DPP: All This Has Happened Before And All This Will Happen Again

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

Now we sink into a summer afternoon
Central park in june
Marveling at the bounty our days contain
And I feel it like the shiver
Of a passing train
That other life, deep underground
You and I, side by side
We are the next time around
--"In Another Life" by Vienna Teng

One of the things that came up in the Joe's Bar post the other day was The Poof, and more specifically people who thought the Poof was not the end. Whether it be that Kara had the choice to leave and come back at will, that they would see each other in the afterlife, or would be reincarnated, the poof was not going to keep Pilots apart forever.

I'm going to open with a couple of fic recs:
leiascully 's New York AU. Which is multi-part and made of so much wonderful I can't even begin. The title sort of says it all. Kara and Lee, reincarnated in New York. (A few parts of this story are A/R)
ariastar 's This Is Not Our Fate. I love this fic, though possibly because I spent so much time talking it out with the author on trips to the pizza place. It's an ensemble cast (Kara, Lee, Sam, Dee, Zak, Helo, Boomer, Athena, Gaeta, Adama, Roslin, and Leoben) college reincarnation story--all about getting things right this time. There is a big shuffle of who everyone is to each other (i.e. certain people who were siblings are not and vice-versa, there's some change in who is whose parent, etc... Leoben is not a creeper... not very creepy at least...) Kara/Lee is definitely a part of it, most apparent at the end though.
wisteria_ 's Aegis (Part 1) and (Part 2) A crossover with L&O UK. Matt Devlin/Kara Thrace. ABSOLUTELY AMAZING. Kara has been going around, through the ages, helping Lee out of scrapes in various lives... she's not supposed to really be a part of his life, just save it... but when she meets him as Matt Devlin, it becomes much harder to resist. LOVE IT.
Did I Fall Asleep? Part 1  (and Part 2) is my own story, so shamelessly plugging here. A crossover with Dollhouse, Paul Ballard meets a new handler, just transferred from the Dollhouse in London. His name is Lee Josephs and it is the second time this week Paul has been struck with the most intense feeling of déjà vu he’s ever had.

I'm a big proponent of the reincarnation idea when it comes to BSG, since there's an already established cycle of time. (Whether or not RDM admits it, I feel like it's completely backed up with Kat, Stinger, Duck, and Hadrian being on Caprica...er... the folks who played them. You know what I mean.) So I always believed that Kara and Lee would meet again in another life, and keep meeting over and over, and they'd probably mess it up a couple of times, but they'd get it right sometimes too.

What do you think Kara and Lee would be like in reincarnated lives--whether they be present, historical, or possibly before BSG? What would they do, would they be at all familiar with other reincarnated souls or are they alone? Fic recs? Thoughts? 

Comments

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

I hadn't actually thought much about the idea of reincarnation in the BSG mythos until recently, and the more I think about it the more I agree with Taragel that I don't think that's quite what the "cycle of time" idea was meant to convey in the cultures that RDM and company invented. Though of course that's no reason to stop interpreting the story that way for the sake of awesome AU possibilities.

As presented in the show, I don't think we're meant to think that reincarnation is a part of the BSG scriptures/prophecies/faith traditions, in part because the Cylons' ability to escape death by awakening over and over in new bodies is presented as the essence of their inhumanity and artificiality. In her speech in "Guess What's Coming to Dinner," Renegade Six is fairly clear that mortality defines humanity, and that it is the destruction of resurrection technology that will unite Cylons and humans. So I don't think that humans, even religious ones, believe in reincarnation within the context of the show ~ they don't expect to wake up in new or similar bodies somewhere down the road.

I think the religious humans follow some sort of Greek pagan concept of an afterlife in Elysium or other realms of Hades, or their equivalent. I think that the "cycle of time" indicates a fatalistic belief that the common flaws of human nature and the fickleness of the gods will create cycles of history where the same essential events repeat themselves. The same noble struggles and fatal mistakes will be repeated ~ and the cardinal human flaw of hubris will cause men to destroy themselves by overreaching time after time. I'm no expert on Greek myth, but I think this "cycle of history" idea was a concept put forward by Greeks from Polybius to Thucydides, and it was also a dominant theme in Greek tragedy, which envisioned human suffering as a disaster both fated and caused by men's choices, like the famous prophecy that Oedipus would kill his father and sleep with his mother. In attempting to avoid his fate, he ensured it. They conflated free will and fate ~ choices created destiny but could never escape it. I know lots of people hated these themes in the overall story arc, but they do strike me as fairly consistently reflecting an ancient Greek mythology.

