A reader writes:
I have a massive quandry… I am having a problem rooting for the colonials in Battlestar Galactica due to the fact they are polytheists. The cylons are Monotheists.
What did you think of [last week’s episode] Downloaded??!!! <SPOILER DELETED> is great.
Okay, second question first. I thought that "Downloaded" totally rocked. Having an episode from the cylons’ viewpoint was totally great, and I can’t way to see how they play out the implications of this episode in the two-part season finale that starts this week.
I also thought that <SPOILER DELETED> was really, REALLY great. (For those who have seen the episode, <SPOILER DELETED> is the revelation that Caprica 6 has as soon as she wakes up in the rebirth tank–the one that "could cause a problem" for her with the other cylons. DO NOT spoil this in the combox for those who haven’t seen the episode. Just refer to it as "<SPOILER DELETED>".)
It was also nice to have numbers assigned to some of the other cylon models–to know that Sharon/Boomer is an 8, that the Lucy Lawless character is a 3, and that that TV-reporter-male-cylon guy is a 5.
Now to the main question: the monotheism/polytheism question.
In principle, I don’t have a problem watching a drama in which the good guys are polytheists and the bad guys are monotheist, because in reality some polytheists are good and some monotheists are bad.
For example: Suppose Battlestar Galactica got re-envisioned as an earth-based drama occuring in Kashmir.
Instead of the twelve colonies, we’ve got twelve Hindu villages–which are then wiped out by an invading hord of Taliban that have been skulking around Pakistan after their defeat several years ago in Afghanistan. The surviving Kashmiri villagers then are forced to flee for their lives to the lost, thirteenth village–called Earthstan–while constantly being persecuted by the Taliban hordes.
In watching such a series, I wouldn’t have any problem at all rooting for the villagers over the Taliban. It doesn’t matter that the villagers are Hindu and thus polytheists, while the Taliban are Muslim and thus monotheist.
Being a monotheist is not enough to get you on the side of right in my book. If you’re a monotheist who persecutes innocent polytheists, you’re a bad guy in my book, and I’ll root for the polytheists against you.
Now let’s apply this to the complexities we actually see in the series.
Yes, it’s true: The human culture presented in the series is largely polytheistic. But it’s not entirely polytheistic. There are atheists in the population (like Baltar) and agnostics (like Adama).
And there even seem to be human monotheists. If you watch the original mini-series, you’ll notice that the cylon they find at Ragnar Anchorage is walking around with Adama and talking about God (singular) and what he wants and Adama talks back to him about God (singular) and the conversation plays naturally. The fact that the guy is a monotheist isn’t a dead giveaway that he’s a cylon (something else gives him away, but not that), so there seem to be human monotheists out there somewhere.
So human culture isn’t monolithically polytheistic. (I guess it’s polylithically theistic.)
The cylons, by contrast, do seem to be solidly monotheistic, except for lone individuals who have "gone human," like the original Galactica Boomer (who is now on Caprica).
So what are we to make of this? Are we to approve or disapprove of polytheism?
I don’t think that the series means for us to do either. The polytheism of the main humans in the series is something of a relic of the original Galactica, with its Mormon-Egyptian-Greco-Roman themes. (They even visited the tomb of one of their gods of Kobol in the original series.) What’s new is that they’ve made the cylons monotheists.
Since our native sympathies are with the humans rather than the cylons, this could be read as an endorsement of polytheism over monotheism, but that doesn’t seem to be what the producers are doing.
Watching the show carefully, it seems that they’re trying to explore the viewpoints of both sides and not establish either side’s religion as right or wrong. It’s certainly true that the cylons were wrong to wipe out human civilization, but that doesn’t make their monotheism wrong in the eyes of the show.
Thus there are episodes in season 1 in which Galactica 6 stresses to Baltar that one of God’s main commands is procreation (true) and in which she tells him God loves him (true) and wants to redeem him from his sins (true) and that he needs to open himself to the will of God (true) and that he can thereby become an instrument of God (true)–which he then does BY HELPING THE HUMANS BLOW UP A CYLON BASE.
6 also tells Baltar that God doesn’t take sides in this conflict–that he transcends our conflicts and is not to be viewed as a tribal deity who always endorses the wars of one side over the other. Instead, God wants the love of all. This is certainly a rather enlightened view of God that doesn’t square with a monotheism=evil interpretation.
We also have the cylons distinctly calling into question the deity of the colonists gods, suggesting that they were mortal beings (like Athena, who lept to her death on Kobol) and calling them "idols"–which we from time to time see the colonists actually using. The monotheist perspective is thus allowed to critique the polytheist one in a way that does not happen in reverse. The polytheists on the show never attack the monotheistic view. They may attack the cylon’s beliefs about what God is like, but they don’t mock the notion that there might be a single, supreme God.
Except for occasional expletives like "gods d*mn it!" or "oh my gods!" or an occasional prayer for the soul of a dead person, the polytheism of the humans really doesn’t come into the plot that much. (The tomb of Athena story on Kobol was an exception.)
