Angry Robot of the Week

Well, last week’s season premiere was greeted with many a kind word, which was probably largely due to Bender threatening everyone if they didn’t say nice things about him.

This week, Alasdair Stuart tells us about a very different kind of Angry Robot:

Angry Robot of the Week
Week Two
John Cavil

Let’s talk about Tommy Westphall. Tommy is a character that, chances are, you won’t be aware of. Tommy is the autistic son of one of the main characters of St Elsewhere. Tommy is an autistic boy who, it’s revealed in the last scene of the last episode, has imagined the entire series. It’s a fantastic, audacious piece of storytelling and whilst it incensed some fans it fascinated others.

Except Tommy wasn’t done. As Tom Fontana, one of the producers on the show moved on he began writing little nods to St Elsewhere into his other shows. These in turn connected to the nods and winks, the in jokes and references that other people wrote into their shows and the Tommy Westphall Universe began to grow and expand and has never stopped. Let’s pick a single strand, and follow it through, starting with St Elsewhere and Doctor Roxanne Turner who had a guest spot on Homicide: Life on the Street. Homicide: Life on the Street in turn crossed over with Law and Order and John Munch, one of the main characters ended up transferring over to one of the Law and Order spin-offs, Special Victims Unit. Munch made a guest appearance in The X Files and was also namechecked in an episode of the BBC’s excellent, just concluded and staggeringly horrible Luther.

Six TV shows. One boy’s head.

There’s a flowchart, I’ll link to at the bottom of this piece, which tracks all the Tommy Westphall universe shows and it’s both excellent and slightly unsettling because there’s a lot of TV in there including the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica, thanks, weirdly to a jokey reference to Weyland Yutani in Angel, which carries over to Firefly and a Firefly-class ship guest stars in Battlestar Galactica. Which all still exist in the same world as Tommy Westphall and Doctor Roxanne Turner.

Still with me? Great, let’s talk about John Cavil, this week’s Angry Robot. Oh, there are colossal, face-melting spoilers for the end of Battlestar Galactica and the TV movie The Plan here so if you don’t want to know, go back and re-read the Bender one. Everyone likes Bender.

John Cavil is the first and, it turns out, being the eldest is almost as bad as being the youngest. The first humanoid Cylon created by the Final Five cylons, Cavil was modelled on Ellen Tigh’s father and he assisted in the creation of models two through eight. Problems arose when he realised Ellen, technically his mother and also his daughter, favoured Number 7. Cavil tampered with the amniotic fluid of every Daniel, killing them. Which is a pretty extreme way of attracting a parent/daughter’s attention however you cut it. As if that wasn’t enough, Cavil soon realised that he was an intelligence limited by his body rather than empowered. Enraged about his limited senses, he killed his ‘parents’, wiped their memories and placed them among the humans so, when the war he started came, they could understand what it was like to die. Although it didn’t stop him hitting on and sleeping with his sort of mother/daughter on New Caprica. So he’s not only angry, he’s actually… gross.

Of course things don’t end well for him –  he’s an angry teenager, they never do. Cavil is talked out of killing the last few humans on the offer of resurrection technology and when one of the Final Five humanoid Cylons realises another killed his wife and murders her, he realises that’s not going to happen. He kills himself, finally and permanently, the Cylon equivalent of stomping upstairs and slamming the door and his final act of rage, making him our Angry Robot of the Week.

Name: John Cavil
Aliases: Brother John Cavil
Occupation: Cylon master mind, wannabe post-singularity god, secret knitter
Power Sources: Rage, Oedipal complex, Shouting
Notable Personality Traits: Rage, Shouting, Sarcasm, Excellent hat wearer

There is, of course, more. You see, Edward James Olmos is on record as saying that as far as he’s concerned, Battlestar Galactica is a prequel to Blade Runner and that William Adama is a distant ancestor of his other iconic sci-fi role, Gaffe, in Blade Runner. I rather like that as an idea, especially as it’s in keeping with the Tommy Westphall hypothesis so let’s try a little thought experiment.

In the late 1990s, a government project is hijacked by it’s own chief scientist. Desperate to prove it’s possible to travel in time, Doctor Sam Beckett steps into the Quantum Leap chamber and is thrown back into his own timestream. Acting as a course correcting agent for history (Perhaps aided, from time to time, by Eloise Hawking? Hmmm, Lost fans? HMMMM?) Sam is aided in his travels by his best friend, Admiral Al Calavicci, a lecherous, womanising man with a tragic past.

But how tragic?

What if, in amongst the last few humans, a Cavil made it to Earth? What if he had children? What if, 150,000 years later, one of his descendants joined the Navy and became friends with a rash young scientist? What if that was Cavil’s plan all along? To not only take control of Earth, but of time itself?

If so it’s not really a problem as the Doctor’s in the Tommy Westphall universe too. Still, makes you think doesn’t it?

If you want to get drawn into Tommy’s world, go here: http://home.vicnet.net.au/~kwgow/crossovers.html

Next week: Megatron – and not the version you’d expect.

And here’s your Moment of Angry Robot Zen: