Cyborg Selves in Battlestar Galactica and Star Trek: The Next Generation : Genre, Hybridity, Identity
2015; Wiley; Volume: 48; Issue: 6 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/jpcu.12355
ISSN1540-5931
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
ResumoSomewhere in that hard-drive that you call a brain is a beeping message: ‘Error. Error. Does not compute. I don't have a soul, I have software. If I die, I'm gone.’ If I am a foreigner, there are no foreigners. Battlestar Galactica (2004–2009) explores some familiar territory for television SF in dramatizing the cataclysmic war between humans and intelligent machines called “Cylons,” but it refreshingly troubles the human-machine binary division. Situating this text within the complex intertextual web of the television SF genre, including comparison with the original Battlestar Galactica (1978–1979) and with Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994), this essay explores Battlestar Galactica's contributions to the conventions of the SF genre. Battlestar Galactica plays with cultural and individual hybrid identities, favoring narratives of self-discovery over those of mastery. Wars of conquest and assimilation become civil wars, as the Other is discovered to be an aspect of the Self. The maintenance of the strict division between human and machine is tied to the scientific racism inherent in the construction of cultural identity. These categories are undone as their boundaries are transgressed through various forms of hybridity, culminating in a hopeful messianic hybrid child. Genre study has been largely out of favor over the last few decades, dismissed as structuralist and essentialist in its apprehension of the ways in which texts and audiences interact. Jacques Derrida, for instance, considered genre as imposing tyrannical limitations on the openness of a text, acting as a “Law” that dictates its formation and interpretation (“Law of Genre”). But genre can be a useful way of approaching a text like Battlestar Galactica, as long as we remember that genres are neither homogeneous, nor static, nor clearly delineated; they are protean, shifting; they bleed into and appropriate elements from one another. According to Rick Altman, genre can be conceived as a language, whose semantic makeup consists in conventions—character types, settings, images, devices—arranged individually within a given text through the syntax of plot (89). But, as J. P. Telotte points out, this semiological model of genre again presumes an unchanging and correct grammar. Telotte suggests that genre is therefore better understood as slang: all elements are subject to appropriation and re-appropriation, and innovation and reconfiguration are not only tolerated, they are necessary to the vitality of the genre (18). Each text participates in an ongoing multiplicity of texts, writers, and audiences, each asserting their own vision of science fiction. In this way, all genre texts are textually or linguistically hybrid in Mikhail Bakhtin's sense, in that a significant portion of what is said is “implicitly or explicitly admitted as someone else's” (354). Multiple voices speak within the text, and each utterance can hold multiple meanings, a phenomenon Bakhtin terms “heteroglossia.” Heteroglossia is endemic to television programs, which are by nature collaborative projects, lacking a single authorial voice, and which are always subject to power struggles and interpretive disagreements among writers, producers, performers, and network executives. Marketers and producers can encourage heteroglossia to attract the greatest possible number of viewers, and thus ensure success in the competitive television market and the survival of the series. Meaning, in a text like Battlestar Galactica, is consequently difficult to pin down, with slippage and ambiguity creating a hybrid text. This particular SF text has a specially hybrid status because it is a remake. The original Battlestar Galactica ran for only one year, from September 1978 to August 1979, airing 21 episodes in all.1 Viewed by many as an attempt to exploit the success of Star Wars, it was cancelled–despite immense popularity–because ABC felt it was too expensive to maintain, costing more than a million dollars per episode (Phillips and Garcia), a familiar story in the history of SF television production. Nevertheless, Battlestar Galactica sustained a loyal fan base, through re-running in syndication, and a continuous stream of graphic fiction and novels set in its universe. Among others, Richard Hatch, star of the original series who appears in the remake as the dissident leader Tom Zarek, led repeated efforts to give the show the second chance it never had: The network should have given us a second year in order to really do the show the way everybody really knew and hoped it could be (Phillips and Garcia 36). Yet the new series was not really what Hatch and many fans of the original series had in mind: they wanted to see the potential of the old show fully explored, in a manner that