Battlestar Galactica (BSG), a SciFi Channel original series (2003-2009) that "reimagines" a goofy genre classic from the late 1970s, has been critically acclaimed as the rebirth of television science fiction. It descends from familiar, almost cliché tropes: the cataclysmic near-extermination of humankind by their robot servants, the Cylons, who accomplish this holocaust by fabricating infiltrators able to biologically and emotionally mimic humans. The ensuing narrative cosmos, however, evolves into more than the sum of its parts, generating complexities that stretch even sci-fi's already postmodern renditions of such oppositions as "us" and "them." The upgraded "skin job" Cylons are, in effect, the hybrid offspring of the conflict between humans and machines, and despite or because of this status they refuse attempts to contain the threat that they pose within a stable "alien" classification. BSG the program is likewise a version 2.0, grafting together its fictional legacies and real world politics to produce an intertextual mongrel with unpredictable potential. As such, it exemplifies the reproduction of television itself, which mediates a cross-species love affair between show and viewer by promising fans that, if our passion is strong enough, we can penetrate the dimensional barrier of the screen and join with this parallel universe. If my discussion of Law & Order: SVU in the previous chapter [coming Spring 2008] emphasized the impossibility of closing the mystery of desire and arriving at a unified truth, science fiction inflects that indeterminacy more positively than the procedural. It is, after all, by inspiring our love across gaps and borders that TV succeeds in spawning the serials, franchises and spinoffs that are its forms of self-perpetuation. On Battlestar Galactica, love is also the Cylons' reproductive technology: they believe that only an inter-technic romance could produce Hera, the first bio-Cylon/human hybrid baby and, in their theology, "the shape of things to come." Battlestar Galactica, in parallel, epitomizes "the shape of things to come" for television at large. While always characterized by repetition, diffusion, collaboration, and contingency, mainstream TV is increasingly embracing cult genres' strategies for generating engagement, including endlessly recycling and reworking the show's text and putting the show's metatext in intercourse with fans. Television is learning that its progeny can be most fruitful when, like Hera, they're orphaned: disseminated outside their biologically, technologically, and patriarchally authorized families and adopted by their audiences.
In contrast to this efflorescence of vitality, Mark Pesce hailed Battlestar Galactica's premiere on the British satellite network SkyOne in October 2004 as "the day TV died" (Pesce 2005). BSG was a joint US-UK production that began its life as a stand-alone miniseries, and the decision to hold the stateside launch of the series until 2005 was only the first salvo in an ongoing battle between corporate owners and fans over its distribution (for example, the network has raised ire by scheduling extended hiatuses between and sometimes during seasons). In an article titled "Piracy Is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV," Pesce points to the dissemination of episodes online via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol to prove his eponymous point. As he puts it elsewhere: "once the broadcast networks moved to digital, they became entirely obsolete, because I can get a stream of bits from anywhere in the world that I can get a high-speed connection to the internet" (Pesce 2004). In addition to the technological convergence that makes television and the web functionally equivalent as screens that display digital streams, Pesce remarks on the cultural affinities between socially constructed practices of TV viewership and the emerging configuration of internet video, which joins the throng of consumer options that, since the VCR, have progressively liberated TV from a fixed schedule at put it at the disposal of the viewer. Pesce astutely notes that television has long promoted itself as a "free" entertainment medium that is coextensive with everyday life and available on demand. Illegal file-sharing aligns with this preexisting sense of entitlement and extends the ways that the domestic, serial, immediate temporality of TV was already being taken up/over by the internet.
