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flowrs4opheliaYes, that's right, a whole week later when everybody else has long since moved on with their lives I've still been too lazy to wrap this up before now. First part of my review was here if you missed it.
In this post:
— I take a shot at trying to articulate what I think Ron Moore is really trying to say
— Why I can't exactly defend but can't not like the plot resolutions and philosophical/theological implications
What does it mean?
Probably first starting at the scene in "Flesh and Bone" when Laura watched Leoben getting sucked out an airlock and realized she had already seen this moment in a dream, BSG became more than just science fiction. Then there were the revelations in the Temple of Athena. And Leoben the monotheistic Cylon who foresaw that the fleet would find Kobol. And the polytheistic oracle who foresaw that D'Anna would find Hera at a critical moment. And finally, Starbuck's unexplainable reappearance after she died.
This show, just like real life, has had many cryptic, unexplainable things happening since the beginning. Religion exists to explain the unexplainable. It would have been unbelievably pretentious for a show dealing with themes like this one to pretend it can hold all the answers to the biggest questions about life and the universe. And I mean whether it did this by eventually explaining that there was electricity generating a very sophisticated technological illusion inside the Temple of Athena and that there was some secret Cylon base where Starbuck resurrected and a Centurion spent meticulous hours recreating her tattoos on her new body, or by having the Lords of Kobol eventually appear to the characters in physical form and tell them all about how and for what purpose they've been influencing everything all along. Either of these kinds of endings would have made perfect sense, but also would have made the story completely irrelevant as something we can apply to real-life experiences.
In the end, we pretty much get solid proof that something has always been at work, but that's it. To me, this isn't saying anything about religion other than that it will never just go away because there will always be something in the world we can't understand. Many people would say a higher power or just some kind of unknown phenomenon in the world is self-evident in our very existence. The only divine intervention in the universe of BSG steps in to allow existence of humanity to continue, just as the unnamed higher power intervened by creating it in the first place, but after that humans are free to determine what the fate of humanity will be each time. The higher power is just an elusive force of nature, the spark of creation that is beyond human capability and comprehension, the Big Bang, whatever. We don't know what it is, the show doesn't lecture us about what it demands we do, we only see the effect of its presence. It just is.
But even if there's clearly something unexplained influencing the world, it never shows its face, it never directly intervenes, and so it's impossible to ever completely understand it. At the end of the day Pythia was just a human who could have been interpreting things the wrong way, so her prophecy wasn't completely true. Leoben always saw patterns and thought he had a unique understanding of the universe, but he turned out to be wrong about some of the things he saw in Kara. Even Head Six gets corrected by Head Baltar in the final scene of the show after referring to her recognized deity as God, which implies that even what the "angels" say is just an interpretation in a way.
The repeated cycle of violence seems to represent how we do have an essential, flawed human nature. In real life no gods or God have ever had to intervene to prevent the complete extinction of the species they created, but "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" can be applied to the same kinds of mistakes being made over and over in different civilizations throughout all of our own human history. The fact that some higher power has to intervene to save the Colonials should make the warning the show gives that much more serious. If we fuck things up badly enough, things might really get so bad that only something greater than us could save us. But there's the strong suggestion that we can rise above our nature and prevent that from happening, if we gain the kind of self-awareness the Colonials did by reaching the first Earth and seeing the undeniable effects of the cycle.
The way a higher power sends angels/spirits/the Q/whatever to the characters and gives them signs that allow humanity to survive suggests that it is actually indifferent to the "sins" they might have committed by creating the Cylons. Baltar says the ideas of good and evil are things we created. And many events in the story show how "good" and "evil" can be complicatedly intertwined and even define each other. Baltar's betrayal of the human race allows humanity to start anew and he is ultimately forgiven and becomes somewhat of a hero. Tyrol's murder of Tory ends up being the cause of the Galactica having to jump away and discovering their new home.