For the most part, there is much more exploration of monotheism and the monotheist viewpoint. Monotheism is where the action is on the show.
And it’s not clear that God is pleased with either society we see in the series. The cylons, for example, can’t reproduce on their own and are thus unable to fulfill what they acknowlege to be one of God’s commands. This is apparently because they lack love (which also allowed them to destroy human civilization). Those cylons who have learned to love from humans (Caprica 6 and the two Boomers) immediately start questioning whether it was right for their people to wipe out ours. In the most recent episode, two of these characters are forced to conclude that the cylon invasion was just wrong and that they must work to atone for it.
Similarly, the humans (particularly Adama) have been driven to recognize the sins of humanity and to question–at least in the abstract–whether human civilization deserved to survive, what with having enslaved the cylons and (one might add) having permitted abortion. This isn’t to say that the cylons were right to invade, but it points to significant sins for which humanity deserved a comeuppance.
Of course, when the series first premiered, I was quite nervous about the polytheism/monotheism thing and where the series creators were going to take it, but as the show has unfolded, it’s become clear that they aren’t making a statement about whether polytheism or monotheism or atheism is true. They’re simply exploring the dramatic tensions that are latent in these worldviews.
That’s okay. In fact, that’s something I’d do if I were writing the series. Drama is all about tension and unease, and if you can make the viewer tense and uneasy then you’re creating drama–you’re hooking into the emotions that will bring him back for more.
If someone handed me a series about a bunch of polytheistic humans pitted against a bunch of robots and asked me to re-envision it (essentially what Sci-Fi did for exec producer Ron Moore), I might very well make the robots monotheists. That’s a good move dramatically, because it forces the viewers to not view this as a simple good vs. evil battle.
Nobody in a drama should ever be purely good or purely evil, because nobody in real life is purely good or purely evil (except for Jesus and Mary being purely good, but it is so hard to write dialogue for them).
Purely good and purely evil characters are what you may find in fairy tales, but in works written for adults they make the drama flat and uninteresting. If the creators of Battlestar Galactica flipped the religions of the two groups, making the humans
monotheists and the cylons polytheists (or atheists) then the series
would be a lot less interesting than it is.
The viewer’s native emotions will be on the side of the persecuted humans (because, well, they’re humans), but if you want the villains to be anything other than the Evil Walking Toasters that they were in the first series, you need to give them some good points–and a religion that the viewers sympathize with is a good way to do that.
The viewer thus feels tense–uneasy. He’s torn between sympathizing with the humans because they’re humans and sympathizing with the cylons because they’re monotheists. We know, ultimately, that the cylons were wrong to wipe out human civilization, but as long as you can keep that tension going–as long as you don’t resolve it by endorsing one religious view over another–you’re doing drama, which is what you’re here to do.
Jimmy Said:
And there even seem to be human monotheists. If you watch the original mini-series, you’ll notice that the cylon they find at Ragnar Anchorage is walking around with Adama and talking about God (singular) and what he wants and Adama talks back to him about God (singular) and the conversation plays naturally. The fact that the guy is a monotheist isn’t a dead giveaway that he’s a cylon (something else gives him away, but not that), so there seem to be human monotheists out there somewhere.
John Replies:
Perhaps there are human Monotheists out there, However Downloaded ROCKED. It was really an edge of the seat episode for me.
I would love to see an episode from the Geminon point of veiw also. I think that Ron Moore is exploring some real good issues with this show.
Also should have put a 😉 in the message I sent . I am not having a problem with monotheism vs polythieism but it makes a great conversation starter. I am going to be running a class on Catholic morality and Ethics at my parish and I am going to be using BSG and Babylon 5 as the hook into the class.
John Gibson
I responded positively to the Cylon’s monotheism: it amounts to an endorsement of monotheism as the rational position, one at which even coldly calculating machines would arrive given 40 years or so to process over it.
PVO
I hope that BSG isn’t making it up as they go along. I really hope like B5 the writers already know what the Cylon plan is. Otherwise it could end like the X-Files did which was a let down for me.
I would also love to see a few movies. A really big space battle on the big screen would be awesome.
Somewhat off topic …
Where would someone who remembers the original ’70’s Battlestar Galactica (Lorne Greene & Co.), but has never seen the new version, go to get a quick tutorial on what’s going on?
Is the new one a complete remake, or a prequel, or a sequel, or what? And I’m getting the impression that the Cylons are now looking more human (or at least biological) and less like an unsuccessful cross between C-3PO and supermarket bar-code scanner. What’s up with that?
First off I should note that I am watching the series as it is released on DVD, so from my perspective Galactica and Pegasus are still facing off over the sham trial of Helo and the Chief. So having said that I have been very impressed with how the producers have handled the dynamics between the two races.
The only thing I could add is that “racism” seems to come up more often as the series goes along and it manifests itself as human racist attitudes towards the cylons. This seems to be another way to throw us off and try to at least understand the cylons point of view since the majority of viewers would be repelled by any racist attitude.
