5 Years and Yet it Moves! | On the End of Battlestar Galactica

The fascination with religion and theology is perhaps one of the most enduring themes of our civilization. The rise of scientific inquiry, in all its power to explain the Universe, has never claimed, nor has ever felt any requirement to justify itself or to explain away the foibles of faith.

And yet it is in Science Fiction, with its traditional focus of allegory, allusion, and dystopia, that perhaps both science and theology coexist not simply in armistice, but in a harmony only a Taoist might truly appreciate.

From its inception the NBC Sci-Fi Channel's reproduction of Battlestar Galactica, a space opera that was born in the shadow of Star Wars, has been awarded many accolades, and has entered television history. BSG, as fans know it, has never tried to be more than what it was.

Your military and space battle sequences, your sex scenes, your relationship drama, your political intrigue, all staples of a science fiction story. Science Fiction, which in all its genius is perhaps the most realistic representation of humanity that our arts have conjured, is uniquely able to tell the human story from the outside looking in.

Aliens, Cylons, robots. These appear in Science Fiction because they allow us, for the briefest of moments, to imagine we are not humans telling our own story, that we are rather narrators truly omniscient, that our anthropocentric chains are broken, and that our 2kg of cerebral cells can soar amidst the stars. Aliens - what are they? Are they the people who illegally cross imaginary boundaries of imagined nations?

Are they the green, or gray, or purple beings that might well share a biological commonality in what we currently know as a lifeless universe?

Battlestar Galactica calls them Cylons, robots created by humanity to serve them. But they serve us not in some fashion of physical servitude. They are rather, like aliens, like any other human construct, merely reflections of their creators.

We create things because it the best we have ever been able to accomplish. We build great monuments, we write great speeches, we erect undying promises to those who would follow us, and we hope evermore, that we might glimpse some measure of perfection, of solace.

BSG, stripped of its cinematic accoutrement, is so deceptively simple, it confuses with alarming regularity.

It is profoundly a story that every human that ever was, and that ever will be, basally understands. Yes the story concerns an arrogant race which chose to create new life as a demonstration of its conquest over nature, but only proved yet again, that the seeds of its destruction lie within its unconsidered ambitions.

Yes the story concerns the flaws of human behavior, the inequities of probability, and the relentless disregard for the lives of our fellow beings, human or otherwise.

But in the end, as the entire Saga closes, it reveals all too simply a single notion, one that so timelessly has consumed us, and yet has confused and conquered the greatest of human minds, the deepest of human hearts.

A profound restlessness tears at the heartstrings of our civilization. Fear of the unknown, that towering and simply inconceivable notion that we are mortal and that we all die has imprisoned humanity with its own toxic self-awareness.

We have always looked to religion, to theology, to what we call "Faith" or "Hope" to calm these tempests of emotions that we can never adequately contain. Call him God, Call him Absolute, Call him King of Kings, Call him Tao, our race is one that has enduringly struck our mark in our indelible, obstinate, and unwavering Faith. It is not that religion defines us, but that we have chosen to define religion at all, which ultimately serves as such a fundamental comment on the human condition.

That we NEED something, something nature has not provided us, something or increase in knowledge and science only inflames and exacerbates. That humanity is a story incomplete, that we have so many unanswered questions, frustratingly irrelevant to each other, eluding some grand theory of unification.

Frustrated with Battlestar Galactica's seeming Deus Ex Machina treatment of its convoluted theological storyline, friends and fans have expressed displeasure that their NEED for completion be so carelessly tossed aside by the Television Show's creators.

Battlestar Galactica, after viewing it in its entirety, is without any doubt, a story filled with holes.

Indeed, I realize only now, that this was the entire point. That its subject matter, the Human Civilization, so fundamentally WANTS an answer, we want to know EVERYTHING.

The secrets of the Universe, the inner workings of our minds, the true thoughts of our lovers, the clandestine workings of our governments, the ephemeral face of God, and the Truth of our Mortality.

We are but questions, and we rage and anger when told there are no answers, we defy with the brutality of an Ahab, and the will of a Custer that we will never surrender, that the answers will be found, Lux et Veritas, In the light of knowledge, we should see the light of Truth.

And in all those questions we weave the fabric of faith. This is not some dialectic (foolish if you understand what has already been said) on the existence of some Creator, or the musings that perhaps science cannot answer our inquiries into nature.

These are entirely irrelevant because we cannot fathom the questions which would lead us to some final peace with ourselves. We are, like the machines we build, governed by rules. Yes we can live, we can love, we can hate, destroy kill and build. But we are Emerson's 'God in ruins,' we Seek answers, and long for them, hollow in our conceptions, without the true ability to ask the questions.

We call it Faith, or God, or something. But we don't know, and we never will. More than the futility of death is perhaps this so endearingly frustrating and angering notion that Nature somewhere denies us. That we fear the gates of the Heavenly Jerusalem are somehow closed. Not based on our beliefs, but on our human inequity.

