Going Cosmic

"I can see through time!"

—Lalah Sune, test pilot of the Mobile Armor MAN-08 Elmeth.

Going Cosmic is when a show or story that was ostensibly about something else starts delving into deep theological and philosophical issues. Frequently, but not always, this entails the introduction of a monotheistic deity with a strong resemblance to the Judeo-Christian God.

In some cases, the show may have really been about something else to start with, but the writers ran out of ideas and so decided to explore the meaning of Life, the Universe, and Everything. This type of Going Cosmic is usually fairly sudden and happens at the start of a new season.

The other form of Going Cosmic is when the Cosmic ideas which were always in the background start shoving their way to the foreground and overshadowing everything else. This tends to be a more gradual process.

Usually indicates a Writer on Board. Expect a lot of What Do You Mean Its Not Symbolic and Contemplate Our Navels. Often results in Jumping the Shark. Sometimes a symptom of Cerebus Syndrome. Compare Big Damn Movie, where a film adaptation of a mundane series is given an epic storyline.

Doesn't have to do with Space X or other tropes that actually deal with space.

Examples of Going Cosmic include:

Anime & Manga

• Jojo's Bizarre Adventure starts a noticeable shift near the end of Part 5 when it starts taking on themes of fate, gravity, power, and so on, whereas before it involved mostly simple good vs. evil stories.
• The manga version of Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind goes this way towards the end.
• The level of mystical, philosophical weirdness caused by the main characters' Psychic Powers tends to escalate towards the end of most Gundam shows, though gods or anything like that are never mentioned.
• Outlaw Star started as a campy Space Opera filled with Fan Service, cat girls and some Magitech, it ended with wizards dueling in a massive space library that can grant wishes and a gigantic Battle in the Center of the Mind.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion is, at the beginning, a show about teenagers battling aliens in Humongous Mechas. Then they delve into psychology and apocalyptic transhumanism, and the last two episodes are exclusively spent psychoanalyzing the main characters and trying to formulate a way to end human suffering.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica is, at the beginning, a show about Magical Girls battling monsters as a payment for having their wish granted. Then suddenly it's about morality and how your actions reflect (your lack of) it. Then it's about eschatology and the efforts to stave it. And then the main character becomes God, with all the (mostly-unenviable) responsibilities of such position.

Film

• The movie musical The Apple has lots of symbolism and Dream Sequences throughout comparing the Corrupt Corporate Executive Mr. Boogalow to Lucifer, but then at the end there's a literal Deus Ex Machina where "Mr. Topps" descends from the sky in a golden Cadillac and it turns out Boogalow really IS Lucifer.
• The first Matrix movie was about humans fighting their enslavement by machines. By the third movie...your guess is as good as ours, but it sure was cosmic.
• Subverted with the Transformers films. The first film was a basic science fiction/action film with Transforming Mecha. Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen introduced the Fallen, the Lucifer/Judas character of the Transformers universe, as well as the story of the ancient Primes and Ancient Astronauts. For the third film, Unicron was considered, but the final product scales back from the grand scope introduced in the previous film, going back to the first film's science fiction/thriller tone, with the Autobots fighting a rogue Sentinel Prime and a full invasion force of Decepticons.

Literature

• Orson Scott Card is prone to Going Cosmic. The Ender series is a classic example, starting with the tightly written sci-fi classic Ender's Game, then getting more and more Cosmic with each successive sequel, as it expands into speaking for the dead, xenobiology, virology, philosophy, inter-dimensional travel, and inter-personal struggle.
  • Note that Philotes, as the third book was called when it was a mere draft, wasn't originally intended to be part of the series. Card's publisher forced him to add a third book to the series, and he figured that adding Ender to the existing story would both fulfill the requirement and add life to a story that wasn't very interesting as it was.
• The Chronicles of Narnia were always a Christian allegory, but the "allegory" part got lost somewhere along the way, with the final book being pretty much a direct stand-in for Revelation.
  • Something similar happens in the pro-atheist His Dark Materials trilogy, a counterpoint to Narnia.
    • Ofcourse it started out with this very intention, while Narnia drifted casually towards increasing Anviliciousness before the author realized what he was doing...and decided to make the final parts as drenched in allegory as humanly possible.
• Joe Haldeman's classic The Forever War is a science-fiction allegory for the Vietnam War that uses relativistic "time travel" to great dramatic effect. The sequel, Forever Free, involves discovering the true purpose of life in the Milky Way and meeting (essentially) God.
• Frank Herbert's Dune - The first novel is a measured study of the interplay of ecology, science, religion & politics, but is positively action-packed compared to the fourth book, God Emperor of Dune.
• Stationery Voyagers plays with this. It begins cosmic and theological from its first episode in order to build its world. The war between angels and demons takes precedence at first, and then it becomes about diplomacy vs. terrorism. About nationalist sovereignty vs. globalist centralism. By season 3, it's about the Culture War, placing emphasis on a world that can't decide if it's the The Seventies or The Nineties given what issues spring up amidst Political Correctness Gone Mad and other things. But it's a dangerous world full of WretchedHives full of Ax Crazy left-wing organizations depicted as being just like the Weather Underground. Or Commie Nazis. Only to find themselves hijacked by the supernatural villains.
• The Golden Compass is a fantasy-adventure story with an evil church as the bad guys. The following books in the His Dark Materials trilogy go cosmic by extending across various universes including Heaven and the Underworld and the Big Bad being God (or an angel claiming to be God; still, it gets very theological and epic).

