everything new is old again
I feel, as I often do, like I have had a profound insight or "aha!" moment about something. A couple of things, really. So I am in that nice moment of thinking about it, before discovering the 256,245 other people who have thought and written about the same topic with greater depth, thoroughness, and clarity than I ever will, causing me to want to give up on everything in life. Etc.
I am slowly working my way through Battlestar Galactica - the 2004 reboot. I think I decided I needed something to binge that would be fairly mindless but not completely mindless. Some people I know like BSG, and I recently discovered that the mythos is vaguely based on Mormonism. Also, it's free with Prime. ;)
What I keep being struck by in watching this show is how, amidst some very interesting and thought-provoking ideas, it is impossible not to constantly think of how profoundly dated the show's view of technology is. We are only living about 15 years after the show was made, and a bunch of things have already happened that the writers were incapable of imagining. And this makes it very easy to see how silly a lot of the plot contrivances are.
So to a certain extent in order to get to some of the more interesting questions the show poses - how would robot consciousness be like ours? what does humanity mean in an era of AI? - you have to basically buy in to a completely ridiculous set of anachronisms and bizarre juxtapositions. This is a human civilization that has somehow evolved the ability to create both complex AI and interstellar hyperdrives. As is the case in almost every piece of sci fi I have ever seen, the reality of weightlessness in space is simply never referenced at any point. It's just been so solved that we never think about it. And yet they have no communicators, computers look like 1980s Atari graphics, and medicine is still exactly how it is today. In fact, other than the complex AI and warp drives, everything is as it is today. People wear business suits and write and speak in English and "drones" are just decoys. When people vote in elections for "president" and "vice president" they use paper ballots.
Part of the conceit of the show is that some of the robots now look like people. Now, THANK GOD that they do this, because it means they get to give a lot of show time to the only actors on the show who are any good. But then the writers go further and make them totally indistinguishable from people down to the cellular level. (There is one amusing moment when the doctor delivers a robot baby with difficulty, and is like, "you went to all the trouble of mimicking our evolution, but you couldn't fix the plumbing along the way?" YES YES VERY GOOD FUCKING QUESTION, SHOW! An AI would not do such a thing. It is an absurdity.)
It just goes on and on. Why would you go to the trouble of inventing an entire mythos in which 99% of things are exactly as they are today in early 2000s North America?
This surprises me because the BSG writers came to it from ST:TNG, which, whatever else you might say about it, tried to kind of think through what it all meant. "IF we had transporters AND interstellar travel AND colonization AND had made contact with aliens, THEN here's what the world would look like..." But then I started to think about the fact that most science fiction, even Star Trek, often ends up somehow back where we started. TOS Star Trek kind of had some awareness of the campiness of this, so that when Kirk ends up banging a Native American or shooting at Nazis, you just go, "oh, they the sets left over on the studio lot and the show was out of money."
BSG is interesting in a similar way. In this case, the writers seem to be like, "let's get this space shit out of the way so we can write about what we REALLY want to say," which from the vantage of 2019 looks almost entirely about the Iraq War. The show is so fucking gloomy and heavy; there's no humor (another departure from ST), and yet for first season the show avoided wrestling with its central conceit, which is that humanity was basically destroyed and we are condemned to live in a box for eternity. Again, since the prospect of planetary catastrophe is so much more palpable now than in 2006, it's easy to see that playing a lot of New Age music is not the same thing as actually thinking about what this would mean to people.
I want to make fun of BSG for this, but the truth is that pretty much every work of sci fi that has been popularized has this same tendency - set up the conceit and then dispose of it so we can make people think about the things the writers really want to get into, like nuclear war, racism, nationalism, Rome turning into an empire, what have you. The best thing about the movies on MST3K is that you can see that this is pretty much a universal tendency to the genre. It's the classic reason Rod Serling made the Twilight Zone in the aftermath of the Red Scare. But it's also to say that it's nakedly pedantic in a way that usually becomes tedious after a while. (This gets into some pretty deep waters about how we're primed to believe that aesthetically "good" art is non-political and non-moralizing, but I think I'm not going there today.)
And another thing from the vantage of 2019: it doesn't work. No, people did not understand that Star Wars was a metaphor for the Viet Cong and imperialism. No, people did not appreciate Star Trek telling us how silly it was for people with different colored faces to hate each other. Look around the world we are living in. People do not get the goddamn point. (Of course this could be said for any work of literature, religion, morality, history, philosophy, etc. in Western Civilization. It is really remarkable how people never get the fucking point.) I think this is why someone like Vonnegut couldn't help but satirize the conventions of sci-fi at every turn; they are so flimsy and unconvincing in a deep philosophical sense. The actual future will be incomprehensible to us, but that doesn't make for satisfying story arcs, so we always just somehow find ourselves back in the present.
I am not really saying that BSG is a bad show. Once it leaves off the WWII-combat-movie cliches, it gets into interesting territory, particularly, of all things, in the area of religion. (The Cylons are monotheists and most humans are polytheists, although in another sign of the show's lack of creativity, the gods have all the Greco-Roman names from the zodiac.) Similarly, it gropes toward exploring why a robot AI would be so petulant and moody when it comes to humans. (The prequel Caprica, which I saw when it came out, did a much better job with all of this.)
Anyway. I know some of you all have thoughts about this and I am curious as to what you think, because you are among the people who have thought more about this than I have, for sure.