[Warning: Contains spoilers for the Battlestar Galactica episode Someone to Watch Over Me] How should systems of punishment differ when indefinite lifespans are achieved, or when there are many copies of an individual? Does capital punishment become meaningless when you can download to a new body, or does it become an even harsher punishment if it is instead instituted more thoroughly as the deletion of all instances of an individual?
As the story pieces come together and we approach the finale of the series, Battlestar Galactica opens by reminding us of the desperate situation aboard the ship. Starbuck leads a combined crew of human and Cylon pilots, whose ranks have been thinned since the mutiny and who save even a single tube of toothpaste as a reward for the pilot who finds a planet. Despite collaboration between humans and Cylons, Galactica is dying with only a few jumps left in her, and by the end of the episode the Galactica will sustain even more damage.
It is nice to gain a deeper understanding of the Number Eight copy Boomer after seeing so little of her in recent seasons, and to see her interact with humans and other Cylons. While recently she spoke as if she had no use for love and asked why she would want to love a human, it is ironic that in the first season her lover Chief Tyrol was also a Cylon. At the time he told her that she was a machine and that software didn’t have feelings. Boomer now says that while she tried to forget him, she instead thought of him everyday and projects to him her visions of the house and child they never had. Boomer states she has learned that you cannot make someone love you at gunpoint, as the Cylons did with the human race when they occupied the settlement of New Caprica.
Another Number Six model, Sonya, takes a seat at the fleet’s new government of ship’s captains that now includes Cylons. One of the first things Sonya does is to ask the president for the extradition of Boomer, so that she can be tried and executed for treason, as Boomer voted against her model and joined the other side of the Cylon civil war. When Chief Tyrol asks President Roslin to deny extradition as a personal favor to him, she warns him that he should know better than anyone that personal feelings are what Boomer preys on. However, he is not content to watch Boomer be executed, so he replaces her in the brig with an identical looking Eight.
After escaping the brig, Boomer attacks the Eight called Athena, stealing her uniform and leaving her badly hurt in a bathroom stall. Boomer then mimics Athena and sleeps with her husband, before stealing their human-Cylon child, Hera, from daycare. Tyrol would have done well to listen to Roslin about personal feelings, for it becomes clear that Boomer once again took advantage of such feelings, as the entire thing was orchestrated as a means to bring Hera back to Cavil’s baseships. However, while her true true loyalty lies with Cavil and trying to become the best machine she can be, Boomer claims that she meant the things she said about her feelings for the Chief. As the Chief deals with his guilt about allowing the escape of Boomer and Hera, one is left wondering what will happen to him if the others learn he was complicit not only in irreparable damage on a personal level, but also in losing the most important child for the future of both Cylons and humans.
It is refreshing to see Battlestar Galactica finally address some of the confusion and issues that can arise when there are multiple copies of the same person. While Tyrol was able to recognize Boomer when she first came on board and Eight models seem able to recognize each other, even Athena’s husband could not distinguish her from Boomer when she had stolen her uniform. It is difficult to imagine how we would conceptualize our own identities if we could download many copies of our memories, or even if we just had the capacity to create identical clones. The Cylons’ capacity to acquire the memories of those who resurrect is also fascinating, and even sharing of memories and emotions between non-identical individuals could result in a blending of our identity. The novel and confusing conceptions of identity that might emerge with the use of technologies such as mind uploading and cloning can be frightening to our sense of self, but such fear should not be the determining factor in assessing the value of those technologies. Instead, the benefits and disadvantages in each individual application of technology should be independently assessed, whether the disadvantages include the potential for impersonation and the lack of a clear line between individuals, or the benefits include a broader sharing of experiences and the preservation of life.
That the Cylons are for the first time dealing with capital punishment, when they no longer have the resurrection technology to make such execution meaningless, raises other issues. If we were to achieve indefinite lifespans through medical advances, rather than making capital punishment meaningless the prospect of ending a life would only become more profound. In fact, given that prisoners alive today have the potential to see continuing advances in medicine that could keep extending their lives, such considerations should enter into debates about the value of capital punishment amidst other issues such as the many prisoners who have been found innocent with DNA evidence. At the same time, if we succeed in extending life it is likely that we will develop much more effective forensic techniques, while advances in brain and cognitive sciences may lead to prisons that succeed at the often shallowly-stated goal of rehabilitating prisoners, rather than simply immersing them further in criminal life. Of course, other means of life extension would bring different implications. It is possible that part of the reason the Cylons were willing to execute an Eight is that there are many other copies, though the real motivation for killing her was that she went against the rest of the Eight copies and voted with Cavil. If we were able to do as Kurzweil hopes and resurrect people such as his father who were not even cryonically preserved, death would have little meaning indeed, though I share Michael Anissimov’s skepticism of that idea. At the same time, no matter how many copies there are of an individual it would always be possible to try and delete them all, or box them as Cavil did with D’anna.
With only three episodes left, it will be fascinating to see how Boomer’s kidnapping of Athena’s human-Cylon child affects the ever blurring line between Cylon and human.
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