beccatoria (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
beccatoria) wrote2008-04-16 10:16 pm
beccatoria) wrote2008-04-16 10:16 pm
Entry tags:
BSG Meta: BSG vs The Matrix
So, ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
projectjulie asked me - if I was sure that having a bizarre reversal of religious significance and making Kara a human, but a tool of the Cylon God and figure in Cylon scripture, while making Laura the final Cylon but still being a figure of religious significance to the humans and working to save them, was an awesome idea - how did Gaius Baltar fit in?
Because he's the other character with bizarre humanocylon religiousness going on.
So I figure: if we're using the Matrix as a metaphor - he's Agent Smith.
Srsly, stay with me here:
The Lords of Kobol aren't particularly active gods. They make their presence known in the series largely through indirect prophecy and circular predetermination - "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." The Colonial pantheon is the pattern and the framework of the story. The players change, but the story remains the same. Perhaps next time, you'll be the prisoner.
So the Lords of Kobol, in this analogy, are the Matrix itself.
The Cylon God, on the other hand, seems to be taking an active part in unfolding events (especially if we accept that Kara is his chosen instrument and her divine resurrection came from him, and not from the Colonial gods). So the Cylon God is the Architect. The active extension of the Matrix, who operates slightly differently and seeks to rearrange the wider, unbreakable patterns to his own, more efficient will.
Which, of course, makes Kara our Neo. The human, desperate to help save humanity, who is in fact an unwitting pawn of her enemy's deity. Perhaps only through self-awareness can she realise she's dooming her tiny, ragged patch of humanity, rather than saving them, before the cycle starts again. She's also already had a faux-death like Neo's death at the end of the first film, before she really commits to her destiny as pseudo-Jesus. Whether she'll die at the end is...open for debate, though I'd guess not at this stage...
The Oracle is Laura. A machine/cylon who chooses to ally with the humans instead, and who assumes a spiritual significance to them, and who ultimately dies before the journey is over.
Which makes Gaius Baltar into Agent Smith, the Oracle/Laura's tool. Agent Smith is the wild card: the thing that hasn't happened before, the unpredictable element that ultimately destroys the Oracle (and perhaps Laura Roslin too), but it's a price the Oracle considers worth paying in exchange for breaking out of the pattern that holds the humans hostage. Agent Smith wants to bring about a destructive coherence by turning every program into a copy of his own, something that could perhaps be compared with bulldozing monotheism? (Says the girl desperately hoping that Gaius Baltar and Monotheism-as-Saviour isn't going to occur in this series...)
The analogy is at its least literal here, but I think at its most interesting. Clearly the most major difference between Roslin and the Oracle is self-awareness. I'm sure that Roslin doesn't realise she's a Cylon (and tragically, I don't think the show will realise it either, but assuming for a moment that she is), and she sure as heck would never admit to believing that Baltar is in any way helpful to her.
Also, on the surface of things, Roslin is working to maintain the pattern of the Lords of Kobol: of the Matrix, rather than trying to destroy it.
But again, matters of perception and nonliteral comparisons. Laura is doing what she thinks is best, given her current knowledge. And unlike the Matrix, where both the Matrix and the Architect represent the "enemy", here I have aligned the Matrix with the Lords of Kobol and the cycle itself may not be the negative prison that it is in the Matrix series.
Either way I love the notion that - in the same way that God might be responsible for creating The Devil - Laura Roslin is responsible for Gaius Baltar. And that unaware to her, his wild-card status and the endless destruction he wreaks on the fleet and her personally, might prove invaluable in some perverse way.
Heck, he already saved her life once. Though I figure that he's mostly starting to come into his "Agent Smith" phase now. We'll see how the analogy holds up throughout the rest of the series.
I suppose what I find most interesting about reading it like this is that despite Kara and Laura still being my picks for "Mystical Figures in Opposing Scriptures," the comparison starts also drawing lines and rivalries between Laura Roslin and the Cylon God himself (Oracle vs Architect) and Kara and Baltar (Neo vs Agent Smith).
To be honest, I think I'd rather see Starbuck vs a dying cancer patient nearly twice her age than vs Baltar. It seems less one-sided... ;)
I have to acknowledge, having babbled about this, that:
1) I'm aware that Ron Moore isn't cribbing his storylines from the Matrix trilogy so the chances of it panning out this cleanly are few. But,
2) I think that our media does tend to follow broad iconic storylines and so cross-media comparisons can still prove illuminating, interesting, and perhaps accurate. Though,
3) it still bears noting that our media just steals it from older sources, in this instance religion itself (both from the Matrix and BSG), so it would probably be more intellectually valid to start comparing Laura to Moses and Baltar or Kara to Jesus and the Colonial and Cylon God/s to the split between the angry, involved Old Testament YHWH and the softer, more distant New Testament YHWH, but lots of people have already done that. And darnit, I know more about the media than I do about religion! Finally,
4) I should probably admit that a fair amount of this stems from my blind love of Laura Roslin and my hope that she is specialer beyond special. We all have our favourites... ;)
Anyway, that was what I was thinking about last night!
projectjulie asked me - if I was sure that having a bizarre reversal of religious significance and making Kara a human, but a tool of the Cylon God and figure in Cylon scripture, while making Laura the final Cylon but still being a figure of religious significance to the humans and working to save them, was an awesome idea - how did Gaius Baltar fit in? Because he's the other character with bizarre humanocylon religiousness going on.
