Dissecting the Galactica Finale

Sci-fi writers discuss how they would have ended Battlestar Galactica. [Link]

What interested me most at the start of the SciFi channel remake of BSG was the idea that the humans were polytheists while the Cyclons were monotheists. I was intrigued because I study the history of religion--I'm a medieval historian. I'm also an atheist--common enough among historians of religion.

There was no obvious early plot-based reason why the Cylons developed a theology, especially a theology so different from that of the colonists. It was not, for example, given as any part of their reason for the attack on the colonies--so I believed that the makers of the series saw Cylon religion as important in its own right. What I most looked forward to seeing, as the seasons unwound, was the explanation of why religious beliefs mattered.

The series did not disappoint my expectations. We had prophecy, visions, and priests enough to keep up the religious theme. We saw Baltar found found a human monotheistic church and experience a religious renewal, a renewal which, believably, took a long time for him to accept in all its implications. More importantly, the series did not fall back on a simplistic view of believers as deluded or non-believers as deluded: both parties were treated with respect. I wasn't surprised, because producer Ronald Moore had been involved in ST: DS9, in which we were treated to the perspective of those who believed the worm hole aliens were gods and those who did not, and saw Ben gradually move from one camp to the other--which I found one of the most interesting parts of DS9.

I found the BSG series finale very satisfying. I liked the notion that "God" communicated and interacted with people in the sort of ways that one might expect from reading medieval sermons: angels, visions, and a ghost sent back from the dead with a job to complete. But what I liked best was the way that the various themes and narrative threads were resolved around the notion of variation in complex systems, specifically, the idea that if a complex system goes on long enough, variations develop in it.

The idea that complex systems, given sufficient repetition, produce variations is, of course, a foundational idea to the theory of evolution. It is scientific. It is also a common theme in science fiction as an explanation of how artificial intelligence develops self-awareness, and was used that way in this series to explain the development of the Cylons. But in BSG, the notion of variation in complex systems operated on two other important levels as well: historical and theological.