III/2/. Conceptions of Battlestar Galactica

In 1950, A. M. Turing published a seminal theoretical treatise on artificial intelligence in the journal Mind. Therein, he proposes that "thinking" should be solely defined by a (human or machine) entity's ability to succeed at a puzzle he calls "The Imitation Game," which consists of convincingly mimicking, in typewritten responses, the distinguishing characteristics of the other (a man, in the case of a machine; a woman, in the case of a man). In reducing intelligence to the performance of intelligence, and asserting that any more transcendental standard is merely "the polite convention that everyone thinks" (446), he demolishes long-treasured depth models of consciousness and identity. If Turing's test undermines fixed differences between genders and between the biological and the technological only at the expense of reinscribing the originary mind-body divide, then this metaphysical duo, as Hayles argues in How We Became Posthuman, is nevertheless a (re)productive one: the Imitation Game "necessarily makes the subject into a cyborg, for the enacted and represented bodies are brought into conjunction through the technology that connects them" (xiii). As a hybrid of human and machine, the cyborg is closely linked to Hayles's pivotal concept of the posthuman, which "implies not only a coupling with intelligent machines but a coupling so intense and multifaceted that it is no longer possible to distinguish meaningfully between the biological organism and the informational circuits in which the organism is enmeshed" (35). In this construction, difference remains in dispute: neither distinctly binary as in the case of the parent opposition nor fully resolved in favor of its amalgamated offspring. The hybrid remains an awkward and conditional synthesis of modern and postmodern topographies of identity, and it is this terrain that Battlestar Galactica so fruitfully inhabits.

Accordingly, the program's premise is one generation in a lineage of science-fiction and cyberpunk narratives that intervene in these questions, as part of a technological imaginary in its own hybrid intercourse with the material evolution of mediated bodies. In Zeros + Ones, Sadie Plant weaves a genealogy of android ingénues and femme fatales stretching back to Hadaly, the "virtual woman" who is the subject of Villiers de l'Isle Adam's 1884 novel The Future Eve. A robot bride constructed by a fictional Thomas Edison, she is succeeded by texts that include Metropolis, The Stepford Wives, Bladerunner and Eve of Destruction; as Plant remarks, "Of course the makers of all these machines were aware that they might break down or run wild, away, and out of control" (87-88). According to Plant it was cybernetics, the science of self-regulating systems, that ironically "exposed the weaknesses of all attempts to predict and control" (159) in the course of its mission to understand and promote order within an entropic universe. The very feedback loops that enable a system to regulate and coordinate itself ensure that it is in constant circulation, its boundaries never fixed. I'd add that the hybrid has a certain affinity with these "runaway effects." Dynamic processes have a tendency to favor the production of hybrids over the preservation of bounded differences: "Continually interacting with each other, constituting new systems, collecting and connecting themselves to form additional assemblages, [cybernetic] systems were only individuated in the most contingent and temporary of senses" (162). Moreover, the resultant hybrids are prone to continuing the runaway drift through undisciplined and unpredictable behavior – one of the dangers of reconfiguring ontological essence as technologically-negotiated simulation, as Turing does with the Imitation Game. The hybrid (in this case, the cyborg or otherwise simulated or simulatable human, with its bipartite disposition), as the provisional fusion of two into one, always leaves a gap where the intended and anticipated operation of the system can and does run amok.

In Battlestar Galactica's rendition, an advanced human civilization exists on twelve planetary Colonies somewhere in the universe. In Colonial mythology (a polytheistic religion based on Greco-Roman and Mormon traditions), all of us had a common origin on the planet Kobol, but in the exodus from this paradise several thousand years ago (in Colonial history) a thirteenth tribe was separated from the rest and settled a legendary homeland called Earth. The miniseries opens forty years after the end of a bloody war with the Cylons, a breed of intelligent machines that humans created to serve them. The Colonies have had no contact with the Cylons during the intervening decades, and are just beginning to relax security measures and reintegrate advanced technology into their society (during the first war, they were forced to revert to more primitive systems, since the Cylons could remotely interface with and instantly disable the newer, networked ones). Without warning, the Cylons mount a massive attack that wipes out the entire civilization of billions, with the exception of less than 50,000 people who manage to flee the genocide. The ensuing series follows this small fleet of ships as they attempt to survive and continue to evade the pursuing Cylons (the eponymous Battlestar Galactica is the only military ship among them, and thus is solely responsible for defense). The battle lines become ever more indeterminate, however, as intimacy and kinship between humans and Cylons, as well as dissent and enmity among humans and Cylons, gradually unfold.

Central to this trajectory is the twist (an upgrade from the 1978 concept) that the robot insurgents infiltrated the Colonies by synthesizing their own cyborg impostors who, like the artificial intelligences of Turing's Imitation Game, are able to "pass" as human through perfect mimicry. There are twelve models of these "humanform" Cylons, with unlimited clones of each, and it is an alluring Model Six who is sent in undercover to seduce senior scientist Gaius Baltar and thus bring down Colonial defense systems. Apparently made of flesh and blood, these "skin jobs" eat, sweat, think, pray, feel pain, have sex, and are extremely difficult to detect (although at one point Baltar implements a specialized biological test, Cylon models are more often "outed" when multiple copies are spotted). Their provenance and makeup remains ambiguous; while their bodies can interface with computer networks, while their anatomy is vulnerable to a machine virus, and while their spines glow dubiously red during orgasm, their technological components are evidently too well camouflaged to show up on conventional scans. Moreover, humans and Cylons alike wrestle with associated questions of self-determination: are these "toasters" creatures of programming or free will? can different copies of the same model be fully individual? can Cylons truly experience emotions like love? By presenting the status of these pivotal figures as decidedly indefinite, both in terms of their material constitution and in terms of their autonomy, Battlestar Galactica illustrates the instability that the hybrid introduces into supposedly fixed categories like human and machine. As Turing proposes, what conclusive criteria could there be for humanity beyond the ability to flawlessly imitate it? It is this tension -- between the preservationist imperative to categorically divide and demarcate and the treacherous ecology of hybridity -- that fuels the narrative engine of this critically acclaimed cult television hit. Its heterogeneous, unresolved meditations on processes of self- and species reproduction and evolution are a powerful instrument of the program's own perpetuation.