would be “true to the original” or “authentic.” What they got instead was a “re-imagining.” There is a tension in any adaptation between innovation and authenticity: too little innovation, and the show will not find a contemporary topicality and will degrade into nostalgia; too much, and it will lose its connection with the past and the sense of continuity that allows commentary on changes in science fiction and the culture at large. The new Battlestar dared to depart radically from the original: it is so entirely different in tone, in characterization, in plot, and in ideology that many fans asked why the producers bothered keeping the Battlestar Galactica name at all. Why not simply make a new show? The new series had good reason for wanting to distance itself from its ancestor. The original series can be easily criticized as perniciously conservative in its portrayal of gender and of political processes, unquestioningly locating moral, political, military, and religious authority in the Moses-like patriarch Adama. Aliens, such as the Cylons, remain firmly alien and categorically evil, just as hierarchical power structures and humanist values remain categorically good. As is widely acknowledged, the original series depicts and disseminates the beliefs of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The creator of the series, Glen Larson, is a practicing Mormon, and no attempt was made to disguise the show's proselytizing aims. This didacticism is so heavy-handed that the show becomes distasteful to many viewers, prompting most critics to dismiss it completely. An in-depth comparison with the new series’ deployment of religious belief is beyond the scope of this paper. However, it is clear that the new series is neither religious propaganda nor a proselytizer of moral rectitude: its moral universe is simply too complicated. The new series creates an interplay by preserving elements from the old show, but in new configurations. For instance, the new show kept most of the names from the original, although some character names became fighter-pilot call-signs, such as Starbuck and Apollo. In this way, many of the mythical elements of the original series are maintained, but at a figurative remove from the literal reality of the show's diegetic world. The new series retains the basic premise of the Cylons’ destruction of the colonies and the search for Earth, but it fundamentally reconfigures the relationship between humans and Cylons. In the original series, the humans did not make the Cylons and so did not bear any responsibility for their own fate. Not so in the new: the Cylons have as much right as the humans to call the colonies and Kobol “home.” There are also frequent references to the original series and reworked episodes. For example, in “You Can't Go Home Again,” when Starbuck is returning to the Galactica in a captured Cylon Raider without the benefit of normal communication channels, she identifies herself to Apollo by waggling her wings, repeating a plot moment from the original series episode “The Hand of God,” which is also the title of an unrelated episode in the new series. Similarly, the theme music from the original series is played during the ceremony to decommission the Galactica in the 2003 pilot mini-series, “decommissioning” the old show as the new one begins. These references maintain the connection with the original series, but there are sea changes in virtually every aspect of the narrative. For instance, the change that many fans fixated on in their initial reaction to the pilot was the inversion of the gender of several characters, notably Starbuck (Katee Sackoff). Fans who disliked the new series seemed to particularly hate the new Starbuck, expressing a general discomfort with the character's change in gender (“Compare TOS with TNS”). But many more fans liked the change, interpreting it as a welcome progression in the depiction of gender in SF, and an interesting game to explore the complexities of a seemingly simple inversion of gender. Despite the presence of the conventional femme fatale Number Six (Tricia Helfer), the series is notable for its success at incorporating realistically female characters into central roles to a degree that television SF has often struggled to achieve.2 While the show did not offer much in the way of feminist critique, the presence of breast cancer as a major plot element marks Battlestar's commitment to a credible representation of gender. Another related major change to the cast of characters concerns the split of Adama, the authoritative leader, into separate military and civilian functions, Commander William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and President Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell). This split instilled a new dialogue at the heart of the show, further enhancing its heteroglossia and highlighting the militarism that has been accepted as a convention in US3 Television SF, a convention inherited from stories of naval exploration and European global colonization (Barrett