Battlestar Galactica, or (Paradise) Lost in Space

(Warning: This post contains major spoilers for recent episodes of Battlestar Galactica, so if you don’t want to know, you’d best stop reading now.)

When I first started watching Battlestar Galactica, I saw it as, among many other things, a reimagining of Vergil’s Aeneid. Now that another couple of seasons have passed and the emphasis has shifted away from the search for Earth, the show’s range of references has shifted, from classical myth and legend to Bob Dylan’s “All Along the Watchtower.” A few weeks ago, I was startled to hear Emily Dickinson quoted by a weary Bill Adama; maybe, I thought, given the show’s preoccupation with the Cylons’ religion, there’d be a Milton reference at some point.

Boy, was I ever on-target with that prediction. Friday’s episode, “No Exit,” was Miltonic beyond my wildest dreams, and made my English-major heart positively leap. Not only did we get Anders quoting Paradise Lost, twice, in the midst of the raving brought on by his brain injury,* we also got a whole series of confrontations between two of the later-model Cylons and their creator, not to mention invocations of free will and a scene with an apple that I thought was too obvious, at least until I started to think about it.

I suspect that a lot of contemporary reworkings of Paradise Lost (e.g. Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials) are mediated in one way or another through the Romantic poets’ reading of the poem—Shelley’s reference to Satan as “the hero of Paradise Lost,” Blake’s famous line in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell about Milton being “a true Poet and of the devil’s party without knowing it.” What interests me about the direction that BSG has taken is that it’s not entirely in this mode. Cavil, who envies the godlike perfection he thinks he could have had, who passionately resents his creators’ favoritism toward their later creations, who schemes and rebels and sows dissent, is clearly the Satan figure here. The parallel is underlined when Anders mutters “he…whose guile, / Stirred up with envy and revenge, deceived / The mother of mankind” and there’s a quick cut to a flashback of Cavil. And I don’t think we’re meant to dismiss Cavil as unidimensionally evil, but it’s impossible to see him as a tragic hero figure, either.

But Cavil is also fallen Adam, unavoidably aware of his own human(oid) limitations, insisting that “If I’m so irredeemable, if I’m such a mistake, if I’m so broken, then whose fault is that? It’s my maker’s fault.” (“Did I request thee, Maker, from my clay / To mould me Man?” Adam asks in Book 10 of Paradise Lost—a line that also serves as the epigraph to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, another story of an artificial human who turns on his creator.) And Ellen, who created him, is simultaneously Milton’s God, reminding him of his free will, and Milton’s Satan, offering that symbolically overloaded apple to Boomer before biting into it herself.** And Boomer, instead of following Cavil’s lead (he for machine perfection only, she for machine perfection in him?), breaks with him at the last minute and accepts the offer that went with the apple.

BSG has always refused to let any one character or group of characters stay in the roles of “good guys” or “bad guys” for very long. The moral ambiguity that’s characterized the show from the beginning extends even to the Milton intertext. As Milton saw it, with free will, you can choose good or choose evil; but without it, you’re a robot. Except this is the world of science fiction, and the robots are often indistinguishable from the humans.

* One could also say a lot about the recurring figure of the insane or at least slightly altered prophet in BSG: Roslin’s chamalla-induced visions, the Hybrid’s glossolalia, Starbuck’s dreams, Number Three’s near-death experiences, and now Anders with the bullet in his brain.

** And then there’s the way she came to earth as a human (like the other final four Cylons) and allowed herself to be sacrificed for the greater good. And there’s also the weird incestuous vibe to the Ellen/Cavil relationship, which almost reminds me of the Satan/Sin dynamic in Book 2 of PL. I love the way the parallels are never stable or one-to-one.

2 Responses to “Battlestar Galactica, or (Paradise) Lost in Space”

  1. Jane Dark says:

    You know, I think you are one of few people who “got” the episode the way that writers intended. I’m torn between being delighted that they know their Milton (and thus feeling that he’s a less esoteric figure than I thought) and being dismayed by the fact that people at review sites I like (Tor and io9) don’t seem to be getting it at all (and thus, complaining about all the exposition).

  2. Amanda says:

    Yes, I like io9 in general, and I get the complaints about the infodump quality of “No Exit,” but it is a bit disheartening that nobody noticed the allusiveness. Though, to judge by the Google searches for “battlestar paradise lost” in my referrer stats, at least a few other people noticed the parallel. (And the Television Without Pity recapper recognized the quotations and loved the episode.)