Some thoughts on Battlestar: Galactica, Season 1. First of all, this show continues to disturb me. The moral ambiguity of which I wrote some time back (shortly after starting the series, in fact) continues, though it’s more clear who the “good guys” are—or at least it was until the cliffhanger. One of my friends (jec, who loaned me the series) asked about the significance of the fact that the humans are polytheistic while the Cylons are monotheistic. For a while, I thought it represented the impact of Judaism and Christianity in Europe and Asia Minor, where polytheistic religions gave way to the power of monotheism, even though it took a while. I gave up on this toward the end of these last two episodes because the series seemed to be heading in another direction. Some of this theme remains, however, in the form of the Moses-like Dr. Baltar, whose purpose appears to be to bring the Cylon plan, or God’s will, into fruition.
The symbolism of the Cylon-human “hybrid” has escaped me for the moment, though of course there are various pop-cultural references (The X-Files, Demon Seed) that come to mind. The Cylons, at least the female ones, feel love, as well as other emotions, and the fact that they’re genetically human—or close enough to reproduce with human—indicates something more than the standard alien vs. man trope that is common to the genre. The Cylons are us: they feel the same emotions, they have bone and blood, they can procreate with humans. But they are at the same time something else: born of computers, they are copies of each other. They also appear to be networked somehow.
I’m planning to rent season 2 tomorrow. . . .
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