Battlestar Galactica What Has Happened Before Will Happen Again
'It'southward funny, isn't it? We're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I run across the beloved that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Mankind and Bone' (ane.08)[1]
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Ane of the curious features of series tv set is its incompleteness. Where a novel, a painting or even a play arrives fully formed, its early drafts or preliminary sketches subsumed into a complete and unified whole, idiot box shows are fabricated up as they continue, evolving along the way. Sometimes the changes are large, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of emphasis and shifting focus, yet either manner they ensure that equally the years pass no television bear witness is ever the evidence it started as.
It's interesting therefore, as SciFi Aqueduct's Battlestar Galactica enters the second half of its fourth and final season, to wonder how conspicuously Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-serial foresaw the way the bear witness would apace exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original take on genre television receiver into something far richer and stranger.
Watching those early episodes again, it's difficult non to see the way the testify already pushed against the conventions of science fiction television. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a future – or perhaps a past – that looks surprisingly like our present. Confined for the nearly role to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the show's claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the tendency of about scientific discipline fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their identify the show offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Ring of Brothers, an oftentimes hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and jump-cutting editing[ii]. Fifty-fifty the swelling orchestral score that has defined scientific discipline fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Acquit McCreary's hauntingly minimal soundscapes of countless taiko drums and wind chimes, music that sounds more like the Philip Glass of Akhnaten than John Williams (and indeed, on at to the lowest degree one occasion, actually is Philip Drinking glass)[3].
Yet confronted with Battlestar Galactica's increasingly haunted and haunting third season, and the extraordinary first half of its 4th, their vision of ii societies deranged by war and adumbral by visions of both conservancy and destruction, it is still difficult to believe that the foreign, troubling and often beautiful creation the show has go was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and often visceral edge that marks the early on episodes remains, it has become just 1 element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and often deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties nearly war and terrorism and the chapters of violence and trauma to unmake lodge and individuals, as well as an intensely disquieting meditation on the shifting boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, u.s. and them, Human and Other.
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For those who grew upward in the 1970s and 1980s as I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is probable to exist familiar from the original serial of the same name. Humanity, spread across the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is well-nigh annihilated in a surprise attack by the Cylons. In the chaotic aftermath of the attack a ragtag fleet of refugees manage to escape and, banding together under the protection of the terminal remaining battlestar, embark upon a search for the mythical thirteenth colony, Earth.
The original serial is one of the camp classics of 1970s sci-fi boob tube. One part Star Wars, one part a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson's Mormon heritage, it survived a single season, producing twenty-four hours of boob tube and a universally derided spin-off serial, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally found Earth, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the arrival of their cousins from the stars.
Yet for all its woozy 1970s new age trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('In that location are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.. . . . Some believe that there may all the same be brothers of man who even at present fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original prove )something of the original serial wove its way into the pop consciousness, as did its one enduring image, that of the single red Cylon eye, moving inexorably from side to side in the visor of their chrome-plated helmets.
The revisioned Battlestar Galactica recasts the concept of the original series in contemporary terms. No longer an expression of Common cold State of war paranoia, the story of the assail and the fleet'due south desperate flying is grounded in early twenty-first-century, post-nine/11 anxieties virtually terrorism and the decline of the West. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series accept go the last remnants of a shattered society quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the benevolent gaze of Lorne Light-green's original Commander Adama, the fleet is now divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can exercise little to comprise. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a place of wondrous water ice planets and shimmering lights, but a cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken simply by isolated planets devoid of all merely the simplest organic life.
Yet it is the Cylons who are the most haunting creation of the revisioned serial. Where in the original series they are a faceless race of lizard-like aliens, in the revisioned series they have been reborn every bit artificial beings, some, replicant-like, indistinguishable from ourselves and identified past their model numbers (Two, Three, Half dozen, 8), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy limited by inbuilt constraints.
Created not in some alien lab but, as the opening credits inform united states of america in a terse, telegraphed series of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Man. They Rebelled. They Evolved. At that place Are Many Copies. And They Have a Plan'[4], by humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a hidden but revelatory beauty, and uncanny, often greatly disturbing simulacra of homo beings, they are at once like but unlike, manufactured yet alive, Human yet profoundly Other.
