All of This Has Happened Before and It Will All Happen Again But This Time It Happened in London
'It's funny, isn't it? We're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I see the love that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Mankind and Bone' (1.08)[i]
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One of the curious features of series television 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, television shows are fabricated up as they go forth, evolving along the way. Sometimes the changes are big, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of accent and shifting focus, yet either mode they ensure that as the years pass no idiot box show is ever the prove information technology started as.
Information technology'due south interesting therefore, as SciFi Channel'due south Battlestar Galactica enters the 2d half of its fourth and final flavor, to wonder how clearly Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-series foresaw the way the show would rapidly exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original accept on genre television receiver into something far richer and stranger.
Watching those early on episodes over again, it's difficult non to see the manner the bear witness already pushed confronting the conventions of science fiction television. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their identify is a future – or perchance a past – that looks surprisingly similar our present. Bars for the well-nigh part to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the prove's claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling infinite battles eschew the tendency of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their place the show offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, an often hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and bound-cutting editing[2]. Even the swelling orchestral score that has divers science fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Bear McCreary'southward hauntingly minimal soundscapes of endless taiko drums and current of air chimes, music that sounds more like the Philip Glass of Akhnaten than John Williams (and indeed, on at least one occasion, really is Philip Glass)[3].
Yet confronted with Battlestar Galactica'due south increasingly haunted and haunting third flavor, and the extraordinary first half of its 4th, their vision of ii societies deranged by war and adumbral by visions of both salvation and destruction, it is nevertheless difficult to believe that the foreign, troubling and frequently beautiful creation the show has become was in its creators' minds from the first. For although the intense and oftentimes visceral edge that marks the early episodes remains, it has go just one element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and oftentimes deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties well-nigh war and terrorism and the capacity of violence and trauma to unmake society and individuals, likewise every bit 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 up in the 1970s and 1980s equally I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is likely to be familiar from the original serial of the aforementioned proper noun. Humanity, spread across the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is virtually annihilated in a surprise assail by the Cylons. In the cluttered aftermath of the set on a canaille fleet of refugees manage to escape and, banding together under the protection of the last remaining battlestar, embark upon a search for the mythical thirteenth colony, World.
The original series is one of the campsite classics of 1970s sci-fi television. One part Star Wars, one part a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson'southward Mormon heritage, it survived a unmarried season, producing twenty-iv hours of telly and a universally derided spin-off series, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally constitute Earth, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the arrival of their cousins from the stars.
All the same for all its woozy 1970s new age trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may take been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.. . . . Some believe that there may yet be brothers of human being who even at present fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original show )something of the original series wove its manner into the popular consciousness, as did its one enduring epitome, that of the single blood-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 serial in contemporary terms. No longer an expression of Common cold War paranoia, the story of the attack and the fleet'south desperate flight is grounded in early twenty-first-century, mail-9/eleven anxieties about terrorism and the decline of the West. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series take become the last remnants of a shattered society quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the benevolent gaze of Lorne Green'south original Commander Adama, the armada is now divided and suspicious, haunted past political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can do petty to incorporate. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a identify of wondrous water ice planets and shimmering lights, simply a common cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken but by isolated planets devoid of all but the simplest organic life.
Yet information technology is the Cylons who are the most haunting creation of the revisioned series. Where in the original series they are a faceless race of lizard-similar aliens, in the revisioned series they have been reborn as bogus beings, some, replicant-similar, indistinguishable from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Two, Iii, Vi, Eight), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy express by inbuilt constraints.
Created not in some alien lab merely, as the opening credits inform us in a terse, telegraphed series of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Human. They Rebelled. They Evolved. At that place Are Many Copies. And They Have a Program'[4], by humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a subconscious but revelatory beauty, and uncanny, often greatly disturbing simulacra of human beings, they are at once like but unlike, manufactured even so live, Homo 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, not least the names and phone call signs of primal characters such every bit the armada's commander, William Adama, his Executive Officer, Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Adama's son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), and the narcissistic scientific genius, Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Others, such every bit Katee Sackhoff'southward Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the evidence's military, an arrangement in which men and women fight, wash and slumber together (fifty-fifty the toilets are unisex). At to the lowest degree two, Boomer and Tigh, have also been transformed into Cylons, in both cases as sleeper agents, initially unaware of their ain identity[5].
