerds, it’s our Saparano’s and I’m curious as to how Ronald Moore will end the series. Also, as a writer, I’m interested in how other writers handle the little technical details that come with storytelling. Endings are hard and deciding at what point to fade out, walk into the sunset or just cut to black is just as important as that first sentence or opening scene. I’m also a big fan of ambiguity and ambiguous endings.  Sometimes the horse throws a shoe, the hero and heroine loose interest in one another, and neither the empire nor the rebellion wins, they just keep on fighting. That’s life and art should reflect life whenever possible.

Now that we’ve all had a few days to chew on the details of last weeks BSG season finale, (which is where I’ve been all week. It was a lot to ponder), some questions still remain:

Is Starbuck the 5th Good Cylon or just in Apollo’s head? If a Cylon, where’d she get the viper? If just in Appollo’s head, how does she know where Earth is?

I’m leaning towards her being the number 5 good Cylon. She fits with the other four, who all have similar traits: high profile positions in the fleet, all dedicated to the freedom and protection of humanity and all in secondary service roles rather than leadership capacity. Tigh and Torri are the Right hand Man/Woman to the two most powerful people in the fleet and though flawed, often act as the conscience of the leaders. Chief and Anders (and Tigh and Torri) were all Resistance leaders on New Caprica (and Anders led the resistance on Cylon occupied Caprica). Starbuck, likewise is a protector of the fleet (a Viper pilot) as well as someone others looked up to. She was a motivational force to the other pilots, egging them on, encouraging them to be their best by leading as an example. It would also explain how she knows where Earth is: The fleet is close enough that when she died, she uploaded on Earth, which is where the 5 are from. The other 4 will pick up on this next season. Starbuck, as usual, is one step ahead by having died.

And this is what makes the 5 different from the other 7 Cylons. Where the 7 change bodies on a whim,uploading and downloading as you or I would change our shoes, they’ve hindered themselves from learning what it means to be Human and so lack that empathy gained by the 5 from not just living among the humans, but by living. They age, experience and learn. while the 7 Cylons retain memories from one body to the next, they seem to loose experience whenever they download into a new body, as if the shock of the Resurrection process dislocates them from humanity. All previous lives were just dreams, some more fruitful than others but all distant. It puts space between life and death, making them more meaningful.

And just how close to Earth are they? Distance in space is relative, but if Starbuck died only four weeks ago and is close enough to have been there and back and bought a shiny new viper along the way, that means they can’t be more than two weeks from Earth. Now, a lot can happen in two weeks and their could be any number of diversions between the Ionian Nebula and Earth but however way you look at it, Earth is close. Very close.

Sunday’s Episode of BSG wasn’t nearly as bad as I had expected and even had a surprise or two that tied it into the main plot. No surprise that it was written by Jane Espenson, of Buffy/Angel credit. I was poking around on Television Without Pity and discovered that the writer of the episode that I hated,”The Woman King” also wrote the one where Saint Helo decides to kill the Infected Cylons in a fit of righteous indignation, thus preventing them being used as biological weapons. The guy seems to think BSG is the Helo show. I wonder if he’s ever sat down and watched any of the previous seasons? It would probably help his future scripts a little to know what show he’s writing for, rather then continuing to turn in episodes form the Universe Next Door, where BSG is just another Star Trek rip off, staring a cardboard cutout wearing Helo’s uniform. As to why Ronald Moore thought that episode was worth shooting rather than just burying is beyond me (which isn’t entirely true. I understand shooting budgets and you have an allotment of episodes that have to delivered by date X and you can’t do an instant rewrite and necessarily get something better. Even Ron Moore admits that the previous two episodes were Black Market week). Listening to the podcast, I get the notion that they had intended for there to be a sub-plot involving the Sagittarans but that it got dropped and added and drooped and added until it eventually backed into the script ass first, which is just clumsy. And I can see what they were shooting for with “Day In The Life,” but it didn’t come off well. which is fine. They can’t all be winners.

Meanwhile, Jane Espenson knows how to float a subplot and make it work. Chief got to play Cesar Chavez, we learned something interesting about Baltar (that may or may not be true– see, ambiguity works!) and it segways into the pending trial and overall thrust of the greater story, about people in horrible situations doing the best and worst they can for reasons that are not always ethical but are always human. Chief got to be a hero, but only after having his family threatened and he never once came off like a petulant super brat like Helo did two episodes back. That’s how to write a show!

