Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up?

By Josef Steiff and Tristan D. Tamplin

In attempting to retain her "human" side, does Sharon really have free will? Is killing a Cylon murder or garbage disposal? These are some of the questions addressed in this thoughtful collection of writings on the philosophical underpinnings of Battlestar, Galactica. The book includes a brief analysis of the original 1970s and 80s series but concentrates primarily on the episodes, characters, and issues from the entirely reimagined current series (including its fourth and final season, scheduled for airing in early 2008) as well as the two-hour TV movie and direct-to-DVD release Razor.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Court
• Release date: Jun 1, 2008
• ISBN: 9780812697087

Book preview

MODEL ONE

Some Are Programmed to Think They Are Human

There was a sense of inertia, at least in those early days, that they all were going to continue to try to just keep doing what they used to do, because to give up that identity (to give up your identity as the gardener, to give up your identity as the lawyer) was to essentially cast [yourself] into the abyss. You would have no identity.

—RONALD D. MOORE

www.concurringopinions.com/archives/2008/03/battlestar_gala_5.html

1

The Narrative Disruptions of Model Eight

DANIEL MILSKY

Imagine you’re rushing to the living room to catch the premiere of the final season of Battlestar Galatica when you trip over the dog. A Frak! leaps from your lips as you look down to stare at your bleeding knee. As you clean it up, you notice that there is a shine under the torn skin and to your horror you see that your knee is in fact a metal joint—a mechanical metal joint with all the circuitry of an artificial android. After some time, you slowly come to realize that you are not human—you are, in fact, an android.

In assessing the situation, you might wonder what the importance of this odd body is to your understanding of your identity. So you aren’t human . . . so what? Your body is different than you thought it was—but look—that would have been true had you been human. Human bodies change all the time. One year you’re fat, the next year skinny. You grew up all your life thinking you were good looking, but never seemed to attract a partner. So now you are metal boned . . . big deal. The worry is not whether you are human or android, the worry is whether or not you are the person you thought you were. Are your memories real? Are your thoughts your own? These are the things that really matter; these are the components of our identity. Right?

But then you really start to worry. How do you know if your memories are your memories? You have memories all the time of things that never really happened. You may even have memories of things that you feel sure happened to you, but really happened to your brother or sister or friend. Furthermore, you may have recently changed your mind about a core belief—perhaps you stopped eating meat, for instance. You may have even switched political party allegiance or become a religious zealot. It seems then that our bodies change, our memories may be unreliable, and our ideas and beliefs can be in flux.

Science fiction is fun because it affords us a unique opportunity to explore fundamental questions in new ways. There is no more fundamental question than Who are we? On Battlestar Galactica, this question takes on a whole new level of complexity. Not only must the characters worry about all the usual philosophical issues related to their identities, but they must also worry about whether they are human at all or, even more importantly, whether they know that they are human. If they think they are human, and are not actually human, they may run the risk of being fundamentally wrong about not only what they are, but about who they are as well.

The Two Sharons

The Cylon that perhaps most obviously struggles to develop a coherent understanding of self is Sharon Valerii. Sharon is a number eight model humanoid Cylon. Multiple copies of Sharon appear throughout the series, but the two most important and central characters are Sharon Boomer Valerii and Sharon Athena Agathon—hereafter Boomer Sharon and Athena Sharon. We are introduced to Boomer Sharon in the miniseries and by the first episode of Season One, entitled 33, we know that she is Cylon. During the miniseries Boomer Sharon is forced to leave Karl Helo Agathon on Caprica where he is later reunited with a Sharon copy—Athena Sharon. During 33 we realize that both Sharons are Cylons because they exist at the same time in two different places. Helo does not realize this and believes Boomer Sharon has returned to rescue him.

The beauty of these two Sharons, from a personal identity perspective, lies in the very different identity struggles they go through throughout the first season and beyond. Boomer Sharon is a sleeper Cylon and, thus, does not know she is Cylon. She believes she is a human from Troy. In contrast, Athena Sharon knows she is Cylon with a very clear mission to carry out on behalf of the Cylon race—to become pregnant with Helo’s child. Unbeknownst to Boomer Sharon she also has a Cylon mission to carry out—to assassinate Admiral Adama. To each of these Sharons their senses of self are clear and they seem to have quite a firm grasp on their personal identities. At the outset of the series, there is no internal struggle or confusion, but things quickly begin to change.

