The Last Cylon
Obama about to take office, war in the Gaza strip, Russia freezing out Ukraine, enormous military movements in Sri Lanka, the world economy tanking…. so what will I blog about? Well, Battlestar Galactia, of course.
I have long held that the reborn (or “re-imagined”, as the Powers like to say) series is the single finest current television show in the world. I am not alone in this assessment (see here, here and here.) Few other mainstream entertainment products offer such dark assessments of the human soul, drawing fairly obvious analogies to modern American military policy, primarily the “war on terror”. It takes courage to present a universe that clearly mirrors our own, North American world, but in which the polytheists are the ostensible good guys and monotheists the bad guys. It takes further courage to miraculously get us to sympathize with the mass-murdering, robotic bad guys– and yet somehow the show manages to do this.
There are many ripe philosophical fruits to be plucked and devoured in this show. Among my favourites is the anti-heroic path of Dr. Gaius Baltar. He is demonized as a villain for having made some selfish, but very human, self-serving decisions. But if we are honest with ourselves we recognize in Baltar (in all but his genius intellect and creepy narcissism) the truth of our existence. He, unlike other impossibly and predictably heroic members of a typical TV show, behaves pretty much how a normal human being would behave, given the truly extraordinary circumstances in which he finds himself.
Baltars quest for redemption underlies, for me, the lesson of the show: that everybody is both good and evil, that everyone both deserves life and deserves death, and that only the honest among us can embrace this truth and thus seek justification for our continued existence. Dark? Of course; it’s Battlestar Galactica.
The other, more accessible philosophical plumb presented by the show is the number of models of “skin jobs”, or human-form Cylons. There are exactly 12 of them. Why? It is never expressed explicitly, but the implication is that the race of mechanic Cylons took a good, long look at humanity and saw only twelve of us. There are only 12 archetypal human beings, so simple are our motivations, so predictable our behaviours and responses.
Others have discussed this aspect of the show’s mythology. The show’s producers have encouraged this discussion, and most have landed upon a summary of the archetypes, as summarized well by a poster on nightly.net:
The innocent
The regular guy
The warrior
The caregiver
The explorer
The destroyer
The lover
The creator
The ruler
The magician
The sage
The jester
Now, as fans of the show know, while there are 12 archetypes, there are only 11 Cylon models so far identified. The lasting mystery is, of course, the identity of the final Cylon. As shown in the image below, Cylon D’Anna glimpsed the faces of the Final Five Cylons, four of whom are now known to us as occupants of the Colonial fleet.
The producers have fed the speculation, most famously by issuing the following manipulated photo, based on “The Last Supper”, with the message that none of the characters portrayed is in fact the Final Cylon:
A series of snippets were also released by the producers on a website called YouWillKnowTheTruth.com, that further fed speculation and planted clues (or, more likely, misdirections). A summary of those clues is given here.
For a lot of reasons, I believe the identity of the Final Cylon boils down to two candidates: Felix Gaeta and Anastasia Dualla.
Now, I know that I have discussed this several times in the past. And I have linked to at least one thorough analysis of the clues. But I love a good mystery. I am so satisfied that the Final Cylon is one of these two individuals that I’m even willing to put money on it.
Part of the charm of the mystery is the bizarre, almost secretive, evolution of Felix Gaeta. If you’re a fan of the show, I doubt you will ever be able to forget the haunting, creepy yet beautiful song sung by Gaeta as his leg was amputated. The composer of the song talked about it on his blog, and called it both “Gaeta’s Lament” and “The Stump Serenade”. Much analysis has surrounded the eerie song, as it supposedly contains clues to the identity of the Final Cylon, to whom God (or the gods, depending on which of the show’s faiths you subscribe to) has bestowed a special fate relating to the dispositions of both races, the humans and the Cylons.
This post has, for my money, one of the more intriguing analyses, specifically that Gaeta’s secret is his transsexualism. The theory has some appeal to me, since the nature of the hidden Cylon(s) has been something of a bridging of gaps or paradigms. Much the same way that the “skin jobs” cross the divide between men and machine, a transsexual Cylonic Gaeta would cross the divide between male and female.
Then again, for all I know, the Final Cylon is the dead cat formerly owned by Apollo’s lawyer buddy. It’s just a TV show, after all. The identity of the Final Cylon will be revealed to all in a matter of weeks.