And the development of technology is strongly implied to be something that is inevitable in human civilization, part of our nature, even part of "God"'s design. This is all expressed in the Cylon monotheistic belief that no matter what they do, they have to be perfect the way they are, because they were made that way. Starbuck says that creating the Cylons was a frakked-up mistake that they've paid for, but Leoben says God had his own part in it and as a self-conscious person with feelings I'm sure any Cylon would disagree that their creation in itself was a mistake. When the Final Five traveled to the Colonies it wasn't to warn them not to advance and create Centurions, just to tell them to make sure they treat them well. Technology isn't good or evil because there is no objective good and evil, but we reap what we sow. If God knew Adam and Eve were going to eat the apple, why did he bother making them flawed? Because it doesn't matter. And it may seem like the characters' efforts to break the cycle this time are pointless because this kind of destruction has happened again and again before and humanity always survives to make the same mistakes again anyway.
But a repetitive, never-varying cycle is depressingly meaningless and futile. Life without a defined good and evil is futile. There is a reward in making the effort to rise above just simply existing. And just like being flawed, "God" is down with that, too. Like Six says (explaining the "work of God" in a scientific way, which I love) "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough and eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan."
...This is all what I took from it, anyway.
My strangely religious experience
of watching BSG
Since quite early on in the series, the many similarities in Colonial culture to our modern culture have often reminded me of one of the short stories in Ray Bradbury's collection The Martian Chronicles, in which some astronauts land on Mars and discover what appears to be a human civilization identical to their own. One of the astronauts has a very emotional reaction to this discovery, commenting that this can only prove the existence of God. But somehow the way the familiarity of Colonial civilization might relate to the theological ideas of the show never occurred to me until season 4.
Ever since "All Along the Watchtower" started appearing in different unexpected places in the universe of BSG, I was thrilled about the implications of this. Because who doesn't love some Bob Dylan? (Okay, don't answer that, LOL.) Wouldn't it be comforting to know that our music and art and the best parts of our culture are all somehow truly immortal? This is one of the ideas that I just connect to too much to not love how the presence of the divine has an especially big part in the end of the series.
It's weird. After rewatching and rethinking the episode a lot, I've come to a point that I'm not even quite sure what made me feel a little let down by some aspects of the plot resolution after I first saw it. I think it might have just been that the way things worked out so closely fit exactly the kind of ending that I've always thought would logically make sense for this show that it held no big surprises for me.
The fandom, of course, is very much divided in their opinions about it, and I disagree with most of the criticisms I'm seeing. I'm inclined to think it's unfair to have expected anything very different from this kind of ending when RDM had never falsely advertised the show as anything other than what it ended up being. He's never hidden the fact that he has no detailed and elaborate plan for an endgame with the most brilliant developments and plot twists that will ever fuck your head up. He's always said it's a story dictated by the characters and where they take the plot based on what feels right for them to do. If he wanted to tell a story for which the unpredictable and brilliant plot is the focus, he wouldn't have ever taken the not-completely-planned approach to telling it. So it seems like it should be no surprise that he might have sacrificed addressing every single question in a way that makes sense and leaving everything tied up with a neat bow in order to serve the characters' individual stories and the thematic ambiguity that was important to him. (I may be grasping at straws by pointing this out, but sometimes deus ex machina is appropriate if it ultimately supports the point the author is trying to make.) He and his team have always just developed the story by grabbing at ideas until they come to something that feels right even if they're not sure why it feels right and belongs in the show, finding the story as they go along. In a funny way, I find it appropriately similar to how the characters try to interpret visions and find the truth in them.
And part of me also wants to say Ron Moore shouldn't be apologetic about any religious message people get out of it. In response to someone angrily saying this is "a religious show dressed up as science fiction," RDM recently said on the Skiffy boards, "Religion and the metaphysical have been part of the human experience since time immemorial, and I decided early on that they would be part of our characters' lives as well. If the fact that the drama decides to include the notion that something else exists beyond what the characters could rationally perceive means that it's then categorized as a 'religious show' then so be it, but I do find that to be somewhat of a simplistic definition." This just shows he cared about this story and wrote it for himself. If he'd done it in a way that he wasn't passionate about and didn't seem true to him then it wouldn't have had any chance of turning out any good. And anyway, I fail to see the big deal. I enjoy the movie Hero even though I don't agree with the political stance it seems to take, though I'm sure it would heighten my enjoyment of it if I did. Even though I don't necessarily believe that we're all alone in this world and there is no such thing as one objective morality I can still appreciate existentialist works like The Stranger and Taxi Driver. Just like countless other works of art, BSG is just a meditation on a certain point of view that might not be yours.
