Where is Everybody?The Colonial Fleet has not encountered any other intelligent life during their travels—in fact, it seems the Colonials have never encountered intelligent life anywhere, ever, nor do they ever seem wonder about it, even in passing. (Okay, they've got more important things to worry about, but still…) One advantage of this philosophy is it keeps them from constantly having to come up with aliens with funny noses and names that are mostly consonants, but what kind of universe is it with only one species anywhere? Which brings up another question:A colony is defined as "a country or area (or in this case, a planet) controlled politically by a more powerful and often distant country (planet)." So if these are the colonies… Where is the planet of origin? Are the colonies all in one solar system, two, six, a dozen? How far apart are they? (Far enough to make FTL jumps the preferred mode of travel, apparently.) Why did they have (or choose) to colonize in the first place? Why not go back to the planet of origin instead of looking for the “lost” colony? (Okay, maybe somewhere their religion said the Gods of Kobol placed them on twelve planets and the thirteenth colony was “lost” (by the gods?) or something, but still…) Finally:What the Frak is a Cylon, Anyway?In the opening credits, we are told, "The Cylons were created by Man…" (Because… Man was bored? Somebody lost a bet? It seemed like a good idea at the time?) "They rebelled." (Because…?) "They evolved." (Again, "Because…?")The Cylons (Cybernetic Lifeform Nodes—could that be any more ambiguous?) are essentially the raison d'ete for BSG. They are as compelling as fully-realized characters as the Klingons, Ferengi, or Bajorans. (Y'know, we really don't know that much about the Vulcans, when you think about it.) Yet unlike the others, they don't make a lot of sense.Actually, by 21st century Earth standards, the Cylons are like Americans on a jihad: yuppies who believe in one god, bent on destroying everybody who doesn't. (It’s the polytheist Colonials who are at odds with things.) Since the original Cylons were the Centurians—obviously some sort of battle droids—who were they built to fight? (And did they win? Gotta admit, if I were constructed solely to be a full size Rock’Em Sock’Em Robot, I’d be pretty peeved, too. Shouldn’t we be really rooting for the Cylons?)When the Cylons "evolved," why did they chose the form of their creators—their “enemies?” ("They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human.”) If you look up the words making up the acronym, and r-e-a-l-l-y stretch their meanings, a Cylon represents a convergence of machine and biological life, sort of like a Borg with a better complexion. But since they retain elements of both (After all, didn't we see Boomer pull a fiber optic cable out of her arm and plug into computer circuit?), why can't the machine components be detected? (Is Colonial Fleet Medical that lax, not to spot so many of them during induction? Shouldn’t there have been enough similar “anomalies” to raise a flag somewhere? And that thing where their spines light up when they're having, uh, "a good time—" Is that just for the viewing audience to see or does this tell us a lot about sex in the Twelve Colonies?) How is it that Cylons can eat, drink, get sick and reproduce with humans… unless there's something different about humans in the colonies we'll discover in the remaining 10 episodes?BSG puts me in mind of the old saying “If you can’t dazzle ‘em with brilliance, baffle ‘em with BS.” It does both, being consistently brilliant but distracting us from asking simple questions, much less tough ones. I’d say it is compelling drama, engaging, addictive, well-acted, produced with theatrical feature quality… but science fiction? Not really.
You need to be a member of Blacksciencefictionsociety to add comments!
Replies