A Tale of Two Visions: Laura Roslin, Compared

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Second post, in which I go on at length. Contains DS9 comparisons.



Once upon a time, there was a sci-fi show in which the lead started out as a very rational, deeply sceptical man. Through some circumstances, he ended up being regarded as a religious icon by some people, something with which he was very uncomfortable at first. Being surrounded by people who were deeply convinced of their faith and who saw him as their hope in a desperate situation, he started to adjust to it, but remained more or less an agnostic until one day, he started to experience a series of visions. Visions which provided him with a series of clues, first how to find a lost city of those people, something that was a symbol of their past, and then about something concerning their future.
These visions did not come without a price. His health was seriously deterioting. It was an extremely delicate political situation. And then this man did something supremely irrational. Trusting the visions, he risked everything, risked destroying the touchy alliance that had started between his side and another side, by demanding what looked like an insane course of action.
He was listened to. (But only didn’t lose his job because of the religious icon status, which assured his organization couldn’t fire and replace him.) As it turned out, a few months later, his insane course of action saved a planet from being invaded and conquered by a superior force. The man was forever changed by the experience and became a man of faith. Actually, he ended up becoming a god himself in the final episode, which was years later. Mind you, he was not presented as being in the right afterwards all the time, and in fact was shown making serious mistakes or making some morally bad decisions if he deemed it necessary. In one of those AU episodes, we saw him going insane, and later in an asylum. But that particular decision, the vision-based one, turned out to have been correct.

The episode was Rapture, the show was Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, and the man I was talking about was one Benjamin Sisko, Starfleet Captain. DS9 was regarded as revolutionary and atypical of ST in many things, not least because whereas all the other Trek shows tended to present religion as a superstition left behind with progress and enlightment (see also TNG’s Who Watches the Watchers) and regularly showed god-like entities to be not deserving of worship and being either unreliable tricksters (the Q) or up to no good in general (take your pick), an attitude best summed up with the sentence uttered in ST V, “Why does God need a spaceship?”, DS9 took religion seriously. Of course, it always presented alternative explanations. The Bajoran Gods, the Prophets, are regarded by Starfleet as wormhole aliens, which is just as viable; they’re able to provide Sisko with visions because they experience time in a non-linear way. But while he starts out thinking of them as wormhole aliens, he comes to convert wholesale to the Prophet pov, with Rapture being the big turning point. This development is not presented as a negative one. Rapture could get summarized as “Sisko goes nuts”, sure, but it was hailed as an amazing turnpoint for the character by the fandom at large instead.

One of the main writers of DS9, if you don’t know already, was one Ronald D. Moore, these days chief executive producer and headwriter of the new Battlestar Galactica.

Now fast forward to the very different fannish reaction to Laura Roslin in Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part I. I’m sure I don’t have to point out the most glaring similarities. Including, of course, the two sets of equally viable explanations. Laura Roslin started to experience visions when she started to take the chamalla due to her deteriorating health. What she has seen so far could have been the product of her subconscious mind remembering parts of the sacred scrolls of her people, even if she consciously does not recall them. (For example, Roslin says that she didn’t read the scrolls of Pythia in Hand of the Gods, but Baltar in the same episode observes that everybody learns the verses from them in school (and then proceeds to forget them). Or they could be manipulated by the Cylons (which would explain why Roslin accurately saw the Cylon Leoben before she ever met him, and the manner of his death, though that could have been a self-fulfilling prophecy). Or they could, you know, be the genuine article. Seeing Kobol as it used to be for a moment, which is the final vision that convinces her and makes her take the step towards believer, doesn’t just remind me of Sisko finding the sacred city via visions (which convinces him to take the later vision regarding Bajor seriously, so seriously that he destroys everything he and Starfleet worked for regarding Bajoran membership in the Federation with one outburst) but of Heinrich Schliemann finding Troy. In his podcast, Moore observes that Laura approaches faith in “her usual logical manner, as a series of clues, a puzzle which she has to solve”. Heinrich Schliemann, deciding to take the Iliad as being literary truth instead of seeing it as a pretty legend talking of gods and heroes who never existed, found Troy. Laura, having seen the Kobol that was and having seen a brief vision of an arrow as well, decides to take the scrolls in just as literal a fashion, to take them as a guideline on how to find Earth.

As opposed to finding Troy or finding one old Bajoran city, finding Earth isn’t just of archaelogical or symbolic value, it’s a dire necessity. The ragtag fleet of humans can’t remain on the run from the Cylons forever. They have far, far less resources, and the lesser technology. They can’t settle down on Kobol, either; the Cylons are already there. And Kobol is the first planet with a breathable atmosphere they’ve encountered so far. Moreover, Adama promised Earth as a safe haven, a promise he and Roslin know he can’t deliver; to pretend knowledge of its existence was his short-term solution to the problem of giving the survivors of humanity new hope.

Now, Laura Roslin goes about her newly decided plan regarding the way to find Earth in a far more rational and clever manner than Sisko did regarding his vision. (Sisko just burst into the room where the final negotiations were to take place and yelled Bajor was not to join the Federation, and because they saw him as a religious icon, the Bajorans listened.) She first suggests the plan to Adama, notably not mentioning her visions at all. (My guess is she doesn’t because that would have required her to explain why she’s taking chamalla, but she probably also was aware that Adama wasn’t the type to consider “I’ve had a vision” as a good argument.) Instead she takes the Heinrich Schliemann route, the “what if we take the scrolls literary, and search following their instructions” one. Adama says no. Roslin then circumvents him by talking directly to Kara Thrace in order to convince her to go to Caprica and retrieve the scroll-and-vision defined instrument to find Earth. Being the good politician she is, she does so by pressing just the right buttons with Kara, but, and this is important, not by lying to her, and not by giving her a direct order.

