Why I heart the Cylons: integrated meta, vid recs and notes on Sons and Daughters

[heyiya]

(It was a relatively quiet day at work today; my last week in my summer editing job. When I asked my boss what else there was to do she - who knows a fair bit about my interests and my research - said "Nothing, why don't you write something about cyborgs?" The post-vid Cylon theorizing I've been meaning to write up fits the 'assignment' perfectly.

Comments

"fight for our children - for our daughters and sons"

[kiki_miserychic]

Mmmm, I love me some good meta

part 1

[heyiya]

I always saw Caprica snapping the baby's neck as a mercy killing
I definitely think that’s a part of it but also not all of it -- beccatoria said it better than I could in her comment below, and I’m especially interested in the fact that to call it a mercy killing involves a retrospective reading since we aren’t to know at the moment when it happens that it’s saving the baby from the holocaust. I see it as the curiosity fascination (taking things apart to see how they work, like you said about burning flies) and also the fruition of that destructive urge I think most of us feel toward fragile things…

But I’m interested in what that scene signifies outside the logics of the show as well as within them, and it’s in those terms that I immediately read it when I was first watching, I think. Like you said:

science fiction tends to look toward the future and children are considered the ultimate representation of the future.So a science fiction show that starts by killing a baby, killing the future in a scene that manages to leave your sympathies

Re: part 1

[kiki_miserychic]

That's what I love about BSG. The neck snapping of a baby can be seen as one thing at first, then something, something else upon further thought, then something else two seasons later, and I'd imagine that by the end of the series it can be seen as something else entirely. Why snap one baby's neck to save it from the coming holocaust? BSG can do irony very well sometimes, like when Natalie talked about how the Four could be watching and judging them. Yet we know that Tory, Anders, Tigh, and Tyrol have no idea what they're doing. What I remember from the neck snapping scene is Caprica's face. There were so many things there that didn't quite add up until after watching the miniseries. Caprica seems endlessly fascinated with humans and all the baggage that comes with them.

also the fruition of that destructive urge I think most of us feel toward fragile things...Yes. Very well put. It's like an irrational urge that is actually rational to break things that can be broken

part 2

[heyiya]

I agree with you about the childishness, but also it’s childishness only if the human life narrative is applied to machines with downloadable immortal consciousnesses. Anthromorphism? Of course they apply the anthropomorphism to themselves too, especially now that the resurrection hub has been destroyed. I guess I think that the idea of the Cylon as immature beings, who killed everyone because they couldn’t understand what life is and now they do, is the interpretation the show’s making available to us. And I like it, but am curious too about a nonhumanistic take on things and how and where we can find one in the show. That’s why I connect to the Tiptree story which is completely from an alien perspective I think, because I love trying to imagine how totally differently - how outside of the standard definitions of what it is to be human - it might be possible to think.

Re: part 2

[kiki_miserychic]

I read something years ago about the human need to anthropomorphize God. The Cylon have that same urge toward themselves. I have a probably completely unscientifically founded idea that the only reason there isn't an artificial intelligence being is because we have yet to create a mechanical being with enough connections. In the human there are neurons and synapses constantly firing and communicating. I think in order for a consciousness, there needs to be enough connections communicating and then from there everything will snowball and an artificial intelligence will emerge