Battlestar Galactica‘s Boethian Satan

Almost exactly a year ago I wrote one of my favorite posts here about Sopranos and Battlestar Galactica and the wildly different moral universes they set forth. ?By that time I had finished Sopranos but was waiting for the third season of Galactica to hit Netflix. ?Now, a year later and several episodes sadder, I have finished Battlestar Galactica, mere months behind the folks with cable and TiVo and such.

Just in case anybody’s been as slow as I have watching these episodes, I’ll go ahead and say it: SPOILERS AHEAD.

SPOILERS AHEAD.

No, really.? SPOILERS AHEAD.

Oh, and one other thing: Battlestar Galactica is a show for grownups.? It makes moves psychologically, theologically, and otherwise that great literary works like 2 Samuel and Beowulf and Paradise Lost and Shakespeare’s tragedies make, but it’s no place for children.? This post discusses some of those very dark places that the show goes, so if your mother would object to your reading such things, STOP HERE.

Galactica's Lucifer

Alright.? Now it’s just us adults who have seen the last season.? The last two seasons of this drama demonstrated the capacity for a privative, Boethian theory of the evil to account for the worst sorts of wickedness that we humans can dream up. Contrary to Tom Shippey, who insists in Road to Middle-Earth that art ought to take on a Manichean cast in the face of genuinely world-threatening evil, Galactica in its final season brings to a central place in the drama one John Cavil, which is to say Cylon model One who goes only by Cavil until Ellen Tigh, the last revealed Cylon and one of the creators of the eight main Cylon lines, begins to call him by the name she gave him as his “mother.”? (Cylon family trees, because they sometimes span forty and sometimes thousands of years, are tricky.)

Having listened to Ron Moore’s podcast commentaries on the last season, I’m confident saying that he and his writing team are fully conversant with the Bible and with wide swaths of literary, philosophical, and theological traditions; and therefore I have no reservations saying that Cavil is the BG team’s vision of Satan in this science-fiction setting.? Reminiscent of Milton’s Satan among other figures, Cavil first appears in the series simply as a deceiver, disguising himself as a priestly confessor and leading one of the Final Five (his creators in ways that the show leaves somewhat mysterious) to doubt the Lords of Cobol, the deities he is supposed to represent, as he undergoes a spiritual crisis.? Later he reveals himself a sadist, not only killing human beings (as the other Cylons do without qualm) but torturing Sol Tigh psychologically and physically (he’s the reason Sol has the eyepatch), and a manipulator, promising to Ellen Tigh that he’ll spare Sol Tigh’s life in exchange for sexual favors.? Then, in the last season, the audience finds out that in fact he knew the whole time that he was tormenting his “father” and forcing sex from his “mother,” adding an Oedipal layer of darkness to his character.

When a faction of the Cylons rebels and joins the human beings, Cavil quickly assumes the mantle of leadership for the anti-human Cylons.? As that story unfolds, the truly Boethian character of John Cavil becomes apparent.? First of all, Cavil demonstrates no gratitude for his own being, instead berating Ellen Tigh for modeling him bodily after human beings.? In a haunting speech, echoing Adam’s in Paradise Lost that Mary Shelley picked up for Frankenstein, Cavil bemoans the character of his creation:

In all your travels, have you ever seen a supernova? I saw a star explode and send out the building blocks of the universe: other stars, other planets, and eventually, other life. A supernova. Creation itself. I was there. I wanted to see it and be part of the moment.

And do you know how I perceived one of the most glorious events in the universe? With these ridiculous gelatinous orbs in my skull! With eyes designed to perceive only a tiny fraction of the EM spectrum. With ears designed to hear only vibrations in the air.

Although the woman before him has given him life, will, intellect, and incredible capacities, Cavil can only see what he is not, namely a sensing machine that can (he thinks) apprehend the universe in ways that human existence can only imagine by analogy.

BG‘s vision of Satan is as Milton’s: a most gifted being, blessed by a benevolent creator, with no capacity to appreciate Being as a gift.? Acting analogously to the Biblical Cain, he “deletes” an entire line of his final Cylons because he enjoyed greater favor from the Five. ? Later on, Cavil even goes so far as to alter his own programming so that he need never sleep nor dream (Hamlet, anyone?) and his fellow Cylons’ memories so that they forget the identities of their five creators.? Not surprisingly in the logic of the drama, Cavil is a vocal atheist, unlike the Colonial human beings, who are mostly polytheists (with exceptions like Gaius Baltar and William Adama) and unlike his fellow Cylons, who by and large are monotheists.? And in the end, like Milton’s Satan, Cavil finds himself the victim of his own plots, betrayed and robbed of resurrection by his fellow creature-Cylons and finally done in when the creator-Cylons, suddenly possessed of memories of which he deprived them, abort the process that would restore resurrection to the Cylons.

Battlestar Galactica thus presents a smart, sophisticated version of Satan consistent with its genre and harmonious with a privative, Boethian vision of good and evil, in which all Being is by definition good, where sentient souls are gifted with the highest created goods, and where those same souls, deprived of their proper aim, quickly become the most dangerous and soul-rending evils in the universe.

I might write another post or three about Galactica in the coming days.? I might not.? I suppose I’ll just have to see.