As someone who watches and thinks too much about the new Battlestar Galactica (which, for those who haven’t been watching, is as good as the original was bad), I’ve had some ideas today about the theology of the Cylons.
Here’s my hunch: The core of the Cylon world is a self-aware artificial intelligence. This intelligence was created at about the same time as, or soon after, the Centurion “toasters.” It developed the notion of considering the humans to be a lesser rough draft of what was possible, and that they were to be destroyed.
The AI had difficulty understanding how the humans were reacting to things, and how they were fighting back. After the truce at the end of the first Cylon war, it developed the android “skinjobs” in an attempt to understand them. Being a close replica of a human, each android contains programming from the AI, but is not directly connected to it when alive. When an android dies, its consciousness is reabsorbed into the AI, which learns from the android’s experience. That consciousness is then updated with new information from the AI, and downloaded into the android’s next incarnation (or whatever the term would be for the soul being made artificial flesh).
What the androids think of as God is really the central AI, which is what created them and has the plan for what it wants to do. As the Cylons have more interaction with the humans, though, the AI is learning more and adapting as it goes.
The Cylon D’Anna (played by Lucy Lawless) may be figuring out some way to manipulate a bug in the AI to avoid losing the memory of the between-life process. The hybrid is a half-android whose consciousness, in more direct contact with the AI and also experiencing the life of the ship itself through its senses, cannot communicate well with the androids and the one human that it has met, and appears insane. (In the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is unintelligible.)
I wouldn’t be surprised if, by the end of the series, the AI decides that it was wrong and the Cylons and humans again come to some sort of truth. There may be some climactic encounter between a human and the AI, akin to the encounter between Neo and the central intelligence of the Matrix at the end of that series. (Though that is sufficiently famous that Galactica would show it differently.) I also would guess that the person to make the connection would be Gaius Baltar, in a final redemptive act.
This idea of the AI incarnating as human has connections, of course, to some interpretations of the Jesus story (and, come to think of it, would in a sense make each of the android Cylons misguided messiahs). It also ties in to the Jewish myth in which souls reincarnate but have their memories of past lives and between-life experiences locked between incarnations (by, in some tellings, a kiss from the angel Gabriel).
Ron Moore, the developer of the show, has said that he is a lapsed Catholic. Glen Larson, creator of the original series, is a Mormon and drew upon their theology in developing the show. Moore said that he didn’t draw on Larson’s theology in developing that of the Cylons. Intriguingly, he has revealed that the religious aspects took off from a throwaway line in the pilot miniseries, and that someone from the SciFi network encouraged him to pursue it.
We’ll see if this bears any resemblance to how it plays out…
John Cowan | 24-Dec-06 at 5:01 pm | Permalink
This reminds me of Spider Robinson’s Mindkiller/Timepressure/Lifehouse trilogy, and also of Roderick MacLeish’s Prince Ombra. (See Amazon.)
Speaking of Lucy Lawless, I forget if I pointed you to these two by Kevin Wald:
http://www.xenafan.com/fiction/content/forant.html
http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~valkyrie/parody/xena.html
Jane | 29-Dec-06 at 11:32 am | Permalink
Wow, new format! I mean here on the blog. Nice. Easier to read. BTW, Rod MacLeish, who just died this year, was an old friend of my parents’, and I knew him when I was a kid (and later), when he and my father were both foreign correspondents. He was primarily a journalist and commentator. Novels were his sideline and I haven’t read Prince Ombra, only The First Book of Eppe, which wasn’t a sci fi book. MacLeish, quite the Renaissance man, also recorded wonderful commentaries for all kinds of art museums, especially in DC, where he lived.
He was the son of Norman MacLeish, the painter, and nephew of the better-known poet Archibald MacLeish. His son Eric (Roderick, Jr.) was one of the lead attorneys on the victims/survivors’ side during the Boston RC clergy abuse scandal. Rod and family were Episcopalians.
That’s your gossip for the day.
Happy almost-new-year,
Jane the (not very these days) Eminently Quotable
msmas | 01-Jan-07 at 6:25 am | Permalink
I too love the format, but what I really love is that you are writing almost daily. Happy New Year!
msmas
p.s. isn’t latex a glove style?
Gyrofrog | 04-Jan-07 at 11:56 pm | Permalink
Ah! A Mormon friend of mine had once speculated that the show’s creators were Mormon, because the show seemed (to him) to draw from that belief system. I am guessing that he didn’t know Glen Larson was Mormon (and until now, I didn’t either).
Fred Kiesche | 08-Jan-07 at 2:07 pm | Permalink
My theory is that both the quest for Earth and the Cylon theology may be the death of the show. It never really (quest for Earth) was well-thought out for the original and they don’t really seem to be implementing it here. I have a feeling the theology aspect was a throwaway thrat grew.
See “X-Files” for a similar situation. Chris Carter and Co. would throw in a bit about the various aliens every now and again. Soon you had multiple groups, multiple agendas, multiple aliens and more. Why? I’ll bet he never thought through the whole conspiracy from the beginning, and just tossed in something new whenever they needed an answer. Eventually the whole thing came crashing down and the mystery was never really solved.
I would have been happy if BSG had just junked the whole Earth quest and made it a quest for survival. The Cylon theology might have been easier to live with if it had been thought out more.
joseph.zitt | 08-Jan-07 at 2:39 pm | Permalink
Listening to Ron Moore’s interviews and podcasts, I’m pretty sure he’s aware of how the X-Files made a hash of its mythology and is working not to do that. Things have evolved from Twin Peaks (which fell into weird-for-the-sake-of-weird) to X-Files (which fell into “Let’s do this and figure out how it fits later”) to Babylon 5 (which got messed up by never quite knowing if the show would be able to run the full five years) to now.
With the quest for Earth, they obviously can’t get there until the end of the series. Having both the humans and the Cylons looking for it ups the stake from the point of view of, well, an audience on Earth.
While the theology began as a throwaway, I get the sense that once they decided to use it (before the first season), they thought it out well and are running with it in what looks to me, at least, as a relatively coherent way.
Lost is also playing with similar stuff. On their podcasts, the developers have insisted that they don’t show anything unless they have a very clear idea of what it is and how it fits.
Fred Kiesche | 09-Jan-07 at 8:52 am | Permalink
Don’t watch Lost, as I’m down to pretty much one hour of TV a week (guess what show). I wonder if the podcasts are what has become the commentary on the DVD’s (podcasts are out for me, being the last person in the US on dialup). I’ll have to re-watch the episodes to include the commentary.
joseph.zitt | 09-Jan-07 at 5:22 pm | Permalink
Yup, the podcasts are the commentary. They usually show up just before the show airs.
I’m down to three shows: Galactica, Lost, and Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip, though all are on hiatus now. I don’t watch them at the time they’re aired, though, catching up with them either via iTunes or streaming.