Now in a war of course the enemy is always going to be demonized and called by racist epithets. But at least by the mid-point of season 2 I haven’t noticed racial slurs on the part of the cylons directed at the humans. Maybe someone could jog my memory if I missed it. This could of course go along with the cylons being machines and not being as emotional as humans. But we’ve seen the cylons exhibit a lot of emotion. We also don’t see the blind hatred on the part of the cylons towards the humans that we see in the humans. Individual exceptions notwithstanding, when the cylons as a group discuss the humans they seem pretty dispassionate.
So is the series as much about the cylons becoming more human or growing emotionally as it is about the human/cylon conflict?
Now since I have not seen the episode from the cylons point of view a lot of this might have come together by now and I have to wait to catch up.
The new BSG is a “Re-Imaged” series. It uses some of the parts of the story line of the 70’s show, but it is all together different.
For starters:
The Cylons in the Original Series were a race of androids created by a race of lizards. In the new series, the Cylons are artificial intelligence created by the humans. They rebelled and there was a war, then finally a peace treaty was signed and the Cylons left to find a world of their own.
Now, the series can get pretty raw in the sexuality area, but it is so well done that it works well. It could have been toned down… but it isn’t an issue for me.
The series seems to get into moral issues and deal with them in quite intelligent ways. There seems to be some thought to the writing rather than the endless crap that is spoon-fed to us via Network TV.
What will we conclude if the Cylons say they’ve been commanded to destroy the humans?
“Drive out all the inhabitants of the land before you. Destroy all their carved images and their cast idols, and demolish all their high places. Take possession of the land and settle in it, for I have given you the land to possess.”
(Num 33:52-53 RSV)
Reputedly, there’s a deleted scene on one of the dvd sets with the priestess/spiritual guide telling Roslin the story of how one of the gods of Kobol fell by claiming to be the one-and-only god. So apparently, the human monotheists are considered diabolists by the mainstream of Colonial human thought.
Take that as you will.
Having a Plan didn’t help make B5 more watchable to me (it felt mechanical most of the time-if I want a tightly plotted SF epic with weak characterization, dialogue and humor I can read one in a fraction of the time it takes me to watch JMS’s magnum opus) or save it from some really idiotic decisions (“Into the Fire” for starters), so I don’t know if I’d hope Moore Has A Plan, even if I weren’t convinced, based on the stories that have appeared and on his writing pedigree (after writing alot of competent and fondly remembered stuff on Trek:TNG, came into his own on the flying-by-seat-of-your-pants Trek: DS9) that he hadn’t.
To mio: The original BSG was a kind of fun and hokey space opera. The new BSG is sometimes called (and not just by me) the best show on television, bar none. It’s a complex, well written, well acted drama loosely following the lines of the old one, but with significant differences (as in the origin of the Cylons, as cited above). Just get hold of the two part pilot and watch that: you’ll see.
Derringdo – maybe, maybe not. I remember (I *think* it was in a DVD commentary) that originally the idea had been for the high priestess to stick around longer and be a fairly negative influence on Roslin. Obviously that got shelved, but the fact that the high priestess thought negatively of monotheism doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a view (or a character) we’re supposed to sympathize with.
Mike K: Not to be pedantic, but if you’re referring to the miniseries, that is actually equivalent in length to *four* regular episodes. It was originally shown in two parts of two hours (including commercials) each; without commercials, the runtime is just over 3 hours total.
Sonetka: fair enough, it’s been long enough since I saw any of the eps with her to where I didn’t know how we were supposed to take her; certainly many of the fans seemed to find her sympathetic. And I don’t own the dvds, and haven’t been following the podcasts, so I was pretty much relying on hearsay.
We were supposed to find the priestess sympathetic, I think. She never exhibits any bad traits, and is always gentle with Roslin and Adama. And, of course, she seems to have been spot on about Roslin being “the prophet”, since it was because of Roslin’s propheting that they found the star map they needed.
If there was ever a plan to make her a negative influence, it seems to have been not only chucked, but turned around.
In the Series you will see that the Priestess comes to belief though the fact that Roslin is dying. She makes a comment about it during the last 1/2 of season 1 somewhere…
I just can’t remember where it is.
John
Bubbles shoots his mouth off: play the guilt card was downright tasty. What was even more satisfying was seeing 6’s growing awareness/reaction and nascent disaffection about being “A hero of the Cylon.”
I think the humans and the cylons are morally equivalent, and if you still need a really bad guy, 3 is filling the bill rather nicely now. After the captured 6 was revealed on Pegasus, and Baltar’s 6 reacted with outrage, I kept thinking “you folks just wiped out billions of humans and you’re freaking over one tortured POW?” Then, in “Downloaded”, watching
The only high ground held by the humans seems to be their belief that they existed first and that the cylons are their rebellious creation/property. But, “all of this has happened before, all of it will happen again.” What if the humans are only the latest model in a repeating cycle of evolution and combat? What if children always rebel and kill off their parents?
As far as, “The polytheists on the show never attack the monotheistic view.”, the only thing I remember is a sneering reference from Starbuck about cylon belief in the “One, true God.” It’s interesting how monotheism is played as somehow a freakishly alien concept.