Saturday, February 14, 2009

mail bag: BSG insights

Andy writes:

Hi Kevin,

A few thoughts.

#1: Love it or hate it.

I was kinda torn - the TV shows I love all die quickly, and this seems to be a case of it. Now that I'm interested, it's a dead-man walking.

As you said, tonight was a 'bridge' episode. Between Resolution and Important Things happening. And let's be honest, between the suicide and the Adama/Tigh fight.... all the other episodes are going to have a damn hard time garnering impact.


#2: About the Cylons copying Humans down to the molecular level.

I think my 3.89 year hiatus has left me out on something. When everyone was looking at the brainscan with the bullet in the skull... why didn't someone make a quip to the effect of, "And *that's* the part that makes you Cylon"?

As I understand it: physically, the only difference between Humans and Cylons is a silicon widget in the brain [ and yes, the undefined-method to upload to a resurrection ship when you die ]. The folks in the hospital made no note of the silicon widget-bits.... is the widget not visible? Or did I miss something through my extra-lax viewing habits?


#3: Dean Stockwell. During the run of "Quantum Leap", my Mom told me repeatedly that Dean Stockwell was quite the item in his prime. And watching tonight's repeated soliloquies, I'm starting to seeing more of the magic he projected. Not the physical attraction, mind you, but his intensity is engaging. And reminiscent of the 'Perry Mason' era of television. I respect his acting chops even more as time progresses.


#4: Starbuck. While in the hospital she made a comment to the effect, "I thought *I* was one of the 5!" You aren't, babe. But how the heck are things going to be resolved with your carcass being on Dead Earth, and still flying back to the fleet?

I know tonight they touched on the Relativistic Effects of travel... but they still haven't addressed her duality.


#..., nothing you raised directly.

Kevin: Do you remember when I wrote to you about about James P. Hogan's novel "The Gentle Giants of Ganymede"? I hope not. You've been busy.

http://www.amazon.com/Gentle-Giants-Ganymede/dp/0345323270

Long story short: big ol' aliens (who are long gone) populated the planet that's now the Asteroid belt beyond Mars, in order to raise human-sized slaves. But the giants never came back to harvest their crop of slaves.

The slaves evolved over eons without supervision. After a time, they ended up with intra-solar-system space travel, and finally a war between factions of Mars and the 'other planet' left all but a few slaves dead. And a of those couple slaves managed to make it to Earth.

Those who made it to Earth became our "Missing Links", those millions of years ago.

My first impression from tonight's episode of BSG that talk of: the 5, the 7, the 8, Humans and Cylons, the 12 colonies, the Missing 13th Colony... was going to end in a paradigm like that. Or similar.

I only watched it once, though. But that was my first reaction.


_Andy

Thanks for the email, man.

re: Cylons

Cylons are enfleshed organisms, but they're entirely artificial, simulating humans right down to the molecular level, but perhaps not down to the atomic or subatomic level (a case of functionalism in action?).

Baltar initially built a bogus Cylon detector, but he later went on to build the real thing early in the series. Through the real detector, he discovered that Boomer was a Cylon. Out of fear for his own life, he told Boomer that she had tested negative and was human. Baltar had been worried that, had he revealed his knowledge that Boomer was a Cylon, her hidden programming would have activated and she would have killed him on the spot. This cowardice set up a chain of events leading to Boomer's shooting of then-Commander Adama, who had no idea that Boomer was a Cylon sleeper agent. In true Lee Harvey Oswald fashion, Boomer is shot not long after.

A different copy of Sharon Valerii, stuck with Helo on the surface of post-holocaust Caprica, falls in love with Helo; their coupling leads to the first successful case of Cylon pregnancy. This seems to imply that Cylons can become pregnant, but not reliably so. To that extent, we might say that they're organic.

At the same time, humaniform Cylons are obviously programmable, and they can interact directly with machines, as the "good" Sharon does when she physically interfaces with Galactica's computer system and stops a Cylon assault. She does this in what appears to be a crude and bloody manner, jamming one of Galactica's data cords into her arm. The interface works perfectly.