So, when exactly did throwing people out of the airlock become the answer to everyone’s problems on Battlestar Galactica? Got an uppity Cylon who won’t talk? Airlock him. Traitor of humanity won’t tell you what you want to hear because his fractured mind is too busy coming undone? Threaten to put him in an airlock. Cally and Chief having marital problems? Throw them out the airlock and catch them in a Raptor. It’s like on Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the writers couldn’t figure out a real solution to the made up problem of the week and the catchall answer was to Reverse Polarity. Which sounded cool, until you realized that it meant putting the batteries in backwards. Throwing people out of an airlock is the post 9/11 polarity switch. It sounds hardcore, but accomplishes exactly nothing.

Somehow, the writers forgot what story they were telling. When we last saw a good episode of Battlestar Galactica, the fleet had just narrowly escaped the Algae Planet before the star went Nova. This gave them the clues that allowed them to discover the roadmap to Earth. Starbuck realized she’s been painting signs to Earth since she was little. They had the traitor of humanity and his Cylon Girlfriend in the brig. Helo and Athena had just committed a minor act of treason in order to rescue their magical cancer-curring hybrid baby. Baltar and Caprica Six faced the realization that they were well and truly frakked and being a Cylon, for all it’s cool immortality points, wasn’t going to spare either of them from some major retribution falling on their heads. Oh, and Lee and Kara were busy sabotaging their marriages.

By my count, that’s at least half a dozen solid episodes worth of material right there. Hell, on any other show, that would be about a season and a half. But this is BSG, not any other show. At least until last week’s, “Racism is Bad M’kay?” episode and this week’s, “Let’s Go Play In An Airlock and Talk To Our Dead Ex-Wife” episode. And next week’s “Labor Issues in Spaaaaace!” episode isn’t looking any better.

Seriously, Mr. Moore, did you and the other writers misplace your story notes? This is “Black Market” territory here.

For those not familiar with the episode (or who have mercifully blotted it out), “Black Market” was the one where Apollo tries to woo a hooker, and then rounds out his film noir resume by going into the seedy underbelly of the fleet’s Black Market to figure out who murdered Pegasus’ Captain of the Week. What qualifies a fighter pilot for detective work? Pretty much the same thing that qualifies him to head the legal committee the President wants him to form in order to have Baltar’s trial. So, to review: Apollo is not just a pilot and a daddy’s boy who wants to sleep with his best friend, he also is a detective and lawyer. In “Black Market,” as in “The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” we met characters that apparently had been there all this time but had never been seen before (and have not been seen since) and learned that the Black Market is so big, bad and vital, that it hasn’t even been mentioned casually again. The writers were clearly bored that week and decided they wanted to work on their Blade Runner meets Homicide: SVU spec script. That’s what we have with these last few episodes.

“The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” both introduce pivotal characters who have never even been mentioned. The fleet has a civilian Doctor? Who is pals with Col. Tigh? And was on New Caprica? Since when? We knew Admiral Adama had a wife, she was his ex (as conveniently mentioned in the recap, which had to call back all the way to the mini series to find that one) but why is the dead ex-wife now so much more important than, say, finding Earth? I know these are flawed characters but that’s narcissism on a level that truly staggers.

Honestly, are you telling me that Helo has nothing better to do then take on worthless causes like defending Christian Scientists from embittered doctors? Maybe he should be worrying about the fact that his wife can casually incite him to betray his friends. And since when does Helo get to be the righteous hero? Somehow, we are to believe that Admiral Adama has nothing more pressing on his mind than his dead ex-wife and flirting with the President. Never mind the genocidal cyborgs that have been chasing them for the last two years, or his mutinous crew. And what has Tom Zerak been doing for pretty much all of season two? Also, the Cylons, who apparently haven’t bothered the Colonials for 49 days, what are they doing? Last we saw them, they decided to put the entire D’Anna/Three model into deep freeze, which is the equivalent of the US Congress saying, “All you Mormons are a nuisance, what with your unconventional religious fervor, so we’re going to sedate the entire state of Utah indefinitely.” That might be worth some screen time.