I happen to think that Roslin made a mistake, that she should have tried to win Adama over again because it was obvious from the start that he would take this interruption of the military chain of command, and the hijacking of an important military asset, very badly indeed. But she was pressed for time, more so than she usually is. Her idea to use Kara didn not occur to her until Tigh mentioned Kara would use the Cylon Raider as a Trojan Horse to destroy the Basestar, thereby destroying it in the process; and the Raider is the only means they have at their disposal to get to Caprica and back. She also knows she’s dying, her VP has just had a meltdown in front of her and is in no way ready to take over government, and the most likely winner of a presidential election if she drops out of the race is a terrorist. Personally, I’m not surprised that she takes that straw of a vision and runs with it.

But that is all which she did. If you read some of the commentaries, you’d think Laura Roslin had just declared herself the BSG equivalent for Pope, complete with infallability doctrine, and started a theocracy. She did not tell Adama he was supposed to do was she said because of her visions; as I mentioned, she doesn’t mention the vision to him at all, she suggests a course of action instead, SUGGESTS, not orders. At no point does she position herself as a religious authority, either; she clearly treats the priestess Elosha as such. In the end, she risked one pilot, one military asset, and her working relationship with Adama to what she sees as the only way to save her people in the long term. Was she right to do so? Maybe not, maybe she was (that’s why we hear both Billy and Roslin herself on the subject), but she is actually far more considerate and rational than both Adamas were in You can’t go home again, when they risked the entire fleet, all ca. 50.000 lives, to rescue Starbuck, far beyond the point where there was even a sensible chance of doing so. (Note that it was of no good , too; in the end Starbuck rescued herself.) She’s also more honest about it. Adama hid behind “this is a military decion” then, and denied that this was all about emotion and family until Roslin shamed him and Lee out of it. Roslin does not claim that this is anything but what it is, a desperate gamble on faith.

“Follow your instinct” is what Adama advises his son to do in the teaser; in the two-parter, both Adama and Roslin follow their instincts. Adam will do this in the second part, and I don’t want to spoil anybody who hasn’t seen it yet as to what he does, so I’ll just say that to my mind, Moore showed both Adama and Roslin making mistakes, but both for understandable reasons. Still, even among those who saw both parts, Roslin gets the brunt of fannish hostility. Again, I can’t help but comparing this to the very different reception Rapture and Sisko’s behaviour got back in the day. Now I would blame the intervening years, 9/11 and the current President of the US causing one to be very wary of leaders who claim to be visionaries if one is of the liberal persuasion (which I am myself), except that I saw the anti-Roslin reaction from conservatives as well, so it can’t be that, or not that alone.

So… could it be gender? Because Sisko as the Emissary is not that different from other male Chosen Ones, prophets, etc. Him making the step from man of science to man of faith is revolutionary in the determinedly secular Star Trek context, but not when compared to a lot of other sci fi and fantasy. Usually these types are of the heroic persuasion. Female politicians, otoh, are a far more rare breed. And traditionally villainous. I was somewhat amused to read one lj (darchildre, I think) in which there was worry that Roslin would “go Kai Winn” on us. Because while Winn and Roslin are both pragmatists and female politicians, Winn’s problem and her tragedy was that her gods absolutely would not talk to her, not that they would. She was never asked to accept or reject a personal vision until the end, when it was a vision from the Pagh-Wraiths, and in any event, she believed from the start – there was no step from agnostic to believer nesessary. It was Sisko, the male hero, not Winn, who had to either trust or disregard personal visions from entities he had not at first regarded as gods.

If I have to guess: I think the Sisko parallel will hold in as much as what Kara will come back from Caprica with will provide the clue on how to find Earth, but it won’t necessarily be the literal arrow she was send to find, and Laura will still acknowledge she should have gone about the entire thing in a different way. (They might even extend the Sisko parallel as much as having the visions end by letting Billy destroy her chamalla supplies, which would parallel Sisko’s son Jake telling Bashir to operate on his father against his will.) Considering she won’t be the only one who will have to acknowledge having made a major mistake, the power balance between civilian and military leader will restore itself. But let’s put the laws of tv aside for a moment and assume the worst case scenario: Kara won’t come back from Caprica, meaning both the best pilot and the Cylon Raider are lost. In that case, I still wouldn’t consider Laura Roslin’s behaviour “insane” or driven by hubris. The same would hold as above; she should have gone about it in a different way, and should have questioned her instincts because of the problematic nature of the intel (i.e. visions via chamalla and old texts) more, but she would be no more or less responsible as she already is for the lives of the ships left behind in the miniseries, or of the Atlantic Carrier she ordered destroyed in 33, decisions which did pay off by saving the fleet. As Laura said to Lee in Water, leaders make mistakes, and it’s important for them to bear that responsibility and to face it. Sooner or later, she will be confronted by the lethal consequences of a decision of hers that does NOT pay off.

But, as with the other decisions, if this were to be the one, it would be one made for the same reasons that she ordered one ship destroyed and others left behind. Laura Roslin, like it or not, is a big picture kind of girl. Her big picture is the salvation of the human race. This makes her ruthless in some regards. It also makes her entirely capable of doing decidedly not-nice things like hitting Kara’s weak spot by shattering her trust in Adama, if this helps to accomplish her goal. But it does not make her insane.