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Technically speaking of course, the new Battlestar Galactica is neither a continuation of the original series nor a remake. Many narrative elements are retained, non least the names and call signs of central characters such as the fleet'south commander, William Adama, his Executive Officeholder, Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Adama'southward son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), and the egotistic scientific genius, Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Others, such equally Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the contradistinct gender relations of the show's military, an organisation in which men and women fight, wash and sleep together (even the toilets are unisex). At least two, Boomer and Tigh, accept besides been transformed into Cylons, in both cases as sleeper agents, initially unaware of their own identity[five].
Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (M.01) we are informed that forty years take passed since the ceasefire that ended the war betwixt the humans and the Cylons, xl years in which the Cylons take remained invisible across the demarcation zone. The Galactica herself, pride of the fleet in the original series, is at present an ageing relic scheduled for decommission, destined to serve as a museum.
Thus the revisioned series is placed in a universe in which many of the elements of the original series remain, nowadays yet absent-minded. The war of forty years earlier is presumably the same state of war in which the original serial took place, yet the set on itself lies in the future, not the by. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both as cultural memory and in specific appropriations and allusions, nonetheless the testify is not bound by it in any mode[6].
The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate as The Aeneid, The Book of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, as well as suggesting other, more than mystic parallels in the Zodiacal names of the Twelve Colonies (Caprica, Sagittaron, Gemenon and so on) and the idols and rituals of the Colonials' polytheistic religion. Like the playful appropriation of scientific discipline fictional tropes such as the term 'skinjobs' to describe the replicant humanoid Cylons from Ridley Scott'due south Blade Runner (in which Olmos also appeared) and the spectral images of the Cylon Hybrids that control the Cylon Basestars lost in waking dreams similar the Delphic precogs in Steven Spielberg'south Minority Written report, or the more than subtle incorporation of sacred texts and language (Kobol, the proper noun of the planet from which the humans fled prior to the founding of the Twelve Colonies, means 'Sky' in Persian, while the evidence'south melancholy theme music incorporates a Hindu Mantra)[7], these mythic elements are highly suggestive, generating parallels and allusions while simultaneously denying like shooting fish in a barrel or reductive correlations. It is a process made more powerful by the repeated suggestion that the events depicted in the narrative are part of some larger whole (non for null are we told the Cylons 'Have a Plan' in the opening credits), some wheel of time in which by and time to come are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the evidence's core, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen over again'[8].
This blurring of the familiar and the unfamiliar is a narrative strategy Battlestar Galactica too employs to anchor its political subtexts. For all that its contemporary political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety most apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of ceremonious society by the military, torture and religious extremism, there is seldom any easy correlation between events in the series and events in the real world. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified past the events of the first 4 episodes of the 3rd series. Following the discovery at the stop of the second season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar'due south defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the kickoff free elections held after the attack, much of the fleet abandons their ships to settle on the planet, now called New Caprica, only to notice themselves, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, living under Cylon occupation.
With Galactica gone, the colonists are left undefended, forced to resist the Cylons in whatever way they can. Some, like Baltar, have little choice but to work with their Cylon masters; others decline to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. Equally the Cylon government resorts to ever more than brutal tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves abound more extreme, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to kill Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human police force.
Role of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral order of u.s.a. and them, right and wrong, Human and Other implicit in the show'due south conception, these episodes practice non just undermine the like shooting fish in a barrel identification between insurgent and terrorist, but past explicitly invoking the retentiveness of quisling governments such equally Vichy, suggest the simplistic historical parallels often drawn between the war in Iraq and the Second World War are far less comforting than they are unremarkably assumed to exist.
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This sort of destabilisation is of course the bespeak and power of science fiction, still Battlestar Galactica deploys information technology with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Bone' (1.08), a Cylon amanuensis is found within the human armada. Convinced its information volition be worthless, Commander Adama argues it should be thrown out an airlock but President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the agent, a Two known equally Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), be interrogated.
Starbuck is assigned the task of interrogating the captive Cylon, a task she takes to with disturbing zeal, brutally beating Leoben until at last President Roslin interrupts. Seemingly appalled at what she has found, President Roslin demands to know what is going on. Unabashed, Starbuck responds, 'It'south a machine, sir, there'south no limit to the tactics I tin can use.'
