Honestly, I wish Caprica had not been cancelled. It would have been a great way to show what the society, culture, and religion of the Colonies were before being fragmented and preserved only in a handful of survivors.
Yes. Caprica had some serious flaws, but there was a lot of unfulfilled potential there. I think season 2 is when it would have started to really find its way.
Even though I’m not a Mormon, I will say that their cosmology is interesting at the very least. The explanation of gods having once been essentially human before transcending into their current state would go a long way towards explaining why mythological pantheons and even the OT Yahweh to a certain extent seem to have very human emotions and dispositions about things.
Yes!! Covering my favourite show and the first "grownup" series I started and finished!! Admittedly though the Mormon stuff really flew over my head since we don't have that many of them in my part of the world (Greece) and haven't been exposed to their ideas and beliefs. An interesting thing to look out for whenever I eventually do a rewatch.
Part of this is why i love bsg. It feels like an actual alien civilization because it exists in a completely different paradigm from our modern, dreary and rationalistic world. They are industrial, scientifically advanced pagan animists and for them, magical thinking is their greatest strength, while our society has condemned it. So its kind of fitting that both earths in canon are at least partially ethnically cylon, after all our society is so much closer to cavillist nihilism than any other worldview.
Yes. This is one Frank Herbert got wrong - _fear_ isn't the mind-killer, _despair_ is. Fear is an imperfect tool at best, but it can be useful as a motivator when all else fails. Despair, on the other hand... I've never seen or heard of any practical value to despair.
As always, I like the thoughtful, fresh ways you break down a topic derived from World-Building Fiction. More to the point, your video essays are never boring, always thought-provoking, and go well with any refreshing drink; I'm enjoying a homemade iced coffee as I watch this. That said, I don't think that Zima or coffee would be Kosher for a Mormon / LDS viewer . . . . 482nd Like.
I discovered that the latter series borrowed a lot more from the former than I had realized. Some of that is how young I was when I watched Larson's series, and some of it is just how little I know about Mormon theology.
I think the cycle is a clock-cycle occurring in a lab computer running the simulation, and the machines are trying to determine how to become content with no meaning, even as the humans are happy-enough to imagine that the lie of the Matrix is good-enough to allow them to sleep at night (after a slave-labour level of maintenance). It is the synthesis of the MATRIX and the original series; even though 2nd Series Space: 1999: A Moment of Humanity did it all before even Glen showed us the first viper or raider. Don't get me started on Stargate: Universe...
I was annoyed when it very rapidly became obvious that the writers had no plan nor clue. I was also bored of yet another in a decades long string of products examining what it means to be human. I think they passed up a more interesting, timely and concerning question of what means to be civilized.
Getting some TIKhistory vibes from this, as the past year he's done a number of videos on Gnosticism and the Dialectic and it's effect on Nazism, Marxism and Fascism. Which is why he advocates they're Religions as much as they are Political/Economic ideologies. His introduction in his video titled "The cult many are in but don’t realize" I heard much of that in your video just. It's also why when I get into argument with some, not all... but some Marxist, they will still bring up Material Reality basically as a fall back every time they don't have an answer, ie every time evidence doesn't support their views. The fall back basically being reality isn't reality.
I came across TIK's channel just in the last couple months and have been listening to some of his stuff. It's probably unsurprising that I agree with most of his interpretations. An upcoming video is going to make some familiar points along those lines.
I was going to say, it sounds like a lot of Gnosticism being mixed into that world view, a connection I get from watching TIK and James Lindsey. Lindsey is far more.. blunt... about his problems with Gnosticism (and those he sees as its modern proponents;) TIK more points out the Gnostic thought mixed into various flavors of socialism and lets the empirical results speak for themselves.
