Frakking Toasters Provide Perspective on Hopes for Battlestar Galactica
On a good day, my overarching thesis of Battlestar Galactica is one of hope. Hope that the humans will learn something from all they have been through, that they will look up from the day to day struggle to survive and hope for more from human nature in addition to their hope for a home on Earth.
The complex interweaving of pity and pain, hatred and hubris, and similarities with sabotage that we saw in Season Three of Battlestar Galactica seemingly reinforced my theory that only way the human race will survive is if the members who sympathize with the Cylons strive to form a mutually cooperative peace with the “toasters.” The plotlines about genocide, the mutual quests for answers, these things and so many others seemed to reinforce my theories. And of course the revelations of the four Cylons in the final episode of the season, All Along the Watchtower, made me even more firmly convinced I was correct.
But I still wonder. And leave it a comic strip, that simple yet potentially provocative medium, to succinctly express one of my primary doubts about this idea.
The blog Galactica Sitrep recently linked to Frakking Toasters, a very cool BSG webcomic. And the December 8, 2006 panels described many of the reasons why this hope of mine may be futile. The Cylons and the humans hate one another, and even the members of each group that sympathize with the others tend to so on an individual, not a mass, level.
If one of the ongoing themes of the series is that being self-destructive and prone to mistakes is what makes the humans so gloriously, imperfectly, human … then perhaps it is too much to expect them to set aside mass murder for an ideal. Perhaps it would be very BSG for the audience to realize there is potential for peace and continued existence, but the characters on screen do not. The character development certainly supports this idea, taking the human characters to increasingly darker and more desperate places as the series progresses. President Roslin’s slow deterioration from idealist to angerball is fairly strong evidence that hoping for peace between the groups may be hoping for too much … this generation, anyway.
Webcomic, toasters, cylon, armistice, peace, Battlestar Galactica, Roslin
April 6th, 2008 at 9:16 pm
[...] prophesy indicates that the Cylons and humans will work together at some point to find Earth, and while that makes sense in the context of the show it was probably not part of [...]
April 15th, 2008 at 9:26 pm
“President Roslin’s slow deterioration from idealist to angerball is fairly strong evidence that hoping for peace between the groups may be hoping for too much … this generation, anyway.”
Yes, but Tigh finding out he’s a Cylon and having hated Cylons for so long may suggest they’re moving in that direction by a weird path.
The show is now taking over my blog.