They Never Had A Plan (I)
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Consider this the first in a series of reflections on the now-concluded Battlestar Galactica. Obviously, numerous spoilers follow for those who have not yet caught up with the end (or even the beginning) of the series, so caveat lector.
Peter and Matt are not wrong to see in the final episode hints at a “crunchy” or agrarian critique of a hyper-technological civilization, but I tend to agree with Matt that the “transparent craving for the supposed authenticity of the land will seem so pat to future generations.” At its best, the “crunchy” or agrarian critique should not be based in such a craving, as if there is an authenticity of the land that liberates us from the artificiality of technology, but instead be based in the recognition that man should be using techne to shape a landscape rather than objectify an “environment” for exploitation or pure preservation without any use. After all, it is not techne, which is part of human culture and cultivation of the land, but the glorification of techne, that leads to the abuses that agrarians and neo-traditional conservatives find so troubling.
One of the most annoying things about Battlestar Galactica is its tendency to insist on choosing between a primitivist society or a technological civilization doomed to destroy itself. The mythology of the series takes for granted that the latter will always happen, sooner or later, and in the final scene of the last episode the writers engaged in an unusually blunt, embarrassingly heavy-handed effort to drive home that we are just a hop, skip and a jump removed from the Cylon rebellion ourselves. In the least credible plot device of the entire series, we are supposed to believe that the incredibly fractious, disunited Colonial population will submit meekly and unquestioningly to some flight of fancy by Lee Adama to return to the land, despite his heretofore insufferably pious attachment to high-minded democratic principles and procedure. If only to insist on the importance of self-government, I have to protest at the idea that the conclusion of BSG has anything to do with a genuinely agrarian, decentralist or neo-traditionalist view of things. It has more in common with revolutionary dictates forcing intellectuals to go out into the fields and villages than it does with a real respect for the way of life that the cultivators and villagers have. In the end, the return to the land is treated as a therapy for alienated space-exiles, who have no knowledge of cultivation of crops or the raising of livestock, except, of course, for Gaius Baltar.
I didn’t see it as a crunchy/agrarian critique, but something proper to anarcho-primitivism. All they needed to do to make it complete was add a couple of words about how hunter-gathering societies were more egalitarian and democratic than more nation-states.
Given that they spread the colonists all over earth at a time when our species was confined to Africa, and have them talk about teaching humans to plant 140,000 years before the agricultural revolution. Oops. I guess they did choose the “everyone dies” ending (except, obviously, for Hera and may be a few others from the Colonial group in Africa, but there were way too many colonials for a hunter-gatherer society). Moore admitted in the podcast that Hera as mt-MRCA was just something he had heard of and thought was cool, which probably means they chose the landing date based on that, and didn’t consider anything else (like the then-current Ice Age).
The finale scene was just terrible, and may be best forgotten. It wasn’t just ridiculous in its implications, but unnecessary, given the show.
“Moore admitted in the podcast that Hera as mt-MRCA was just something he had heard of and thought was cool, which probably means they chose the landing date based on that, and didn’t consider anything else (like the then-current Ice Age).”
Yes, the Ice Age could pose problems for Tyrol’s plans to dwell in the Highlands of Scotland (or at least that’s where I assume he was supposed to be going). In any case, it just makes no sense that everyone would agree with Lee’s fairly crazy scheme. The same near-riotous captains who were desperate to tear Galactica apart to get its equipment are going to sign off on destroying their ships because Lee is having an existential crisis? I think not. Not only would you have another mutiny/rebellion/insurgency against the Adamas, but I’m pretty sure that there would be no more willingness to tolerate the presence of Cylons among them.