We Are the Story We Tell

Narrative theory is perhaps the most interesting way to analyze the Sharons’ personal identity turmoil. Taken mainly from the writings of Paul Ricoeur and Alasdair MacIntyre, narrative theory is a theory of personal identity rooted in the stories we tell about ourselves.² The most fitting response to the question, Who is the author or agent? is to examine the story the author or agent tells about his or her own life. The enduring identity of a person is provided by the narrative conviction that it is the same subject who continues through its diverse acts and words between birth and death. The story told tells about the action of the self; and the identity of the self is a narrative identity. Thus, if we are to uncover who Sharon is we must look at the story Sharon tells.

Part of the way we construct our narratives is to engage in the process of ‘emplotment’, the way in which we arrange events and actions that give a sense of wholeness to the story with a beginning and an end. Emplotment is what makes the story intelligible. The beauty of emplotment is that we are able to take discordant events and heterogeneous episodes of our lives and tie them together into a coherent plot permitting readability to our lives. It is what draws the events into one temporal whole. The emplotment process allows us to turn events in our lives into episodes and the series of episodes then become the fodder for our stories.

We come to understand all the characters in Battlestar Galactica through reference to their past stories and we come to understand ourselves in this same way. For example, Boomer Sharon, as far as she knows, is a member of the crew, a human, a fighter pilot, a lover of Chief Tyrol, a woman from Troy. She is enmeshed in a complex web of prior stories. Sharon gathers the scattered events, actions, goals, causes, and desires in this web of stories into one meaningful story. The configuration of this story is the activity of emplotment. It is a way of imitating our actions with the hope of grasping them as a meaningful whole. Understanding these seemingly disconnected events is by means of the plot.

Nevertheless, Boomer Sharon’s emplotment process represents a possible challenge to narrative theory. After all, she had been telling a story all along but, as it turns out, the story she had been telling wasn’t actually true. It wasn’t intentional self-deception, but it was a story that was not actually based on accurate facts about the world. The plot development was based on inaccurate facts about the world. She did not know that she was not a human, that at her core she was Cylon, a machine, a toaster. She was living a lie. She was, in reality, the one thing she hated most—a being responsible for the destruction of nearly the entire human race.

Disruption

It’s hard to imagine a greater disruption to one’s understanding of what they are. Let’s call this error in Boomer Sharon’s story a factual disruption to her narrative. Factual disruptions are disruptions to our understanding of the material details or facts from the history of one’s life. The material conditions of the world, the raw facts of the world, are important sources of information necessary to understand place, space, and meaning. As these facts are discovered or re-discovered, they have immediate implications for the narrative we’ve constructed. This factual disruption is a possibility for all sleeper Cylons, but obviously doesn’t affect their narratives until they discover the error. Thus, we can believe false facts about the world which may not actually affect our identity development. For example, the actually ugly but self-perceived handsome person. The disruption occurs when they finally realize they are not actually beautiful. The awareness of a factual disruption is shocking; it is a wake up call. Boomer Sharon gets this wake up call when she shoots Adama. In the following days she finally confirms her previous suspicions—she is Cylon. She comes to this realization through the analysis of her narrative which forces her to notice the inherent inconsistencies. She’s unable to give a coherent account of the story while holding onto the belief that she is human. The only way to coherently understand the plot of her narrative is through the lens of a Cylon self.

Athena Sharon experiences a different kind of narrative disruption. Athena Sharon knows that she’s a Cylon on a mating mission. As she pursues her goal she begins to experience an emotion previously not experienced by Cylons—love. This emotional experience is startling and functions to alter her perception of humanity and the human-Cylon relationship. The experience causes her to re-assess the validity of the previous beliefs she had about the world and the way humans and Cylons ought to interact. It’s hard to hate and kill when one loves. Unlike Boomer Sharon, Athena Sharon is not wrong about the facts of her life; instead she changes her beliefs about the world. She decides that humans are not the objects of hate but, rather, things worthy of love and affection. Nothing has changed about her understanding of the fact that she is Cylon but, rather, she has changed her mind about the value of humans. Let’s call this sort of disruption a disruption of belief. In the episode Flesh and Bone, Athena Sharon and Helo wake up after a sexual liaison. Nearby, Doral (a number five model Cylon), observes that Six is calling Number Eight by the name Sharon now. Six reasons:

SIX: I choose to think of her as one of them.