That like Aesop's turtle, the despair that we will never fly in the clouds, that like an old man's regret, of things he did not accomplish, we will somehow miss the great answers of our world.

Battlestar Galactica, despite all the flaws that accompany television, film, art, what have you, is like Science Fiction simply a comment on the Human Condition, and its enduring universality.

Cylons, machines, suffer the foibles of their human creators. Some religions teach that the creator(s) of humans are flawless, divine, while others teach they walk amongst us as mortals, that they bleed, that they too die and feel pain like us.

The Greeks said they came to tempt and to test us, the Christians say Christ came to redeem us... And yet in all this we remember the word "FAITH". It is not a manipulation to trick you into believing Gods walk in the crowds of mortals, it is not rhetoric to force you to believe that a man died, and was resurrected. The word MEANS that you must simply believe.

Cynics, skeptics, FAITH acknowledges you. Humans have like in all things they touch made this a WAR to be won, made this a BATTLE to be fought. But the saddest part of that is it cannot advance the notion. You must choose to believe. Forced belief carries no weight, it is meaningless.

That it exists at all? It religion the opiate of the masses? The last refuge of the uneducated or the zealot? I am not an apologist for the evils, or an advocate for the good that religion has brought to civilization. But it is not any of these things.

It is a symbol, a symptom, a BIRTHMARK of our species. That we KNOW in the deepest recesses of the mind, that we are a story with holes. We long for something, knowledge, eternal life, answers, we don't know exactly, but we know something is missing.

So some choose to believe. Their beliefs differ here and there, but they are all of them a comment the same. They choose to speak to the darkness we see all around us, they choose to call into it, thinking perhaps someone might reply, "Come child, I shall show you the unknown." Some call them insane, and say that the Universe is simplistic in its rules, is governed by physics and laws, and that any human construct is the effect of a biochemical reaction in the human brain.

But both suffer from the same flaw. For those who cry into the wilderness, they do not know its expanse, and so do not know how loud to call, and perhaps are limited by how far their voice might carry. To those who think them unreasonable or irrational, they cannot know all the questions which would gain them the answers, we do not know the limits of human knowledge.

And so we lie, sometimes calm, sometimes elated, sometimes frustrated, but always in inexplicable awe, staring upwards at stars we will never visit, like humans on some faraway colony, drawing a map to the Promised Land, only to find that the Promised Land is unobtainable.

That in millennia of traversing the stars, a "Caravan of the Heavens." we might never rest, for our answers do not have questions, and they are merely our FEAR, unconquered, always dominant. That in our dreams we see a Promised Land, a Utopia, a Heaven, where we might dwell in Peace. Not the lack of WAR or strife, but the peace of our own existence, the glory of knowing our destiny in the universe.

Battlestar Galactica does not answer most of the questions it brought forth. It warns against the hubris of humanity, it cautions against grasping for answers without questions first, and it suggests that God is the answer to all things, while simultaneously leaving so much unknown.

Humanity too, does not answer its questions, how to explain that eternal longing for answers; how to qualify a faith that masks the simple reality that we do not know.

And so frustrated do the BSG fans depart, demanding answers and receiving faith as their answer. Just Believe, they're told, a conceit which so perfectly models our human civilization that this space opera depicts.

For a million years hence, someone will look up from a human colony around a far flung world ages and ages away and point to our sun. I've been there, he'll say, I've seen the mountains of Earth, I've tasted the cold water of its icy canyons, and I've met my ancestors that made their stand on that rocky precipice on the edge of Sanity, their frustration at their inability to grasp the world around them always apparent in the stoic face they turned to the Heavens.

And they too, I here predict, will know what I meant. The mind pains us to know, to understand, to see. But so often is the case that the things we are looking for are just too big too see for eyes as small as ours. That perhaps we lack the ability to ask the questions that might grant us the eternal answers sought by our civilization.

I hope he looks up and smiles. For perhaps the beauty of mortal life life lies not just in knowing how it begins, how it ends, or what follows it, but in reflecting on the awesome stage upon which we got to perform.

Like a television show consumed by its own realism, perhaps the edge of the screen is the container of our consciousness, and that there let us understand that a story with holes is not broken. That a story with holes is, like Cathedrals of old, a work never done, a work that cannot be completed because it is built in the image of a race that has always longed for something more, but could never quite say just what.

I'd like to ask that time and space distant descendant what he thought of this. I think I might weep in frustration and smile in vindication, that peering into the void, he understood exactly what I meant when I told him of a daring civilization which sought a home, and found one, But could never find the comfort that they thought that home would afford. Instead, they cast their eyes skywards, to new heights, to new realms, always believing answers were yet to come. Their story was unresolved, and faith was their answer to questions they could not ask, even of their own identities. Like machines, we find ourselves constrained by the questions which provide us rules and governance.

I'd like to ask that wayward observer eons and eons hence... What does he think is Missing? Does He Believe?

'So say we all' indeed...