The Apocalypse of St. D'Anna

I previously mentioned that D'Anna is my favorite of Battlestar's recurring characters. Hers is to me one of the most simultaneously beautiful, tragic, and inspiring stories I have ever watched on television. D'Anna's story is one we all know -- it is the story of Eve, and all the others who have reached for the forbidden fruit --yet it deviates from the archetype in important ways that make D'Anna's story not one of a fall, but an apotheosis, an elevation to divinity.

"Apocalypse" comes from a Greek word meaning "revelation"; its association with destruction apparently comes from "apocalypse eschaton", or "revelation of the end of the world", a phrase from the Book of Revelation (otherwise known as the Apocalypse of St. John). D'Anna seeks the former but, as in all such stories, inevitably experiences the latter as well, though unlike most she is not destroyed by herself or her own actions, but by others' fear of her.

From her introduction, it is clear that D'Anna is not an innocent. In "Downloaded", her first major episode, she is established as a manipulative fundamentalist fanatic who proudly proclaims "God loves me!" as she prepares to murder a human resistance fighter. Indeed, if one were to categorize, D'Anna would be the villain of the episode, and she stays little from that status as her story begins in season three -- she agrees with Cavil regarding the mass executions in "Precipice", and later clinically tortures Baltar in "A Measure of Salvation". D'Anna is not a likable person, nor even a good person.

Someone once remarked that more than other Cylon (including Cavil), D'Anna is a machine, incapable of understanding human emotions or pain. (Consider her confusion at Caprica's love for Baltar in "Occupation".) Yet, against her programming (and unlike Cavil), she desires to experience such emotions (even if she cannot admit it to herself). When the oracle tells her that she will "experience true love", she dismisses it; but we can hear the desperation and desire in D'Anna's voice when she recites the oracle's words to Athena in "Exodus, Part I". (Her desperation also demonstrates the hollowness of her religious conviction -- she does not truly feel that "God loves [her]".) It could be argued, even, that her quest for the identities of the Final Five (D'Anna's forbidden fruit) is founded in a desire to realize that conviction -- to truly feel loved by God. It is debatable whether or not her relationship with Baltar and Caprica ("Hero" through "Eye of Jupiter") begins with true intentions, but it is clear by the end that D'Anna is simply manipulating both of them for her own ends. (I am convinced that she did, and it only turned to manipulation when she found herself unable to experience the love she was looking for; but that's more due to my own bias towards seeing the Cylons as people rather than machines.)

D'Anna's quest -- like all forbidden fruit, against the commands of her society -- is not given to her by a snake (though Baltar plays shades of that role, in an interesting juxtaposition to his increasingly Jesus-like appearance), but one she embarks on of her own volition. Her religious fanaticism manifests, as it so often does, in an absolute certainty of her own self-righteousness, or her destiny to enlighten others with the knowledge of God. Yet D'Anna fears her destiny -- "To know the face of God is to know madness," she says, quoting Leoben, the mad Cylon -- and questions the nature of her mission, the first admissions of possible mistakes we hear her make. Is it God that drives her to seek the Final Five? Her own subconscious humanity, as I suggested above? Or is it her destiny that leads her to experience humanity? I don't the answers to such questions, but such questioning, as D'Anna does, as we all must do, is at the heart of humanity, and makes her as human as any of us -- more than Eve the pure, certainly.

It is this individual -- flawed, fallible, human -- that reaches the Temple of the Five and, as the star above the temple goes nova, steps into the light of the Eye of Jupiter and experiences her final vision. In the space of a few moments, as she is finally able to see the Five in their glory, she is transformed. Apotheosis -- the elevation to godhood. But not divinity in the traditional sense of lightning-bolt-hurling power, but true divinity: infinite understanding, and the infinite mercy that follows it. In the space of a few moments, her flaws are healed, and she becomes something more -- but still herself. No longer fearful, or angry, or even proud, she apologizes to the Five and then dies in Baltar's arms...



...and is reborn, like all Cylons, on a resurrection ship, the scene of her inevitable destruction. It is Cavil, of course; the other Cylons have decided that her messianic convictions are too dangerous to allow her to exist. Her tone with Cavil is confident, but not angry; understanding, but not sympathetic: "It's not a flaw to question our purpose, to wonder who programmed us and why. There are five other Cylons, brother. I've seen them. And one day you're going to see them, too." The tone of a god.

Cavil doesn't listen; he just pulls the plug -- D'Anna's final death. But we hear her. We hear her, and hope. For us, there is no Temple, no Five, nor even a God to grant us the understanding and mercy she achieves. We in reality can only try, and never reach, the divinity that D'Anna reaches. But we can watch and hope -- that we can be forgiven, and forgive; that we can be healed, and heal. In the end, that hope is all we have.