That was a really good, well-thought-out assessment. I’m not sure I buy the cohesion between the two shows, though. My reasoning: The Original Galactica (Hereafter: TOG) was a cold war allegory of a worst-case situation in which the stupid wussie liberals like Jimmy Carter gleefully take the inhuman Soviets at their word. The soulless soviet automatons - robots in this allegory - immediately take advantage of this and destroy the US analogue. We’re told in the first episode that humans love “The freedom to live, to do, to change. To the Cylons, this is an alien way of existing that they will never understand” And of course humanity is willingly sold out by a duplicitous politician (Baltar) who wants to be placed in charge of whatever vassal state of humans the Imperious Leader allows him to keep. The Mormon Theology was because Larson is a Mormon, as you pointed out. He definitely worked that into it. No arguments, but I don’t think the “Angels are looking after the Americanish refugees, and the devil is helping the godless commiebots” can be overlooked. I think that’s important. And of course TOG Adama is continually shown sitting around reading their equivalent of the Bible. In Ronald D Moore’s Galactica (Hereafter: RDMG), Moore made a concerted effort to *not* rewatch the original series and rely on his own childhood memories of it (Though he did watch the 3-hour TV movie). He describes himself as an atheist and a “Recovering Catholic,” and it seems very clear that he swapped out the barely-remembered mormonism of TOG for his own issues. Where TOG was a cold war allegory, RDMG is a 9/11 allegory, and RDM has been very open about that. Why are the Cylons expressly monotheist? Because the guys who blew up the Twin Towers were monotheists, and there’s a general liberal athiest dislike of Monotheism. Religion in general, but Monotheism in particular. Conversely, the Colonials are portrayed as “Tolerant” polytheists who barely believe their own religions. There is no deep insight here, just “Many” instead of “One.” The Leftist perspective of the “Right,” versus the leftist unrealistic perspective of polytheism as tolerant. He’s openly stated that he just set up some stuff in the pilot miniseries with no real idea where it’d go, and figured he’d figure it out later. Deleted scenes and interviews suggest he did an abrupt about-face on some of his original ideas. Season 1 was supposed to end with the Colonials in that cave on Kobol, when Dirk Benedict walks up and says, “Hello. I’m God.” He ditched that idea. He seems to have been working towards the idea that humans on Kobol created ‘the gods’ in their own image, and these gods threw them out, resulting in the colonies, and a new cycle beginning. (However he’s stated that initially when they made the pilot movie, Kobol was the planet everyone lived on and “The colonies” were simply countries *ON* Kobol, though he changed his mind shortly after it was shot). There is talk in deleted scenes about “one evil god” but whatever he was going for in that one seems to have been abandoned by the end of Season 2. My point being simply that he never seems to have had a very clear plan, and changed it a lot, so not only is the show not terribly cohesive thematically with TOG, it’s not thematically cohesive with itself. (Its lack of Cohesion with TOG isn’t a problem. We always retell myths and legends with new perspectives. That’s fine. I take no issue with that) And in the end it *appears* there really is a God? Although He doesn’t like to be called that? And Head 6 and head Baltar are angels, evidently. I dunno. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. “So the answer to the big question is ‘God did it,’ and please be nice to your robots in the future. Thank you and goodnight.” Personally, I tend to ignore Caprica. That show was developed as an unrelated standalone that was eventually retconned into the RDMG-verse, and RDM himself seems to have had very little to do with it, and shed no tears when it ended. I get the feeling he didn’t really want it there, because it would have eventually answered questions that RDM didn’t want answered and didn’t himself know the answer to. What the hell is Starbuck? He’s said he doesn’t know. Was her daddy a cylon? RDM says no. But he likes the mystery because there are things in life that are inscrutable, and while I never liked that storyline any more than you do, I do appreciate that it was a question never intended to be answered. A deliberate nonsequitor to keep the show from being too deterministic. Anyway, that’s my take on it. I enjoyed your essay, but having puzzled over it for a few hours, I don’t think I quite agree with you. It is well reasoned, though.
Interesting background, I learned some things. This one, like most of my stuff here is more about cultural continuity than conscious intent of the showrunners, but yes, there is clearly a hard disconnect in how Larson and Moore approached the material.
