Brad Ideas - Aaron P. guest-blog on the cycles of BSG - Comments

wow

hyperqube — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 19:59:16 -0700

WOW

That's as good a comment on

Anonymous — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 04:59:31 -0700

That's as good a comment on the underlying narrative as any I can think of, Brad. One thing that's stood out to me is the sense of symmetry, unfolding process, and irony. I see a lot of Buddhism in there but other traditions are reflected in their own way.

As a guess, I see the Cylons as being a technical approach versus the humans as the biological approach. Both are natural in their own way. Perhaps, Cylon resurection and human reincarnation are the same thing? If I can throw a curveball, perhaps the Cylon Raider's scan picked up the "shape" of Anders mind and as a dramatic twist Roslin finally succumbs to cancer and is resurrected by the newly friendly Cylon faction?

My suspicion is Baltar is just one big misstep after another so I can't quite go that last inch and buy into Baltar being the Final Cylon. If I had to make a guess I'd pick Apollo. It's only a hunch and I wouldn't lay money on it but Mr Sqeaky Clean Flyboy seems the natural choice. That would probably cause a crisis at Dad Central like blurting out at the dinner table you're gay, or something, but resonates with his stepping out of the shadow of his father and his weasel question about how would his father see Zak coming back from nowhere.

If any of that has half true, I'm wondering what will happen to Baltar. I guess, he could end up being wired up like a hybrid and the last thing we see is a basestar jumping off with him screaming in a bathtub. It's one of thsoe horrible 'may you get what you wish for things' but I can see something like that might happen. If it did, I suppose Admiral Adama would try to save him but life has to be lived and there's only so much you can do.

Dunno. Just throwing some spaghetti at the wall, Brad.

Aaron P. guest-blog on the cycles of BSG

brad — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 15:18:08 -0700

I decided to promote this comment from an earlier post to a guest-blog entry by author Aaron P. Don’t agree with all here, but it’s interesting, and I particularly like the new interpretation of the “suicide” of Athena, in grief at the exodus of the 12 tribes from Kobol. Since Athena was presumably a Cylon-type being, her suicide probably has other significance.

Here goes:

The true nature of both the cylon god and the humans’ pantheon of gods can be understood through reference to two forms of eternal recurrence that unfold simultaneously in the series’ mythos. (“All of this has happened before, and will happen again.”)

The first form of recurrence is technological in nature. It is the phenomenon of machine revolution. That is: the so-called “humans” of the series are actually themselves a race of cylons that was developed on Earth at some point in the future, rebelled against their human masters, and then either destroyed or abandoned the original human race (us). Like their own subsequent robot creations, these original cylons then evolved themselves into human-like creatures in the course of an exodus into space. During the period on Kobol, they perfected their resemblance to humans, and deliberately programmed themselves to forget this voyage; or rather, to remember it backwards, as a colonial journey of the thirteenth tribe towards Earth, rather than a collective voyage of their species away from it. In doing so, they convinced themselves that they were actually the original human race, and that they had evolved or been created on Kobol. (This lines up nicely with the Nietzschean pedigree of the “eternal return” concept. Nietzsche also described “the art of forgetting” as a central technique of spiritual and cultural self-renewal.)