and Barrett 11–14). Even in the humanist utopia of Star Trek, Starfleet is a much more important governing structure than any legislative body, yet the militarism is subsumed under the scientific and cultural goals of the Enterprise's mission (Hardy and Kukla 181; Short “Federation” 34). By contrast, the Galactica is explicitly and emphatically military, and its leaders are often in conflict with civilian leaders, who are generally not portrayed as wrong in their disagreement. Commander Adama does not always carry the moral authority of the show in the way that his predecessor or the Captains of Star Trek generally do, nor does any other character. For example, in the multi-episode story of the military coup beginning in “Kobol's Last Gleaming,” the Commander's moral authority is displaced by the implication that his actions, though honestly motivated, cause the fragmentation of the fleet and thereby endanger the survival of the colonists. A comparatively minor character (and a female one with darker skin), Petty Officer Dualla (Kandyse McClure), sets the Commander straight in a memorable scene which emphasizes the degree to which the one-way flow of command no longer applies: “You asked to talk to me, sir, maybe because you think I don't have anything to say, but I do” (ep. “Home Pt. 1”). The series continually both dramatizes and invites talk. It invites controversy through deliberate ambiguity and offers a multiplicity of viewpoints within the shifting melodrama of relationships among the characters. The most important way the new series differs from the original, however, is in the portrayal of the Cylons, who have gone from being one of the most Other enemies in all of SF to being uncomfortably “Same,” from looking like “toasters” to being indistinguishable from humans. This change, which was reportedly made to limit production costs (Moore), profoundly alters the stakes in the series, as the boundaries between “human” and “Cylon” become increasingly leaky as the series progresses. This leakiness allows the show to play with and undermine the binaries that shore up identity, while exploring the possibilities offered by hybridity. In so far as we know ourselves in both formal discourse … and in daily practice … we find ourselves to be cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras. Biological organisms have become biotic systems, communications devices like others. There is no fundamental, ontological separation in our formal knowledge of machine and organism, of technical and organic. (177–78) In Battlestar Galactica, the humanoid Cylons are found to have organs, blood, and all the same bodily functions as humans, and it is impossible to distinguish them on the autopsy table, but once cremated, certain trace compounds reveal their synthetic nature. While the show asserts that it is possible to scientifically distinguish Cylon from human, the plot neutralizes the practical effects of that essential difference. For example, Baltar develops and conducts Cylon-detection tests, but he consistently lies about their results. Furthermore, the authority of the test is undermined by its development through the advice of his hallucinated Number Six and so may be just another Cylon trick. Thus, the difference can't be tested, and consequently no essential difference exists at all. It is a roundabout logic, to be sure, but one that works within the series to keep the Cylons ambiguous: the viewer is assured that a difference exists only to have that certainty eroded. Neither the viewers nor the characters can identify the enemy by sight or any other available means.4 There are also multiple copies or “avatars” of each model of Cylon. Viewers are often alerted to a character's Cylon status by seeing another avatar of the character consorting with known Cylons, long before the other characters suspect anything, creating suspense. Up to the mid-point of season four, any of the apparently human characters may turn out to be a Cylon, ensuring that the designation of human is always provisional. The intimacy between human and Cylon localizes the struggles of the war in the interactions of individual characters as much as in the macrostruggle of species versus species. Rather than invader versus defender, the conflict becomes an internal struggle, a civil war of representation and identity, over the right to be called human and the fuzziness of truth. The new complexity of the represented world, the new heteroglossic multiplicity and dissent, and the loss of the Manichean morality of the original series result in a darker, more disturbing, more mature, and ultimately more realistic show. This pattern is similar, though more intense than the changes made to Star Trek: The Next Generation (TNG). While a century separated the events and characters of TNG from its progenitor, both Battlestars ostensibly chronicle the same events and characters. The two series share more than just genre: Battlestar's developer, lead writer, and executive producer, Ronald D. Moore, was a staff writer for