It is a sequence that is agonizing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that none of the characters involved evince whatever reservations almost the use of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is not debated, nor is there any suggestion the characters regret their actions. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in straight breach of her own offering of immunity, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock only moments afterward he provides the information she seeks.
At one level these instances of brutality on the role of the human characters are of a piece with the recurrent proffer that the Twelve Colonies may have been a less than ideal society, for all its autonomous trappings. When in 'Bastille 24-hour interval' (ane.03) it is discovered the political agitator and terrorist Tom Zarek is incarcerated on a prison ship send within the fleet, Apollo admits to having read his books at university, despite them beingness banned (possibly seduced by the neatness of the idea, the serial toys for a time with the notion that Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original series, might serve as a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his former self). In another episode, 'Hero' (three.08), nosotros acquire the military may have provoked the Cylon assault with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of forty years before. And while its exact nature is left ambiguous, the administration in which President Roslin served before the attack seems to take been both politically inept and surprisingly brutal: in a scene set only hours before the attack President Adar demands Roslin's resignation because she has managed to defuse a teacher'southward strike Adar had planned to break up with troops in order to provide an example to other groups seeking to sway the authorities in similar ways.
The ambiguity these glancing references creates is left unexplored. Indeed given that the series is predicated upon unthinkable grief and loss, Battlestar Galactica provides trivial in the style of backstory (and on those occasions it does, one usually wishes it had connected to err on the side of silence). The vision of space information technology creates, its emptiness and blackness, is quite literally a place of decease, a fact reinforced by the recurring device of characters existence blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions we know next to naught of the lives of the characters before the attacks: sometimes nosotros glimpse photographs, occasionally names are mentioned, and on several occasions we see the galleries on Galactica'due south lower decks where, in a haunting reminder of the message boards that sprung upwardly in New York in the days after September xi, the crew have pinned pictures and messages and other memorabilia of the lost, but past and big the show inhabits a world where the by has been, quite literally, obliterated.
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Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Leobon Conoy (Callum Keith Rennie)
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Nonetheless the implications of the events depicted in 'Flesh and Bone' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration'southward prosecution of the state of war on terror. While the human characters see the Cylons as inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to see them non as an implacable Other, but as something both less and more familiar. For all that he does not fear death, Leoben feels pain, fearfulness, hunger and, most unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual conventionalities. 'I see the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might be like, 'I know that I'one thousand more than this torso, more than this consciousness. A role of me swims in the stream but in truth, I'm continuing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream.'
In 'Mankind and Os' and elsewhere, much of the pleasure of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie's disconcerting performance. With his scraggy hair and battered blond looks he most resembles some cracked, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes come across beyond this globe, yet whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously propose something dangerously mercurial. By contrast the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Bone' is a woman swaggeringly certain of her own convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben'due south suffering might be more than simulated.
The result is an encounter that blurs the distinction between Human being and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and by extension Colonial society as a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the matter she seeks to destroy[9].
The boundary between human and Cylon has already begun to mistiness before the scenes with Leoben. We accept learned Cylons are biological replicas of man beings, almost indistinguishable even at a cellular level[10], as well as encountering at least two Cylons (both Eights), the Sharon known every bit Boomer and the Sharon assigned to breed with Helo on Caprica, who not only resist their programming, but too feel conflicted by human love, desire and loyalty. Likewise we have been offered many disquieting images of human cruelty, and of the horrors of war more generally. (In the episode 'Flight of the Phoenix' (2.09) we witness a squadron of Vipers massacre hundreds of disabled and defenceless Cylon raiders. While the pilots and Galactica's bridge coiffure whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfortable reactions.)
Notwithstanding it is not until the eye of the show'due south second season, and what may well stand as its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the stardom between human and Cylon has become. After surviving for more than than a year on the run, Galactica and the noncombatant armada run into some other Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has also managed to survive the attack upon the colonies. Merely the initial jubilation over finding other survivors quickly gives way to ailment. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew have go instruments of total war, loyal only to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their cause.
