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beccaelizabethtook me this long to notice because I wasn't thinking, but they make Earth be empty except for some conveniently shaggable bodies that have no language, no culture, no thoughts of their own. That's proper evil against actual existing people, because it's the logic that underpinned colonialism, bringing language/culture/civilisation to the natives, who weren't proper human yet anyway. Evil evil evil, mythologised at the end of the shiny show which I had hoped would have a message more along the lines of 'hey, how about we try thinking of everyone as people!' But no, it gets to the end, and they're empty unpeople, who get no voice. They have no opinions. They're TV extras and don't get a vote. Just bodies to be acted upon.
It's implausible that 39K people unanimously decide to get rid of their tech and scatter across the planet.
It's impossible that the inhabitants of said planet have a single reaction to that, let alone a welcoming one.
And it's evil to decide their... everything should be overwritten by all that language etc the colonials give them.
Is it meant to be evil? Because I missed it until I thought about it this morning, so if it's meant to be them screwing up again I missed it under all the having a feels.
They act like the locals aren't going to contribute everything... I meant to type anything, but everything seems more like it. What I know of the Thanksgiving story from the UK is that colonists were dying of ignorant and the locals told them where the food was at? Like that. Across a whole planet. Full of more life forms than the colonials have ever seen before, let alone learned how to interact with. But is there a hint of that at the end? No, there's Hera the mother of the whole human race, and she's going to be taught hunting by her dad from another planet. Or her mom from another planet. And they're going off on their own, not trying to make contact. There's no meet cute where a nice local boy offers her a flower or something useful like some grain. ... and she offers an apple from the ship...
Science Fiction's tendency to go out and find literal empty planets is a bit sketch in colonialism terms, but this is the pure vein. They're people, but they're empty people, so the colonists come in and expect their presence will make them real people. That's the original ugly in pure form.
And it fails their goal from the outset. Because the way they treated cylons was never about them being toasters, it wasn't a problem unique to artificial intelligence, it was about the ability of humans to look at beings utterly indistinguishable from themselves and just say nope, they don't count.
So they arrive on a new planet and, nope, they don't count.
Throwing away their tech does nothing, when they've never realised the underlying problem.
And that feeds in to the utter failure of democracy that ending represents. Nobody gets a voice. Do they take a vote? Not seen. Do they even have a president right then? Confused, try again later. Trying to uphold democracy in the face of all those challenges has been one of their central tenets, but we do not see it played through at the end. One guy decides. He makes no arguments for it. There's no debate. And the locals do not get a vote. Utter and complete failure of the concept of democracy.
So it paid lip service to democracy, but it was really about the Adama family leading their people. Those were the only choices that mattered. And that's just screwed up.
But the big evil is making the natives be tabula rasa. Because that evil is old and worn.
And yet it took me this long to get annoyed about it because I was annoyed about all the other wtfs first.
It's implausible that 39K people unanimously decide to get rid of their tech and scatter across the planet.
It's impossible that the inhabitants of said planet have a single reaction to that, let alone a welcoming one.
And it's evil to decide their... everything should be overwritten by all that language etc the colonials give them.
Is it meant to be evil? Because I missed it until I thought about it this morning, so if it's meant to be them screwing up again I missed it under all the having a feels.
They act like the locals aren't going to contribute everything... I meant to type anything, but everything seems more like it. What I know of the Thanksgiving story from the UK is that colonists were dying of ignorant and the locals told them where the food was at? Like that. Across a whole planet. Full of more life forms than the colonials have ever seen before, let alone learned how to interact with. But is there a hint of that at the end? No, there's Hera the mother of the whole human race, and she's going to be taught hunting by her dad from another planet. Or her mom from another planet. And they're going off on their own, not trying to make contact. There's no meet cute where a nice local boy offers her a flower or something useful like some grain. ... and she offers an apple from the ship...
Science Fiction's tendency to go out and find literal empty planets is a bit sketch in colonialism terms, but this is the pure vein. They're people, but they're empty people, so the colonists come in and expect their presence will make them real people. That's the original ugly in pure form.
And it fails their goal from the outset. Because the way they treated cylons was never about them being toasters, it wasn't a problem unique to artificial intelligence, it was about the ability of humans to look at beings utterly indistinguishable from themselves and just say nope, they don't count.
So they arrive on a new planet and, nope, they don't count.
Throwing away their tech does nothing, when they've never realised the underlying problem.
And that feeds in to the utter failure of democracy that ending represents. Nobody gets a voice. Do they take a vote? Not seen. Do they even have a president right then? Confused, try again later. Trying to uphold democracy in the face of all those challenges has been one of their central tenets, but we do not see it played through at the end. One guy decides. He makes no arguments for it. There's no debate. And the locals do not get a vote. Utter and complete failure of the concept of democracy.
So it paid lip service to democracy, but it was really about the Adama family leading their people. Those were the only choices that mattered. And that's just screwed up.
But the big evil is making the natives be tabula rasa. Because that evil is old and worn.
And yet it took me this long to get annoyed about it because I was annoyed about all the other wtfs first.
no subject
Date: 2014-03-10 11:59 am (UTC)let me try this again
Date: 2014-03-10 12:14 pm (UTC)This is evil.
Because people are never empty, and the story of uncivilized savages who need colonial intervention is the story used to excuse genocide on several continents.
The story is evil because they chose to end it with a way of treating people as without meaning.
Even if the story was about meeting earlier hominids it would still be an evil story because they specifically stated that these beings were enough like them to have children with and then said that they have no language, culture, stories, opinions, voice of their own. Colonials didn't even meet them, they just looked at them through binoculars and decided to take over their land. That is the evil part. That they made a story where people could consider that reasonable, when it's the exact same evil that was argued about populations in very recent history.
Re: let me try this again
Date: 2014-03-10 12:32 pm (UTC)Just, well... I have some doubts if many contemporary people will think H. erectus looks like someone to have children with. And there would be problems later on, I guess (it is thought that Neanderthals and modern H. sapiens mated, but later much of the resulting hybrid genomes were lost because of already emerging incompatibility. And all this even if we forget that totally unbiological stuff about some species evolving on a totally different planet and then mating with anybody from another lineage. But maybe that's what they have the gods for, to arrange such things).
Re: let me try this again
Date: 2014-03-10 12:40 pm (UTC)http://anthro.palomar.edu/homo2/mod_homo_4.htm just for the first google link, there's a lot more
homo sap = 200,000 years ago
bsg = 150,000 years ago in the geographical area of earliest homo sap
bsg met homo sapiens
and the science of the final episode is so screwed it's pretty irrelevant anyway
Adama, Cottle, and Baltar looked at whoever they met on Earth and explicitly stated they could have children with them. That's the relevant bit in the context of this story. They said they could teach them their language and culture, that they were anatomically advanced enough to understand it but they hadn't developed their own. That's the relevant bit in the context of it being evil.
they also explicitly stated it was a miracle from god that such beings existed. which I'm just going to ignore. because boring.
Re: let me try this again
Date: 2014-03-10 12:46 pm (UTC)