Cylon, farewell

Q: Why were you initially drawn to Battlestar Galactica and why do you think it appeals to such a broad fan base?

Grace Park plays humanoid cylon Number Eight. (Space TV)

A: [Jason Eberl] I’m a lifelong sci-fi fan. So when the new Battlestar Galactica started, I became an avid fan right away. I immediately noticed how different it was from other sci-fi shows — even ones like Star Trek, which incorporated philosophical themes throughout. BSG showed human moral dilemmas in a new light. Unlike Star Trek, where the conflict comes from without, in BSG, the characters are wrestling with things inside themselves.

From the beginning of the series, humans suffer. They suffer because they’ve created Cylons — they’ve played God — and use them for their own purposes. You understand why the slaves have revolted against their masters. It’s like [Admiral] Adama says in a speech in the first episode: you can’t play God, create life and wash your hands of what you’ve done. There’s a notion of moral responsibility. As the series progressed, there was increasingly a sense of moral complexity. At various times, the heroes you’re supposed to be rooting for do very questionable – if not reprehensible – things, like the suicide bombing of New Caprica. And the Cylons are sympathetic characters because you can understand what they’re going through.

A: [Tiffany Potter]: Honestly, what initially drew me was my co-editor [C.W. Marshall]. I remembered the series from the ‘70s and thought, “Nope, I don’t need to see any more of that,” but he insisted it was completely different. So I sat down and started watching. The first episode of the miniseries — with apologies to Jack Bauer and 24 — is the single most tense episode of television that’s ever been created. There’s a sense of constant peril, because we know they’re willing to kill major characters at the drop of a hat. At first I just thought BSG was a fun show, but six or seven episodes later, I was like, “Look at what they’re saying about questions of politics and policy and the American presidency. Look at what they’re saying about terrorism! You can’t do this on TV!” Especially back in 2004, [the thinking on] terrorism was: you’re with us or you’re against us. But Battlestar addressed the issue in a much more complex manner.

There were also [important] questions around race and culture. There’s a point where Helo and Apollo [two military captains] are having a debate on the relative merits of genocide, when they have a virus that could wipe out an entire race and benefit humanity. They’re both characters who are sympathetic, which puts the viewer in a very complicated position. You’re not supposed to be able to ask these sorts of questions. You’re supposed to have an automatic answer for certain questions, even if we don’t all agree on what the automatic answer is — as in the case of abortion. But this is a show that complicates those questions.

Q: Is it really a big deal that Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff), the fleet’s top Viper pilot, is a woman?

A: [Jason Eberl]: [Laughs] When I was a kid I watched the old BSG. I was a fan of Dirk Benedict’s Starbuck, and I chuckled when I saw all the people who dismissed the show because of [the character’s gender change in the new series] and other changes that were made. The new BSG is a better show for our era; the old one was limited by the constraints of the day, by censorship… It had to be family-friendly, because you didn’t have cable back then. So anyhow, Starbuck being a woman is significant because of a point the writer makes in that chapter of my anthology: she’s a woman, and yet she maintains a lot of the masculine qualities of the original character. She’s a smoker, a drinker, she gets in fights, and she’s the best Viper pilot. You can compare her to Tom Cruise’s "Maverick" in Top Gun — she doesn’t play volleyball in the sand shirtless like he does, but she has a lot of the same qualities.

Combine that with Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell) being a female president — remember that the show hit airwaves back when everyone knew Hillary Clinton would eventually run for president — and the fact that even the sexpot characters, like Number Six (Tricia Helfer) are powerful. You have a notion of a future society that is genderless, in some ways. There are still biologically two sexes, but those biological differences don’t have any bearing when it comes to social roles.

Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff, left) and President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell). (Space TV)

A: [Tiffany Potter]: One of the articles in our book has a great title — “Long live Stardoe: Can a female Starbuck survive?” It outlines the huge furor that exploded in the internet community when it was originally announced that Captain Starbuck would be a woman. Nobody thought it was a big deal that Boomer [a Galactica lieutenant] was an Asian woman, but Starbuck was such an icon of ‘70s masculinity. Dirk Benedict said they were castrating Starbuck and making her into a “Star-doe” [laughs]. They were trying to remedy this completely masculinized narrative that existed in the 1970s.