Regardless of the implausibility of the finale, I felt that Lee Adama’s soliloquy regarding how our technology is outracing our heart was well written, as was Baltar’s sermon in the CIC just before Brother Cavel surrendered. And I say this as an atheist and a technologist, so one would anticipate I would have found both speeches offensive. I didn’t. I found them to be well written, passionately delivered, and thought provoking. That being said, no matter how bad life has been for the last 4 years living in a grey metal box eating algae, as much as you want the green pastures, you aren’t giving up the trappings of civilization. Heat in the winter, AC in the summer, a decent operating room for Doc Cottle…
I agree with the critiques that the finale may not have been terribly realistic based on the arc of the show (and common sense). Still, maybe this is too highfalutin, but I have been reading about Rousseau’s critique of our civilization as containing seeds of inevitable corruption of the individual and of a society based on status and hierarchy, and the finale kinda resonated with me on the level of that critique. There was a sense (Adama’s speech about not being able turn your back on the things you created and their consequences) that the destruction of the colonies resulted in part from a decadent arrogance about the limitless things humans could do without thinking through what the results would be for the individual human and for their society as a whole. With that in mind, I viewed the idea of the finale expressed by Lee (let’s get more humble about what we can and can’t do, especially when there’s only 30000 of us left!) as interesting, an attempt to keep human society on a small enough scale to avoid the corruptions and the arrogance that brought them down. Too pat and cartoony, unrealistic, badly dramatized as a clumsy tie-up in the last 15 minutes? Sure. But I thought it was an intriguing notion and thought provoking at least. As far as finales go, I didn’t feel cheated.
When I first read the title, I thought Daniel intended to speak about the Republican Budget proposal.
Good thing I was wrong, as there is no there, there!
The finale was a disappointment on so many levels it becomes close to impossible to think that the narrative arc of the entire series is to be taken any more seriously or as well thought out than any other TV action movie, Unless I’m completely off base, Baltar and Capric 6 are instruments of God through whom the nuclear destruction of Caprica and the other colonies was orchestrated? That was God’s meta-plan? So that, what, Hera could get to Earth II to be our genetic ancestor?
What sense in the end did that make? The assertion in the final minutes that she of all the people from the fleet who settled on Earth II was the mitochondrial Eve just seems silly. This was what the whole mission to find earth was designed to achieve? That earth evolution be directed by a species that is half human/half cylon? What difference does that make since humans and cylons are in the end indistinguishable.
And who cares? Ask yourself what difference would it have made if fleet found its way to earth without Hera. Wouldn’t one of the other women have been our Eve? Couldn’t Sharon and Helo or another human and cylon have other babies on earth? Weren’t they likely to? The whole idea that finding Hera was central to the human future makes no sense unless every other human or cylon woman who landed would be infertile. Maybe there’s something else intended here that I’m missing, but unless I am, I see no reason why anyone should have cared more about Hera than any other little girl in the fleet.
This was what the whole mission to find earth was designed to achieve? That earth evolution be directed by a species that is half human/half cylon?
I think it’s supposed to be the ultimate reconciliation of humans and cylons — thesis/antithesis/synthesis, with the product of the synthesis encountering a new “antithesis.” I think the fleet ultimately finding our earth has always been the plan–the question was what the impact would be, and how it would resolve the conflict between the humans and the cylons.
As for the destruction of the colonies — perhaps it could be justified as the visiting of Divine Wrath upon a race that had become too mired in sin. The humans were being punished for all the evil they had committed. Technology isn’t evil, but how it was being used was, and this is hinted in the last couple of minutes. (Whether this was developed in the first season or not, perhaps someone with a better memory can answer that question.)
It was supposed to be the Highlands, Moore said so in the podcast and even added that Tyrol was the ancestor of the Scots.
At that point, I could not tell if he was joking, because it was no dumber than any of the other mistakes, really.
What did it signify that they murdered the disabled guy, Anders?
As a plot device, his death was necessary in order for Kara to make her escape, I suppose. Abandoning her disabled husband to the tender mercies of an impoverished society without modern medicine might make her look bad. But why not have him die because he got overloaded in the battle or finished off by Galactica’s final jump or because he got too integrated with Galactica and could not survive her death, or whatever.
But it was also weird within the world of BG. Objects really don’t need much in the way of help to fall into the deepest gravity well around, do they? So, why was it necessary for him to fly the fleet into the sun? Or, why not just burn the fleet up in the atmosphere?
And the reaction of the other characters to this event was chilling, dehumanizing. They just pretty much ignored it as if it did not happen. And this was juxtaposed with the high flying bullshit about escaping humanity’s fallen nature by returning to the land.
Maybe this is the point? Is Moore pointing out the vicious evil which is so commonly exhibited in practice by idealistic utopians?
