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This is flippant, but remembering the discussion around the reboot, a lot of it was more "mmm, smexy Cylon ladies!" and not so much "Big Moral Ethical Philosophical Issues" 😁
The 'heritable castes in a year' sounds a leeetle quick off the mark, I imagine they were trying to retcon the original "all the Twelve Colonies of Kobol that these people come from were the origins of the zodiac signs on Earth, and all the Taurans do X and all the Librans do Y and all the Cancerians do Z" typing.
Speaking of theology, Glen Larson (the show creator) was a Mormon and put in Mormon themes into the show, it seems!
There were definitely smexy Cylon ladies, sometimes 12 clones at a time. But seriously, it's a great show. They really commit to the premise of, "we're trying to preserve our society and our humanity, but we're in circumstances that pretty much demand a military dictatorship" and all sorts of stuff naturally falls out of that. What do you do when there's not enough food and water to keep the fighting soldiers going and everyone else? What do you do with criminals when keeping them in prison is a massive and dangerous waste of resources? The heritable castes thing comes because one of the main characters is a deckhand and he's training his younger son (who was supposed to be going to go off to the big city) to help because they're desperately overworked and there's nobody else, and everyone around him is doing the same. Lots of people don't like the way society is being run, and some of them are well-meaning and some of them are deluded troublemakers and some of them are con artists, and how can you be sure you're being honest with yourself about the difference when you're suppressing the latter two to keep your society from collapsing around you?
Boomer is a brainwashed Cylon infiltrator in disguise and doesn't know it (but we do). Baltar is a genuinely brilliant egotist desperately trying to cover up that his foolishness was responsible for the death of their society. The Admiral and the President are doing the awkward dance you do when the military is the most important element of your society and the line between 'civil-military cooperation' and 'well-meaning military dictatorship' is looking thinner by the day.
It's a great show, and they act their hearts out.
That's not really establishing a caste system, though, that's "we're desperately undermanned and since I'm a deckhand that is what I know and what I can teach you to do".
Sure, give it four or five generations and it becomes a caste system, but it's a bit too on the nose for "right now I am drowning, please throw me that life belt" situation they got going on. God knows, Original Trek engaged in some anvil-to-the-head moral lessons as well, but that is a little too much nudging in the ribs about inequality and the state of society today.
Okay, it's pulled out a bit for that episode, but this is after a year of going and he's not presented as being in the right. He's nervous about the future, and understandably so. It's not preachy at all - the President's position of look, this just isn't the time is treated very sympathetically and pretty much wins out, with some fig leaves. This was in the early 2000s when anvil-to-the-head moral lessons were out of fashion and hard choices were in. Pretty much all the characters get to be sympathetic.
Sorry, I'm surprisingly enthusiastic about it for something I haven't watched in 15 years.
No need to apologise, we all are enthusiastic about what we love!
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