But even with all this in mind, in some ways I understand how the finale just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It was uncompromising and daring. The fandom can continue to argue about its merits and faults all we want and we're still going to be divided, and that's fine. I think I can especially understand how people could be disappointed because I recognize that a lot of my appreciation for it comes from how it ended up being pretty much the perfect ending for me on a sort of personal level and seemed to tap into some of my core beliefs. These are beliefs that I rarely—well, never, in fact—try to articulate to anyone, and this show has ended up seeming to express them in a very elegant way and it made me feel like someone else out there is actually spiritually on the same page as me. I don't even know if this is because RDM and I really share a lot of views or because it was just written in such a way that you can easily take different preferred ideas from it.
Which brings me back to the astronauts on Mars and "Watchtower." It's very fitting to me that the coordinates to our Earth were found in a song, that the vision showing the moment everyone's destinies would neatly snap into place took place in an opera house, that Baltar described to Tory how his moments of spiritual clarity are like hearing the cacophony of a tuning orchestra finally arrange into an orderly sound with the direction of the conductor. I got chills during Anders' whole speech about feeling "the perfection of creation" while playing Pyramid because it just rang very true to me. What he describes is what I feel when I'm writing a story and the pieces fall into place in a way I didn't expect but makes so much sense. When I listen to a great song. When I watch a show called Battlestar Galactica.
Not because this is necessarily experiencing something perfect, but because these are some of the many things in life in which I see some kind of intended purpose and divine design. Because that's just the person I am. Because I can't accept the cold emptiness of space. There is certain beauty in the world I cannot perceive as a fortunate accident, but only as something that is meant to exist. I can't see things like my favorite Led Zeppelin song or my love for my friends as convenient items of meaning that we've made for ourselves as incentive to go on as a species. As much as I strongly believe we need to take responsibility for ourselves, part of me can't accept that if life on this planet as it is now keeps going down the self-destructive path we're on and we destroy ourselves then that will mean existence like ours will be over forever. That's just what I believe. And I don't think there's anything insipid and offensive about a television series suggesting such a belief. There's only so ambiguous you can be about philosophical themes without going into the range of boringly safe and wishy-washy.
Somehow I am not even bothered by how so many of the characters' destinies ended up determining their resolutions even though I feel like maybe it should bother me, maybe because something about the way this was handled rings true to me as well. I do, in a way, believe in "destiny" in the sense that we can each have a true calling. We're perfectly free to do whatever we want, but many people at their core have a natural identity and may never live a whole life without being true to that. Baltar spent so much of his life ashamed of who he truly is, and at the end when he finally accepts where he comes from and that he has always been an Aerilon farmer deep down it is the first we've ever seen him truly content. Just like it was once unthinkable that Baltar would ever do anything heroic, I think there is something incredibly poignant about Starbuck of all people becoming the one who lays down her life for everyone else and finding that she was always special when she used to be so insecure and not believe in herself at all. Many Kara/Lee shippers, myself included, were fond of the idea of her ending up with Lee in a way that represents choosing free will over destiny since it would seem she has more of a fated link to her Final Five Cylon husband, but there was never really any precedent in the show for her destiny having anything to do with her love life. And honestly, I can only believe that her finally being in an honest and fulfilling relationship only would have turned her into the kind of person who would be willing to embrace her destiny and die for humanity more easily than the push Head Leoben gave her in "Maelstrom." That's satisfying to me, not depressing. Tragic, yes, but not depressing.
Farewell Battlestar, the TV love of my life. You won't be forgotten. ♥
.
