JuicyTalk
Many years passed before the Cybermen had some proper competition. The Doctor’s clanking enemies marked the science fiction genre‘s first truly iconic robotic species that wanted to see humanity perish in a wave of cold, emotionless steel. They wouldn’t be the last. 12 years after the Cybermen battled against a weary First Doctor, Battlestar Galactica came along and introduced the Cylons.
The key difference? Battlestar Galactica‘s entire premise revolved around an ongoing conflict between fleshy humans and those clunky Cylons. This was one of the first TV shows to put the ‘man vs. machine’ concept front and center, depicting a galaxy where an overwhelming and technologically advanced force of emotionless robots sought to end human life as we know it. Today, that idea isn’t especially novel, with everything from Terminator to The Matrix diving down the rabbit hole of cybernetic doom, but Battlestar Galactica was right there at the vanguard.
Star Trek hadn’t quite cracked that nut during its original 1960s run. Most robot enemies Captain Kirk’s crew encountered were oversized gray cabinets with flashing lights and tinny voices. They were computers either gone wrong or programmed to do wrong, whereas Star Trek‘s truly iconic villains, like the Klingons, the Romulans, and the Gorn, were all flesh and blood races. An important distinction.
Everything changed in 1989 when, following a really-quite-underwhelming debut season, Star Trek: The Next Generation debuted the Borg midway through season 2. Not long after, Star Trek had a new iconic villain on its hands, and sci-fi history had itself a whole new chapter. The Borg assimilated themselves aggressively into pop culture, defining Star Trek for decades to come with appearances in Voyager, Picard, and a successful stint on the big screen.
It’s difficult to overestimate the impact of the Borg upon science fiction. It’s also difficult to ignore the contemporary parallel to Battlestar Galactica‘s 1978 Cylons.
Star Trek Found A Way To Upgrade The Cylons
Star Trek: The Next Generation‘s “Q Who” episode came at a time when robots were transforming into a Hollywood staple, popping up everywhere from 2019 Los Angeles to the crime-ridden streets of future Detroit. Not only were fictional robots becoming more common, the narratives around them were growing more complex, incorporating notions of existence, sentience, and legal ethics.
In the Borg, however, Star Trek had a villainous race of robots that despised the living, possessed overwhelming firepower, and would chase a spaceship to the end of the galaxy just to kill its occupants. In that sense, it was hard to not see the Borg as a continuation of what Battlestar Galactica was doing with its Cylons. The comparison only strengthened as the Borg became a more permanent fixture in the Star Trek franchise, positioning themselves as humanity’s natural enemy in the same way the Cylons did 12 years prior.
But the Borg were Cylons kicked into overdrive. If Battlestar Galactica‘s villains were somewhat cartoonish, the Borg carried a genuine aura of fear with their pale appearances and ghoul-like behavior, and The Next Generation took a step further into horror territory by revealing how the Borg recycled captured humans into hosts.
Their ships were dingy but callously efficient, their voices were calmly terrifying, and when Jean-Luc Picard himself visited the assimilation spa, Star Trek began to dissect the tricky issue of what makes a human truly human.
As a rival species from another franchise, the Cylons couldn’t help but look obsolete, tossed onto the technological scrap pile alongside black-and-white TVs and vinyl record players. The villains that had allowed Battlestar Galactica to stand so proudly apart from Star Trek in the 1970s suddenly found themselves outdone by Star Trek in the 1980s. But oh, how Battlestar Galactica would have its revenge.
Battlestar Galactica Strikes Back
The year was 2003. It had been 23 years since Galactica 1980 concluded. Star Trek: The Next Generation had been over for almost a decade, and Enterprise was struggling to fill that gap. Being a prequel also prevented Star Trek‘s 2000s venture from revisiting the Borg in any meaningful way.
Elsewhere, a genuine challenger to Star Trek‘s sci-fi crown was taking shape, as Ronald D. Moore set about rebooting Battlestar Galactica for the new millennium. Truthfully, “rebooting” is too soft a term. The new series was a complete overhaul right down to the chassis, and one of its most significant updates was reserved for the Cylons.
In this reality, the Cylons wore human faces, with the chrome robots from 1978 now merely footsoldiers in a much larger and scarier empire. These Cylons had giant, imposing, otherworldly space vessels, they operated as part of a hive-like consciousness, and they were driven by a lofty philosophy about what life in the universe should truly look like. Weirdly, this iteration of Cylonkind had more in common with the Borg of Star Trek: The Next Generation than their predecessors from the ’70s. The real trick was that, instead of merely assimilating humans, these Cylons became humans. Or vice versa. Or both.
Just as Star Trek‘s Borg represented a giant leap from the original Cylons, the gap between the Borg and Battlestar Galactica‘s rebooted Cylons was a chasm. Hiding in plain sight made the villains even more terrifying, and their moral ambiguity added the kind of complexity that Star Trek had only hinted at through characters like Hugh and Seven of Nine. As great as they were, the Borg never had enough mileage to be the focus of Star Trek: The Next Generation every week, but Battlestar Galactica‘s Cylons never got old, despite the show declining to introduce any other villainous species.
The Cylons Haven’t Yet Been Replaced
While the Battlestar Galactica reboot concluded in 2009, it wouldn’t be especially controversial to say that the Cylons still haven’t been ousted as sci-fi’s premier robotic villains. The Borg have reappeared several times in modern Star Trek projects, but with mixed results, and never markedly different from the version from the ’90s. Various attempts at another Battlestar Galactica reboot have failed to make progress, which might be for the best.
Doctor Who‘s Cybermen have continued their usual shtick, but nowhere in the science fiction realm has a new robotic race risen to prominence and overtaken the Cylons. That may have something to do with advancements in real-world technology, which have left the Cylons and Borg seeming much more believable. One could also argue that modern depictions of AI have become far more nuanced as a result of those real-world developments, so the very idea of metallic armies waging war against humans perhaps feels outdated in 2026.
With no movement on Battlestar Galactica‘s future and no fresh Star Trek series on the horizon, it appears that the Cylons will have the final word in the ‘cyborgs taking over the galaxy’ stakes. For now.
- Release Date
-
2004 – 2009-00-00
- Showrunner
-
Ronald D. Moore
- Directors
-
Wayne Rose, Michael Nankin, Rod Hardy, Sergio Mimica-Gezzan, Edward James Olmos, Robert M. Young, Jeff Woolnough, Félix Enríquez Alcalá, Jonas Pate, Allan Kroeker, Anthony Hemingway, Jean de Segonzac, Marita Grabiak, James Head, Paul A. Edwards, Gwyneth Horder-Payton, Brad Turner, Ronald D. Moore, Bill Eagles
- Writers
-
Carla Robinson, Michael Taylor, Bradley Thompson, David Weddle, Jane Espenson, Mark Verheiden, Michael Angeli, Anne Cofell Saunders, Jeff Vlaming, Michael Rymer, Dawn Prestwich, Nicole Yorkin, Seamus Kevin Fahey
-
Edward James Olmos
William Adama
-
Mary McDonnell
Laura Roslin