Leaving my own hardcore Catholicism aside, in just dealing with developing themes of LDS/Mormonism, I have to give serious cred to Joseph Smith Jr. as a religious/literary creator. This was cinched for me when I read a computer analysis of the Book of Mormon which couldn't find evidence of Smith's own verbiage (from later writings and recorded speeches) but did find big dollops of Oliver Cowdrey, Martin Harris, and Samuel Spaulding, the last a minister and religious novelist whose lost (stolen, most likely by Harris who worked at Spaulding's publisher) manuscript _View From the Hebrews_ which like an earlier Spaulding work, told the tale of Israelite immigrants in the Americas. As such, the Book of Mormon, including it's near verbatim plagiarisms of the pre-1830 KJV (including "Apocrypha"/Deuterocanonical Old Testament books ) is simply an awful Frankenstein-monster composition, even by 19th century standards, a fact Mark Twain gleefully savaged in _Roughing It_ . Joe Smith, on the other hand, as an innately gifted tale-telling conman (look up his treasure hunting career prior to the BoM), chosen by Cowdrey and Harris as the charismatic front man for their "noble lie" of restored Christianity (see the Church of Christ at this same time regarding restoring "true Christianity"), quickly took over as an innovative religious leader, especially considering the limitations of his early education. In brief, Smith when given the opportunity, was a vastly better writer than whoever composed the BoM. In the "King Follet Funeral Speech", shortly before Smith's murder by a lynch mob at Palmyra, Smith's language is far more eloquent than anything found in the BoM.
I read the entirety of the Book of Mormon way, way back, and yeah, it's both a clunky text and fascinating piece of myth-making. Plus it has cavalry battles. And being set before Europeans brought horses, I have this delightful image in my head of Nephite cavalry on their War Llamas.
This is the first video I've seen from this channel that I really disagree with the Feral Historians take. This was the story of a real god always giving humanity another chance even though their hubris brings them low every few thousand years or so. They try and become God's themselves and fail miserably. Even the Earth Cylons repeated the cycle and tried to create life. They even try and create God's that they can interact with, at least create the mythology of the lords of kobol. Its like the Jews that created the golden calf idol in the old testament even though God had set them free from Egypt. The Battle Star series of the early 2000s has a God, the Judeo Christian god, more or less. This was a story about rejecting false God's, about a God wanting us to accept the role he created humanity for. When people try to become God's we lose the best parts of ourselves that make us human. We're not wise enough or noble enough to create an intelligent "lifeform" and do the right thing by it. The mental versions of 6 and Baltar were really angels the whole time and had probably seen the same cycle repeat itself over and over for an untold number of years. The Universe of Battlestar Galactica isn't one that's partially created with a god who wants humanity as partners in creation...its a universe where god is the parent that is constantly struggling to teach his children to keep the home he provided for them nice and the kid keeps on drawing on the walls with sharpies and crayons trying to make it their own.
Did the lie become real because people believed in it? When you consider that the BSG crew was on our earth 100,000 years before the real flowering of our culture and our beloved characters died out without a trace. Despite what Apollo says about teaching the natives none of that came through to today. If they started farming, it vanished. If they used better hunting weapons like composite longbows or crossbows, they vanished. All their stories, all the lessons completely gone. Simply put, the crew of the BSG left NO IMPACT. They didn't make earth better or worse. All their struggling amounted to absolutely nothing. Maybe the Earth scam stayed a scam?
Honestly, I wish Caprica had not been cancelled. It would have been a great way to show what the society, culture, and religion of the Colonies were before being fragmented and preserved only in a handful of survivors.
Agreed.
Yes. Caprica had some serious flaws, but there was a lot of unfulfilled potential there. I think season 2 is when it would have started to really find its way.
Even though I’m not a Mormon, I will say that their cosmology is interesting at the very least. The explanation of gods having once been essentially human before transcending into their current state would go a long way towards explaining why mythological pantheons and even the OT Yahweh to a certain extent seem to have very human emotions and dispositions about things.
Exaltation, Eternal Progression, pre-existence of humanity, agency, all of these things are very integral to my culture and beliefs
Yes... never give up...
...Never surrender.
By Grabthar’s Hammer,
You shall be avenged.
Yes!! Covering my favourite show and the first "grownup" series I started and finished!! Admittedly though the Mormon stuff really flew over my head since we don't have that many of them in my part of the world (Greece) and haven't been exposed to their ideas and beliefs. An interesting thing to look out for whenever I eventually do a rewatch.