The parallels with the Bush administration's state of war on terror are evident, not least in Cain's barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of civilian government that endures in the fleet ('The Secretary for Educational activity?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her first interview with him and President Roslin). Only it is not the frighteningly conspicuously fatigued portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic heart (in another of the serial' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama eventually agree the but manner to comprise Cain is to corrupt themselves, and murder her) but the revelation that Pegasus has a Cylon prisoner in her brig.
When Baltar examines the prisoner and extracts what information he can, he discovers a Six (Tricia Helfer), a model he has been in dear with since before the attack on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her torso displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual attack.
The discovery is securely disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, but it is the following scenes that complete the reversal of roles that is prefigured in 'Mankind and Os'. Unbeknown to Adama and President Roslin, Cain orders her intelligence officeholder, Lieutenant Thorne, to interrogate the Eight known as Sharon (Grace Park) who, having betrayed her race to help the stranded Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) escape Caprica is now held in Galactica's brig. In a series of viscerally agonizing scenes that cutting between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica's flight deck and Galactica's brig, we circle inwards, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon's cell (constructed, in a visual repeat of Guantanamo Bay's holding pens, of wire mesh within a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus coiffure boasting about their treatment of the Six in their brig, see Sharon'due south incertitude plow to first to concern then terror every bit Thorne and the troops with him force her face downwardly on her bed and rape her.
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Admiral Adama (James Lee Olmos) and Saul Tigh (William Hogan)
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No incertitude this game of shifting sympathies, and growing dubiety about the boundaries betwixt the human and the Cylon Other would exist less effective if it were not embedded in Battlestar Galactica's broader interest in exploring the chapters of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the bear witness'due south relentless downward spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more than important, connecting the question of the relationship betwixt the Human and the Cylon Other to the question of the survival of both.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica presents a vision of refuse that is almost unique in serial television, its four seasons non charting humanity's triumph over adversity, but the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what is left of homo society. This solitary would brand for confronting viewing, however the bear witness goes further, weaving its depiction of this process into a grander mythic narrative.
In quantitative terms this process is charted in the number that flashes up at the end of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, it ticks ever downwards from its offset reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-as in the first survivor count subsequently the escape from New Caprica-drastically, but always downwards, reaching, by midway through the 4th season, a mere 39,685.
In more human terms it is also visible in the gradual fraying of the fleet itself. Episode by episode the toll in lives weighs more than heavily upon the characters, in particular the fighter pilots who are the forepart line of defense force. Although the men and women of Galactica are the heroes of the slice, the show has few illusions well-nigh the reality of military machine life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive risk-takers, and there are more than than a few scenes that remind the viewer of the violence and dehumanisation that is a necessary part of military machine life. Simultaneously though we are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, human being beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Besides the many scenes of dress uniform ceremonies that occur in early episodes quickly fade, ceremony eroded by the need to survive.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica often subverts one of the basic tenets of series idiot box. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the most office, remain abiding over fourth dimension, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can only emerge radically and irreparably altered, a process that is well-nigh evident in the episodes set during the occupation of New Caprica. All the same while all the characters are implicated in this often brutal procedure of psychological and social disintegration, growing increasingly embittered and damaged every bit the serial proceeds, it is in the person of President Roslin that the procedure is most starkly drawn.
President Laura Roslin, and indeed the entire notion of a surviving noncombatant government, is i of the masterstrokes of the serial as a whole. The quondam secretary for pedagogy, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies afterward the xl-ii members of the government ahead of her fail to report in line with emergency protocols. A onetime schoolteacher, and initially regarded as a soft-headed junior member of a government-Adama himself admits to not having voted for her: 'President Adar was an idiot,' he remarks at one point-President Roslin assumes the reins of power essentially unknown and lilliputian-respected. At showtime her principal concern is preserving lives, but by the first episode of the first serial, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to requite the order to destroy a ship carrying 1500 civilians because she believes a Cylon agent on board threatens the entire fleet. This blooding begins a journey that sees President Roslin grow into a hawk of such swift brutality she unnerves fifty-fifty Adama (when, in 'A Measure of Conservancy' (three.07), Roslin is offered a means to destroy the Cylons forever she does non glimmer at genocide).