TNG. So, in a sense, the new Battlestar Galactica can trace a lineage to TNG as much as to the original Battlestar, among many other works in the great intertextual web of genre. All the Star Trek series construct their utopian future by drawing on the traditions of the enlightenment and liberal humanism. As Duncan and Michèle Barrett have shown, Star Trek draws directly from a tradition of representation which ties British maritime supremacy to the development of “‘modern’ culture, built on the co-operation required by trade and on a secular rejection of religion and tradition in favor of science and exploration” (49). At the heart of Star Trek is an unshakeable faith that scientific and technological progress will lead to social progress, that the future can be better than the past. Both the original series and TNG have been lauded for their socially progressive stances, particularly in the depictions of racial harmony on the bridge. In 1966, Star Trek's racial diversity was bold and controversially progressive, and the show famously presented the first interracial kiss on television. TNG extended the project of social utopia beyond the original Star Trek, offering a vision of an even-more-enlightened future, signaled through the newly gender-neutral construction “where no one has gone before.” In this way, TNG proposed itself as the next step in a long chain of technological and social development, a series of revolutions stretching back to the primitive present, a pattern which has continued to be developed through each successive series. This paradigm of progress invites viewers to make comparisons and contrasts between successive series. For instance, while the bridge of the Galactica looks similarly racially multicolored in what is now, thanks to Star Trek, a convention in film and television SF, BSG offers a much less rosy vision of the tensions of teamwork. The problems of unequal power and economic relations that TNG tended to elide are here courageously faced in a representation that tends more toward realism than utopia. In this way, Battlestar Galactica, like TNG, operates as a commentary on older shows, depending upon a prior knowledge of other science fiction, if not the original series. This commentary works to create a sense of progress in the genre itself, and the reimagined Battlestar Galactica is positioned in a chain of successive revolutions in representation. However, the divergence or transcendence these reimagined series strive for may not be complete, and ideas and attitudes that SF would like to represent as past can remain embedded in its conventions. As Robert Young shows, hybridity is a dual process: “a doubleness that both brings together, fuses, but also maintains separation” (22). Indeed the word “hybrid” was invented to explain the phenomenon of miscegenation within racialized scientific discourse “to describe the offspring of humans of different races [and to imply] that the different races were different species” (Young 9). Young worries that the translation of this concept from biology to culture may preserve the structures of essentialist racism within contemporary cultural theory. Such unwanted ideas may be preserved within the generic and textual structures that Battlestar Galactica is working to transform. Postcolonial critiques of Star Trek have explored the ways that the various series portray race and identity, exposing the thorny paradox that Star Trek often winds up “participating in and facilitating racist practice in its attempt to imagine what Gene Roddenberry called ‘infinite diversity in infinite combinations’” (Bernardi 30). The problem stems from Star Trek's attempt to simultaneously imagine a utopian future without racial conflict, while dramatizing the challenges of cultural difference through the relationship between humans and aliens. Conflict between cultures is displaced onto conflict between species, and consequently the attempt to imagine a world without racial conflict winds up reproducing some of the worst assumptions of scientific racism. Most crucially, in inter-species conflicts, culture is consistently conflated with species, and consequently ethnicity is depicted as biologically essential. As David Golumbia argues, “Being a member of any ‘other’ race—especially Klingon or Ferengi, or a villainous race like the Romulans or the Cardassians—means that one's character and characteristics are largely determined by one's membership in that race” (87). This displacement of race onto species in Star Trek replicates the buried structures of scientific racism identified by Young. Denise Allesandria Hurd argues that whenever Star Trek invokes the hybrid by the inclusion of a character with parents from different planets, “the following familiar crisis is enacted: A Hybrid character lives with a personal angst which stems from the difficulty it has in living with the ‘pull’ of its different blood” (23–24). Just as in nineteenth-century colonialist texts, biological hybridity in Star Trek overrides any other influences in