The glowing red eye that goes bump in the night

For most of the first two seasons of Battlestar Galactica, the show's supposed "bad guys", the Cylons, remained a mysterious, malevolent force, striking out from the shadows like the bogey man of children's nightmares. The few glimpses we had into their society -- notably "The Farm" -- suggested a foreign culture that enhanced rather than diminished the alienation Battlestar's characters, and its audiences, felt towards the Cylons. Then season two's "Downloaded" offered an open view into life of three Cylons, showing them to be not as different as we had thought, and humanizing them. Season three spent an entire story arc on a Cylon ship, a decision that generated much controversy. Many, including the show's own Jamie Bamber (Lee "Apollo" Adama), thought that the unknown, mechanical nature of the Cylons had been their greatest asset, and that by stripping the mystery away, they had been weakened as enemies. While I understand this point of view, I personally disagree it with it.

The Cylons of seasons one and two (prior to "Downloaded") are, as stated, the stuff of children's nightmares. They represent the fear of the unknown that, certainly, is a prominent instinct in all of us, leading to xenophobia and paranoia and a host of other issues. But that avenue of fear has been explored thoroughly -- practically the entire horror genre is predicated on it, for example -- and its very nature prevents many nuances or variations from emerging. You can't change the details because in order for the fear to work, you can't have any details.

The Cylons of season three are, of course, entirely different animals. Instead of monsters, they become people -- horrible, evil people, who are willing to cage and torture and murder on a scale incomprehensible to us, but people nonetheless. D'Anna and Caprica and Boomer and Cavil are no longer caricatures lurking in the shadows but characters of their own that are explored and developed as the season progresses. D'Anna becomes convinced that she has a special destiny chosen by God, and is destroyed by the Cylons themselves for seeking the forbidden fruit (as a side note, D'Anna is my favorite of Battlestar's many recurring characters, and I've considered writing an entire post about her journey); Caprica tries to recapture her relationship with the human Gaius Baltar but discovers he is not the man she remembers; Boomer, perhaps the most tragic character on the show, realizes she is home among neither humanity nor Cylon; and Cavil, the face of evil, demonstrates best of all how an undisguised villain is more frightening than any bogey man.

It could be argued that D'Anna, Caprica, or Boomer or no longer even antagonists -- I would suggest that Battlestar has no absolute protagonists and antagonists, and that such descriptions are only relative to your own point of view. Cavil, however, remains indisputably evil. He is the ultimate expression of the Cylon's mechanical natures -- he is cold, calculating, and ruthless, caring only about the most efficient way to control the human population. And yet, as we listen to him speak and watch his actions, he is not a machine to us. He is a person, not far from the number-crunching accountants or the Defense Department analysts who use algorithms to calculate how many more people have to die before Iraq is stabilized. He is a machine, yes, but a human machine. And all the more terrifying because of it.

The Cylons of season one were frightening, but we could take solace in one fact -- they were not like us. We were better than them, and though outnumbered and outgunned, we were superior in morality and integrity. Season three's look into Cylon society destroyed that illusion, and tore away from us the last comfort we had. The Cylons still outnumber us, but now we know that we are capable of the same atrocities. And we must ask ourselves, if we had our reasons for suicide bombing, for attempting genocide -- did the Cylons as well? Are they really as evil as we believe them to be?

What little black and white Battlestar had (since the beginning, its characters have straddled, and occasionally crossed, the line of what is acceptable for "good guys" to do on television) was wiped out by season three, replaced by, in the words of an acquaintance, "a big bucket of gray paint". Both as a student of writing and as a human being, I find the new Cylons much more interesting and valuable than the old. Human villains, characters that we know and understand and perhaps even sympathize with, are always more dangerous and more interesting than the bogey man. Because we're not children. Our greatest fear is not of being hurt by the unknown, but of being hurt by ourselves, of betraying our values and becoming that which we despise. And we can only save ourselves by facing that which we fear, not turning away.