I think it is this theme of fatalism that is presented through Kobol and Earth and the Twelve Colonies, and of course where we get our sci-fi departure is that human hubris is tied closely to technology from the beginning of the series and the concept of the Cylons - the weapons that turned against their creators. I know how much everyone hated this anti-technology theme, too, because it was dealt with in the end in an unrealistic and simplistic way, but I will say that to me it seemed to tie into this idea that cycles of history were far more likely to be delayed than to be broken, and that learning from the past involved realizing that once technology capable of destroying humanity had been invented, it would inevitably be used. Human nature and human flaws were such that we couldn't live on that precipice forever without falling into it. The best chance seemed to be to try to obliterate or uninvent the technology in question, rather than to trust human choices to overcome its dangers. In its way, this idea is what really made Battlestar Galactica into the anti-Star Trek. It is an incredibly bleak view of humanity's future and of human nature. But again, it seems pretty closely tied to a real (though now defunct) cultural point of view, that of the ancient Greeks, rather than just a slapped-together incoherent mess. But maybe I'm giving it too much credit :)

To conclude this long and rambling post with something that actually has to do with pilots, I would recommend to anyone and everyone the amazing story "Signal Fire," which is my favorite portrayal of post-poof resurrection and redemption, and not just for Kara alone. I believe this was written by mintenergy ~ I will run check and post a link shortly.

[kag523.livejournal.com]

Oh I love your commentary, Rachel - so engaging! Brilliant ideas and well put!

I particularly like the Signal Fire story too (yes it is mintenergy's), but is it really reincarnation? I always read it as a single loop in time story. Very, very cool though. Here's your link:

http://www.fanfiction.net/s/5104776/1/Signal_Fire

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! Yes, you're right, it does seem to be a single time loop, so it fits the idea of resurrection more than reincarnation. I guess I associated it with reincarnation because she has that sensation at the beginning of waking up in her own body and reliving a familiar past in a different way. But, no, you're right ~ it was a one time thing in that story for everyone involved. I feel sorry for Billy and everyone who died before Starbuck ~ didn't they deserve their get-out-of-jail-free reprieve too? :)

[rayruz.livejournal.com]

So I don't think that humans, even religious ones, believe in reincarnation within the context of the show ~ they don't expect to wake up in new or similar bodies somewhere down the road.

That wasn't quite what I was implying when I was thinking about BSG reincarnation, or reincarnated characters. Whereas the cylons life just... continues, memories stay the same, it's the same life going on and on... when I was thinking about other lives for characters it was more of, this is the next life... they are no longer who they were before, but it's still the same spirit, same soul. That was more of the idea that I was thinking about.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Oh, good point, I see the important distinction you make there. From that perspective, you might say that religious humans in the BSG verse might have expected to be born again without any memory of previous events, which is why they had to rely on scripture to teach them their role in the continuing stories. That perspective makes sense, too.

[damao2010.livejournal.com]

"I think that the "cycle of time" indicates a fatalistic belief that the common flaws of human nature and the fickleness of the gods will create cycles of history where the same essential events repeat themselves. The same noble struggles and fatal mistakes will be repeated ~ and the cardinal human flaw of hubris will cause men to destroy themselves by overreaching time after time"

I agree with you here. This is what I think they meant by "everything there was, will be again". However, unlike ancient Greek tragedies that focus on the futility of trying to escape fate, I don't think the series tried to convey a fatalist message in the sense that humanity is destined to fail time and again and this destiny is utterly unavoidable. Instead, I think BSG is all about the hope that in some way, by repeating the cycle over and over again, we will somehow be able to learn from our mistakes and break it. That is why free will is so important because following the old patterns that lead to destruction or breaking them is, ultimately, a choice.

Although the series didn't deal with very well with the differences between the polytheism followed by humans and the cylon's monotheism, the whole concept of cycles that repeat themselves is very strong in ancient polytheist religions, such as the Greek. As far as I remember from the little Anthopology I studied in college ( some 20 years ago, mind you), the myth of eternal return has something to do with a "terror of history", that is, men are afraid of linear history and find comfort in the belief of a continuous return to the beginning, seen as the sacred time. As ancient societies started to abandon myths and try to understand nature through rational thought, linear history became more important. Monotheist religions, such as Judaism and Christianism, also value linear history but for a different reason: they don't see the return to the beginning as something desirable, to them, sacred time is the future when salvation will be achieved and history is a continuous progress towards this point.

I believe BSG was kind of inspired by these ideas. So, the whole "cycles of time" concept is associated with a more primitive form of religion (more fatalist) whereas free will (and the breaking of the cycles) would be associated with linear history and, possibly, monotheism.

"I don't think we're meant to think that reincarnation is a part of the BSG scriptures/prophecies/faith traditions"
Me neither. However, I think of Lee and Kara as soulmates, so I guess I can think of them (their spirits) having met each other before in a different incarnation.

[rachelindeed.livejournal.com]

Wow, I enjoyed this comment so much ~ very interesting ideas there on the shift from past to future as the locus of hope, and on the tension of fate and free will. I was never quite sure whether the themes of BSG tended more toward fatalism or break-the-cycle-yes-we-can; certainly there were intimations of both at various points in the series (my favorite yes-we-can was Lee's speech in "Revelations," but that Gaius and Six coda also suggested that "let a complex system play itself out enough times, and the outcome may change.") So yes, as I consider it further I think you're right to say that the series overall was less a doomed but noble struggle against inevitable tragedy a la the Greeks, and more about discovering the reasons humanity was worth saving and the ways individuals and cultures could choose new freedom, tolerance, and humility. But I do think that ancient Greek flavor did affect much of the storytelling along the way ~ perhaps especially in Kara's story?

Thanks so much for paying attention in college - intriguing thoughts!