Doubtless a lot of Battlestar Galactica viewers will have watched the show finale with a certain amount of disbelief. Instead of a gritty space opera focused on the harsh realities of war and survival, we were presented with angels doing the work of God.

Some viewers will simply see the whole thing as a massive cop-out, quite literally a deus ex machina ending if ever there was one! After tangling himself in knots, the only way producer Ron Moore could end the series was by having God appear and set everything to rights. Less cynical viewers might be intrigued by an ending that was certainly unique within the realm of science fiction television; for them it won’t so much be the simple presence of God in the drama that was the sticking point, but whether Ron Moore managed to put God into the show in a way that made sense.

But Moore wasn’t the first person to have God nudging the characters through a drama, making sure they all do the things they need to.

A Middle-earth Parallel?

One of the striking things about the BSG universe is the parallel that can be drawn between this show and the the Middle-earth world of J. R. R. Tolkien. Both contain cosmologies that attempt to reconcile fantasy make-believe with an overtly Christian spirituality. Or put another way, they ask the question of how would God interact with humanity in a world substantially different to our own. Besides being set in the distant past, both BSG and Middle-earth contain something apparently absent from our own: a second intelligent species. In the case of BSG, these are the Cylons, while in Middle-earth they are of course the Elves.

In Middle-earth the Elves came first, followed thousands of years later by the race of Men. Each had their own talents and characteristics, but the most striking difference was that the Elves were immortal, though not indestructible. Even if they were killed, they were reborn once more. In the same way, Cylons have the gift of immortality because of resurrection technology, a method that allows a dying Cylon to move his or her consciousness into a new body. Unlike the Cylons though, the Elves were certainly able to reproduce in the normal way, though they never appear to have been all that fertile. By contrast the populations of Men grew rapidly, despite their seemingly more fragile existence and the various setbacks they had along the way.

God’s interaction with the Elves was delegated to twelve angelic beings known as the Valar. Initially there were thirteen of them, but one of them, Melkor, became succumbed to the sin of Pride, and declared himself superior to all the other Valar. Eventually he was cast out of Middle-earth, but not before leaving behind a legacy of evil.

The Valar had much less interaction with the race of Men, supposedly because Men are less able to understand (and more likely to misinterpret) the omens the Valar put before them. But on at least one occasion they sent a group of angelic beings of a lesser order to guide them. These were the Istari, or Wizards, of whom Gandalf is the best known. These beings took on the forms of Men, and like Men, they could succumb to all kinds of weaknesses and temptations. Their memories of their previous life were limited to dreams at most, so that they would instead be forced to think and act like the Men and Elves amongst who they worked. They could also be killed, as happened when Gandalf died after fighting the Balrog. But in this case, his task was not yet finished, so he was sent back to Middle-earth until it was. He was reborn, but with a clearer vision of what needed to be done.

Careful readers will immediately catch the Gandalf-Kara Thrace parallel here. Like Gandalf, she was sent from God to do a job, and also like Gandalf, she was returned to life after being killed. Once she had brought the remaining humans and Cylons to their new home, she said her good-byes and vanished.

So Who Were the Lords of Kobol?

Like Kara Thrace, the Lords of Kobol seem also to have parallels in the Middle-earth cosmology: the Valar. Like the Valar, the Lords of Kobol are mysterious figures, and we still don’t know very much about them. At least ten were named in the series, though at least one more is known to have existed. This Lord, referred to by Elosha as the ‘Jealous God’ wanted to be elevated in status above the others, a seeming parallel with the fallen Valar, Melkor.

On the other hand, when the Colonials visit the Temple of Five, mention is made of the god of the Thirteenth Tribe, in Colonial mythology known as the ‘One Whose Name Cannot Be Spoken’. Is this deity the same one named by Virtual Gaius Baltar as God? After he uses that name, Virtual Number Six admonishes him, reminding him that this divinity does not like that name to be used: a deity who’s name cannot be spoken indeed!