The series is unclear, though, on how Cylons do what they do while possessing bodies that, when scanned in the typical manner, look perfectly human. An X-ray or MRI would not have revealed the way in which the "good" Sharon had interfaced with the Galactica's wiring. Reference has been made, on several occasions, to "silica pathways" used in Cylon neural structure, but these pathways are undetectable by colonial technology. Perhaps the genius of Cylon tech lies in something like "nanoswarm" technology: particles distributed throughout the body can temporarily come together; they self-assemble into a needed component, then fray apart when no longer needed.

Cylons have been inconsistently portrayed as alternately super-strong and of normal human strength. It seems they can do whatever the show's writers require of them at a given moment in the plot. Sam Anders was shown, at the beginning of Season 4.0, unconsciously sending out a burst of IFF signal to the aggressor Cylons, who responded by immediately halting their attack against the colonial fleet. How his body was capable of emitting such a signal is beyond me; the feature has been cleverly hidden, perhaps in a diffuse, distributed manner, throughout his body, much the way that cognitive functions are distributed throughout the human brain (e.g., a memory is not a single, distinct chunk of flesh, but is instead the result of electrical activity interacting with the evolving hard-wiring of the brain). Anders's eye might be another example of nanoswarms at work.

re: your theory about origins

My buddy Mike had a similar-sounding hypothesis. I hope I'm getting this right, but I think Mike's idea was that humans and Cylons arose from some third-party life form, something not seen yet. I think this theory is as plausible as any of the theories out there, given how little we still know, and how few episodes remain. The only reason I don't lean toward this theory is that, up to now, we've seen only humans and Cylons in an otherwise "empty" universe. In terms of dramatic structure, the sudden revelation of "the race behind the races" at the very end of the series would be something of a deus ex machina-- a Tolkien lover would appreciate such a move, but "hard sci-fi" David Brin acolytes would resent it forever. Then again, such a reveal would strike an almost religious note, which would be perfectly consistent with what the series has done so far, thematically speaking. Much of BSG is about a Creator-ward (or origins-ward) striving.

I'm still stuck on the fact that Ellen Tigh somehow came back to life aboard a second-generation Cylon vessel, and not aboard a Final Five-type vessel. Does this mean the Significant Seven/Eight had extra Ellen bodies lying around? How is that possible?

I'm also fascinated by the origins of Cylon monotheism, which according to that episode traces back to those boxy Cylon centurions on the colonies. I'm unclear on whether Ellen Tigh's own monotheism is the result of the centurions' religious insights, or a separate epiphany.

In any case, the thirteenth tribe appears to have begun as human; the holocaust on Earth was a nuclear war similar to what happened on the colonies, i.e., it was between humans and Cylons. The colony's temple on the algae planet may well have been in honor of a "one true God," who could not be named. Perhaps strains of that monotheism existed quietly elsewhere on the other twelve colonies, and were somehow passed on to the centurions developed on those colonies.

The whole chronology of what caused what is very confusing. One theory over at the Battlestar Wiki site is that Earth, not Kobol, is the original cradle of humanity, with everything, all history, blossoming outward-- and curdling-- from there. The evidence for this argument lies in the show's description of the ages of the various landmarks encountered on the path toward Earth: they seem to get progressively older as one gets closer to Earth. While I consider myself a BSG geek, I obviously didn't have the insane level of commitment needed to spot this fact. To do so would have required multiple viewings and probably a bit of note-taking. (Then again, blogging BSG episode commentary is a sort of note-taking.)

Sam Anders's account of events still doesn't explain why the Cylons of the thirteenth colony had a culture that exactly mirrors the culture of the twelve colonies. The twelve colonies and the Earthbound colony should have diverged a great deal in terms of language, culture, etc. Again, the best explanation for such rigid consistency over time and space is the Everyone's a Cylon theory. But we'll see.


_

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