DORAL: Because you dislike her?

SIX: Because in the scheme of things, we are as we do. She acts like one of ’em, thinks like them. She is one of them.

DORAL: But she’s one of us. It would be best to remember that.

When Athena Sharon reports that she’s just had sex with Helo, Six asks, Does he love you?

ATHENA SHARON: I think so.

SIX: Has he said it?

ATHENA SHARON: Not directly.

SIX: Then you’re just guessing.

DORAL: Stay in your current location. We’re setting up a cabin for you nearby. Food, water, electricity, all the comforts.

SIX: Shouldn’t be too hard to convince him to stay and start a life together.

DORAL: If not, kill him. Can you handle that? (Flesh and Bone)

She runs back to Helo and starts having flashbacks to everything that had happened to them so far on Caprica. When she reaches him, she does the opposite of what she’s told. She tells him that they have to leave. I saw the Cylons, they’re headed this way. We gotta travel fast, even faster than before. Why? What’s different? Everything. Just trust me. I do.

Societal reactions to both the factual and belief disruptions are somewhat illuminating. They warn us that some people may believe that these disruptions are sufficient to fundamentally change our identities. Number Six has recognized the deep belief change in Athena Sharon and has now denied her membership in the Cylon community. The change in her beliefs has, from the point of view of Number Six, changed Athena Sharon’s identity. In Six’s view, she has moved from a model number eight Cylon to Athena Sharon—in some respects a new person with a human identity.

Once Boomer Sharon is identified as a Cylon, she is treated as less than a morally considerable entity. She is beaten and raped in prison and it is clear that some members of the society no longer believe she is the same person. She has become a non-human other, a Cylon who is no longer Boomer. Even her former lover, Chief Tyrol refuses to acknowledge her as Boomer.

The role of the socially constructed self is clearly raised here by both Six’s remarks and by the actions of Chief Tyrol and the other colonists. Six has ostensibly removed Athena Sharon from the Cylon community. The Cylons seemingly believe that the fundamental disruption of belief experienced by Athena Sharon is insufficient grounds for a change in her identity. The colonists aboard Galactica, through their refusal to acknowledge Boomer as a member of the crew, demonstrate that they have embraced a similar change of heart. The social construction process here is one in which third parties actively work to structure, through their own (sometimes communally developed) narratives, the identity of the ‘other’. In this case, Number Six works to revise her prior narrative of Athena. Tyrol does the same through the revision of his Boomer narrative. This third-party or socially developed narrative may become internalized as one develops their own personal, identity informing, narrative. What becomes especially interesting here is how the socially constructed narrative may ultimately lead to a self-fulfilling prophecy where the agent internalizes the third-party narrative and makes it their own.

Self-Fulfilling Prophecy

According to some social psychologists, our stories have implications beyond our identities; they may offer clues about the motivation for and source of our behavior. Subjectivity constitutes its own agency and by interactionally conjuring up a self, one implicitly provides reasons for why he or she may have acted in a particular fashion or interprets things in a distinctive way. As we develop a narrative, we also develop expectations for our behavior and reasons for our actions. One might argue that this self can be socially manipulated and externally constructed. Certainly we are prone to outside influence both positive and negative. We need only look at the results of bullying on young children to see how low self-esteem and a narrative of fear develops. It’s not uncommon for us to alter our actions in a manner consistent with our developing narrative. Here we can see the role of the societal construction of self on the agent in question.

As one tells the story of their past, they may develop a narrative that they would rather disavow. For example, during Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part II, Boomer Sharon must develop a narrative that includes the possibility of being Cylon. As she is attempting to unleash a nuclear bomb to blow up a Cylon basestar a number of naked Number Eight models walk in her direction. She takes her helmet off and tells them, I’m not a Cylon. I’m Sharon Valerii. I was born on Troy. My parents were Catherine and Abraham Valerii. You can’t fight destiny, Sharon. It catches up with you, no matter what you do. Don’t worry about us. We’ll see you again. We love you, Sharon. And we always will. Boomer Sharon races back to the ship and the character, Racetrack, asks her about the missing helmet. Close the hatch. Don’t turn around!

