There's this amazing scene in last week's episode of John Adams where the Adamses and Thomas Jefferson join more than 100,000 Parisians to witness the flight of Montgolfiers’ hot-air balloon over Versailles. Awestruck, Jefferson whispers this great line: "Mankind floats upon a limitless plain of air."
That we took flight and birth'd democracy at nearly the same moment was no accident, as your Western Civ 101 prof no doubt taught you. And you, no doubt, quickly forgot. As organism-at-large, our world works in an amazing synchronicity. Even, ironically, when that synchronicity gives rise to the era of individualism.
[I know. As a small boy he had a bat named Rosebud!]
More than my passing preoccupation with the fact that Tom Zarek is Cylon #5, I've been thinking a bit about The Final Revelation in the BSG series. Though designed to reflect our own plight back on us, I don't think that revelation will be a place called Earth where they find a mob killing the madman they created for a crime he didn't commit in order to alleviate their guilt for creating him in the first place. No, I think radical change is in the offing --made possible only by the marriage of advanced technology and new thinking about the way we (and the BSG characters) all move forward. Together.
Just fraking oy! Which is one reason why I'd much rather blog BSG than politics lately. Tho, of course the two aren't mutually exclusive.
Speaking of Judas ...As we were chatting last night, Amanda reminded me about this great post she did on the illusion of free will and its thematic use in BSG:
[Spoilers ahead, Noz!]
The fact that religion is a big deal on the show bolsters the sense that it’s dismantling the illusion of free will. People and Cylons both sense they are at the mercy of omniscient deities, and the fact that they have oracles and visions only confirms this. Destiny is unavoidable on the show; what’s happening now has happened before doesn’t have to be taken literally, it could just mean that the path ahead has no branches, no alternate possibilities, that the future was written literally (by the gods) or metaphorically (by the convergence of forces that necessitate certain outcomes). Omniscient gods pretty much preclude the possibility of free will, and while there’s plenty of strained attempts to argue otherwise, they’re just the result of hope trumping logic. Religion is a projection of ego—I feel my life is meaningful, so there must be an outside force validating that—and the stubborn insistence on free will is a projection of ego. The two are wed together out of human egotism, but they don’t really make sense together logically.
[...]
This is why Adama’s speech about Baltar’s lack of guilt is wed to the revelation of the four Cylons. I found the scene where they realized they are Cylons, but then decide to do their jobs anyway as if nothing had changed, very moving. The crushing realization that you don’t have “free will”, that you’re a robot and functioning on some programming seems very distressing, but if you think about it, it’s not. How does that really change anything? Can you actually say that there’s something about you that is free from “programming”, a part of you that’s independent from internal and external pressures that is there to make decisions for you? And if it’s there, isn’t that just another part of your programming? Our brains are computers, constantly weighing different priorities and factors, but the algorithm being used is out of your control, and if you sense you control it, another step back and you’ll see the algorithm of priorities directing your controls.
Life is a stage and we all play parts—the four Cylons were activated by a song that mocks our pretensions and illusions of control. They are victims of forces beyond their control. And with that knowledge, they shrug and return to life, because in a fundamental way, nothing has changed.
With little time to flesh this out, I'll leave you with the idea I've felt an inevitability about next November's general election. And have for more than a year now.
After watching a couple of old episodes of BSG this weekend --and for a whole host of reasons I don't want to get into because Noz is catching up-- I've come to the conclusion that Zarek is it.
I pulled this image off of the Battlestar Galactica website tonight. I'm not sure why they're gettin' their Dan Brown on here and or if studying this image will point us in the direction of the last of the final five. But, it's interesting nonetheless.
BTW: If you've missed any previous episodes of BSG, you can now watch five of them for free on the SciFi Channel website. Hmmm. Five of them?
I hope this is true because I can't go much longer without knowing whether or not Starbuck's "claws come out" when Adama and the rest of the gang accuse her of being a cylon.
Like a lot of commenters here, this really made me think:
I think we all have to come to some serious real world conclusions here.
There will be no significant residuals coming from the Internet.
Why? Because Google, Facebook, Myspace, Yahoo, and Youtube don’t pay (if any) significant residuals on the internet. AND THEY NEVER WILL. NBC.com, ABC.com, CBS.com… who even goes to these websites… they are not going to saddle themselves with a whole bunch residuals that other websites are never going to have.
Not to mention that there are infinite amounts of ways to get our content for free, and new ways are being developed daily. Forget “The Office”… I just saw a perfectly good streaming copy of “American Gangster” the other day, BEFORE the movie came out. The one clicks (Megaupload, Zshare) have arrived and they are coming for you.
So we were angry about the bad deal on DVDs, and because we’re mad about that, we went all out for some revenue stream that no one’s figured out yet.
Everything is going to the internet. listen and listen closely. THE INTERNET IS NOT OUR FRIEND. We just hastened the inevitable.
We doubled down on a pair of twos. And the whole time, the studios saw our cards.
EW features a short report on November's BSG Razor mini-do that includes spoilers discussed below the fold.
Regarding the flashbacks to the first Cylon War:
Do you think we'll find out that the "final five" are the product of human-cylon "love" and that's what makes them fundamentally different cylons? Because that's what I'm betting on. And, if that's the case, Hera is #5.
I also think that Sharon might be the fifth and that all of them are the sons and daughters of a single, special cylon. Can you guess who I think it is?
Will we find out who Starbuck's father was? Plus, see #1 and #2.
Did the president of the twelve colonies inadvertently fund cylon terrorist activities by buying their cooperation using a special slush-fund generated by the sale of dangerous, illegal substances to a minority population? Ha! Ha! Just kidding ...