Nevertheless other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (G.01) we are informed that xl years have passed since the ceasefire that concluded the state of war between the humans and the Cylons, forty years in which the Cylons take remained invisible beyond the demarcation zone. The Galactica herself, pride of the fleet in the original series, is now an ageing relic scheduled for decommission, destined to serve every bit a museum.
Thus the revisioned series is placed in a universe in which many of the elements of the original series remain, present nevertheless absent. The war of forty years earlier is presumably the same war in which the original series took place, still the assault itself lies in the futurity, not the past. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both equally cultural memory and in specific appropriations and allusions, nevertheless the prove is not bound by it in whatever way[6].
The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources every bit disparate equally The Aeneid, The Book of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, as well as suggesting other, more mystic parallels in the Zodiacal names of the Twelve Colonies (Caprica, Sagittaron, Gemenon and and then on) and the idols and rituals of the Colonials' polytheistic organized religion. Like the playful cribbing of science fictional tropes such as the term 'skinjobs' to describe the replicant humanoid Cylons from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (in which Olmos also appeared) and the spectral images of the Cylon Hybrids that command the Cylon Basestars lost in waking dreams like the Delphic precogs in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, or the more 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 'Heaven' in Western farsi, while the show's melancholy theme music incorporates a Hindu Mantra)[7], these mythic elements are highly suggestive, generating parallels and allusions while simultaneously denying easy or reductive correlations. It is a process fabricated more than powerful past the repeated proffer that the events depicted in the narrative are part of some larger whole (not for naught are we told the Cylons 'Have a Program' in the opening credits), some cycle of time in which by and future are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the prove'southward cadre, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen again'[8].
This blurring of the familiar and the unfamiliar is a narrative strategy Battlestar Galactica also employs to anchor its political subtexts. For all that its gimmicky political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety well-nigh apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of civil guild by the armed services, torture and religious extremism, there is seldom whatsoever easy correlation betwixt events in the series and events in the real world. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified by the events of the beginning four episodes of the third series. Post-obit the discovery at the end of the second season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar'due south defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the first free elections held after the attack, much of the armada abandons their ships to settle on the planet, at present called New Caprica, merely to find 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, similar Baltar, accept footling choice but to work with their Cylon masters; others turn down to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. As the Cylon regime resorts to ever more brutal tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more extreme, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to kill Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human police force.
Office of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral order of us and them, correct and wrong, Human being and Other implicit in the show's formulation, these episodes practise not only undermine the piece of cake identification between insurgent and terrorist, only by explicitly invoking the memory of quisling governments such every bit Vichy, advise the simplistic historical parallels often fatigued between the war in Iraq and the Second World War are far less comforting than they are usually assumed to be.
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This sort of destabilisation is of course the indicate and power of science fiction, still Battlestar Galactica deploys it with specially unsettling results. In 'Mankind and Bone' (1.08), a Cylon amanuensis is establish within the human armada. Convinced its information will exist worthless, Commander Adama argues information technology should be thrown out an airlock but President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the amanuensis, a Two known as Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), be interrogated.
Starbuck is assigned the task of interrogating the captive Cylon, a job 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's a machine, sir, there'southward no limit to the tactics I tin can apply.'
Information technology is a sequence that is disturbing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that none of the characters involved evince whatever reservations about the use of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is non debated, nor is there any proffer the characters regret their deportment. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in directly breach of her own offer of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock only moments after he provides the information she seeks.
At one level these instances of brutality on the part of the human characters are of a piece with the recurrent proposition that the Twelve Colonies may take been a less than ideal gild, for all its democratic trappings. When in 'Guardhouse Day' (1.03) it is discovered the political agitator and terrorist Tom Zarek is incarcerated on a prison transport transport inside the fleet, Apollo admits to having read his books at university, despite them existence banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the idea, the series toys for a fourth dimension with the notion that Zarek, played past Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original serial, might serve as a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his sometime cocky). In another episode, 'Hero' (three.08), we larn the military may take provoked the Cylon attack with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of forty years earlier. And while its exact nature is left ambiguous, the administration in which President Roslin served before the attack seems to accept been both politically inept and surprisingly brutal: in a scene ready only hours earlier the attack President Adar demands Roslin's resignation considering she has managed to defuse a teacher's strike Adar had planned to break upwards with troops in lodge to provide an example to other groups seeking to sway the regime in like means.
The ambivalence these glancing references creates is left unexplored. Indeed given that the series is predicated upon unthinkable grief and loss, Battlestar Galactica provides little in the way of backstory (and on those occasions information technology does, one usually wishes it had connected to err on the side of silence). The vision of space it creates, its emptiness and blackness, is quite literally a place of death, a fact reinforced by the recurring device of characters existence blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions nosotros know adjacent to zip of the lives of the characters before the attacks: sometimes we glimpse photographs, occasionally names are mentioned, and on several occasions we run across the galleries on Galactica's lower decks where, in a haunting reminder of the message boards that sprung upwards in New York in the days after September xi, the crew take pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but mostly the testify inhabits a globe where the past has been, quite literally, obliterated.
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Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Leobon Conoy (Callum Keith Rennie)
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Yet the implications of the events depicted in 'Mankind and Bone' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration'due south prosecution of the war on terror. While the homo characters see the Cylons as inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to see them not 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'm more than this trunk, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream only in truth, I'm standing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream.'
In 'Flesh and Bone' and elsewhere, much of the pleasure of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie'due south disconcerting performance. With his scraggy pilus and battered blond looks he most resembles some cracked, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes see across this globe, notwithstanding whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously suggest something dangerously mercurial. By contrast the Starbuck of 'Mankind and Bone' is a woman swaggeringly sure of her own convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might exist more than simulated.
The event is an encounter that blurs the distinction between Human and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben'due south humanity, Starbuck – and by extension Colonial gild as a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the affair she seeks to destroy[9].
The boundary between homo and Cylon has already begun to blur before the scenes with Leoben. Nosotros have learned Cylons are biological replicas of homo beings, near duplicate even at a cellular level[10], too as encountering at to the lowest degree two Cylons (both Eights), the Sharon known as Boomer and the Sharon assigned to brood with Helo on Caprica, who not only resist their programming, simply also feel conflicted by homo love, desire and loyalty. Besides we accept been offered many disquieting images of human cruelty, and of the horrors of war more generally. (In the episode 'Flying of the Phoenix' (ii.09) we witness a squadron of Vipers massacre hundreds of disabled and defenceless Cylon raiders. While the pilots and Galactica'southward bridge crew whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfortable reactions.)
Yet information technology is not until the middle of the bear witness's second flavour, and what may well stand every bit its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the distinction between human and Cylon has go. After surviving for more than than a twelvemonth on the run, Galactica and the civilian fleet encounter another Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has also managed to survive the assault upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors chop-chop gives way to disquiet. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her coiffure take become instruments of total state of war, loyal only to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their cause.
The parallels with the Bush administration's war on terror are evident, not to the lowest degree in Cain'southward barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of civilian government that endures in the armada ('The Secretarial assistant for Pedagogy?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her first interview with him and President Roslin). But information technology is not the frighteningly conspicuously fatigued portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked past ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic heart (in another of the series' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama eventually agree the only mode to contain Cain is to decadent 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 beloved with since before the assail on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her body displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual assail.