The Eights suggest an alternative identity to her, an identity that is actually becoming more consistent with the factual disruptions that she has subconsciously noticed in her life. She knows she has done some things that don’t fit into the human narrative. In the episode Water she finds herself soaking wet after she awakes to her human personality shortly after the bombs used to destroy Galactica’s water tanks were planted. She becomes increasingly concerned and starts to question her true self. Her worry increases during the episodes Six Degrees of Separation and Flesh and Bone, when she experiences an attachment to a captured Cylon Raider, and is able to give insight into how it can be properly assessed and understood. Her concerns are further elevated in Litmus when, following the bombing by Doral, Galactica’s Sergeant Hadrian, suspects her and Chief Tyrol of Cylon complicity.

The questioning of her human identity combined with the socially suggested Cylon identity influence her. She comes to re-develop her narrative in a way consistent with the factual disruptions. This newfound coherency causes her to begin to accept a developing Cylon narrative. The developing narrative functions to open her up to behaving as a Cylon—just as a person who is marginalized and treated as an outsider or criminal eventually begins to act the part.

In the case of Boomer Sharon, the human story begins to break down and the Cylon narrative establishes itself. She is overcome by her Cylon self and, in fact, blacks out during the shooting of Adama. Boomer Sharon becomes fragmented in a sense, forced to reconstruct what has become an incoherent narrative. It is interesting to note here that the behaviors exhibited by Boomer Sharon are consistent with the classic psychopathological diagnosis of DID or Dissociative Identity Disorder (formerly Multiple Personality Disorder). She compartmentalizes the moment she shoots Adama and later can’t even recall the events that transpired. Her other voice, a competing internal narrative, is acting in those moments.

Not a Uniquely Cylon Problem

At this point one might be tempted to believe that these deep narrative disruptions are a uniquely Cylon problem, but factual and belief disruptions are not at all uncommon amongst humans. Cylons may be created with artificial pasts and false consciousness but narrative disruptions occur naturally amongst the human population as well. This becomes especially obvious when one thinks of the experiences of victims of extreme trauma.

Victims of childhood abuse often experience factual disruptions of their narratives. Take Starbuck for example. A grown adult, she begins to have flashbacks to scenes of horrible cruelty from her childhood. In Maelstrom she has flashbacks to her mother’s abuse. We see her hand slammed in a door jamb; an act of retaliation for a prank she’d pulled on her mother. Perhaps these flashbacks are post-traumatic stress responses or even repressed memories surfacing. The mind is able to compartmentalize trauma and repress memories of past experiences in an effort to cope and survive. Although I suspect Starbuck has had some awareness of this trauma throughout her life, we have some evidence that she had not fully incorporated it into her narrative nor made it part of the plot.³ In Occupation, she experiences a conversation with Cylon Leoben Conoy in her apartment on Caprica where he forces her to confront her past, the abuse she received from her mother and the guilt she feels for leaving her mother to die alone. He comments that Kara had been running from her past just as she had been running away from death for her entire life, and implied that eventually she would have to confront her fears and her destiny. Starbuck’s running from the past is a way of refusing to address the factual disruption she subconsciously knows to exist. Coming to accept the factual disruption may be so traumatic that it could lead to an incoherent narrative and, thus, cause an identity fragmentation.

In this case, we might imagine that the awareness of the factual disruption becomes so central to her story that she is unable to get a grip on her current narrative. She may search for a way to integrate this new information but ultimately struggle for years. She feels fragmented and she no longer knows who she is. Her life had been built upon a refusal to accept the truth and is thus built on a lie about her relationships with her mother and the memories she thought she had. Starbuck may begin to believe that she is no longer the same person she had been all along. This sort of awakening to a factual disruption is not uncommon in victims of childhood abuse and in some cases the awakening only comes after the emergence of repressed memories. In these cases, the disruption may be even more fragmenting because now the entire story of the past has to be re-visited and the narrative must be completely revised. It seems clear then that the kind of factual disruption the sleeper Cylons face through the realization of the factual error upon which they’ve constructed their narratives may also occur in humans.

