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mswyrrSci Fi can allow us room to explore dynamics that aren’t meant to be about inter-human conflict on planet earth. This is one example where the violence and oppression involved isn’t intended to be a metaphor at all for how humans treat each other: it is more like if a species we’re currently driving extinct were sentient and able to restore the planet and control humans.
(We’re driving a lot of species extinct right now)
Doesn’t make it right, but makes it really fascinating and complicated in a way 1:1 analogies about human politics, well, they can be a worthy thing. I like them when they’re well done. But it’s also good to not be all about humans all the time. To take advantage of the opportunity to go genuinely alien, explore something like a planet where a predator and prey species are both sentient.
One of the genius things about the Ba’ul IMO being the prey species is it makes so much sense. They’re sentient, technologically advanced people who are utterly ruled and driven by fear. They’re sentient rabbits who, instead of fleeing, can create and enforce total peace and harmony and safety no matter the cost… ofc that would be the sin a prey species is most prone to.
To elevate the creation and maintenance of total certainty, total security and safety, over every other aspect of life. Long after it was necessary to stop their own extinction, they made a literal religion of control and killing and invested their whole sense of meaning and purpose in that and forced the Kelpiens to do the same.
(And OFC the sin of a predator species would have been to over-consume once they first evolved)
IMO it fits really well within the way religion has been explored as one of the ways we deal with and make sense of the fundamentally uncertain and frightening experience of being a mortal creature. That and family/legacy. (Even the 100k year old being needs to reach out, to create connection and kinship and legacy. To be mortal is to need these things.)
I feel like they’ve handled the way these things can go wrong really well without pathologizing the fundamental, natural impulse toward them.
With Kaminar, that makes *two* Edens they’ve ended (transformed, really) by bringing knowledge to the people. First in New Eden, which has a very blatant title and that image of Pike passing the gift of knowledge to Jacob. But then here, they have Michael say that Kaminar is “like a paradise.” And it is visually Edenic. The “innocence” the Kelpiens are kept in too fits with that.And the message in both is that you have to step into knowledge, with all its complexity and pain, to shed the security of certainty. The sin of the Ba’ul is that they believe goodness only comes through absolute control - absolute lack of pain, risk, or conflict. But that can only be achieved through depriving people of what makes a life their own.
Similarly, in Hugh’s situation we have his missing scar - that pain and experience defined him, led him to becoming a doctor. Who is he without it? IMO he’s going to seek out Ash soon to confront his pain and figure out who he is now, in light of this new pain/reality his life has become.
I think it all ties in well with the quote about pain Michael cites at the end of the episode:
“he who learns must suffer. and even in our sleep, pain that cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart”To be alive as mortal beings is to step outside of the perfection of Eden and find knowledge through suffering and joy. To turn your scars into purpose. To balance hope and wariness; to not lock yourself or others into the kind of living death of control and certainty the Ba’ul sought. To embrace life in all its uncertainty.
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Date: 2019-03-22 03:25 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2019-03-23 09:47 pm (UTC)I accidentally deleted my account during the Tumblr Purge but I was able to claim the screen name for a new account.
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Date: 2019-03-23 10:16 pm (UTC)