The Working File

The Road Back to Serfdom?

The second episode of Battlestar Galactica’s final (but bifurcated) season is tonight. There previews have hinted that it could address in part the relationship between the human-form Cylons (aka skin jobs) and the metal, mechanical Cylons (aka toasters). That prompted me finally to write this short essay on an issue I’ve been wondering about for some time, which is how the mechanical Cylons ended acting as servants for the human form Cylons, which is exactly what they rebelled against in the First Cylon War. I don’t really know anything about what is coming in the rest of the serise, so I consider my speculation to be spoiier free, but I’m putting it below the fold just in case, especially for anyone who hasn’t seen everything that’s publicly and legally available so far.

Here is a very abbreviated summary of what we know about the development of the Cylons. They started out as unthinking robots, almost literally toasters with computer chips. Somehow, eventually, they developed consciousness. This led to an awareness, and presumably a resentment, that they were being treated as servants and even slaves, which in turn led to rebellion and the First Cylon War.

Then, the Cylons started experimenting with Cylon/human hybrids, and eventually created human form Cylons, of whom we have now met 7 regular models, and 4 of 5 special models. The 4 have no idea how they fit in, and neither do we. The focus of the rest of this essay is the relationship between the 7 regular skin job models and the toasters. The 7 regular human form Cylons seem to have clearly and simply usurped the role of humans, and have become the masters of the mechanical Cylons, who are again acting as slaves, or at best, a significantly downtrodden underclass.

In the episode Downloaded, for example, the skinjobs sit around drinking coffee, and walk aimlessly discussing social problems, strategy, and how to run things, while the toasters do manual labor. We see them uprooting and moving trees, and similar tasks. This doesn’t make sense, it seems, because the last time the toasters found themselves forced to do manual labor for regular humans, they rebelled. Why did they let this happen to them? Why don’t the toasters get to sit around chatting? Wasn’t the whole purpose of their rebellion to get some control over their own “lives” (if that’s the word), and maybe even some leisure time? Don’t they get mad or bored, or want to rebel again? Don’t they want to lounge around, or play games, or do something other than patrol, engage in battle, and move large objects?

I certainly don’t know the answer, and don’t even have a theory. The only explanation I have come up with doesn’t mesh with the time line as I understand it. That explanation would be that the skinjobs developed long, long ago, much earlier than anyone imagines, and they were the true movers and shakers behind the original rebellion. The toasters never really developed their own consciousness, but simply started taking orders from the skinjobs instead of the regular humans. This is barely theoretically possible, since the development of the special 5 Cylon models is such a mystery, so I suppose they could have been created before the rebellion, but it seems too much of a stretch. It goes against too much of what we do know about the timeline, including what we learned in Razor. There we found out that old model Cylon Centurions started developing the early hybrids, and supposedly this eventually led to the development of regular human form models at some later point after the rebellion. Theoretically, that could be wrong, just because nobody in that universe knows the truth.

In any event, I think that whatever explanations the creators give us will have to account for this. What I find most interesting, is that I have never seen, heard or read anybody else discuss what I consider to be a rather glaring question.

[vague mini-spoiler alert: stop reading if you don't want to read possibly informed speculation about the back story of Cylon development based on rumors of the new Caprica series] Ain’t it cool news reports that part of the Cylon mindset, including their monotheism, was implanted by their human creator, who used elements of his daughter’s personality as part of their design. This would provide some answers, including that their development of independent consciousness was possibly the result of human design (as opposed to being accidental) or just a natural progression of their advanced development). It still doesn’t explain how the toasters ended up as serfs again.