One commentator on BitTorrent’s copyright skirmishes observes that "unsurprisingly this high-tech larceny has a strong sci-fi bent, betraying the geeky culprits, with two Stargate shows, one Star Trek show and Battlestar Galactica in the top 10" (Sturgeon) -- if Battlestar Galactica is among the most popular TV downloads, that is, this status is tied to the interpenetration of audiences, technologies, and narratives, each of which works through and by the tensions of the others. A perfect example is BSG's TV movie "Razor," scheduled to air on November 24, 2007, midway through a thirteen month hiatus between seasons three and four. Diegetically, "Razor" revisits one of the pivotal arcs of season two to fill in further backstory on the actions of guest character Admiral Cain, while intermittently flashing forward to a new storyline inserted after Cain's death and backward forty years to events of the first Cylon war (including visual references to the original 1970s BSG). Metatextually, "Razor"'s timelines are equally nonlinear: in addition to the authorized overlap of season two retconning, season three canon, season four speculation, and series prehistory (also doled out in advance in seven promotional "flashbacks"), "Razor" leaked online prematurely in the last days of October. In keeping with the same conditioned impatience which made fans seek out the delayed premiere, "Razor" soon hit the BitTorrent portals and became freely, which is to say illegally, available to technologically-enabled renegades (our metaphorical Cylons). With BSG, and "Razor" in particular, the producers erect a reproductive mechanism that links narratives, technologies, and viewers whose temporalities and imperatives often crisscross and collide. File-sharing is one instance of the ways that the operation of this network, with its unpredictable connections and fissures, exceeds full corporate control.
In addition to the unsanctioned distribution of "Razor," its proprietary jurisdiction has to contend with the accumulation of conjecture and creativity around these storylines since season two. The movie is derivative of BSG's established narratives in much the same way as are typical fanworks, reinserting itself into the program's own latencies. These apertures are already avidly occupied by fans, however, and long before the screen text existed it was anticipated through fandom's spoiler apparatus. On June 18, 2007, for example, a cult media news site released some insider information, including this juicy tidbit:
This is not to say that the technical, legal, or socioeconomic power of producers and networks is at an end, however. The explicit acknowledgement of Cain and Gina's relationship onscreen still has greater legitimacy than a much vaster accretion of "fanon" (collectively established narrative circumstances), even for the very fans whose "wishes" "Razor" "answers." Nor does it end all problems of queer visibility on Battlestar Galactica, just as illegal file-sharing doesn't end the corporate regime of media production and distribution. Confrontations over bootleg television portals (a number of which have been shut down in legal challenges), not to mention signals that piracy may not necessarily run counter to profits (as Pesce reports, after leaking online, BSG's first season went on to garner some of the SciFi Channel's highest ratings ever), are only one example of the ways that difference remains in dispute. While there are a number of neologisms available to encapsulate current transformations in media consumption and production, some of which I discuss in Section 1/C below, in this chapter I root my analysis in Battlestar Galactica's own term, "hybrid" (in its orthodox use, the issue of an interspecies union of animals or plants). This construction indicates both the constitutive bifurcation of the parents and the disintegration of their defining boundary, evoking an unresolved tension between reinscribing binary difference and erasing it. As neither a radical break with its twofold heritage nor a sterile joining which leaves twoness intact, hybridity is an apt staging ground for the marriage of broadcast and broadband, which continues to be negotiated and metamorphosed. The contours of its ultimate progeny are far from a foregone conclusion.
Like Cylons, fans of Battlestar Galactica threaten the established order through their intimacy with technology and their networked proliferation. But like on Battlestar Galactica, as the story unfolds it becomes less and less clear that they are in fact either alien or genocidal, and more and more conceivable that they will merge with or become truly indistinguishable from civilization as we know it. Nobody can predict, yet, whether "the shape of things to come" as embodied in Hera will be an apocalypse or a fruitful hybridization of humans and machines. Moreover, the anatomy of the "love" required to produce her remains shrouded in mystery -- as Nielsen's scrambling to revise audience metrics for the digital era makes plain. As best I can define it at this stage, love is a generative modality that, at least momentarily, sidesteps the lack inherent to desire and arrives at an immanent contact between worlds. In the following chapter [coming Fall 2008], I will explore the concept further as I investigate how the mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism rely on subjectivity in contradictory ways. Here, I attempt to parse the economies of media reproduction in their technological specificity -- within theory, within Battlestar Galactica, and within its queer communities of production. Turning to several species of fan video in Section 3, I will examine both the tactics of material and discursive control that structure the possibilities for spawning televisual offspring and the bastard children that escape or exceed these bounds. As in the case of SVU, the particularities of lesbian sexuality parallel more diffuse libidinal operations, and I'd like to consider how technological affordances enable media "families" to parlay such loves into their own perpetuation.