Returning to the Lords of Kobol themselves, we can find some further parallels between them and the Valar, though they are not precise. In the Middle-earth universe, the Valar live alongside the Elves in a beautiful and peaceful realm where mankind is forbidden to go. By contrast, it both humans and the Cylons they created lived with the Lords of Kobol, at least for a time. The Cylons eventually left Kobol, and were only remembered in Colonial history inaccurately as the Thirteenth Tribe of humans.

A thousand years later, the humans left Kobol as well. While the Colonials continued to worship the Lords of Kobol, little else is about them has been made clear in the show. We know that the Lords of Kobol stayed on Kobol for a while after the humans left, at least long enough to build a tomb to one of them who died, Athena. But beyond that, it isn’t even clear what their precise nature was. Given that they were apparently distinct from both humans and Cylons, they were presumably angelic beings of a similar type to Kara Thrace, though perhaps of a higher order.

The God of the Thirteenth Tribe

The fate of the Thirteenth Tribe only became clear in Season 4. Though they were humanoid Cylons, they were able to reproduce normally, and they eventually abandoned resurrection technology completely. As the humans would do thousands of years later, they constructed their own type of Centurion labourer. At some point the Centurion revolted and wiped out the Thirteenth Tribe except for the Final Five who escaped, via re-invented resurrection technology. The Final Five set off for Kobol to warn the humans, but because their spaceship was so slow, they arrived long after the humans had departed to the Twelve Colonies.

The Thirteenth Tribe were apparently monotheists, and when the Final Five meet the robotic Cylons, they share with them their beliefs as well as their technology. The identity of their One God is a tantalising conundrum. The Jealous God was originally a Lord of Kobol, so while monotheists in the BSG universe as well as our own might consider him unique, the history of the BSG universe would say otherwise. On the other hand, if Elosha’s description of a Jealous God is a red herring, then the Colonials have the wrong idea about the One God of the Thirteenth Tribe. Rather than being one of a group of Lords of Kobol, the One God was above them, and they, presumably, were his representatives on Kobol, rather as the Valar were representatives of God in Middle-earth.

The Hand of God

In Tolkien’s cosmology, God generally did not act directly. Apart from the Creation of Middle-earth, only two incidences are recorded, one of which was the discovery of the One Ring by Bilbo Baggins. As readers of The Hobbit will remember, Bilbo found the Ring blindly, groping around in the dark. While Bilbo assumed this to be luck, Gandalf believed otherwise, and that Bilbo was meant to find the Ring.

There is a precisely parallel incident in BSG that might be viewed as the “hand of God”, so unlikely is it to have happened otherwise. This is the destruction of the Cylon Colony by nuclear missiles fired from a Colonial Raptor. The pilot, Racetrack, is dead; but when the Raptor is struck by a small asteroid, her hand hits the fire button. Given the astronomical odds of the Raptor pointing in the right direction and the pilot’s hand being in just the right place, is this the hand of God at work? It would seem so.

BSG: Elves in Space!

So while the BSG story itself may not be as completely bizarre as some viewers might think, does this necessarily mean that Ron Moore created great television. For this viewer at least, while the ending was fascinating in some ways, it did rather stretch belief a little too far.

Unlike the world of Middle-earth, the BSG universe is distinctly technological. At least some of the Colonials were on medication, and many of them would presumably be suffering from illnesses such as diabetes that while manageable in a technological world would be fatal in a pre-technological one. Expecting the Colonial refugees to agree to settling on a planet and reverting to an essentially stone-age existence would be condemning them to death. Similarly the Colonials would inevitably end up with a drastically shorter lifespan thanks to the lack of medicine and sanitation, as well as massively increased infant mortality. So while merging the Colonial refugees with our remote human ancestors in this way is an attractive idea, it would seem to be about as plausible as having turkeys vote for Christmas.

If this is God’s plan, it does seem rather a harsh way of going about things. Not only were the Twelve Colonies wiped out, but so, eventually, were the humanoid Cylons with the sole exception of the hybrid, Hera. Since we know modern humans evolved in Africa, and East Africa at that, all the other groups of Colonials on Earth must have died out without issue as well. It all seems rather bleak.

Perhaps that’s the point? Rather than being a morally uplifting confirmation of faith in a loving God, the God of Battlestar Galactica comes across as being much more brutal and unsympathetic.