Live Action TV

• The remake of Battlestar Galactica Reimagined. The show started out as the story of a bunch of human survivors on the run from renegade robots bent on genocide, with occasional hints at a theological basis for the whole business. In later seasons, the episodes of divine intervention became more and more blatant.
• Supernatural started out as a Monster of the Week show focused on urban legends. Now it's about the impending Apocalypse, with angels and demons duking it out, Greek and Egyptian gods showing up, Lucifer sermonizing on the evils of humanity, and the protagonists caught in the middle. The monster legend adaptations also got less accurate.
• Star Trek did this with Deep Space Nine. Technically, the god-like entities are explained as being non-corporeal life-forms that exist inside a wormhole, but they differ from gods only in title, and sometimes even that distinction is eliminated as one of the focal points of the series is an entire planet that religiously worships the wormhole aliens. Captain Sisko at many times tries to provide scientific explanations for what goes on, but later on the series is forced to admit that the universe holds things queerer than we can fathom, and that the religious followers might actually be right about a lot of things. The Prophets' role in the story and Captain Sisko's role as their "emissary" increases steadily every season.
• Stargate SG-1 got much more serious in the last two seasons with the charlatan Goa'uld and classic science fiction themes being replaced by the Ori, who bear a much stronger resemblance to actual deities.
• There was a lot of this in the later seasons of Xena: Warrior Princess.

Tabletop Games

• Many games of Unknown Armies have this as the explicit goal. First you start off learning about how weird and twisted the world really is. Then you move among the people who embrace the weirdness, and maybe pick up some of it yourself. And then you start competing in the game to remake the universe...

Video Games

• Xenogears. What starts out as a game about using giant robots to overthrow an oppressive technologically advanced empire steps off the edge of the pier at the start of the second disk and quickly turns into game about killing "god" and stopping a madman with a Messiah Complex from ending human existence as we know it. The game starts throwing out Old Testament biblical references like they'd just gone bad to the degree that you either need to be well-versed in Biblical lore or play the game with a decent encyclopedia close by for it to make sense.
• Pokémon started out with a variety of animalistic creatures that at times show relation to certain concepts and natural forces, but weren't really considered to be rulers or representatives of said forces; the rarest monsters were much more scientific in orientation (Mew being the genetic ancestor to all Pokémon, his clone Mewtwo being genetically engineered). Since then, we've had Pokémon that have been able to revive the dead (Ho-oh), Pokémon that rule over land, water, and air (Groudon, Kyogre, and Rayquaza, respectively), Pokémon that rule over time, space, and other dimensions (Dialga, Palkia, and Giratina), Pokémon that rule over elements of the human mind (the Lake Trio), and finally, God (Arceus).
  • And now we have what seem to be representations of Dark Yin and Light Yang with Zekrom and Reshiram.
• Mass Effect 3 has this occur in the last five minutes of a three game-spanning epic, and as expected, it's handled less than smoothly, attempts to change the overarching theme of the narrative and results in a Gainax Ending with Inferred Holocaust. Cue Internet Backdraft on a hitherto unprecedented scale.
• Marathon: Gheritt White had been floating six feet off the floor for three weeks...

Western Animation

• Transformers went this way in the Beast Era. Beast Wars was about small groups of Maximals and Predacons fighting a relatively small war with big consequences on prehistoric Earth, but towards the end brought in the Transformers' religion. The sequel show, Beast Machines, was all about identity, consciousness, and the balance between freedom and chaos.
  • Oddly for the metaseries, religion was dealt with exclusively from the perspective of the faithful, arguing over interpretation of their holy text. Usually, when a Transformers series goes religious, it means Robot God Primus and Robot Satan Unicron are at it again in a cosmic battle for the fate of the universe. Considerably more awesome, but less philosophical.
  • Exactly how cosmic a Transformers series becomes depends on the creators of the particular work of fiction. The Unicron Trilogy dealt heavily with Primus and Unicron, with long, epic stories surrounding the Autobots and Decepticons being caught in the battle of the two gods. Naturally, as those series were considered lukewarm at best, and horrible at worst, the two series following those (Transformers Animated and the Transformers Film Series) kept Primus and Unicron out of the limelight. While the films' Expanded Universe hinted at the two existing, they were never shown to be proactive in the present. Meanwhile, Animated decided to be rather ambiguous about the Transformers' origins, though Word of God says that, as far as he is concerned, Primus doesn't exist, though Unicron might. The main reason for leaving the two out of the equation is that, when one boils down to it, having an ultimate force for Good and an ultimate force for Evil in a story usually ensures that the Good will undoubtedly win (at least when applied to a children's show). It's no wonder then that IDW's comics also skirt around the issue; there's more drama when things don't necessarily happen Because Destiny Says So. Transformers Prime, and the new Aligned Continuity as a whole, have brought Primus and Unicron back, however; but since this is now more or less an Ultimate Universe for Transformers, it's only natural that the two be included in some form.
  • In Transformers Prime, we go the Devil but No God route: "By the Allspark" is the go-to "Oh My Gods" exclamation of choice as seen in some other series, but that's all we get on the creative side of things. Unicron, however? His blood is the "Dark Energon" that is used to basically perform Black Magic without calling it that, and Megatron's been pretty Badass since jabbing a chunk of it into his Spark. What's it doing on Earth? Unicron is the Earth's core, under our feet the whole time, that's what.