Random thoughts about the Cylons from BSG season premiere
I don't think this is really spoilerish for last Friday's premiere, but I'd rather be safe than sorry.
For some reason, I woke up this morning and couldn't get it out of my head how much like very angry children the human-form Cylons on BSG seem this season.
I guess I never saw enough of their interactions with each other and with humans in concentrated doses during previous seasons (though the 'pressure to conform to the peer group' elements were awfully evident in that one episode from last season, where we saw Caprica Six and Boomer decide to join forces, not to mention the Junior High social manipulations represented by the Lucy Lawless character in that ep). But after two hours of frequent glimpses of their internal and external dealings during the third season premiere, and taking note of the individual Cylon responses to humans that struck me as odd and immature, I can't help but think "these are children who are pissed off about not having parents, about having had to raise themselves and their siblings with no adult support."
Yes, I know that in the first season the human-form Cylons talked of themselves as humanity's children, who have to literally (not symbolically -- their literalism in many respects is another trait that says to me "young") kill their "parents" in order to come into their own, take their rightful place in the adult world, etc..
But, when you think about it, the human-model Cylons weren't made by humans -- they hadn't been invented yet when humans and Cylons went their separate ways after the end of their first war. They had to have been the creation of the older-model "walking toaster" Cylons. That's who their parents were, technically speaking. But apparently, those "parents" were too easily controlled and supplanted by their human-form offspring, reduced to mere servants with intentionally limited programming, now (according to what Adama said he'd learned from Galactica's Sharon, Sharon Agathon, last Friday). You can't rebel against or even learn much from parents over whom you have total domination and control, it seems, from the moment of your birth.
So, it is to their metaphorical grand-parents, to humanity, that the human-model Cylons decided to direct all their un-parented, unloved, teenaged resentment and rebellion. Their "parents" had told them of humanity's shortcomings and crimes, and being made in humanity's image, the new Cylons decided that it was these absentee/abandoning/rejecting parents-once-removed who deserved their wrath. Or so it seems to me. Humanity seems to come in for the irrational anger one feels for grandparents who didn't know of one's existence or somehow failed to save one from growing up alone.
I'm even reminded of a story on public radio's "This American Life" that I heard recently, about a boy adopted from one of those notorious Romanian state orphanages, who when he finally learned what a birthday party was and realized that he'd never had one (among other normal human inter-actions during his first 8 years) began to hate his loving adoptive parents, who by their very loving attentions made him painfully aware of what he had gone without for all those years living untouched in a metal playpen. His adoptive parents spent many years at the mercy of his rage, which was actually meant for the birth-parents who'd apparently abandoned him to the uncaring institution, before beginning to be able to make a dent in his 'attachment disorder'.
Of course, they're not the first "orphaned" children to think of God as their one, true, parent -- the parent who loves them unfailingly and unconditionally, but who can be capricious and inscrutable and must not, under any circumstances, be doubted or questioned, lest He/She lasth out against them in terrible judgment. Many of us look to God to redress the parental neglect or shortfall in our earthly family relationships. But their lack of real, tangible parents upon which to base their ideas of God might also have had some effect on the shape of their at times surprisingly rigid and un-nuanced theology.
But even more than that, the human-form Cylons' own determination to procreate, to reproduce in the human manner rather than by building more of their existing sibling models, speaks to me of the parent-less child's longing to provide to another the thing that they most painfully lacked, a loving parent.
Yes, I know the Cylons' lack of empathy for humans, most of the time, can be put down to the fact that they're machines and have been trained and programmed to regard humans with disfavor and distaste. But their barely restrained (or sometimes, in the case of the 'Cavil' models, entirely uncontained) satisfaction and glee in their power to cause humans pain and suffering . . . well, that doesn't say "machine" to me, but rather "pissed-off kid who's smart enough and strong enough to be able to pass that pain along to others, and will do so at the first excuse".
Leoben's own treatment of little Kacey struck me as rather far from paternal, though he was trying to be "the mature one" in his dealings with Starbuck. He was more like a detached older brother, when he talked about her birth and future, and when he watched Kara's parental anxiety during the bedside vigil without really being able to share or completely understand it. Kara's own parental issues and fears, we understand, from the little bit we know of her abused childhood and the whole freakiness of being confronted with a child she never carried or consented to the creation of, but the distance she tried to maintain between herself and Kacey for mutual protection dissolved as soon as the child was hurt and in danger. It almost seemed to me as though Leoben was watching Kara for clues to parental emotional responses.
I'm probably talking through my hat, and no doubt events in the coming episodes will completely explode this hypothesis, but for right now, I cannot erase the thought that, no matter how smart and 'mature' they think they are, the human-model Cylons are -- for the most part -- acting and reacting like children who are enraged by the lack of reliable parenting in their past and just don't know how to handle it.