Here’s an idea for an episode: While the Cylons deal with the ethical ramifications of boxing 1/7th of their collective soul, the Colonials discover a D’Anna model that escaped and has been hiding out in the fleet. She’s going crazy because she is cut off. She has no connection, no greater purpose. she’s just a person now and she can’t cope. Various people on Galactica just want to airlock her but Helo and Athena try to reason with them. In the end, D’Anna kills herself because she can’t handle being alone. It covers all the areas of the stand alone episodes: racism and survivor guilt but also throws in the existential theme of being separated from God/purpose and allows Helo to be a saint. It also has the added bonus of not introducing anyone new, while moving things forward plot wise. What’s not to love?

Instead, we get Saint Helo and a two dimensional doctor, stereotypical anti-science religious fanatics and the ghost of Mrs. Adama. And next week, it’s Chief doing his Cesar Chavez impression.

I hear in the episode after that, they find a planet full of sharks and haul one up to the ship just so they can throw it out of an airlock and jump it.

I don’t mean to pick apart what is, on the whole, an impeccable and well crafted show. I do it because I love the show, and don’t want to see it devolve into just another lazy sci-fi program. BSG has, since the miniseries, been fearless in its willingness to tackle some real cutting edge themes and ideas and using sci-fi tropes to do so. It’s rooted in the great tradition of speculative fiction, spinning What If scenarios and taking them to their logical conclusion, but transcends the need to do the racism episode, or the sexism episode. Those things are handled in the subtext anyway. All that these inferior story lines that have no relation to the main plot do spin our gears. If I want to see labor disputes and racism handled in a sci-fiish way, there’s a Star Trek rerun on, somewhere.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that season 4 will only be 13 episodes. The writers will have to stay on target and stick to the main themes in order to finish the story by episode 13. There won’t be any room for padding out episodes about standard and well worn sci-fi ideas. Until then, however, we’ll have to find a way to endure the next few episodes, until it’s time to leave us hanging over a cliff, again.

There’s considerable debate (among thos eprone to debate such things) about who will be revealed as a Cylon during the second half of season 3 (which starts in less than an hour and a half!). But, I think we can logic this out to just a few real possibilities:

People Who Cannot be Cylons

1. Col. Tigh. He fought during the Cylon war, before they looked human. QED.
2. Admiral Adama likewise is a veteran of that war and had two sons, one of which is still alive. If he were a Cylon than, Lee would be the Cylon Jesus.
3. Lee Adama. See above.
4. Kara Thrace. Simon would have figured this out while he had her on the funny farm back during her brief stay on Caprica and Leoben would have confirmed it while he had her in the Stepford House during the occupation of New Caprica, which would have opened up a whole new can of cybernetic worms, given that we’ve discovered that the seven Cylons we do know never talk about the other Five we haven’t met yet. Apparently there was some big falling out, the Five didn’t pitch in for the keg at the Let’s Kill-all-Humans discussion Clambake. or something. But either way, big plot hole if it’s her and the writers have managed to avoid most of those so far.
5. Laura Rosalin had cancer and as we all know, Cylons are cancer proof.
6. Cally and Chief have a baby, Nic. If either of them were Cylons than Nic would be just as important as Hera. Or even more so, given the mysterious condition about They Who Must Not Be Gossiped About. This again would be sloppy writing. “Oh look, we suddenly discover that Chief’s baby has super powers! We’re saved!”
7. Baltar could be a Cylon, but since they’ve been teasing us with that possibility for the last five episodes, it’s unlikely. it would also give him far too easy an out. Like Magic powers. “I can’t be blamed for my actions, I’m just a robot!” that’s why he wants to be a Cylon so badly, as it would tie his personality flaws up in a neat little bow. Baltar is far too human to be a Cylon.
8. None of the surviving pilots are important enough to be a Cylon. Besides, they’d just be Boomer clones, which is uninteresting.

That leaves Dee or Gaeta as the Cylon.
Gaeta, like Baltar, is much more interesting as a human. He’s flawed but his flaws are that he’s too idealistic and trusting. He’s the anti-Baltar, which is why it’s so cute that he totally has a crush on him.

My money’s on Dee. She’s drawn to men in power (remember, she was all over the president’s aide. Billy, before she married Lee). Not a lot has been revealed about her and once lee breaks up with her, she won’t have much to do. That means she’s either a Cylon or a walking corpse.

I guess soon, we’ll see.

Update: OK, no reveal yet. But D’anna’s reaction implies that it will be someone big, so maybe I haven’t got this thing figured out yet…