So I figure: if we're using the Matrix as a metaphor - he's Agent Smith.
Srsly, stay with me here:
The Lords of Kobol aren't particularly active gods. They make their presence known in the series largely through indirect prophecy and circular predetermination - "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again." The Colonial pantheon is the pattern and the framework of the story. The players change, but the story remains the same. Perhaps next time, you'll be the prisoner.
So the Lords of Kobol, in this analogy, are the Matrix itself.
The Cylon God, on the other hand, seems to be taking an active part in unfolding events (especially if we accept that Kara is his chosen instrument and her divine resurrection came from him, and not from the Colonial gods). So the Cylon God is the Architect. The active extension of the Matrix, who operates slightly differently and seeks to rearrange the wider, unbreakable patterns to his own, more efficient will.
Which, of course, makes Kara our Neo. The human, desperate to help save humanity, who is in fact an unwitting pawn of her enemy's deity. Perhaps only through self-awareness can she realise she's dooming her tiny, ragged patch of humanity, rather than saving them, before the cycle starts again. She's also already had a faux-death like Neo's death at the end of the first film, before she really commits to her destiny as pseudo-Jesus. Whether she'll die at the end is...open for debate, though I'd guess not at this stage...
The Oracle is Laura. A machine/cylon who chooses to ally with the humans instead, and who assumes a spiritual significance to them, and who ultimately dies before the journey is over.
Which makes Gaius Baltar into Agent Smith, the Oracle/Laura's tool. Agent Smith is the wild card: the thing that hasn't happened before, the unpredictable element that ultimately destroys the Oracle (and perhaps Laura Roslin too), but it's a price the Oracle considers worth paying in exchange for breaking out of the pattern that holds the humans hostage. Agent Smith wants to bring about a destructive coherence by turning every program into a copy of his own, something that could perhaps be compared with bulldozing monotheism? (Says the girl desperately hoping that Gaius Baltar and Monotheism-as-Saviour isn't going to occur in this series...)
The analogy is at its least literal here, but I think at its most interesting. Clearly the most major difference between Roslin and the Oracle is self-awareness. I'm sure that Roslin doesn't realise she's a Cylon (and tragically, I don't think the show will realise it either, but assuming for a moment that she is), and she sure as heck would never admit to believing that Baltar is in any way helpful to her.
Also, on the surface of things, Roslin is working to maintain the pattern of the Lords of Kobol: of the Matrix, rather than trying to destroy it.
But again, matters of perception and nonliteral comparisons. Laura is doing what she thinks is best, given her current knowledge. And unlike the Matrix, where both the Matrix and the Architect represent the "enemy", here I have aligned the Matrix with the Lords of Kobol and the cycle itself may not be the negative prison that it is in the Matrix series.
Either way I love the notion that - in the same way that God might be responsible for creating The Devil - Laura Roslin is responsible for Gaius Baltar. And that unaware to her, his wild-card status and the endless destruction he wreaks on the fleet and her personally, might prove invaluable in some perverse way.
Heck, he already saved her life once. Though I figure that he's mostly starting to come into his "Agent Smith" phase now. We'll see how the analogy holds up throughout the rest of the series.
I suppose what I find most interesting about reading it like this is that despite Kara and Laura still being my picks for "Mystical Figures in Opposing Scriptures," the comparison starts also drawing lines and rivalries between Laura Roslin and the Cylon God himself (Oracle vs Architect) and Kara and Baltar (Neo vs Agent Smith).
To be honest, I think I'd rather see Starbuck vs a dying cancer patient nearly twice her age than vs Baltar. It seems less one-sided... ;)
I have to acknowledge, having babbled about this, that:
1) I'm aware that Ron Moore isn't cribbing his storylines from the Matrix trilogy so the chances of it panning out this cleanly are few. But,
2) I think that our media does tend to follow broad iconic storylines and so cross-media comparisons can still prove illuminating, interesting, and perhaps accurate. Though,
3) it still bears noting that our media just steals it from older sources, in this instance religion itself (both from the Matrix and BSG), so it would probably be more intellectually valid to start comparing Laura to Moses and Baltar or Kara to Jesus and the Colonial and Cylon God/s to the split between the angry, involved Old Testament YHWH and the softer, more distant New Testament YHWH, but lots of people have already done that. And darnit, I know more about the media than I do about religion! Finally,
4) I should probably admit that a fair amount of this stems from my blind love of Laura Roslin and my hope that she is specialer beyond special. We all have our favourites... ;)
Anyway, that was what I was thinking about last night!