For some reason, I woke up this morning and couldn't get it out of my head how much like very angry children the human-form Cylons on BSG seem this season.
I guess I never saw enough of their interactions with each other and with humans in concentrated doses during previous seasons (though the 'pressure to conform to the peer group' elements were awfully evident in that one episode from last season, where we saw Caprica Six and Boomer decide to join forces, not to mention the Junior High social manipulations represented by the Lucy Lawless character in that ep). But after two hours of frequent glimpses of their internal and external dealings during the third season premiere, and taking note of the individual Cylon responses to humans that struck me as odd and immature, I can't help but think "these are children who are pissed off about not having parents, about having had to raise themselves and their siblings with no adult support."
Yes, I know that in the first season the human-form Cylons talked of themselves as humanity's children, who have to literally (not symbolically -- their literalism in many respects is another trait that says to me "young") kill their "parents" in order to come into their own, take their rightful place in the adult world, etc..
But, when you think about it, the human-model Cylons weren't made by humans -- they hadn't been invented yet when humans and Cylons went their separate ways after the end of their first war. They had to have been the creation of the older-model "walking toaster" Cylons. That's who their parents were, technically speaking. But apparently, those "parents" were too easily controlled and supplanted by their human-form offspring, reduced to mere servants with intentionally limited programming, now (according to what Adama said he'd learned from Galactica's Sharon, Sharon Agathon, last Friday). You can't rebel against or even learn much from parents over whom you have total domination and control, it seems, from the moment of your birth.
So, it is to their metaphorical grand-parents, to humanity, that the human-model Cylons decided to direct all their un-parented, unloved, teenaged resentment and rebellion. Their "parents" had told them of humanity's shortcomings and crimes, and being made in humanity's image, the new Cylons decided that it was these absentee/abandoning/rejecting parents-once-removed who deserved their wrath. Or so it seems to me. Humanity seems to come in for the irrational anger one feels for grandparents who didn't know of one's existence or somehow failed to save one from growing up alone.
I'm even reminded of a story on public radio's "This American Life" that I heard recently, about a boy adopted from one of those notorious Romanian state orphanages, who when he finally learned what a birthday party was and realized that he'd never had one (among other normal human inter-actions during his first 8 years) began to hate his loving adoptive parents, who by their very loving attentions made him painfully aware of what he had gone without for all those years living untouched in a metal playpen. His adoptive parents spent many years at the mercy of his rage, which was actually meant for the birth-parents who'd apparently abandoned him to the uncaring institution, before beginning to be able to make a dent in his 'attachment disorder'.
Of course, they're not the first "orphaned" children to think of God as their one, true, parent -- the parent who loves them unfailingly and unconditionally, but who can be capricious and inscrutable and must not, under any circumstances, be doubted or questioned, lest He/She lasth out against them in terrible judgment. Many of us look to God to redress the parental neglect or shortfall in our earthly family relationships. But their lack of real, tangible parents upon which to base their ideas of God might also have had some effect on the shape of their at times surprisingly rigid and un-nuanced theology.
But even more than that, the human-form Cylons' own determination to procreate, to reproduce in the human manner rather than by building more of their existing sibling models, speaks to me of the parent-less child's longing to provide to another the thing that they most painfully lacked, a loving parent.
Yes, I know the Cylons' lack of empathy for humans, most of the time, can be put down to the fact that they're machines and have been trained and programmed to regard humans with disfavor and distaste. But their barely restrained (or sometimes, in the case of the 'Cavil' models, entirely uncontained) satisfaction and glee in their power to cause humans pain and suffering . . . well, that doesn't say "machine" to me, but rather "pissed-off kid who's smart enough and strong enough to be able to pass that pain along to others, and will do so at the first excuse".
Leoben's own treatment of little Kacey struck me as rather far from paternal, though he was trying to be "the mature one" in his dealings with Starbuck. He was more like a detached older brother, when he talked about her birth and future, and when he watched Kara's parental anxiety during the bedside vigil without really being able to share or completely understand it. Kara's own parental issues and fears, we understand, from the little bit we know of her abused childhood and the whole freakiness of being confronted with a child she never carried or consented to the creation of, but the distance she tried to maintain between herself and Kacey for mutual protection dissolved as soon as the child was hurt and in danger. It almost seemed to me as though Leoben was watching Kara for clues to parental emotional responses.
I'm probably talking through my hat, and no doubt events in the coming episodes will completely explode this hypothesis, but for right now, I cannot erase the thought that, no matter how smart and 'mature' they think they are, the human-model Cylons are -- for the most part -- acting and reacting like children who are enraged by the lack of reliable parenting in their past and just don't know how to handle it.