Sixes and Seven

Lately, I’ve found myself braving the wilds of Spike TV, and their corny commercials about Manswers, for the chance to re-watch episodes of Star Trek: Voyager. It’s interesting to watch how the show came alive with the introduction of Seven of Nine in the latter seasons, her distinctive personality adding a new perspective on the franchise’s well established canon of characters designed to explore the nature of humanity, though unlike those which came before, with Mr. Spock, Data and even Odo, Seven represented among the first female characters to occupy the complexity of such a role.

Interesting also, is the comparison which comes to mind to another numerically designated statuesque blonde making her mark on sci fi television these days.

As Seven did during her time as part of the Borg Collective, the idea of a shared consciousness and unity of purpose lends a certain sense of commonality among each unique humanoid Cylon models on Battlestar Galactica. And if Seven’s choice of attire lent itself to the perception that her introduction was meant to include a certain titillation factor, Cylon model number Six’s almost predatory sexuality makes no excuses for her revealing attire. Rather than being a meta-textual element designed to appeal to certain elements of the audience, Six’s appeal to the baser human instincts is a fundamental aspect of her characterization. As such, it serves to enhance the sense of menace she is able to invoke, like a Venus Flytrap seducing it’s prey with an intoxicating aroma and luring it to it’s doom.

Making her an even more indefinable threat is the genuine fascination with humanity, and the idea of love. By contrast, Seven of Nine’s introduction carried with it a basic disdain for the notion of humanity and its perceived weaknesses. Despite being born human, Seven’s assimilation by the technologically predatory race known as the Borg, where individuality is purged in the name of harmonious thought and the purpose of a unified whole, helped define her own beliefs and sense of self-worth. When encouraged to rediscover her humanity, Seven is contemptuous, describing humans as “hypocritical and manipulative”, adding “we do not want to be what you are!”

During her years on Voyager, Seven’s journey took her from this sense of derision, to an uneasy curiosity and finally a genuine, if tentative, exploration of her own nascent humanity. Equally transitory was her opinion of the Borg themselves, as she came to have a greater understanding of their destructiveness through the eyes of cultures and individuals they had victimized. And though she initially scoffed at the notion of guilt as irrelevant, Seven came to feel great remorse for atrocities she had been apart of, even without her individual consciousness or consent. More than once, she proved willing to sacrifice her own life in the name of doing penance for what she perceived as her crimes.

One of the Sixes, known as Caprica Six for her pivotal role in the dominating victory of her people over the human colonies, underwent a similar change of heart with regard to the beliefs and actions of her own race. Having fallen in love with Gaius Baltar, Caprica’s disagreement with the destruction of all humans caused her to stand up, along side another Cylon with emotional ties to humanity, as lone voices of dissention against the unified will of the Cylons, their experiences setting them apart from even other identical models much like Borg liberated from the Collective by being disconnected from the hive mind.

And while the most often seen version of Six is a literal fantasy, existing only in the mind of Baltar as a constant, if often meddlesome, companion, unwilling to let him forget his own isolation from humanity, the real Caprica Six, downloaded into a new body after using her old one to shield Baltar from a nuclear blast, carries a similar illusion of Baltar, reminding her in turn of her own detachment from the other Cylons and her ultimate conscience and guilt for her instrumental part in the destruction of the human societies. The implied connection between Baltar’s troubled psyche and Six’s equally troubled consciousness strengthens the notion of the connection between them, not only as characters, but as representatives of their respective races, further blurring the lines between what defines someone as being alive. Seen as initially dangerous by the rest of the Cylons for being “celebrities in a culture based on unity” whose voices might carry over the collective whole, the idea of such a threat was also shared by the singular consciousness in command of the Borg Collective, their Queen, upon discovering an anomalous unconscious connection between many of her own drones, allowing them the freedom of independent thought and action, if only during unconsciousness.

For both the Sixes and Seven, their characters came as a result of putting a face and identity on previously established faceless technological villains, yet villains which had some tenuous connection to humanity. In this new version of Cylons, they were created by humans, their ideological children while the Borg absorbed a connection to humanity by assimilating individual humans and gaining an interest in them in the process.

The idea of the link between artificial intelligence, artificial life and our own humanity is a staple of science fiction storytelling, seeking to push the boundaries of what can be called life and the idea of when increasingly complex and lifelike beings cross over into sentience and truly independent identity.

Using Freud’s model for understanding the human minds, perhaps the most interesting comparison of Six and Seven come in their contrasting journeys, with Six’s introduction being pure Id, approaching humanity through the realm of the sensual and sexual and only slowly finding a path to conscience and responsibility. While Seven carried the Borg beliefs and understandings with her as if it were the personification of a super-ego imposed over her consciousness. Her hesitant journey had to discover her own sense of identity before she could gain an understanding of, or appreciation for the idea pleasure, comfort and other primal instincts regarded as useless or irrelevant by the singular consciousness dominating the Borg.

In both cases, it would be easy on the surface to discount either of these characters based on the assumption that overt sexuality, in appearance or by design, exists in this context to mask shortcomings, or to serve as window dressing to the distract from the story being told rather than adding to it. But instead, both characters were embarking on a journey taking them, literally and figuratively from being just a number, important only in relation to the greater whole, to an identity born of that number, and defined by their distinctiveness from what other such numbers represent.