Thirty Days of TV: Day Twenty-Six

[selenak]

Day 26 - OMG WTF? Season finale

Star Trek: Enterprise, season 4: These are the voyages... comes immediately to mind.

Some background first: I had watched the first few Enterprise episodes when they were broadcast and then decided the show wasn't really for me. Not that it was staggeringly incompetent or something like that, but it came at the

Comments

[abigail_n]

Enterprise's 9/11 storyline is actually one of the few points on which I think the show did good - well, good for Enterprise. Especially when you compare it to what BSG did with the same material - where the characters and the writers behave as if a 9/11 analogy is appropriate but the actual event they've described is basically the Holocaust times one million - I was impressed with how relatively restrained Enterprise's handling was. So you've got a brutal attack on Earth that leaves everyone on the ship reeling and furious, but once the shock wears off, their lives are basically the same as they ever were, and because the - admittedly horrifying - death toll is still only a tiny percentage of Earth's population, there's only one person on the ship who is directly affected by the attack, and his uncompromising anger is contrasted with other characters' more measured variety.

Admittedly, it doesn't go anywhere very interesting, because the show doesn't want to make the bad guys terrorists, so the whole story ends up being about saving the Earth. Really, I think the only SF show to have done anything interesting with 9/11 is Fringe, and even there that was only in the first three seasons, after which the writers clearly got bored with the subject. Person of Interest is also circling around that topic, though more along the lines of dealing with the aftermath of the aftermath of 9/11 - the characters have basically woken up to the fact that in the name of fighting terror, they've created a surveillance state with zero accountability.

[selenak]

I'm totally with you that the BSG premise isn't anything like 9/11, but I'd say "it's a genocide on a twelve planets scale" rather than "Holocaust", because of the "Cylons were invented by man and enslaved, rebelled, developed, committed horrible genocide" narrative that really doesn't fit with anything in German history. (Actually I can't think of one particular human history genocide that would provide a good parallel, unless maybe Rwanda and there would would have to be the Belgians getting massacred instead of the Tsutsi for the parallel to work, so no, not Rwanda, either.)

Also, I'm ever more curious about Person of Interest now.

[londonkds]

I thought that for a while, but it's really not true. Maybe the fact that I watched BSG so quickly made it easier for me to get the implications of the plot. But the genocide was *not committed by Cylons who were taking revenge on their former enslavers*. Firstborn!John took control of the Cylon civilisation, lobotomised the machine Cylons, and created a whole new culture of organic Cylons who did not actually have any experience of being enslaved by humanity, even though he brought them up to hate humans.

[selenak]

Point taken, though the first Cylon war (in terms of Caprican history) was of course conducted by the metallic Cylons before the Final Five ever arrived, and they also had already developed hybrids for the base stars, though they couldn't manage independently walking organic Cylons on their own. There is a brief moment in No Exit when Tyrol, Tigh and Tory discuss whether or not that makes them responsible for the genocide (on the basis that the organic Cylons did it, and whether the mechanics ever would have, nobody knows), but of course they're unaware that Cavil might it impossible for the mechanical Cylons to act against the will of the organic ones for the longest time. Which also supports your point that the Cylons fighting the second war (or: conducted the genocide, then fought the war with the surviving colonials) were a whole new culture.

I rewatched The Plan the other day with the audio commentary by Jane Espenson on, and thus I noticed something that had escaped or which I had forgotten. What I had remembered was that the Cavil on Caprica was trying to get Sam to basically admit that humanity had it coming (just as Galactica!Cavil, aka presumably the original one or at least the one to survive till the end, later wanted Ellen to do), and that was there, but what I had overlooked, and what Jane Espenson points out, was that Caprica!Cavil actually (in the later stages of frustration with Sam) asks for forgiveness (when he says "Could you forgive the Cylons? I mean, they must have had a reason, so could you..." and then Sam interrupts him vehemently), which no Cavil before or after does, though of course he does not ask Sam as a human but Sam as one of his (non-human) creators, and he doesn't mean "the Cylons" but himself, with the motivation not being any type of "killing is wrong" insight but the increasing awareness that it was pointless as far as the reason why he did it was concerned. There is still not a good parallel in human history, but going through my old reviews & rewatching reminded me again that No Exit struck me essentially as Paradise Lost, Cylon Style, with John Cavil in the role of Lucifer raging against his creator for a) creating him in the first place, and creating him flawed and b) liking other creations better. Basically: there's the mythological/literature parallel instead of the historical one.

BTW, I remember there were some complaints that this emphasis on Cavil whitewashed the responsibility of the other organic models, but I don't think so, because the show made it clear that while he messed with their memories as far as the Final Five were concerned, he never interfered with their free will. He was manipulative, sure, and gave them the "humans deserve it" credo, but they all were capable of making their own choices (unlike the Centurions), and we saw them make them basically from the miniseries onward in increasing numbers. Which means they're also fully morally co-responsible for the destruction of the colonies.