There's a lot to cover with Galactica. More is on the way I'm sure.
@@feralhistorian Looking forward to it
The idea of "soul as external interactions" is what I call Freshman Dorm Bong-rip Philosophy.
Wow this video is actually extremely deep
Perfection.
Now waiting for your take on Space: Above and Beyond.
Above and Beyond is ripe for another viewing now that you mention it.
As the prune-faced dictator says, "DEWIT"
@@feralhistorian
Part of this is why i love bsg. It feels like an actual alien civilization because it exists in a completely different paradigm from our modern, dreary and rationalistic world. They are industrial, scientifically advanced pagan animists and for them, magical thinking is their greatest strength, while our society has condemned it. So its kind of fitting that both earths in canon are at least partially ethnically cylon, after all our society is so much closer to cavillist nihilism than any other worldview.
I mean, Japan and the Republic of Korea are basically that right now.
Yes. This is one Frank Herbert got wrong - _fear_ isn't the mind-killer, _despair_ is. Fear is an imperfect tool at best, but it can be useful as a motivator when all else fails. Despair, on the other hand... I've never seen or heard of any practical value to despair.
The counter of Despair is Hope, that's what Adama gave them with Earth... and it worked.
As always, I like the thoughtful, fresh ways you break down a topic derived from World-Building Fiction. More to the point, your video essays are never boring, always thought-provoking, and go well with any refreshing drink; I'm enjoying a homemade iced coffee as I watch this.
That said, I don't think that Zima or coffee would be Kosher for a Mormon / LDS viewer . . . .
482nd Like.
Initial thought: Woot!
Thought upon finishing, agreed, frak
I second the guy below asking for Space: Above and Beyond
This was excellent.
I discovered that the latter series borrowed a lot more from the former than I had realized. Some of that is how young I was when I watched Larson's series, and some of it is just how little I know about Mormon theology.
Would you nerd on Legend of the Galactic Heroes? A pretty old anime but it is still gold
I haven't seen that one, but I'll make a note of it.
Great stuff. If only Kircheis were here.
@@Quackerilla that’s all what the man thinks about. His boy Kircheis
Again with the Zima, and the sit downs. Lol.
Any chance of delving into the can of worms known as "The Matrix" trilogy?
What sort of take could you have "Agent Smith"?
I've been thinking about that since the Cyberpunk video a few weeks back. It's near the top of the rewatch pile.
@@feralhistorian Thank you for your consideration.
I loved the caprica show. Too bad the series ended before it got better.
Caprica had a lot of potential. A lot of flaws too, but there was more right than wrong with it.
I think the cycle is a clock-cycle occurring in a lab computer running the simulation, and the machines are trying to determine how to become content with no meaning, even as the humans are happy-enough to imagine that the lie of the Matrix is good-enough to allow them to sleep at night (after a slave-labour level of maintenance). It is the synthesis of the MATRIX and the original series; even though 2nd Series Space: 1999: A Moment of Humanity did it all before even Glen showed us the first viper or raider. Don't get me started on Stargate: Universe...
I was annoyed when it very rapidly became obvious that the writers had no plan nor clue. I was also bored of yet another in a decades long string of products examining what it means to be human. I think they passed up a more interesting, timely and concerning question of what means to be civilized.
I always wanted to watch RDA BSG in REVERSE order... just to see where these weirdo plot lines manifested, vanished, or came from nowhere
Nice
Getting some TIKhistory vibes from this, as the past year he's done a number of videos on Gnosticism and the Dialectic and it's effect on Nazism, Marxism and Fascism. Which is why he advocates they're Religions as much as they are Political/Economic ideologies. His introduction in his video titled "The cult many are in but don’t realize" I heard much of that in your video just. It's also why when I get into argument with some, not all... but some Marxist, they will still bring up Material Reality basically as a fall back every time they don't have an answer, ie every time evidence doesn't support their views. The fall back basically being reality isn't reality.
I came across TIK's channel just in the last couple months and have been listening to some of his stuff. It's probably unsurprising that I agree with most of his interpretations.
An upcoming video is going to make some familiar points along those lines.
Have you heard of whatifalthist?
