Follow-Ups
Loose ends from yesterday. Anent the torture “reality show” Eve writes, “I mean, people volunteer for sex all the time, and that tells you less than nothing about rape.” Also, did I ever get around to saying explicitly that Battlestar Galactica, and the Lear revisit it inspired, helped me understand how much of America’s embrace of torture is driven by anger? It did. In college, when someone would come back from what they said was “a good movie,” I had a roomate who would ask, “Did it change the way you look at life?” Well there you go. (I’ve been focused almost exclusively on the country’s fear, missing its rage.) Also, Mrs. Offering used to get on me for overusing “anent,” but I think I laid off it long enough to get away with this one.
UPDATE: Meant to mention. Andrew Olmsted didn’t like Friday’s BSG nearly as much as I did. I think he’s wrong at just about every turn, but not provably so. I think the show’s creators are largely in control of the seeming loose ends; he doubts they are. Time will tell, but it does set one to musing how literary and paraliterary works acquire authority (let’s gloss it for now as confidence that the creator knows what he or she is doing). I will say I don’t think there’s any “telepathy” going on necessarily, though I could be wrong. I do suspect that the Cylons, as artificial intelligences, probably have access to the material in an awful lot of computer databases. Were there background check records somewhere covering Starbuck’s horrid upbringing? Seems plausible.
Of course, the other possibility is that God knows all and the Cylons know God.
