BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, Pt. 4

Before taking the plunge and buying the BSG complete series box-set, I tried to do a fair amount of non-spoilery reading online to help make up my mind. One thing that gave me pause was the amount of contentious chatter about the role of religion in the series. I wasn't about to waste that kind of money or time on anything like Left Behind, even if the preachiness turned out to be relatively subtle and subtextual. Ultimately, too many people whose taste I trust regarded the show highly enough that I just couldn't believe it would be that kind of show, and my concerns pretty much evaporated altogether when sources like Skepchick and Amanda Marcotte directly shot down rumors that BSG was pushing any kind of religious agenda.

I'm not hostile in principle toward religious elements in art or entertainment, and in fact one of my favorite things ever is absolutely drenched in Christian imagery--the anime series Neon Genesis Evangelion. Assistant director Kazuya Tsurumaki has said of this imagery,

There are a lot of giant robot shows in Japan, and we did want our story to have a religious theme to help distinguish us. Because Christianity is an uncommon religion in Japan we thought it would be mysterious. None of the staff who worked on Eva are Christians. There is no actual Christian meaning to the show, we just thought the visual symbols of Christianity look cool. If we had known the show would get distributed in the US and Europe we might have rethought that choice.

Gainax's Toshio Okada is also summarized as having said, "[Series director] Mr. Anno ("Evangelion") apparently never read the Bible, despite the heavy Christian symbology of his work; he just (according to Mr. Okada) picked out a few interesting technical terms." Quotes like this might make the religious imagery sound like window-dressing, but it's much, much more than that. Any symbol system with centuries of human life and death behind it is bound to make some kind of impression and provoke some kind of affective response, no matter how foreign or unfamiliar the symbols, and no matter how obscure their cultural meanings might be to the observer. On the basis of his own such impressions and responses, Anno basically repurposed Christian symbols to express facets of his disordered and deteriorating psyche. That could have been a recipe for a total mess, but the effect turned out quite extraordinary, rendering imagery that's all-too-familiar to me startlingly alien, and reinfusing it with power enough to leave my jaw hanging open through much of my first viewing. Once I got over my reservations about the prominence of religion in discussions of BSG, I began to harbor some hope that it might do something just as wild that would strike me just as profoundly.

Having now watched it start-to-finish, I realize it wasn't aiming for anything like that, but its treatment of religion still turned out to be ambitious in approach and (mostly) impressive in execution. Going back to science fiction's very taproots, we find a long, variously distinguished tradition of displacing/distorting current issues and events as if in a funhouse mirror for the purpose of commenting or meditating on them. At its weakest and least imaginative, this amounts to thinly-disguised moralizing and, worst of all, cheap point-scoring. At its best, it fundamentally recontextualizes the questions in a way that demands and provokes fresh thinking and deeper examination. BSG pretty clearly stands in this tradition, and to my mind, skews hard toward the better end of the spectrum. In this light, there's no way it could have avoided dealing with religion in a big way and at great length.

There's also no way it could have failed to be controversial. In our almost tribalistic political climate, BSG did an amazing job of stripping familiar tribal markers off of most issues and then reshuffling them. A relatively simple and self-contained example is its treatment of abortion. President Laura Roslin is one of the most religious (and conservatively so) characters on the show. And yet she expresses a modern feminist pro-choice position. And yet she imposes a ban on abortions, but her reasons are purely secular and pragmatic--the human race teeters on the brink of extinction. And yet, also contra her pro-choice personal views, she also orders the forcible abortion of a human/cylon fetus, blithely handwaving any question of human (or "human") rights with a politically regressive "we're-at-war-dammit!" rationale. When I think of some of the choices Roslin made, it boggles my mind that she never lost my sympathy, despite my strong disapproval of those decisions, and even more significantly despite the fact that I loathe most real-world politicians who make the real-world equivalents of such decisions.

Isolated issues like that, though interesting, reflect a more profound reordering of broader questions. Thus, the humans are unreconstructed heathen polytheists, while the Cylons claim to worship the one true God. Both sides have their disbelievers, and both sides struggle with a bewildering stream of confirming and disconfirming experience. Some explicitly religious motivations ring eerily familiar, while others are more difficult to place on any map of current real-world discourse.

It's a little disheartening how much online discussion I found that tried to unbend all these twists and turns, and flatten the exploration of these issues into something more recognizable and comfortable. I suppose it's only to be expected. I suspect this tendency played some role in the backlash against the series finale that ultimately vindicated the religious characters. By that time, though, the religious points of view had mostly converged in the direction of monotheism, leaving a binary division between belief and unbelief. Naturally, it's going to be harder to resist identifying one way or the other, when the sides map so easily and directly onto bitterly contentious real-world divisions.

That's not to say I thought the finale came off without a hitch. One near-ubiquitous complaint was that the Big Reveal that God was behind it all amounted to a deus ex machina. Strictly speaking, that's not accurate. The possibility that God might be guiding events was introduced right from the start (either in the first episode of the miniseries, or close enough--it's been long enough that my memory is getting a little hazy), and that possibility was reinforced on a regular basis, the whole way through. So we're not even remotely talking about something the writers pulled out of their ass in the last season, or anything like that. In this sense, Sean T. Collins is surely correct in observing that,

It’s interesting to see how different people’s expectation for the show’s ending was from what the show had been basically promising to deliver all along, which was a heaping helping of honest-to-gods mysticism. . . . These folks appear to have believed that all the god-talk all along was a fake-out, that the show didn’t really mean it. For a lot of them, having the “divine” play a role in the finale, any finale, is automatically a deus ex machina in the pejorative sense–you see that phrase everywhere.

For all the foreshadowing and groundwork, though, the revelation still felt a lot like a deus ex machina. I think that's because, no matter how many times the writers reminded us they had that wild-card up their sleeve, they never developed it into anything other than a wild-card, an X, a narrative and thematic black-box. It was never anything more than a wild-card, and that's exactly how they played it.

Well, I've only just begun to lay my thoughts out about religion in Battlestar Galactica, which is a deep enough well that I'll probably go back to it a few more times before I wrap this series up. The note I want to leave you with here is that BSG's treatment of religion is admirably thoughtful and complex, and though it's far from perfect, even the low points tend to be provocative and worthy of discussion.