Ducks @ Oregon - University of Oregon

Battlestar Galactica

Katie D.

November 21, 2009 - 2:32 PM

Last night saw the end of a nearly year-long saga of Battlestar Galactica viewing. Beginning winter term of last year, I spent every Tuesday night watching at least two episodes of Battlestar with my roommates and another friend. The roommates have moved on, but the last two of us have soldiered on with the show, and it has finally come to an end.

Now Battlestar is about the nerdiest show you can possibly find. But be that as it may, it is also an incredible story about human society and the classic sci-fi commentary on social structures, human nature, and the relationship between human beings and the machines we create.

This isn't really intended to be a blog about Battlestar itself. You'd have to watch it to understand the true magnitude of the journey. But after hundreds of hours of watching this show and falling in love with the characters, I have arrived at the end.

It wasn't just another night of Battlestar viewing, either. Instead of cramming it into a busy weeknight, we watched the last two episodes in full form. We got Chinese food and drinks and spent the whole evening psyching ourselves up, watching the episodes, and then discussing the whole show in minute detail. That's one of my favorite parts of the show: the conversations that arise from the story are even better than the action itself. We talked about the limits of sci-fi, and the differences between novels and television, and the reasons that TV series so often seem to end without tying up all the loose ends.

The good news is that I've begun watching the series again, with another group of friends. Every Sunday we watch two episodes. It's amazingly similar to when I began watching the show: we get together in my house and my friends ask the same questions, freak out at the same moments, and make demands on my knowledge of the show's future while I smile smugly and say (in my old roommate's tone) "I don't know" or "wait and see."

One of the most quoted lines of Battlestar is a religious statement, often repeated in the show: "all this has happened before, and all this will happen again." Well...

To hit upon a final pinnacle of nerd-dom, I will be using Battlestar for my final essay in Comparative Literature 301. There's a fabulous moment in the final season when one of the cylons (machines that look like humans and who destroyed the vast majority of human civilization) is speaking about his human form. He is incredibly bitter about the limitations of the human body, which have been artificially imposed upon him by his makers. He complains about the limit of human vision, that instead of witnessing a supernova in all spectrums of light, he instead had to see the birth of a star only in the range of light visible to the human eye. He even complains about his "prehensile paws," the hands that are in many ways the ultimate representation of human biological potential, remarking that he could have been created within an infinite conceptualization of physical being, but instead has become ensnared in human experience.

I will be examining this scene using Freud's "The Uncanny." Science fiction has, for the last two hundred years or so, been ultimately concerned with the implications of our advancing technology that leads us to be more and more uncertain of the boundaries between human and machine. In Battlestar, the differences between human and cylon are virtually impossible to see, and there is the added threat of reincarnation and reproduction among the machines.

So there it is: Battlestar Galactica as social commentary, friendly gatherings, and literary criticism. You might be asking "what the frak?" But I tell you that "all this has happened before and will happen again."

So say we all.