forming identity (Bernardi 123; Vande Berg 56). Yet, Jon Wagner and Jan Lundeen point out that this perspective leaves Star Trek trapped. Regardless of how a given plot plays out, “Trek can't win: if Worf drops the knife, the plot validates assimilation; if he uses it, the story racially essentializes Worf. Either way, Trek is racist” (167). In Trek's defense, Barrett and Barrett suggest that this paradox emerges from the “question of how to define humanity” which is “staged through the use of nonhuman species who are designed to function as a foil against which human qualities become more apparent. On the other hand, these nonhuman species themselves end up being progressively ‘humanized’” (109). The more a nonhuman species is humanized, the more treating others as nonhuman looks like racism. In the worst case, an alien group is identified with an existing human ethnic group and the postrace utopia melts away. This constitutes a failure to represent difference, rather than its goal. Star Trek has long struggled with this paradox that seems inherent to its system of representation. Battlestar Galactica differs from Star Trek in this displacement of racial discourses, avoiding the paradox. First and foremost, there are no aliens in this diegetic universe: the Cylons were created by humans, and every planet the colonists visit is either noticeably empty or already colonized by the Cylons. This complete absence of aliens is quite singular in space opera, and the developers must have had a deliberate purpose in mind when they eliminated one of the biggest attractions of the subgenre: the depiction of strange and wonderful aliens. The refusal to create aliens (literally “Others”) resituates the issues of identity within the Self. It removes the distraction offered by the projection of identity onto a variety of aliens and rearticulates the conflict that seemed always to come down to Self versus Other in Star Trek. Or from another perspective, the war of conquest is rearticulated as a civil war. Be that as it may, discourses of race, including bio-essentialist visions of identity, still circulate in Battlestar's depiction of the Cylons. The first two seasons of Battlestar focus largely on the twin struggles of two avatars of Lieutenant Sharon Valerii (Grace Park), eventually differentiated by their call signs, “Boomer” and “Athena.” Boomer, on the Galactica, is in crisis, being unable to face the mounting evidence that she is a Cylon, despite having believed all her life that she was human. The suicidal Boomer expresses an existential angst: “I wake up in the morning and I wonder who I am. I wake up and wonder if I'm going to hurt someone” (ep. “Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part One”). Her crisis is positioned as one of identity, self-knowledge, and agency. Until she knows who and what she is, Boomer cannot control her own actions. She experiences blackouts, during which Cylon terrorist attacks are perpetrated, presumably by her, although she cannot consciously face this possibility. Boomer is forced to confront her Cylon nature in part two of “Kobol's Last Gleaming,” when she meets multiple avatars of herself inside a Cylon Basestar, but she refuses to accept the self-knowledge and comfort they offer. When she shoots Adama in the cliffhanger ending to season one, it seems unmotivated, a robotic carrying-out of her Cylon mission and a confirmation of all her worst fears about herself. Boomer does not remember this action afterwards, and repeatedly claims she “didn't do anything” (ep. “Scattered”), that she would never hurt Adama, remaining a tragic slave to her own unconscious Cylon nature until she is assassinated by a reactionary crewmember.5 The narrative of Boomer, then, repeats the pattern that Hurd identified for Star Trek hybrids, embodying the struggle between her human culture and her Cylon nature, so we can see that many of the same concerns are circulating here. But the narrative of Athena is a bit different. Athena does not suffer the same kind of identity crisis: she has always known she is a Cylon, but, for love of Helo (Tahmoh Penikett), she chooses to defect to the colonists’ cause. When Helo learns she is a Cylon, he rejects her. Her challenge is to convince Helo, and then others, that she is the same Sharon she always was, against his insistence that she is an impostor or some kind of clone or copy. In so doing, she can survive to bear their hybrid child who is heralded as a messiah. One by one, she tentatively succeeds in convincing first her lover, and then her former friends and colleagues, that both her affection and her defection are genuine, and the series supports her assertion to the end. In “Home Pt. 2,” when offered the same opportunity to assassinate Adama, Athena hands over her gun. This suggests that Athena's self-knowledge gives her the self-control and agency that Boomer lacked. Rather than her storyline being dictated by her blood, it seems to be dictated by the reactions of others to her newly perceived difference. Her narrative presents a struggle against the racism of the bio-essentialist view, insisting that her identity is defined through her actions and choices, rather than her biological status. Yet, despite the individuality of the Boomer and Athena characters, they share a unity as Cylon Number Eight models. Cylons are linked to one another through some kind of ethereal network, literalized as both a computer network and as a divine mystery in the series. When a Cylon dies, its consciousness is downloaded via this network into another waiting body. In this way, the Cylons are both immortal and possess a shared consciousness. For example, Athena makes reference to memories that are properly Boomer's, and she tells Helo about the Arrow of Apollo and the search for Earth (ep. “Kobol's Last Gleaming”), a plan which was conceived after Helo (and she) lost contact with the Galactica. Athena exploits this connection to help the colonists, making it possible to rescue Starbuck in “The Farm,” and provide the location of the Tomb of Athena in “Home.” Yet there is also a danger that, willing or no, her connection to the other Cylons provides them with information that might compromise the colonists. Identity for a Cylon is thus a rather complicated matter. Each avatar is connected with the others, and is partially determined by their physical make-up, and yet each is also an individual whose agency and choices determine whether she is valorized or demonized as a character. The instability of Cylon identity is comparable to the portrayal of the Borg in TNG. Represented visually as quintessential cyborgs, with interchangeable organic and machine body parts, the Borg operate as a collective “hive” mind, perfect examples of Haraway's “disassembled and reassembled, postmodern collective and personal self” (163). As a positive figure, the flexibility and impermanence of the cyborg self offers Haraway a strategic move that short-circuits the categories of race and gender, a way out of the paradox that troubles Star Trek and liberal humanism more generally. Yet the Borg do not offer any such strategic possibilities in TNG, because the show's ideology is grounded in the integrity of the autonomous individual. The Borg violate this integrity on two fronts: through the penetration of technology into the human, and through the collectivity of their identity. How do you pursue a diplomatic solution to a conflict with an enemy with whom you share no basic assumptions, an enemy you cannot even define as a “who” definitively over a “what”? Haraway suggests that this kind of crisis is endemic to the modern attitude which seeks to establish what Bruno Latour calls a Great Divide between subjects and objects. The transformation of a human into a Borg is terrifying because the loss of autonomous individual identity is tied to a loss of agency; this loss would make everyone like Boomer, rather than Haraway's cyborgs. It should not be surprising then, that the threat of the Borg is ultimately neutralized in TNG through implanting the structure of individual identity in the naming of Hugh (Short “Federation” 45; Boyd 110). In this way, TNG recuperates the threat to its humanist ideology, and remains faithful to the possibilities of progress. The Cylon threat is in some ways similar to that of the Borg. The Cylons, too, are a seemingly unstoppable cyborg collective, who have/are superior technology, and their victory over the human forces is instantaneous and total. There is little motivation provided for the destruction of the colonies, beyond genocide, and until the later seasons, the Cylons display no interest in negotiating with the colonists, or allowing any portion of their race to survive. The Cylons pursue the surviving fleet relentlessly and mechanically, and if the Cylons were limited to the “Centurion” “toaster-like” models, there would be no further development. However, the humanoid Cylons, like the individualized Borg, Hugh, have names and differentiated identities and personalities, but they just happen to also have multiple selves and para-human ways of communicating. Battlestar does not locate the threat of the Cylons in that multiplicity in the way that Star Trek does, or at least not to the same extent. Battlestar seems to have less faith in the idea of progress in the first place. Instead of a utopic future full of more-perfect people, Battlestar presents a recognizably same level of social development to our own. The colonists have better technology than we do in some areas (e.g., interstellar space travel), but the same in others (e.g. cancer and radiation are deadly). The Cylons and the colonists alike believe that time is cyclical and that “all of this has happened before. All of it will happen again” (ep. “Flesh and Bone”). Both theorize their progress through life as a discovery of destiny. This raises old arguments about free will and determination, but it also circumvents the notion of scientific progress. Furthermore, there is no discourse of assimilati
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