I was going to say, it sounds like a lot of Gnosticism being mixed into that world view, a connection I get from watching TIK and James Lindsey. Lindsey is far more.. blunt... about his problems with Gnosticism (and those he sees as its modern proponents;) TIK more points out the Gnostic thought mixed into various flavors of socialism and lets the empirical results speak for themselves.
I wish the remake would have borrowed more from other successful series like V
God in the Reboot always send Angels and dont like to Be call by that Name lol
Frell?
👍
That was a really good, well-thought-out assessment. I’m not sure I buy the cohesion between the two shows, though. My reasoning:
The Original Galactica (Hereafter: TOG) was a cold war allegory of a worst-case situation in which the stupid wussie liberals like Jimmy Carter gleefully take the inhuman Soviets at their word. The soulless soviet automatons - robots in this allegory - immediately take advantage of this and destroy the US analogue. We’re told in the first episode that humans love “The freedom to live, to do, to change. To the Cylons, this is an alien way of existing that they will never understand” And of course humanity is willingly sold out by a duplicitous politician (Baltar) who wants to be placed in charge of whatever vassal state of humans the Imperious Leader allows him to keep.
The Mormon Theology was because Larson is a Mormon, as you pointed out. He definitely worked that into it. No arguments, but I don’t think the “Angels are looking after the Americanish refugees, and the devil is helping the godless commiebots” can be overlooked. I think that’s important. And of course TOG Adama is continually shown sitting around reading their equivalent of the Bible.
In Ronald D Moore’s Galactica (Hereafter: RDMG), Moore made a concerted effort to *not* rewatch the original series and rely on his own childhood memories of it (Though he did watch the 3-hour TV movie). He describes himself as an atheist and a “Recovering Catholic,” and it seems very clear that he swapped out the barely-remembered mormonism of TOG for his own issues.
Where TOG was a cold war allegory, RDMG is a 9/11 allegory, and RDM has been very open about that. Why are the Cylons expressly monotheist? Because the guys who blew up the Twin Towers were monotheists, and there’s a general liberal athiest dislike of Monotheism. Religion in general, but Monotheism in particular. Conversely, the Colonials are portrayed as “Tolerant” polytheists who barely believe their own religions. There is no deep insight here, just “Many” instead of “One.” The Leftist perspective of the “Right,” versus the leftist unrealistic perspective of polytheism as tolerant.
He’s openly stated that he just set up some stuff in the pilot miniseries with no real idea where it’d go, and figured he’d figure it out later. Deleted scenes and interviews suggest he did an abrupt about-face on some of his original ideas. Season 1 was supposed to end with the Colonials in that cave on Kobol, when Dirk Benedict walks up and says, “Hello. I’m God.”
He ditched that idea. He seems to have been working towards the idea that humans on Kobol created ‘the gods’ in their own image, and these gods threw them out, resulting in the colonies, and a new cycle beginning. (However he’s stated that initially when they made the pilot movie, Kobol was the planet everyone lived on and “The colonies” were simply countries *ON* Kobol, though he changed his mind shortly after it was shot). There is talk in deleted scenes about “one evil god” but whatever he was going for in that one seems to have been abandoned by the end of Season 2.
My point being simply that he never seems to have had a very clear plan, and changed it a lot, so not only is the show not terribly cohesive thematically with TOG, it’s not thematically cohesive with itself. (Its lack of Cohesion with TOG isn’t a problem. We always retell myths and legends with new perspectives. That’s fine. I take no issue with that)
And in the end it *appears* there really is a God? Although He doesn’t like to be called that? And Head 6 and head Baltar are angels, evidently. I dunno. It doesn’t make a lot of sense. “So the answer to the big question is ‘God did it,’ and please be nice to your robots in the future. Thank you and goodnight.”
Personally, I tend to ignore Caprica. That show was developed as an unrelated standalone that was eventually retconned into the RDMG-verse, and RDM himself seems to have had very little to do with it, and shed no tears when it ended. I get the feeling he didn’t really want it there, because it would have eventually answered questions that RDM didn’t want answered and didn’t himself know the answer to.