Honestly, the ending didn’t bother me; but then I didn’t expect to see any kind of super-shooby-doo-wow wrap-up ever since they started to get all “Days-of-our-lives” about the inter-relationships of all the characters. The whole Cylon DNA thing was completely hokey anyway; genetics in this series was one of those narrative black-boxes – like the Fourth Dimension for the theosophists and early Sci-Fi writers – that you could read whatever plot-point or mythological leap of faith you wanted to into it. So, for me, the idea that tens of thousands of psychologically damaged people, who had been trapped together under constant threat of annihilation, or psychotic cabin fever, for several years in outer space-submarines – the idea that they might develop a quiet mass hysteria, and spontaneous consensus to abandon all reminders of that brutal prison life, doesn’t seem too much of a stretch. Look at all those abandoned pyramids in Latin American jungles – sometimes, when a civiilisation’s course becomes fundamentally unsustainable, whole peoples do walk away. At least compared to the whole DNA mcguffin. But again, I wasn’t expecting Ouspensky anyway.
The Greeks came up with the Deus Ex Machina to solve unsolved plot points in theatre, so it seems fitting to help resolve this series, riddled as it is with ancient Greek references. The mythical ambiguity was a welcome change form the normal eye-rolling adolescent obsession for some kind of explanation for absolutely everything common to much sci-fi.
Also, the fact that this was in proximity to an ice age, does tie in nicely with the idea of mythical lost civilisations and races, whose existence was (mostly) scrubbed clean from the planet by it.
Frankly, when I Tyrol was going to a small island up North, I just assumed it was Ireland. And no, I don’t care what the series creator said to you either – the Scottus were the Irish until after the middle ages, and the only place not to be covered by ice was Kerry and surroundings. So there.
Of greater irritation to me, in all seriousness, is the noticeable lack of black people, made all the more glaring by the token inclusion of one at the end of the line marching off towards the finish.
I didn’t think that Mitochondrial Eve as unique progenitor was actually meant to be the main point either. It just seems a neat way to work in a transmission mechanism for all the mythic and esoteric knowledge to present day humans. E.g. the flood and the ark; the clash of Titans vs. Olympian gods (and the mad Titan who devours his FIVE children – who later are regurgitated and banish him into the deepest black hole); the ideas of time as eternal return, as cyclical versus linear, reincarnation, breaking the cycle of death & rebirth.
So, within all that huge library of supposedly junk DNA that makes up most of our source code, that is the collective reliquary of forgotten species (a Lost World, you might say), who knows what keys or modems lurk? Bob Dylan has a car accident, and reads the Bible while recovering and contemplating his life. Afterwards he writes a peculiar ballad whose last verse seems to reverse the entire chronolgy, called “Along Along The Watchtower”.
Isaiah 21:5-9:
Prepare the table, watch in the watchtower, eat, drink: arise ye princes, and prepare the shield./For thus hath the Lord said unto me, Go set a watchman, let him declare what he seeth./And he saw a chariot with a couple of horsemen, a chariot of asses, and a chariot of camels; and he hearkened diligently with much heed./…And, behold, here cometh a chariot of men, with a couple of horsemen. And he answered and said, Babylon is fallen, is fallen, and all the graven images of her gods he hath broken unto the ground.
Keep in mind that the Colonists really had no choice in the matter of reverting to an agrarian/primitivist – they had no technological and/or industrial base, and no way to replicate their technology. Technology that was falling apart, by the end of the series – witness how they were basically living off of algae, and offering the last pre-Fall bottle of toothpaste as a reward.
Their choice was basically to try to hold on to a set of technologies and equipment that they could no longer duplicate or even realistically sustain (cramped in spaceships held together by cannibalizing other ships, eating nothing but algae), or try to make up a new life on the new world. All of this, Adama’s dumb rhetoric aside, mandated that they revert to a more primitive lifestyle.
The colonists had a choice. Baltar was the leading scientist. Chief Tyrol pieced together a stealth Raptor in season 1 or 2. The Cylons were more technologically advanced than the Colonists. What happened to the toasters that were on the Colonial side? Into the sun along with their basestar?
Hey Daniel! Bring back the Battlestar Galactica threads, you promised more than this, and now I’ve finished the series.