Laura Roslin, on the other hand, experiences a disruption of belief. When Battlestar Galactica begins she appears to be a nonsectarian voice of reason. She’s simply a victim of circumstance; the secretary of education who, by happenstance, becomes president of the colonies. But as the show goes on we see her shift her beliefs about whom and what she is. In Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 1, Roslin has visions that may be induced from the chamalla she is taking to fight her breast cancer, that lead her to believe that she is the dying leader prophesized in the Scrolls of Pythia. Rather than the victim of circumstance, she comes to believe that she is chosen and she confirms this belief with her religious advisor Elosha. This shift represents a deep change in her belief, a disruption of belief. It is not uncommon for humans who experience this sort of deep religious conversion to claim that they are no longer the person they used to be. What they mean is that they now have to alter the plot of their previously existing narrative. Rather than being simply the elected leader of the colonies, Roslin is fulfilling a 1,600-year old prophecy and has been fated to lead the colonists to their salvation—Earth. This sort of belief disruption certainly presents a challenge to Roslin and she is forced to develop a coherent new narrative, one where she is the leader foretold in the Pythian prophesies. Not everyone is pleased by this new narrative self Roslin adopts, especially not Admiral Adama.

The story of Roslin is similar to the belief disruption story of Helo. Helo falls in love with one of them—a toaster (a word considered a racial epithet by Number Six). His deepest commitments to humanity and the fleet are challenged when he acknowledges his love for a machine. At the core of his identity was a belief that the Cylons are not people and furthermore they are the source of the misery and suffering humanity is now experiencing. To change his beliefs about the Cylons now would be to change a belief that is part and parcel his identity. It would not be unheard of for people to say you have changed or you are not the same Helo. In fact, upon his return to Galactica he is not treated warmly and many members of the crew believe that in order to love a Cylon, Helo must be a Cylon himself. For the crew, his changed belief can only be explained by a change in his identity—for no real Helo or human could possibly love a machine.

Retelling Our Stories

The disruptions experienced by the Sharons and the humans are merely thatdisruptions. They are not identity-altering phenomenon. Experience provides for us a nearly endless supply of potentially reportable, storyable items; it is the incorporation of particular items into a coherent account that gives them meaning. We compose our accounts; they do not come fully formed or organized on their own. The stories we tell can be re-organized and even re-told. We are resilient and imaginative beings with an ability to heal, an ability to adapt. As new beliefs are accepted or new facts about our lives unfold we can integrate these into our narratives. Just as we change from fetus to adult so too do the stories we tell about ourselves. A slight revision here and a tweak there; this ability preserves our sanity and allows us to remain ourselves over time.

The factual and belief disruptions are harmful in the periods of narrative restructure. Helo struggles to understand his new love and belief about Cylons. Roslin struggled with her leadership identity. Boomer is suicidal in the moments where she has not retold her story or accepted the fact that changes are necessary. A trip to the therapist could have done her wonders. Part of the effectiveness for the overcoming of depression and despair is rooted in the efficacy of the therapist’s ability to help the patient re-construct a coherent narrative. Starbuck began to feel better when she worked to regain the memories of her past. She used to use them to help explain neuroses and character traits she has today. She is able to retell her story in a way that included the previously repressed facts. This process was a unification process, a salvation of the self through an overcoming of the disruption. Boomer Sharon did not change when she realized her past had been fabricated; rather she was confronted with a moment of narrative disruption, a disruption that could be overcome through a narrative retelling. Therapists refer to this form of therapy as integration therapy. The idea is that through integration therapy there will be a restoration of the unified agency of the patient.

Athena Sharon develops such a powerful narrative over time that she is able to suppress her Cylon conditioning and programming in favor of a narrative of the life she wants to lead. She manages to fully integrate into the Galactica-human community, eventually earning the trust of the entire crew. Whether human or Cylon, narratives are sufficiently malleable and elastic that they can be repaired, reintegrated and retold and oftentimes in ways that are consistent with our autonomously determined desires for the future course of our lives.

