I'm interested in the role of religion and the transcendent experience in Battlestar Gallactica (BSG). The material I've read so far suggests that Cylons limit themselves by aspiring to be more like humans. When "they evolved," as the opening credits of the show tell us, they evolved into more human beings. In some ways, then, they might be devolving, or stuck in a cycle of eternal return, like samsara. It makes sense that the creators of the original Cylon robots were not made to improve humanity or eliminate our flaws. The final 5 Cylons in the BSG explain that they felt humans had something special that made life worth it -- life is not supposed to be easy or fun, according to them... Learning to get over one's flaws and shortcoming is the meaning of it all. (We find out in the prequel, Caprica, that the first Cylon was made by accident, in an effort to either 1) keep a deceased daughter alive, or 2) build a super-soldier that can't die. Both of these reasons are terribly vain and express a certain amount of greed or egotism that is not healthy.)
Cavil, a particularity nihilistic Cylon, seems not to be "on board" with the Cylon project to "evolve" into more human beings; he'd prefer to evolve into the best machine he can be. Being human-like, for Cavil, means being imperfect. If they are machines, then why not be perfect machines? Why build in flaws that impair a machine's functioning? This, of course, calls the "intelligent design" premise into question in an important way. It is not particularly "intelligent," in Cavil's opinion, to give a robot with the mental power of a Cylon all of the physical limitation of a human body -- skin, muscle, and bone are subject to decay, and are limited by the physical allowances of nature. Moreover, the Cylons are subject to outbursts -- they have a hard-time keeping control of their emotions, and they have seemingly built in restrictions on individuality which suggests that the final 5 (if they, in fact, "made" the other Cylons) probably weren't interested in creating truly human-like robots, or maybe they were merely acting in blatant self-interest. In either case, the Cylons' emotional outbursts end up causing all kinds of problems -- medical, political, etc -- and eventually create a Cylon civil war between those who want to embrace their "human-like" tendencies of individuality and emotionality, and those who want to deny those aspects of themselves.
The Cylons' desire to form an alliance with the humans underscores the limits imposed on them by their human-ness. The Cylons feel limited by their inability to reproduce sexually, and throughout the series they try all kinds of things to make this happen. They "farm" human women; they plant Cylons who have been programmed to think they human (like Boomer) to see if humans will fall in love with them and the love, mixed with biology, will help to create new life. They also search for "God," an unknown being in the show, whom the Cylons believe in as a creator and benevolent deity who guides them on a pre-ordained path. However, the Cylons cannot have free will if the path is preordained. They seem to have free will, and the final 5 seem to believe that they, the final 5, programmed the Cylons to have it, so where is the path?
In all of this, I keep coming back to the idea of eternal return. Nietzsche wrote about this in The Gay Science, I think, and I plan to read that soon. My understanding of the phrase, "All this has happened before, and all of it will happen again," first uttered by Leoben the Cylon in BSG, and repeated by many others, is that it's a kind of allegorical eternal return. The stories we tell are meant to help us understand the cyclical nature of time, but because people (and some Cylons) are so focused on their own times and places, they have a hard time reading/understanding these stories in allegorical ways. They search for meaning or understanding of their own times and places, their own situations, without seeing the universality of the Situation. Of Time. Of Space.
In The Case for God, Karen Armstrong suggests that seeking transcendental experiences, which has historically been one of the primary goals of religious practice and teaching, has died out as a common experience in the modern age. My initial thought is that transcendence is the only way to "escape" the eternal return, the constant repetition of the same events, the same misunderstandings, the same trials, life after life. As long as the Cylons are obsessed with humanity (becoming more or less human, finding "God," which for them means finding a reason for the way things are, as opposed to transcending the reason for the way things are), they will not achieve transcendence.
The only character who may have achieved transcendence in the end is Starbuck, who disappears without explanation. Also never explained was her mysterious "death" when she crashed into a planet during a fight. Is she a Cylon? If she is, then the other Cylons don't know about her. Maybe she is the lost 13th model, like the lost 13th colony. Or maybe she's an angel. Or maybe she reaches a Nivanic acceptance of the way things are, and because she is no longer striving so hard to escape her situation, escape is finally granted to her at the end. Granted by whom? I don't know. This is either another example of the limits of language, or a hole in my theory.
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