In contrast to this efflorescence of vitality, Mark Pesce hailed Battlestar Galactica's premiere on the British satellite network SkyOne in October 2004 as "the day TV died" (Pesce 2005). BSG was a joint US-UK production that began its life as a stand-alone miniseries, and the decision to hold the stateside launch of the series until 2005 was only the first salvo in an ongoing battle between corporate owners and fans over its distribution (for example, the network has raised ire by scheduling extended hiatuses between and sometimes during seasons). In an article titled "Piracy Is Good? How Battlestar Galactica Killed Broadcast TV," Pesce points to the dissemination of episodes online via the BitTorrent peer-to-peer file-sharing protocol to prove his eponymous point. As he puts it elsewhere: "once the broadcast networks moved to digital, they became entirely obsolete, because I can get a stream of bits from anywhere in the world that I can get a high-speed connection to the internet" (Pesce 2004). In addition to the technological convergence that makes television and the web functionally equivalent as screens that display digital streams, Pesce remarks on the cultural affinities between socially constructed practices of TV viewership and the emerging configuration of internet video, which joins the throng of consumer options that, since the VCR, have progressively liberated TV from a fixed schedule at put it at the disposal of the viewer. Pesce astutely notes that television has long promoted itself as a "free" entertainment medium that is coextensive with everyday life and available on demand. Illegal file-sharing aligns with this preexisting sense of entitlement and extends the ways that the domestic, serial, immediate temporality of TV was already being taken up/over by the internet.
One commentator on BitTorrent’s copyright skirmishes observes that "unsurprisingly this high-tech larceny has a strong sci-fi bent, betraying the geeky culprits, with two Stargate shows, one Star Trek show and Battlestar Galactica in the top 10" (Sturgeon) -- if Battlestar Galactica is among the most popular TV downloads, that is, this status is tied to the interpenetration of audiences, technologies, and narratives, each of which works through and by the tensions of the others. A perfect example is BSG's TV movie "Razor," scheduled to air on November 24, 2007, midway through a thirteen month hiatus between seasons three and four. Diegetically, "Razor" revisits one of the pivotal arcs of season two to fill in further backstory on the actions of guest character Admiral Cain, while intermittently flashing forward to a new storyline inserted after Cain's death and backward forty years to events of the first Cylon war (including visual references to the original 1970s BSG). Metatextually, "Razor"'s timelines are equally nonlinear: in addition to the authorized overlap of season two retconning, season three canon, season four speculation, and series prehistory (also doled out in advance in seven promotional "flashbacks"), "Razor" leaked online prematurely in the last days of October. In keeping with the same conditioned impatience which made fans seek out the delayed premiere, "Razor" soon hit the BitTorrent portals and became freely, which is to say illegally, available to technologically-enabled renegades (our metaphorical Cylons). With BSG, and "Razor" in particular, the producers erect a reproductive mechanism that links narratives, technologies, and viewers whose temporalities and imperatives often crisscross and collide. File-sharing is one instance of the ways that the operation of this network, with its unpredictable connections and fissures, exceeds full corporate control.