An especially interesting example of this retelling and malleability can be found in the narrative revisions that Chief Tyrol, Sam Anders, Tory Foster, and Saul Tigh engage in when they discover that they are actually Cylon. In the Season Three finale, Crossroads II, they all end up together in an equipment room where they come to the realization that they are hearing the same mysterious music and are thus Cylon. This realization does not destroy them; it does not change who they are. Rather, it offers them a chance to revise their narratives. The Chief immediately reports back to the deck where Cally asks him where he’s been. Chief responds, I’ll tell you later. Get that bird in the tube! Get those steps off, come on! Come on, everybody, we’re under attack! He continues the fight against the Cylons and in so doing consciously continues his existing narrative. He is resilient and his ability to integrate this new information is demonstrated here. The narrative is malleable and can be revised to include newly discovered facts that will allow the subject to preserve a continuity of self. Likewise, Saul Tigh announces, My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that’s the man I want to be. And if I die today, that’s the man I’ll be. We can almost see the narrative being developed here through his announcement. While Anders heads back to the flight deck, Tory Foster reports back to the CIC with Tigh and announces, I’m here if you need me, Madam President. The announcement serves as a re-assertion of identity; a re-pledging of allegiance and functions as a revision to the narrative. Once again, we see a conscious effort to avoid fracturing by integrating the factual disruption thereby continuing the narrative, and preserving the continuity of identity.

As often happens throughout the series, the distinction between Cylon and human is blurred. An analysis of personal identity ultimately demonstrates that both humans and Cylons travel a similar path in developing their narratives of personal identity, and disruptions in that path are not necessarily identity-altering. So perhaps you are an Android with a metallic frame. You needn’t despair. Instead, through a careful retelling of your story you ought to be able to construct a coherent and consistent narrative that explains this missed fact. You can avoid the feeling of identity fracture and remain the same person you always were—just stay away from large magnets.

2

Frak-tured Postmodern Lives, Or, How I Found Out I Was a Cylon

PAUL BOOTH

Pop quiz: at what point in Battlestar Galactica did Jammer first betray his shipmates? Was it when they first settled New Caprica, at the end of Season Two? Was it during the arrest of Cally at the beginning of Season Three? Or did it happen sometime between, in the unaired narrative arc between the seasons?

Actually, Jammer first joined the New Caprica Police (NCP), and subsequently betrayed the humans to the Cylons, during the airing of the online Battlestar Galactica webisodes (The Resistance). This series of ten three-minute shorts detailed the story of Jammer and his fellow officer Duck, two friends who make decidedly different choices about their futures on New Caprica. Aired between Seasons Two and Three, the webisodes for Battlestar Galactica not only helped whet the appetite of an audience hungry to find out what happened one year later, but also continued some of the on-going plot lines for the show.

Webisodes are part television (filmed as part of the narrative) and part website (found online). Using steaming video buffered on a network’s website, webisodes can be considered either textual or extra-textual: in other words, they can be part of the narrative of the television show, or can be separate from that narrative. Battlestar Galactica’s producers tied their show’s webisodes into the narrative of the show by using familiar characters and extending plot lines.

The Battlestar Galactica webisodes show that the chasm between television and the Internet is narrowing. The narrative arc of serial television shows, the kind that have continuous, ongoing plotlines, is expanding into the Internet. Henry Jenkins calls this phenomenon transmediation, and he indicates that the viewers of the show have to actively work to put together the storyline (Convergence Culture, New York University Press, 2006). In order to understand the entire plot, you have to construct that narrative from separate parts.

These webisodes can be seen as furthering the narrative, in that there is more of the narrative for the viewer to watch. However, the webisodes can be seen as fracturing the media product into different segments. Instead of being contained in one media technology, the narrative arc of Battlestar Galactica is segmented and broadcast over two. Crucially for the Battlestar Galactica series, the webisodes created a dynamic multi-threaded narrative arc, pieced together by the audience.

To understand the narrative as a whole, viewers must actively construct this narrative by piecing together the different narrative fragments. This parallels a similarly active construction in Battlestar Galactica: the fragmented identity of the characters of the show. Because the Cylons can look and act human, there is a tension in different characters between their allegiance to the humans and the allegiance to the mechanical Cylons. In order to piece together their identity as either Cylon or human, the characters have to actively construct their loyalty between the two. This philosophical concept of a fractured identity offers us a unique lens through which we can observe the active construction that occurs in both the characters and the viewers of Battlestar Galactica.