Nevertheless this transformation is not without its costs. By the fourth serial, haunted by visions from the chamalla extract she has been taking in an effort to stave off the spreading cancer within her, President Roslin experiences a long hallucination in the moments betwixt hyperspace jumps in which she is confronted with just how removed from human feeling she has become, unable to love, unable even to feel (the episodes of the kickoff half of the fourth season also dangle the possibility that Roslin is herself a Cylon).
Nor is this focus on the deranging furnishings of state of war upon societies is not express to Battlestar Galactica's portrait of human society. Although in the early episodes Cylon society remains substantially inscrutable, past the 2d and third series information technology is less so, as the serial explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (2.18), which is gear up not amid the man characters merely among the Cylons on the now-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.
Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer's contact with fully functioning Cylon characters has been express to encounters with individual agents, such every bit the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the 3 known as D'Anna in 'Final Cut'. The three continuing presences in the first and second series-the Six who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the starting time season and culminates in its shocking finale; and the Eight known equally Sharon who helps Helo escape from Caprica-are all either unaware of their true identity or separated in some way from the bulk of Cylon order.
'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The first is the Half dozen who used Baltar to admission the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the 2d is Boomer, who, having been killed after her attempt to assassinate Adama, has now downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed equally heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. All the same despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon society. Boomer, nevertheless horrified past the discovery of her truthful identity, exists in a land of existential rage and despair, while the Vi is haunted by the cognition of her function in the deaths of so many billions also as by her beloved for Baltar.
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A Three (Lucy Lawless) wakes in a resurrection pod
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The question of individuality and what information technology might mean haunts 'Downloaded', as well as later episodes focussing on Cylon characters (by the 4th season the Cylons are often referred to in the singular, as 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and collective nature of Cylon society). Just like the images of a San Francisco populated by alien replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman's 1978 film Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, at that place is something profoundly unsettling virtually the idea of a society inhabited by duplicates (perhaps the more then in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the process of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the set on, engaged in some unexplained attempt to reproduce the human world and then recently extinguished)[11].
Yet as we come up to sympathise more near Cylon society information technology becomes clear exactly why Caprica Half-dozen and Boomer'south resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon society is collective, a unit in which decisions are made by the group, the models voting as blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the bulk. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to exist inside and outside some sort of hive listen, sharing memories and experiences yet still individuated. To deny the group is therefore to deny the whole, a violence of a profound and almost unimaginable kind.
In this respect the Cylons (or Cylon) are a disquieting creation, uncanny copies both of each other and of their human creators. At one time human and non, live however undying, created beings that both simulate and experience emotion, desire, pain, their presence drives a radical instability of meaning, i that echoes precisely the instances of doppelgangers and simulacra that Freud describes every bit instances of the uncanny[12] (the mantra of the Cylons, 'All this has happened before, and volition happen again', might as well be seen as another instance of this Freudian blueprint of recurrence, or indeed of that other almost uncanny sense of repetition, déjà vu).
This strangeness is given its most powerful expression in the scenes and episodes aboard the Cylon basestars in Seasons Three and Four. In dissimilarity to the relatively banal simulation of human society glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might be to exist Cylon. Moving silently through space in their beautiful, geometric Basestars, the immortal Cylons seem to exist both within and outside fourth dimension, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.
It is this unity the Caprica Six and Boomer's resistance threatens, outset past its very nature and later, more direct, by their decision to kill a young man Cylon in order to preclude her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In so doing they spark a series of events that lead first to the doomed endeavour to alive alongside the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and ceremonious war that divides Cylon gild in Flavour Iv.
Such a class is the fulfilment of the Oedipal conflict that begins the series. It is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, yet information technology is likewise a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the issue of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the ii species. Now they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The two are now destined to become one, or perish.
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Sol Tigh (Michael Hogan) interrogates Boomer (Grace Park)
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It will be interesting to discover exactly how Battlestar Galactica'due south producers intend to resolve the remarkable web of narrative and thematic complexities the series has created over the by four seasons in the ten episodes that remain. Making sense of the many competing allusions and expectations they create is likely to show challenging, not least considering any resolution volition need to fulfil the demands of the words that have haunted the serial, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen again.'