In this post:
— I take a shot at trying to articulate what I think Ron Moore is really trying to say
— Why I can't exactly defend but can't not like the plot resolutions and philosophical/theological implications
What does it mean?
Probably first starting at the scene in "Flesh and Bone" when Laura watched Leoben getting sucked out an airlock and realized she had already seen this moment in a dream, BSG became more than just science fiction. Then there were the revelations in the Temple of Athena. And Leoben the monotheistic Cylon who foresaw that the fleet would find Kobol. And the polytheistic oracle who foresaw that D'Anna would find Hera at a critical moment. And finally, Starbuck's unexplainable reappearance after she died.
This show, just like real life, has had many cryptic, unexplainable things happening since the beginning. Religion exists to explain the unexplainable. It would have been unbelievably pretentious for a show dealing with themes like this one to pretend it can hold all the answers to the biggest questions about life and the universe. And I mean whether it did this by eventually explaining that there was electricity generating a very sophisticated technological illusion inside the Temple of Athena and that there was some secret Cylon base where Starbuck resurrected and a Centurion spent meticulous hours recreating her tattoos on her new body, or by having the Lords of Kobol eventually appear to the characters in physical form and tell them all about how and for what purpose they've been influencing everything all along. Either of these kinds of endings would have made perfect sense, but also would have made the story completely irrelevant as something we can apply to real-life experiences.
In the end, we pretty much get solid proof that something has always been at work, but that's it. To me, this isn't saying anything about religion other than that it will never just go away because there will always be something in the world we can't understand. Many people would say a higher power or just some kind of unknown phenomenon in the world is self-evident in our very existence. The only divine intervention in the universe of BSG steps in to allow existence of humanity to continue, just as the unnamed higher power intervened by creating it in the first place, but after that humans are free to determine what the fate of humanity will be each time. The higher power is just an elusive force of nature, the spark of creation that is beyond human capability and comprehension, the Big Bang, whatever. We don't know what it is, the show doesn't lecture us about what it demands we do, we only see the effect of its presence. It just is.
But even if there's clearly something unexplained influencing the world, it never shows its face, it never directly intervenes, and so it's impossible to ever completely understand it. At the end of the day Pythia was just a human who could have been interpreting things the wrong way, so her prophecy wasn't completely true. Leoben always saw patterns and thought he had a unique understanding of the universe, but he turned out to be wrong about some of the things he saw in Kara. Even Head Six gets corrected by Head Baltar in the final scene of the show after referring to her recognized deity as God, which implies that even what the "angels" say is just an interpretation in a way.
The repeated cycle of violence seems to represent how we do have an essential, flawed human nature. In real life no gods or God have ever had to intervene to prevent the complete extinction of the species they created, but "All of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" can be applied to the same kinds of mistakes being made over and over in different civilizations throughout all of our own human history. The fact that some higher power has to intervene to save the Colonials should make the warning the show gives that much more serious. If we fuck things up badly enough, things might really get so bad that only something greater than us could save us. But there's the strong suggestion that we can rise above our nature and prevent that from happening, if we gain the kind of self-awareness the Colonials did by reaching the first Earth and seeing the undeniable effects of the cycle.
The way a higher power sends angels/spirits/the Q/whatever to the characters and gives them signs that allow humanity to survive suggests that it is actually indifferent to the "sins" they might have committed by creating the Cylons. Baltar says the ideas of good and evil are things we created. And many events in the story show how "good" and "evil" can be complicatedly intertwined and even define each other. Baltar's betrayal of the human race allows humanity to start anew and he is ultimately forgiven and becomes somewhat of a hero. Tyrol's murder of Tory ends up being the cause of the Galactica having to jump away and discovering their new home.