In addition to the unsanctioned distribution of "Razor," its proprietary jurisdiction has to contend with the accumulation of conjecture and creativity around these storylines since season two. The movie is derivative of BSG's established narratives in much the same way as are typical fanworks, reinserting itself into the program's own latencies. These apertures are already avidly occupied by fans, however, and long before the screen text existed it was anticipated through fandom's spoiler apparatus. On June 18, 2007, for example, a cult media news site released some insider information, including this juicy tidbit:
"Cain and Gina were quite close," a source tells SyFy Portal. "In fact, they were lovers[...]" Some viewers who had been pushing for some sort of homosexual representation on 'Battlestar Galactica' should finally get their wishes answered with this revelation, especially since many viewers speculated that Cain might be a lesbian previously. (Hinman)Audience interpretations are usually considered to antecede the media source on which they are based, but here it is fans' appropriation of Admiral Cain as a queer character that is seen to prefigure the official narrative, and viewer activism that is seen to drive plot decisions. Indeed, far in advance of the announcement of plans to expand on Cain's story onscreen, elaboration of her projected romance with Gina existed online, some of which is strikingly similar to "Razor"'s eventual rendition. The "cycle of time" is a cornerstone of BSG's diegetic religious faith, summed up in the aphorism "all this has happened before, and all this will happen again"; as the case of "Razor" demonstrates, it is also a cornerstone of BSG's televisual reproduction, wherein textual material is repeatedly reworked across various intersecting registers (TV and TV, TV and online promotions, TV and "extended" DVD releases, TV and spoilers/reviews, TV and BitTorrent, TV and fan fiction, and all further combinations). Within this technocultural constellation, it becomes less convincing to model a television program as original, bounded, and primary rather than as collective, multiple, and hybrid (that is, as human rather than Cylon). While queer "subtext" and queer fandom most certainly predate digital media, the contradictions and gaps in which non-normative readings thrive are becoming increasingly expansive as mass texts become increasingly diffused over disparate sites and times. I will argue that the difficulty of stabilizing authorized meanings is related to the difficulty of enforcing authorized uses of content in digital networks. This connection is practical as well as theoretical, since the internet is the homeland where contemporary fan communities (many of them queer) disseminate, dissect, and regenerate the shows they love.
This is not to say that the technical, legal, or socioeconomic power of producers and networks is at an end, however. The explicit acknowledgement of Cain and Gina's relationship onscreen still has greater legitimacy than a much vaster accretion of "fanon" (collectively established narrative circumstances), even for the very fans whose "wishes" "Razor" "answers." Nor does it end all problems of queer visibility on Battlestar Galactica, just as illegal file-sharing doesn't end the corporate regime of media production and distribution. Confrontations over bootleg television portals (a number of which have been shut down in legal challenges), not to mention signals that piracy may not necessarily run counter to profits (as Pesce reports, after leaking online, BSG's first season went on to garner some of the SciFi Channel's highest ratings ever), are only one example of the ways that difference remains in dispute. While there are a number of neologisms available to encapsulate current transformations in media consumption and production, some of which I discuss in Section 1/C below, in this chapter I root my analysis in Battlestar Galactica's own term, "hybrid" (in its orthodox use, the issue of an interspecies union of animals or plants). This construction indicates both the constitutive bifurcation of the parents and the disintegration of their defining boundary, evoking an unresolved tension between reinscribing binary difference and erasing it. As neither a radical break with its twofold heritage nor a sterile joining which leaves twoness intact, hybridity is an apt staging ground for the marriage of broadcast and broadband, which continues to be negotiated and metamorphosed. The contours of its ultimate progeny are far from a foregone conclusion.
Like Cylons, fans of Battlestar Galactica threaten the established order through their intimacy with technology and their networked proliferation. But like on Battlestar Galactica, as the story unfolds it becomes less and less clear that they are in fact either alien or genocidal, and more and more conceivable that they will merge with or become truly indistinguishable from civilization as we know it. Nobody can predict, yet, whether "the shape of things to come" as embodied in Hera will be an apocalypse or a fruitful hybridization of humans and machines. Moreover, the anatomy of the "love" required to produce her remains shrouded in mystery -- as Nielsen's scrambling to revise audience metrics for the digital era makes plain. As best I can define it at this stage, love is a generative modality that, at least momentarily, sidesteps the lack inherent to desire and arrives at an immanent contact between worlds. In the following chapter [coming Fall 2008], I will explore the concept further as I investigate how the mechanisms of postindustrial capitalism rely on subjectivity in contradictory ways. Here, I attempt to parse the economies of media reproduction in their technological specificity -- within theory, within Battlestar Galactica, and within its queer communities of production. Turning to several species of fan video in Section 3, I will examine both the tactics of material and discursive control that structure the possibilities for spawning televisual offspring and the bastard children that escape or exceed these bounds. As in the case of SVU, the particularities of lesbian sexuality parallel more diffuse libidinal operations, and I'd like to consider how technological affordances enable media "families" to parlay such loves into their own perpetuation.
