The vision of clandestine romance that brings fans and television together via subterranean channels into a creative economy is complicated by its rapidly evolving hybrid progeny. On Battlestar Galactica, when humans and Cylons couple, the consequence is not merely an unpredictable future generation but a breakdown in the classificatory order that allowed the species to be distinguishable in the first place. Corporate media face a similar dilemma: as the industry relies with increasing openness on the labor of fans to produce and promote the value of its properties, it becomes ever more difficult to hold in place the distinctions between owners and consumers. This newfound permeability can jeopardize traditional practices on both sides, as formerly binary conflicts and alliances become murkier. And the promiscuous textuality spawned by today's convergent approach to entertainment makes control of this intercourse ever more difficult to maintain. Preceding season three, for example, the Sci-Fi Channel deployed a promotional blitz geared to attract new viewers and leverage Battlestar Galactica's critical acclaim into a more mainstream market share. In addition to advertising a tendentious opening storyline evoking the current Iraqi occupation, the network assembled an online initiative that included free recap videos pieced together from clips and an automated emailer that encouraged fans to "spread the word" {http://scifi.com/battlestar/storysofar/spreadtheword/}. Headlining the publicity package was an original web series, The Resistance, with an unenviable compound enterprise: telling ten self-contained several-minute stories, adding up to a coherent whole that would be accessible and interesting to both uninitiated and avid viewers, and tying substantively to the upcoming televised arc while not being necessary to understanding it (Glater). In keeping with the pressing power issues threaded through its transmedia milieu, this reticulated narrative explored characters' divergent attempts to navigate the muddy moral landscape of Cylon-human relations under the Cylons' paternalistic occupation of the human settlement on New Caprica; their quandary being whether to risk participating in a violent guerilla resistance or to "collaborate" with the Cylons by joining the peace-keeping secret police. While the network put a positive spin on the outcome of the web series, posting a statement by SCIFI.com senior vice president Craig Engler that "The phenomenal success of The Resistance proves that there is a definite audience for webisodes that can have an impact on TV viewing" (staff), season three's ratings were ultimately lackluster, making the claim (or fantasy) that such official tie-ins can single-handedly catapult the program to popularity seem over-inflated. Perhaps the most interesting question to ask of the webisodes is not whether they succeeded or failed, but rather how they can illuminate ongoing negotiations of who will collaborate or resist when it comes to conflicts within and around the industry.
Notably, The Resistance provoked a pitched battle between Sci-Fi/NBC executives and creative personnel, the former designating the webisodes promotional material not subject to additional wages, while the latter contended that they were original content qualifying for union rates. Ron Moore described the escalation of the hostilities:
This labor negotiation, in the classic sense, is situated within more shadowy mediations of the unruly fan production that has been called libidinal labor, a term I'll explore further in the following chapter. Official and unofficial authors were perhaps surprised to find themselves on the same side of the battle lines, allied as creative workers. Participants in online fandom, who are uniquely equipped to realize the web's status as a commercial platform, banded together to support television writers by picketing, educating, and fundraising. Meanwhile, fans too are wondering how they will be contracted and compensated in a media economy that increasingly attempts to harness and monetize their activities. The AMPTP would like to strong-arm a scenario wherein Battlestar Galactica's textual proliferation doesn't escape a hierarchy with the television episodes at the top, disowning its transmedia kindred and its fan families as bastard children. But as in the program's tales of replication gone awry, all this procreative potential is not easily contained within authorized channels. The franchise is most reproductive in its transactions with interpretive communities, who inseminate it with their own desires and narratives. Battlestar Galactica offers the ground for collective cultivation of lesbian love stories, in the furrows between textual flows and technologies of seeing. At the same time, however, it offers conditions of visibility that make these liaisons always possible but rarely perceptible to the naked eye. And just as it is the fertility of queer readings that necessitates such regulatory protocols, it is the "queerness" of convergence itself, transgressing the accepted boundaries of media formations and making for strange bedfellows and hybrid offspring, that capacitates such propagation. If "all mediation is remediation," we are experiencing a reconfiguration of material and ideological control that repeats and cannibalizes prior forms. Battlestar Galactica's theology turns on an analogous cycle of time: because "all this has happened before," we can look to media archaeologies for insight into our present, and because "all this will happen again," we should join now to engender knowledge, tactics, values, and passions for an intermediated world.