And the development of technology is strongly implied to be something that is inevitable in human civilization, part of our nature, even part of "God"'s design. This is all expressed in the Cylon monotheistic belief that no matter what they do, they have to be perfect the way they are, because they were made that way. Starbuck says that creating the Cylons was a frakked-up mistake that they've paid for, but Leoben says God had his own part in it and as a self-conscious person with feelings I'm sure any Cylon would disagree that their creation in itself was a mistake. When the Final Five traveled to the Colonies it wasn't to warn them not to advance and create Centurions, just to tell them to make sure they treat them well. Technology isn't good or evil because there is no objective good and evil, but we reap what we sow. If God knew Adam and Eve were going to eat the apple, why did he bother making them flawed? Because it doesn't matter. And it may seem like the characters' efforts to break the cycle this time are pointless because this kind of destruction has happened again and again before and humanity always survives to make the same mistakes again anyway.
But a repetitive, never-varying cycle is depressingly meaningless and futile. Life without a defined good and evil is futile. There is a reward in making the effort to rise above just simply existing. And just like being flawed, "God" is down with that, too. Like Six says (explaining the "work of God" in a scientific way, which I love) "Let a complex system repeat itself long enough and eventually something surprising might occur. That too is in God's plan."
...This is all what I took from it, anyway.
My strangely religious experience
of watching BSG
Since quite early on in the series, the many similarities in Colonial culture to our modern culture have often reminded me of one of the short stories in Ray Bradbury's collection The Martian Chronicles, in which some astronauts land on Mars and discover what appears to be a human civilization identical to their own. One of the astronauts has a very emotional reaction to this discovery, commenting that this can only prove the existence of God. But somehow the way the familiarity of Colonial civilization might relate to the theological ideas of the show never occurred to me until season 4.
Ever since "All Along the Watchtower" started appearing in different unexpected places in the universe of BSG, I was thrilled about the implications of this. Because who doesn't love some Bob Dylan? (Okay, don't answer that, LOL.) Wouldn't it be comforting to know that our music and art and the best parts of our culture are all somehow truly immortal? This is one of the ideas that I just connect to too much to not love how the presence of the divine has an especially big part in the end of the series.
It's weird. After rewatching and rethinking the episode a lot, I've come to a point that I'm not even quite sure what made me feel a little let down by some aspects of the plot resolution after I first saw it. I think it might have just been that the way things worked out so closely fit exactly the kind of ending that I've always thought would logically make sense for this show that it held no big surprises for me.
The fandom, of course, is very much divided in their opinions about it, and I disagree with most of the criticisms I'm seeing. I'm inclined to think it's unfair to have expected anything very different from this kind of ending when RDM had never falsely advertised the show as anything other than what it ended up being. He's never hidden the fact that he has no detailed and elaborate plan for an endgame with the most brilliant developments and plot twists that will ever fuck your head up. He's always said it's a story dictated by the characters and where they take the plot based on what feels right for them to do. If he wanted to tell a story for which the unpredictable and brilliant plot is the focus, he wouldn't have ever taken the not-completely-planned approach to telling it. So it seems like it should be no surprise that he might have sacrificed addressing every single question in a way that makes sense and leaving everything tied up with a neat bow in order to serve the characters' individual stories and the thematic ambiguity that was important to him. (I may be grasping at straws by pointing this out, but sometimes deus ex machina is appropriate if it ultimately supports the point the author is trying to make.) He and his team have always just developed the story by grabbing at ideas until they come to something that feels right even if they're not sure why it feels right and belongs in the show, finding the story as they go along. In a funny way, I find it appropriately similar to how the characters try to interpret visions and find the truth in them.
And part of me also wants to say Ron Moore shouldn't be apologetic about any religious message people get out of it. In response to someone angrily saying this is "a religious show dressed up as science fiction," RDM recently said on the Skiffy boards, "Religion and the metaphysical have been part of the human experience since time immemorial, and I decided early on that they would be part of our characters' lives as well. If the fact that the drama decides to include the notion that something else exists beyond what the characters could rationally perceive means that it's then categorized as a 'religious show' then so be it, but I do find that to be somewhat of a simplistic definition." This just shows he cared about this story and wrote it for himself. If he'd done it in a way that he wasn't passionate about and didn't seem true to him then it wouldn't have had any chance of turning out any good. And anyway, I fail to see the big deal. I enjoy the movie Hero even though I don't agree with the political stance it seems to take, though I'm sure it would heighten my enjoyment of it if I did. Even though I don't necessarily believe that we're all alone in this world and there is no such thing as one objective morality I can still appreciate existentialist works like The Stranger and Taxi Driver. Just like countless other works of art, BSG is just a meditation on a certain point of view that might not be yours.