People talk about [BSG] as a de-gendered community where gender doesn’t matter, but in fact gender matters a huge amount. In some ways, they started out with an explicit attempt at a de-gendered utopia — the president is female, the best Viper pilot is female and sex doesn’t matter — but then that starts shifting. At first, Starbuck was seen as more manly as any of the men —she was into gambling, drinking, fighting… she even had a Dirk Benedict-style cigar (and we know sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar). But as we near the end of the series, they’ve been feminizing her more. I’m sure she’ll get to shoot a lot of stuff in the finale, but the last half-season has focused on her role as a wife and on the internal narrative of who she is.

Q: The U.N. recently invited the cast and creators of Battlestar Galactica to convene for a special panel …

A: [Jason Eberl]: I think it was a good move in the sense that pop culture, whether it’s television, film or music, has a power to shape minds. It’s what forms new archetypes or deconstructs old ones. And I think it’s important for those in positions of authority to understand what messages are being put out there. I have no grandiose expectations, like BSG has come to the UN and now all humanity’s problems will be solved. But things like the provocative statements of Edward James Olmos [who proclaimed during the panel, “There is only one race: the human race!”] prove the ways in which celebrities wield power and influence over public opinion. That’s how Angelina Jolie and George Clooney become UN ambassadors. Society is media savvy, whether it’s television or the blogosphere, so we need people to use those means wisely. I don’t know whether Olmos and the creators of the series are reading Plato and Kant and Thomas Aquinas in their spare time, but I can see that [through BSG] they’re communicating these philosophical ideas to the public in a much more direct manner than relying on people reading the original texts.

A: [Tiffany Potter]: [The UN] has a recently created group that encourages the arts community to engage with [the] political community, and this panel was part of that impetus. I think it’s smart, because artists spend their time imagining the future and have a sense of how change could come to be, and it’s interesting for the UN to use that in hypothesizing… God, I wish I could say that [BSG] will help effect change, but I’m not sure that I can. Still, I applaud this kind of initiative. I think it’s important that these two communites aren’t boxed off, that artists and politicians hear each other.

Q: Some critics have argued that BSG has presented some of the most intelligent conversations about religious fundamentalism and the “war on terror” in popular culture. Are there any lessons we should take away from the show?

Commander Adama (Edward James Olmos, left) faces a coup in Battlestar Galactica's fourth season. (Space TV)

A: [Jason Eberl]: As a general comment, BSG is very much a post-9/11 television show. Not that it specifically harkens to that incident, but there’s a fundamental philosophical sense of moral self-examination that follows a cataclysmic event like 9/11 or the wiping out of humanity in Battlestar. Those incidents cause you to reflect on how these events came about. You start wondering about what motivates your enemies, whether they be Cylons or terrorists. I’m not trying to imply that we’re inherently morally culpable for bringing these things upon us, but you need to look at what we’ve done that’s questionable — that’s something the humans on Battlestar think about all the time.

In terms of a lasting philosophical lesson, I think we can learn something about fundamentalist ideology, whether that be religious, political or otherwise. We need to remember not to get too far ahead of ourselves, not to be so certain that what we’re doing is right. I certainly believe that there may be various truths — both scientific and even religion-based — that are true, but you need to be open to questioning those things. The cautionary tale is about people closing off dialogue and proceeding unilaterally. That can lead to devastating consequences. In BSG, the chaos begins with humans unquestioningly playing God and creating life, which is something that we’re having to deal with now as a culture.

A: [Tiffany Potter]: I’m not sure they want us to take any lessons away. I don’t think [creator] Ron Moore is making this series as an exercise in didacticism. If anything, you can read it as a comment on the obsession with balance that exists in the North American media, where you have to show all sides of an argument at all times. I think BSG offers a critique of this impulse to show all sides as equal in a complicated way… At the end of the second season and the beginning of the third, these characters we’ve known and loved as [ourselves], the Western “us,” for two seasons, become inhabitants of an occupied territory due to colonization. They’re known as insurgents and they carry out suicide bombings. You can absolutely see the rational motivation that causes them to carry out acts that Western culture’s deemed absolutely irrational. BSG refuses to leave things in terms of humans good/Cylons bad, heart good/science bad… and it challenges those dichotomies in a way that’s interesting when we start thinking about American politics.

The thing that makes it really good sci-fi is also the thing that appeals to people who aren’t sci-fi fans. You’ve got this really good politicized narrative, and that’s what you’re locating in outer space. But because it’s in space, it’s not real. The coding or covering of sci-fi opens up a zone where you can have discussions about issues like reproductive technology and abortion without being censored. Situate those same questions in a high school and America networks refuse to air Degrassi.