Notably, The Resistance provoked a pitched battle between Sci-Fi/NBC executives and creative personnel, the former designating the webisodes promotional material not subject to additional wages, while the latter contended that they were original content qualifying for union rates. Ron Moore described the escalation of the hostilities:
We got in this long, protracted thing and eventually they agreed to pay everybody involved. But then, as we got deeper into it, they said 'But we're not going to put any credits on it. You're not going to be credited for this work. And we can use it later, in any fashion that we want.' At which point I said 'Well, then we're done and I'm not going to deliver the webisodes to you.' And they came and they took them out of the editing room anyway -- which they have every right to do. (Goldman)This fallout highlights that the altercation was not only a matter of money, but also of who counts ideologically as the owner of entertainment commodities (Moore's last word was to post the complete production credits for The Resistance on his SCIFI.com blog). The above statement is from a picket line interview with Moore in the early days of the industry-wide screenwriters' strike, an entertainment cataclysm that the antagonism over BSG's webisodes seems to directly prefigure (at that time, NBC-Universal filed legally against the WGA, charging that Moore and company were violating their contracts by holding the material hostage). The issue of compensation for new media content like webisodes, as well as of residual payments for traditional screen works repackaged for digital distribution, is the principal deadlock of the labor dispute, and again, the corporations (via the AMPTP, their collective bargaining organization) seem far more concerned with reigning discursively over definitions of media property and artistry into the era of convergence than with profits per se (fighting the union is costing them billions more in lost revenues than it would to accede to the writers' relatively modest demands). The ecumenical consequences of digitization are well known, and Moore also emphasizes this dimension, and its high stakes, in his WGA activism: "The notion that just because it's on your computer as opposed to your television set is absurd. It's an absurd position for [the AMPTP] to take, but, you know, if they can pull it off, they're at the moment of a watershed change of how your media is delivered to you. Your television and your computer are going to become the same device within the foreseeable future" (Goldman). This inexorable hybridization, like the interbreeding of humans and Cylons, is both an upgrade and a threat to the species, and the WGA could be seen to challenge our understanding of what "television" is much as the Cylons challenge our understanding of what "humanity" is, with both sides vying for the first glimpse of their heirs' future home. The fate of Earth hangs in the balance – as does the fate of Battlestar Galactica's final ten episodes, which are expected to thematize in large part the search for this promised land, since production on the show is suspended until the strike is resolved.
This labor negotiation, in the classic sense, is situated within more shadowy mediations of the unruly fan production that has been called libidinal labor, a term I'll explore further in the following chapter. Official and unofficial authors were perhaps surprised to find themselves on the same side of the battle lines, allied as creative workers. Participants in online fandom, who are uniquely equipped to realize the web's status as a commercial platform, banded together to support television writers by picketing, educating, and fundraising. Meanwhile, fans too are wondering how they will be contracted and compensated in a media economy that increasingly attempts to harness and monetize their activities. The AMPTP would like to strong-arm a scenario wherein Battlestar Galactica's textual proliferation doesn't escape a hierarchy with the television episodes at the top, disowning its transmedia kindred and its fan families as bastard children. But as in the program's tales of replication gone awry, all this procreative potential is not easily contained within authorized channels. The franchise is most reproductive in its transactions with interpretive communities, who inseminate it with their own desires and narratives. Battlestar Galactica offers the ground for collective cultivation of lesbian love stories, in the furrows between textual flows and technologies of seeing. At the same time, however, it offers conditions of visibility that make these liaisons always possible but rarely perceptible to the naked eye. And just as it is the fertility of queer readings that necessitates such regulatory protocols, it is the "queerness" of convergence itself, transgressing the accepted boundaries of media formations and making for strange bedfellows and hybrid offspring, that capacitates such propagation. If "all mediation is remediation," we are experiencing a reconfiguration of material and ideological control that repeats and cannibalizes prior forms. Battlestar Galactica's theology turns on an analogous cycle of time: because "all this has happened before," we can look to media archaeologies for insight into our present, and because "all this will happen again," we should join now to engender knowledge, tactics, values, and passions for an intermediated world.