Frak-tured Self

In contemporary postmodern thought the self is a constantly changing and unstable entity. Not only do we not know if our bunkmate is a Cylon—we probably don’t even know if we are. For Michel Foucault, our concept of our self is constructed through a fragmented being of language.⁴ In his writings about postmodernity, Foucault describes how social institutions, such as medicine, psychiatry, and the penal system, determine the way the individual perceives him- or herself. For example, Foucault might say that we have laws in order to establish morality, reversing the idea that law exists to uphold an already existent moral structure.

Individuals are determined (to use his word) by the conditions that dominate and even overwhelm them (p. xiv). A person is a product of his or her own circumstances, and Foucault notes that even these circumstances are determined by larger factors. None of these institutions can be separated from the larger power structures of government and culture. In Foucault’s writings, the concept of mankind is also determined—and constructed. Because we write our own histories, we determine our own cultural identities. Admiral Adama knows this, as he says to his son after reading Admiral Cain’s logs: history is not written from these logs. History is created by what he writes about these logs.

For Foucault, therefore, an accurate description of the self is an impossibility. If there’s no stable human culture, no stable identity, to fall back on, then we must construct our identity everyday. The body we wake up in every morning might be the same, but the self, the internal I, can be radically different. Gaius Baltar, for example, constantly struggles to determine if he is a Cylon or not. In his mind, Baltar’s identity alters between Cylon and human. In Torn, Baltar is trapped on a Cylon basestar and realizes this tension verbally: That’s a bit of a coincidence, isn’t it? That I can see such a vivid reality that I’ve created, and the Cylon projection experience is so similar . . . Am I a Cylon? His question hangs in the air. At that moment, Baltar understands that his self is fractured—by not knowing if he is Cylon or human, he must negotiate both sides. His internal struggle illustrates what Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, in their book Anti-Oedipus, call schizophrenia, a condition by which one liberates the self from the restrictions of society.

Boomer Sharon, as well, experiences this schizophrenic sense of self during the extended, multi-episodic arc of season one in which she begins to suspect her Cylon identity. Witness, for example, the scene in Water where she wakes up dripping wet, not knowing where she had previously been. Her life as a Cylon momentary overtook her life as a human, and this fractured identity created a moment of amnesia for her: the instability of one single identity caused her brain to momentarily snap. Although most of us don’t have to deal with amnesia whenever we’re faced with identity confusion, we do have to deal with momentarily freezing if we misinterpret a situation. Walking into a place where we’re not supposed to be—the restricted area of a Battlestar, for instance—we become momentarily confused: "Am I supposed to be here?" Boomer decided in that moment that she was not Cylon: for better or for worse, she constructed her identity as human.

Foucault also rejects any way to understand the unstable self: it’s just too complicated and too fractured a possibility. His argues in The Order of Things against the modernist notion of a stable, fixed and determinable self. As he writes, the human being no longer has any history: or, rather, since he speaks, works, and lives, he finds himself interwoven in his own being with histories that are neither subordinate to him nor homogenous with him (pp. 368-69). For Foucault the self is a construction made because of, and through, many different factors. Each of these factors, in turn, is constructed. And this means that identity itself is constructed.

Think of it like this: we are all different people at different times. For example, imagine that you have been invited to three different parties for the same evening: a sorority reunion, your parents’ wedding anniversary, and a baby shower. Do you bring the same gift to each party? Do you tell the same jokes? Behave the same? Think the same? Are you the same person at each of those functions? Sociologist Erving Goffman would argue that we are none of those identities, but rather that all of them are just performances, roles that we create in order to fit in.⁵

In fact, just as we act differently at different times, so too we interpret other people’s selves differently as well. Look at how Baltar reacts to seeing Shelly Godfrey, the (physically real) Six in Six Degrees of Separation. Having just finished arguing with the Number Six in his head, he sees Shelly Six in Galactica’s CIC. He talks to her as if she had the identity of Number Six in his head and thinks that no one else can see her, but quickly changes his tone and reception when he realizes she has a different identity (and others look at him like he’s crazier than usual).

If these postmodern philosophers argue that the self is constantly constructible, they also indicate that we can construct it ourselves. We can determine who we are—or, who we want to be. In short, we construct our own versions of our selves out of disperse elements from our everyday life—just as the Battlestar Galactica narrative is constructed by the viewer from the disperse elements found online and on television.