What the hell is Starbuck? He’s said he doesn’t know. Was her daddy a cylon? RDM says no. But he likes the mystery because there are things in life that are inscrutable, and while I never liked that storyline any more than you do, I do appreciate that it was a question never intended to be answered. A deliberate nonsequitor to keep the show from being too deterministic.
Anyway, that’s my take on it. I enjoyed your essay, but having puzzled over it for a few hours, I don’t think I quite agree with you. It is well reasoned, though.
Interesting background, I learned some things.
This one, like most of my stuff here is more about cultural continuity than conscious intent of the showrunners, but yes, there is clearly a hard disconnect in how Larson and Moore approached the material.
Leaving my own hardcore Catholicism aside, in just dealing with developing themes of LDS/Mormonism, I have to give serious cred to Joseph Smith Jr. as a religious/literary creator. This was cinched for me when I read a computer analysis of the Book of Mormon which couldn't find evidence of Smith's own verbiage (from later writings and recorded speeches) but did find big dollops of Oliver Cowdrey, Martin Harris, and Samuel Spaulding, the last a minister and religious novelist whose lost (stolen, most likely by Harris who worked at Spaulding's publisher) manuscript _View From the Hebrews_ which like an earlier Spaulding work, told the tale of Israelite immigrants in the Americas. As such, the Book of Mormon, including it's near verbatim plagiarisms of the pre-1830 KJV (including "Apocrypha"/Deuterocanonical Old Testament books ) is simply an awful Frankenstein-monster composition, even by 19th century standards, a fact Mark Twain gleefully savaged in _Roughing It_ .
Joe Smith, on the other hand, as an innately gifted tale-telling conman (look up his treasure hunting career prior to the BoM), chosen by Cowdrey and Harris as the charismatic front man for their "noble lie" of restored Christianity (see the Church of Christ at this same time regarding restoring "true Christianity"), quickly took over as an innovative religious leader, especially considering the limitations of his early education. In brief, Smith when given the opportunity, was a vastly better writer than whoever composed the BoM. In the "King Follet Funeral Speech", shortly before Smith's murder by a lynch mob at Palmyra, Smith's language is far more eloquent than anything found in the BoM.
I read the entirety of the Book of Mormon way, way back, and yeah, it's both a clunky text and fascinating piece of myth-making.
Plus it has cavalry battles. And being set before Europeans brought horses, I have this delightful image in my head of Nephite cavalry on their War Llamas.
thankfully im athiest but you do great work, your speech is a song.
This is the first video I've seen from this channel that I really disagree with the Feral Historians take. This was the story of a real god always giving humanity another chance even though their hubris brings them low every few thousand years or so. They try and become God's themselves and fail miserably. Even the Earth Cylons repeated the cycle and tried to create life. They even try and create God's that they can interact with, at least create the mythology of the lords of kobol. Its like the Jews that created the golden calf idol in the old testament even though God had set them free from Egypt. The Battle Star series of the early 2000s has a God, the Judeo Christian god, more or less. This was a story about rejecting false God's, about a God wanting us to accept the role he created humanity for. When people try to become God's we lose the best parts of ourselves that make us human. We're not wise enough or noble enough to create an intelligent "lifeform" and do the right thing by it. The mental versions of 6 and Baltar were really angels the whole time and had probably seen the same cycle repeat itself over and over for an untold number of years. The Universe of Battlestar Galactica isn't one that's partially created with a god who wants humanity as partners in creation...its a universe where god is the parent that is constantly struggling to teach his children to keep the home he provided for them nice and the kid keeps on drawing on the walls with sharpies and crayons trying to make it their own.
Did the lie become real because people believed in it? When you consider that the BSG crew was on our earth 100,000 years before the real flowering of our culture and our beloved characters died out without a trace. Despite what Apollo says about teaching the natives none of that came through to today. If they started farming, it vanished. If they used better hunting weapons like composite longbows or crossbows, they vanished. All their stories, all the lessons completely gone. Simply put, the crew of the BSG left NO IMPACT. They didn't make earth better or worse. All their struggling amounted to absolutely nothing. Maybe the Earth scam stayed a scam?
So Scientology meets Mormonism…?! Wow, yeah I wasn’t a fan.
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