Battlestar Galactica's narratives often revolve around the problem of reproduction, in multiple literal and figurative senses. Its very premise, a machine uprising, is an object lesson about reproduction gone runaway: any attempt to contain the propagation of a dynamic system, any attempt (whether heteronormative or human-normative) to limit its development into greater degrees of complexity and hybridity, is likely to go awry. The program's ardent audience suggests a similar moral about the fragility of technological control and corresponding survival tactics. While the Colonial Fleet adopts a restrictive scheme, forbidding computer networks because they're vulnerable to Cylon hacks, Battlestar Galactica's Powers That Be open their textual networks to fandom's hive mind, harnessing its procreative excess to drive a web of modes and sites of engagement. Diegetically, BSG struggles with this as yet unsettled interplay between conventional discipline and more fluid strategies of mediation. In terms of reproduction itself, the program has certainly been criticized for a reactionary fixation on the heterosexual couple and its procreative potential. Weighed down by President Laura Roslin's running whiteboard tally of humanity's remaining numbers, the Colonials adopt a recognizably conservative reproductive politics in their post-apocalyptic desperation to make the total go up rather than down (going so far as to ban abortion, for example). Cylons, for their part, as monotheistic religious fundamentalists, believe their god has commanded them to "be fruitful," a conviction that inspires various initiatives to birth a Cylon-human hybrid heir, from nightmarish "farms" where humans are held captive for breeding purposes to a ploy to ensnare Karl "Helo" Agathon (a Fleet officer) in a loving relationship with Sharon (a Model Eight) to make a baby the old fashioned way. However, these orthodox diagrams inevitably unravel into far more complex and ambiguous familial networks: Sharon falls in love with Helo in earnest and defects from the Cylon cause to be with him; Lieutenant Kara "Starbuck" Thrace must grapple with her role in the life of a toddler the Cylons claim is her daughter, whether the baby is the product of her violation in the farms or of a ruse that leaves them with no blood ties; even the most traditional family -- Specialist Cally, Chief Tyrol, and their son Nicky -- are revealed to be part Cylon when the Chief is outed at the end of season three. Thus, the predicament the program raises -- how to evolve while controlling runaway reproductive energies -- remains unresolved, as familiar hierarchies of containment are challenged while the outcome of the heterarchies that multiply in their place remains to be seen. And the same could be said for the developing system of televisual reproduction, Battlestar Galactica's extratextual ecology, as it attempts to spawn hybrid offspring which could lead television to a new homeland or to a final apocalypse.
Reproduction is a question of media technology: to make a copy requires a means of transmitting an encoded identity from the old body to the new. As with any transmission or iteration, this gap is dangerous to fantasies of presence or unity. BSG's Colonial Fleet contends with problems of inscription and deciphering: how to maintain historical memory and records after the holocaust; how to legitimize and register one true account of guilt and innocence; how to translate the map to their promised land which is coded in myths and oracles, in holy texts, and in the stars themselves. If the Cylons appear as a mortal threat to humanity, it is perhaps because of their superhuman facility at copying: like fans, who can interface with and share a vast digital archive at will, Cylons can jack into their machines and "download" their consciousness upon death. The heart of their ships is a "Hybrid": an ethereally beautiful humanform biomass integrated into its data conduits. While the human leaders are attempting to interpret sacred stories, Cylon gurus are listening for prophetic messages that might be encrypted in the Hybrid's babble, the nonsensical stream-of-consciousness of the computer itself. And yet these advanced technologies are not without their limitations: from what we know of them, Cylons have no "live" linkup with each other that would allow them to communicate wirelessly and in realtime. As per the stipulations of the archival mechanism, information must always be embodied -- literally, here, in a humanform body (while there are many copies of each model, a unique identity can be materialized in only one copy at a time). Violence is indelible, its memory transmitted from one painful download to the next like trauma inscribed on the unconscious (Freud's "mystic writing pad"). The Cylon body is itself a medium, and to network with each other Cylons seem to operate by touch, placing their hands into a liquid datastream to communicate. This corporeal intimacy can evidently bring pleasure as well as agony, judging from the Hybrid's orgasmic expression when instructed to initiate the ship's faster-than-light jump; it is a small step from haptics to erotics. The deferral inherent to mediation structurally mirrors the deferral inherent to desire, and the necessary intercession of a material substrate means that desire will always be reaching through bodies when it yearns to touch unmediated information (Three kills herself repeatedly as a spiritual journey, in hopes that in the instant of disembodiment between one form and the next she will see truth). In this yearning, in their vain quests to find stable meanings, identities, and lineages, humans and Cylons come to share common ground. Industry and fans likewise cohabit the conditions of embodied media formations, with their circulatory passages where promiscuous relations, mongrels, and runaways can germinate, but their reproductive doctrines and tactics may still be at war.
Reproduction is a question of media technology: to make a copy requires a means of transmitting an encoded identity from the old body to the new. As with any transmission or iteration, this gap is dangerous to fantasies of presence or unity. BSG's Colonial Fleet contends with problems of inscription and deciphering: how to maintain historical memory and records after the holocaust; how to legitimize and register one true account of guilt and innocence; how to translate the map to their promised land which is coded in myths and oracles, in holy texts, and in the stars themselves. If the Cylons appear as a mortal threat to humanity, it is perhaps because of their superhuman facility at copying: like fans, who can interface with and share a vast digital archive at will, Cylons can jack into their machines and "download" their consciousness upon death. The heart of their ships is a "Hybrid": an ethereally beautiful humanform biomass integrated into its data conduits. While the human leaders are attempting to interpret sacred stories, Cylon gurus are listening for prophetic messages that might be encrypted in the Hybrid's babble, the nonsensical stream-of-consciousness of the computer itself. And yet these advanced technologies are not without their limitations: from what we know of them, Cylons have no "live" linkup with each other that would allow them to communicate wirelessly and in realtime. As per the stipulations of the archival mechanism, information must always be embodied -- literally, here, in a humanform body (while there are many copies of each model, a unique identity can be materialized in only one copy at a time). Violence is indelible, its memory transmitted from one painful download to the next like trauma inscribed on the unconscious (Freud's "mystic writing pad"). The Cylon body is itself a medium, and to network with each other Cylons seem to operate by touch, placing their hands into a liquid datastream to communicate. This corporeal intimacy can evidently bring pleasure as well as agony, judging from the Hybrid's orgasmic expression when instructed to initiate the ship's faster-than-light jump; it is a small step from haptics to erotics. The deferral inherent to mediation structurally mirrors the deferral inherent to desire, and the necessary intercession of a material substrate means that desire will always be reaching through bodies when it yearns to touch unmediated information (Three kills herself repeatedly as a spiritual journey, in hopes that in the instant of disembodiment between one form and the next she will see truth). In this yearning, in their vain quests to find stable meanings, identities, and lineages, humans and Cylons come to share common ground. Industry and fans likewise cohabit the conditions of embodied media formations, with their circulatory passages where promiscuous relations, mongrels, and runaways can germinate, but their reproductive doctrines and tactics may still be at war.