Frak-tured Narrative

The webisodes of Battlestar Galactica illustrate how narrative is fragmenting in our current media environment. For instance, at the beginning of Collaborators, Jammer is tried and executed for joining the New Caprica Police by a tribunal of six authorized by Tom Zarek. Tigh and Tyrol read his crimes as Jammer pleads for his life, arguing that he should be spared because his actions also saved Cally. Answer the question, Chief: Does Saving Cally let him off the hook for killing twenty-three others? asks Tigh angrily. Tyrol responds in the negative and they all agree to execute Jammer.

We may know that Jammer was disloyal without the webisodes, but do we really understand the full extent of the Tribunal’s anger without them? The webisodes made clear: Jammer betrayed the Resistance. He worked as a double agent and gave up information that would have saved the lives of those twenty-three people. It’s not just that he was a member of the NCP, but that Tigh and Tyrol trusted him with secure information. He didn’t just betray the humans: he betrayed the humans that we care about.

Meaningful to the audience? Sure—if you watched the webisodes and put it together. You have to connect the dots to see if the severity of what he did to the resistance warranted his execution by the resistance. For those audience members without an Internet connection, or those sadly who did not know the webisodes existed, his death seemed a severe and almost unreasonable punishment, especially given his later recant and rescue of Cally.

The webisodes reveal not only character details, but aspects of the narrative arc of the series as well. In Webisode Five, Viper pilot and new husband Duck cries when his wife is killed in a Cylon raid on New Caprica. The subsequent webisodes reveal his descent into anger and frustration with the resistance. Finally, as the ten webisodes end, we feel Duck’s pain and revel in his transformation into a double agent for the resistance. When we find out in Occupation that Duck became a suicide bomber, we may be outraged by his decision, but we do understand it. Because of the webisodes, we know that Duck attempts to kill President Baltar, ostensibly for his collaboration with the Cylons, but really in revenge for the death of his wife.

The narrative of the series is dependent on the webisodes. Without the webisodes, it literally would not be the same Battlestar Galactica. Their very existence changes the larger narrative of Battlestar Galactica—but their presence is also part of the fabric of the show. They don’t just extend the series, they change it. Looked at a different way, however, the webisodes actually fracture the narrative. The events that take place in Battlestar Galactica happen not just on the television screen, but over the Internet as well. The narrative is made whole only through the co-operation of the viewer, who actively constructs the different parts in this distributed narrative.⁶ And this fracturing of the narrative parallels a similar fracturing of the humanoid-Cylon identity.

Frak-tured Identity

Although the producers of the show probably didn’t intend the narrative between the show and the webisodes to be a metaphor for the concept of identity in Battlestar Galactica, the metaphor actually translates well. There is a tension in the narrative between events experienced in the television broadcasts and those seen in the webisodes. And, just as the narrative cannot fully exist without both the webisodes and the television broadcast, neither can the characters fully exist without determining their allegiances. Correspondingly, in the show, there’s a constant tension in the characters between different aspects of their identity. Every character has to actively decide which self they want to be.

A tangible example of this is Hera, Helo and Athena Sharon’s child. In the tragic episode Downloaded, no sooner is Hera born than she is taken from her parents and replaced with a lifeless copy. As Helo and Athena clutch the body of their halfhuman, half-machine baby—the first Cylon-human hybrid—their anguish palpably rains down their cheeks. Conceived on Caprica, the child’s survival was always in question. From the Cylons who wanted to capture Hera to the humans who wanted to kill her, from the moment of her conception, Hera was in danger. Her only comfort was the fact that she was conceived out of love: the only possible conception for a machine-human hybrid.

Of course, for those of us in the audience who watched the rest of the episode, we learned that Hera did, in fact, survive. She was whisked away by President Roslin, placed under the parental care of a childless, anonymous colonist, and hidden from the rest of the fleet. The very knowledge of her existence was a threat to the future of humanity.

Why the deathly concern over the fate of this child? Why hide knowledge of the child from the rest of the colonists? The characters in Battlestar Galactica are obsessed with the fate of the machine-human hybrid: as mentioned many times throughout the show, it is the destiny of the two races to be melded together.

The child was not dangerous: what was dangerous was the