But even with all this in mind, in some ways I understand how the finale just rubbed a lot of people the wrong way. It was uncompromising and daring. The fandom can continue to argue about its merits and faults all we want and we're still going to be divided, and that's fine. I think I can especially understand how people could be disappointed because I recognize that a lot of my appreciation for it comes from how it ended up being pretty much the perfect ending for me on a sort of personal level and seemed to tap into some of my core beliefs. These are beliefs that I rarely—well, never, in fact—try to articulate to anyone, and this show has ended up seeming to express them in a very elegant way and it made me feel like someone else out there is actually spiritually on the same page as me. I don't even know if this is because RDM and I really share a lot of views or because it was just written in such a way that you can easily take different preferred ideas from it.
Which brings me back to the astronauts on Mars and "Watchtower." It's very fitting to me that the coordinates to our Earth were found in a song, that the vision showing the moment everyone's destinies would neatly snap into place took place in an opera house, that Baltar described to Tory how his moments of spiritual clarity are like hearing the cacophony of a tuning orchestra finally arrange into an orderly sound with the direction of the conductor. I got chills during Anders' whole speech about feeling "the perfection of creation" while playing Pyramid because it just rang very true to me. What he describes is what I feel when I'm writing a story and the pieces fall into place in a way I didn't expect but makes so much sense. When I listen to a great song. When I watch a show called Battlestar Galactica.
Not because this is necessarily experiencing something perfect, but because these are some of the many things in life in which I see some kind of intended purpose and divine design. Because that's just the person I am. Because I can't accept the cold emptiness of space. There is certain beauty in the world I cannot perceive as a fortunate accident, but only as something that is meant to exist. I can't see things like my favorite Led Zeppelin song or my love for my friends as convenient items of meaning that we've made for ourselves as incentive to go on as a species. As much as I strongly believe we need to take responsibility for ourselves, part of me can't accept that if life on this planet as it is now keeps going down the self-destructive path we're on and we destroy ourselves then that will mean existence like ours will be over forever. That's just what I believe. And I don't think there's anything insipid and offensive about a television series suggesting such a belief. There's only so ambiguous you can be about philosophical themes without going into the range of boringly safe and wishy-washy.
Somehow I am not even bothered by how so many of the characters' destinies ended up determining their resolutions even though I feel like maybe it should bother me, maybe because something about the way this was handled rings true to me as well. I do, in a way, believe in "destiny" in the sense that we can each have a true calling. We're perfectly free to do whatever we want, but many people at their core have a natural identity and may never live a whole life without being true to that. Baltar spent so much of his life ashamed of who he truly is, and at the end when he finally accepts where he comes from and that he has always been an Aerilon farmer deep down it is the first we've ever seen him truly content. Just like it was once unthinkable that Baltar would ever do anything heroic, I think there is something incredibly poignant about Starbuck of all people becoming the one who lays down her life for everyone else and finding that she was always special when she used to be so insecure and not believe in herself at all. Many Kara/Lee shippers, myself included, were fond of the idea of her ending up with Lee in a way that represents choosing free will over destiny since it would seem she has more of a fated link to her Final Five Cylon husband, but there was never really any precedent in the show for her destiny having anything to do with her love life. And honestly, I can only believe that her finally being in an honest and fulfilling relationship only would have turned her into the kind of person who would be willing to embrace her destiny and die for humanity more easily than the push Head Leoben gave her in "Maelstrom." That's satisfying to me, not depressing. Tragic, yes, but not depressing.
Farewell Battlestar, the TV love of my life. You won't be forgotten. ♥
.
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no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 06:48 am (UTC)Very well said!
no subject
Date: 2009-03-28 09:38 am (UTC)That - confirmed by personal experience. And the whole essay. Good work.
no subject
Date: 2009-03-30 03:41 am (UTC)