But in a way the path is already prepare and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica's third season, in the climactic scene of Baltar's trial for crimes confronting humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned oral communication calling for his amortization. As he speaks he gropes towards the reason then many are assail killing Baltar, a man he and many others hate.
'Because you lot're weak,' Apollo says 'Because you're arrogant … Because yous're a coward, and we the mob, desire to throw you out of the airlock because you didn't stand up to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process. You lot should accept been killed back on New Caprica, only since you lot had the temerity to live, we're going to execute yous.'
But equally Apollo speaks we run into him begin to understand the respond to the question he has been struggling to clear. 'This case is built on emotion, on acrimony, bitterness, vengeance. But virtually of all, it is built on shame … And nosotros're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one human and and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. And then that nosotros tin live with ourselves.'
It is a cathartic moment in more means than one. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in lodge to defend a human being both concord in contempt, information technology signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.
But it also signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not articulate to those present, just which reach into the heart of the testify. For in recognising that Baltar, the bandage out, the abject, must be admitted back into the fold, Apollo articulates the possibility of resolution of the deeper disharmonize that gives the series breath, that between humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were once their children, but rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to be explored in the testify's final season. For in the cease at that place is no us and them, no human and Other. We are them, and they are us. And all of this has happened before, and will happen once again.
Starbuck (Kara Thrace)
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Notes:
1 In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified past the series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode four of series 2 is denoted past the number 2.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired as a dissever stand-alone episode, is causeless to form the first ii episodes of Series 4 (4.01 and 4.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted Chiliad.01 and K.02. Where differences exist between the episodes circulate and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode ii.ten, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some fifteen minutes of extra textile), references are to the version released on DVD.
two Much of Battlestar Galactica's very particular (and extremely coherent) visual style is the piece of work of the Australian manager, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (One thousand.01 and M.02) and more than a tertiary of the beginning iii and a half seasons.
three For a fuller discussion of Battlestar Galactica's use of music, see Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Audible Space', in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended discussion of Behave McCreary'due south influences and his Battlestar Galactica score tin exist institute in Tina Huang'south review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 original soundtrack album. Philip Drinking glass's 'Metamorphosis Five' is used as a recurring motif during Starbuck'south visit to her abased flat on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (2.02).
iv The opening credit montage alters subtly across the four seasons. In Flavour 1 information technology also includes the boosted phrases 'They look and feel human being. Some are programmed to think they are human', while in Season iv we are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four alive in secret. One will be revealed'.
5 Given the by and large heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix by and large notable for the relatively modest number of black characters, it is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the one African-American grapheme in the original series, has non merely been transformed into a woman, but into an Asian woman.
half-dozen The revisioned series also deliberately invokes the outdated technology of the original series, in details such as the Korean Regular army telephones that are used on Galactica and visual jokes, such as the Cylon uniform from the original serial glimpsed as a museum showroom in the first episode of the mini-series (Grand.01) and in Razor (4.02), and as a plot device (Galactica survives the initial set on because its blowsy systems are not networked, and therefore are protected from the Cylon virus that disables the defence networks (M.01)).
seven The Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rig Veda: "OM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât (may we attain that first-class glory of Savitar the God / and so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/trivia).
8 A more extended discussion of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is available in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall'southward insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).
9 For a fuller discussion of this point run across Erika Johnson-Lewis' 'Torture, Terrorism and Other Aspects of Human Nature', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 27-39.
10 The verbal nature of the skinjobs' biology remains somewhat mysterious. Despite being informed Cylons are essentially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, nosotros learn the early biological Cylons were hybrids of human and machine) and it being clear Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in i episode we accept too seen Athena insert a computer cable into her arm and interface with Galactica's computer systems directly, suggesting their bodies have functions that exceed the man and hark dorsum to their cybernetic origins.
11 Information technology is maybe not adventitious that the Cylons seem near focused on creating a replica of what looks like a Starbucks in their reconstruction of Caprica.
12 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin, 2003. For a fuller Freudian estimation of Cylons and Cylon corporeality, run into Alison Peirse, 'Uncanny Cylons: Resurrection and Bodies of Horror', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 118–28.
Originally published in Meanjin, Vol 67, No iv, 2008. © James Bradley, 2008.
Source: https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happened-before/
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