I'm going to assume most of you have some basic knowledge of Battlestar Galactica. I attempted to watch the original series, but gave up, favoring the reimagined version that aired this past decade. In the event that any of you are unfamiliar, or would just like a refresher, please follow the link. It's short, and it includes the awesome music. By the way, the same gentleman who does the music for this series, Bear McCreary, does the music for Walking Dead. And is super handsome.
Now that we're all on the same page, I'll give my own rundown, since that trailer just gives you a taste of the goodness to come, without really explaining much. Humanity has been living on 12 colonies, these colonies being planets, with names like Sagittaron, Tauron, Picon, and most importantly, Caprica, where all the major players in the show call home. It's sort of the cream-of-the-crop planet, where all the money and stuff comes from, the America (sort of) of the colonies. Excuse the digression.
So! Cylons are machines, created by man, who do stuff for us, like build things, wipe our butts, protect us, whatever. Then they began to have thoughts, feelings, opinions about their status, and ultimately it ends in civil war, man against cylon, blood and chrome (little nod to the new show intended, anybody seen it?) This fella is the new version of one of them.
Ultimately, the cylons disappear deep into space, across some boundary. 40 years pass, and the Cylon Wars are thought to be over. Until, of course, the cylons come back, better than ever, having evolved while they were away to look like humans. Incredibly perfect humans, at least Model 6. She was the gal in the clip with the blonde hair and red dress you may have seen biting the shaggy-haired gentleman.
They were created by man. They rebelled. And now they've come back to snuff us out. At the show's beginning, due to bombing and sneaky cylon tactics, the human race is reduced to 50,000 or so survivors, who go on the run in a ship called Battlestar Galactica. What's worse, cylons look like US now. Hot US, but us. Makes them harder to detect.
The original cylons were made of machine parts, and were basically walking computers. The next step in the cylon evolution makes them much more interesting. These folks are made of organic machinery, which means biomechanical skeletal structures, muscles, organs. They're built like humans, using human DNA. They also have superhuman strength and can do things like Project (pronounced pro-JECT). I won't get into it here, but it's awesome.
At this point, whoever has gotten this far in the reading is surely going, "Ok, great, now get to how this applies to zombies."
1)The cylons were created by man. In some scenarios, the zombies were also created by man, either by Vodou (Delice), or science (28 Days/Weeks/Years Later).
2)They rebelled. the cylons rebelled against their creators, it was essentially a slave rebellion. I will argue here, because I want to, that zombies are rebelling against original human nature by feasting on live humans. They typically do not rebel against each other, apparently they only want the freshest meats, and for that I can't blame them. Although in Aimee Bender's Among Us, there is the parable (fable? are zombies animals? definitions can be flexible in this case) of the zombie eating other zombies and becoming just the eating anatomy. So cool.
3)They want to wipe us out. Although perhaps unintentionally, as far as we can observe, zombies appear to not want to live beside us. We are their food source. They don't seem to care that if they eat all of us, they won't have anything left to eat. But it doesn't appear that they even care about being less hungry, only that they are actively hungry. They don't get full. They just keep going, shark-like. I just relearned that sharks die if they stop swimming. Do zombies die if they stop eating/shambling? Eventually? Hard to tell. We also don't know how old sharks get, as in, how long they live. How long would zombies live, assuming they are actually decomposing, which much of the amazing special effects tell us they do?
4) They're really strong. Most zombies are really hard to fight off. They may have rotten pumpkin skulls, which are apparently easy to puncture with a good steak knife, or hack in half with a Samurai sword (still my favorite part of ANY Walking Dead episode, don't care what's happening), but they seem strong in the way that a creature unable to feel muscle/joint/bone strain is strong, with a disregard for their own bodily limitations.
5)They are governed by rules different from human ones. In terms of the uncanny aspect of zombie nature, they are frightening because they are unnatural. So, too, are cylons, because they operate beyond their programming, for reasons that are unknown and illogical to us. The cylons themselves believe they have souls, which is another interesting part of the show. They have a different religion than humans. While humans believe in the multiple gods of Kobol (origin planet), cylons believe in a One True God. Part of why the war is so ferocious, as it is partially a Holy War. Or perhaps fundamentally.
6) They don't need to eat or drink to survive. Whatever is keeping both cylons and zombies alive, it's not food or water. They run on willpower.
7) Destroy the brain. The first round of cylons, the heavily mechanized non-human ones, can only be killed with a shot to the head. And often it has to be an exploding round. Zombies, obviously same thing. New round of cylons, because they're more like humans, can be killed in humanish ways, they're just harder to catch or beat arm-wrestling.
8) They're not to be reasoned with. Metal cylons, the ones least like us (think Warm Bodies, or Zone One) just want to mess up your day. You cannot talk them out of it. Does not compute. They are programmed, by us or by nature, to obey that programming, which is kill or eat people. If you ask them to stop, they will use their fancy arm-weaponry or ghoulish grill to end you.
9) It's hard to tell how they can sense you. Cylons have this bar across where their eyes would be that has a red light that slides back and forth. Is it like radar? Is it showing images into its cylon brain? Is it like sonar? They also don't have ears. Or a nose. So how do they know we're there? Same for zombies. In The Naturalist, the zombies don't seem to be able to hear, although they seem to sense heat, and are drawn to fire. They can't observe something past the fire, but they do know when a human-type entity is near. Maybe we give off a certain kind of heat.
So which monster (I use the word loosely, as I think cylons are rather handsome, in the way that skyscrapers are handsome, or my cell phone) is more unsettling? Personally, cylons are truly terrifying, as they seem more plausible. Just look at the robotics coming out of Japan. The last episode of Battlestar shows lots of examples of current day robots, doing servile things like giving drinks on a platter, or dancing together on stage, or speaking. It's eery, in a Matrix-y way, to think that we may very well bring about our own doom, the machines taking our place in the great order of things. We cannot forever assume we will be the dominant life force on this planet, and certainly not in space. Zombies, on the other hand, seem highly implausible, the dead coming to life and wanting to eat us seems silly.
Any thoughts?
Also, if I got any of my Battlestar info wrong, please, please correct me.
ok first a lil VS comment. If the human cyclon clone is bitten by a zombie i don't see the virus having an immediate affect. Could take some days or weeks for the virus to adapt and evolve to corrupt Cylon programming. And thats a stretch. The cylons operate off code. So, if a zombie virus does affect them it could just cUse their bodies to decay while not impacting decision making at all. So zombies are more unsettling. No rational at all. No communication. Gone. They are the most unsettling. Cylon human clones have desires, wants, and needs. We are looking in the mirror.