The discovery is deeply disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, simply it is the post-obit scenes that complete the reversal of roles that is prefigured in 'Flesh and Os'. Unbeknown to Adama and President Roslin, Cain orders her intelligence officeholder, Lieutenant Thorne, to interrogate the Eight known every bit 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 cut between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica's flying deck and Galactica's brig, nosotros circle inwards, watching Thorne go far in Sharon's cell (synthetic, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay'southward holding pens, of wire mesh within a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus coiffure boasting virtually their treatment of the Six in their brig, run into Sharon's uncertainty plough to beginning to concern and and so terror as Thorne and the troops with him force her face up downwards 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 dubiousness this game of shifting sympathies, and growing uncertainty about the boundaries betwixt the human being and the Cylon Other would exist less effective if it were not embedded in Battlestar Galactica's broader interest in exploring the capacity of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the prove's relentless downward spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more important, connecting the question of the relationship between the Man and the Cylon Other to the question of the survival of both.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica presents a vision of decline that is most unique in series tv, its four seasons not charting humanity's triumph over adversity, but the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what is left of human club. This alone would make for confronting viewing, nonetheless the prove 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, information technology ticks ever downwards from its outset reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-as in the showtime survivor count after the escape from New Caprica-drastically, merely e'er downwards, reaching, by midway through the 4th flavour, a mere 39,685.
In more homo terms information technology is also visible in the gradual fraying of the armada itself. Episode past episode the cost in lives weighs more heavily upon the characters, in particular the fighter pilots who are the front line of defence. Although the men and women of Galactica are the heroes of the piece, the prove has few illusions about the reality of military machine life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are ambitious risk-takers, and at that place are more than a few scenes that remind the viewer of the violence and dehumanisation that is a necessary role of military life. Simultaneously though nosotros are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, human being beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Likewise 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 tv. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the almost part, remain abiding over fourth dimension, information technology repeatedly places them in situations from which they can only emerge radically and irreparably altered, a process that is most axiomatic in the episodes set during the occupation of New Caprica. Yet while all the characters are implicated in this often brutal procedure of psychological and social disintegration, growing increasingly embittered and damaged equally the series proceeds, it is in the person of President Roslin that the process is well-nigh starkly drawn.
President Laura Roslin, and indeed the unabridged notion of a surviving civilian government, is one of the masterstrokes of the series equally a whole. The former secretary for educational activity, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies after the twoscore-2 members of the authorities ahead of her neglect to report in line with emergency protocols. A erstwhile schoolteacher, and initially regarded equally 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 i betoken-President Roslin assumes the reins of ability substantially unknown and petty-respected. At starting time her chief concern is preserving lives, merely past the outset episode of the first series, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to requite the order to destroy a send carrying 1500 civilians considering she believes a Cylon agent on board threatens the unabridged fleet. This blooding begins a journey that sees President Roslin abound into a hawk of such swift brutality she unnerves even Adama (when, in 'A Measure of Salvation' (three.07), Roslin is offered a ways to destroy the Cylons forever she does not blink at genocide).
Nevertheless this transformation is not without its costs. By the quaternary series, haunted past visions from the chamalla excerpt she has been taking in an try to stave off the spreading cancer within her, President Roslin experiences a long hallucination in the moments between hyperspace jumps in which she is confronted with but how removed from man feeling she has go, unable to love, unable fifty-fifty 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 limited to Battlestar Galactica's portrait of human society. Although in the early on episodes Cylon society remains substantially inscrutable, by the second and 3rd series information technology is less so, as the series explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (2.18), which is set not amidst the homo characters but amidst the Cylons on the now-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.
Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer's contact with fully performance Cylon characters has been limited to encounters with individual agents, such equally the Leoben in 'Mankind and Os' or the Three known as D'Anna in 'Final Cut'. The 3 continuing presences in the first and 2d series-the Half-dozen who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the kickoff season and culminates in its shocking finale; and the Eight known as 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 club.
'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The get-go is the Vi who used Baltar to access the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the 2d is Boomer, who, having been killed afterward her attempt to assassinate Adama, has now downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed every bit heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. Withal despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon society. Boomer, notwithstanding horrified by the discovery of her true identity, exists in a land of existential rage and despair, while the Six is haunted by the knowledge of her part in the deaths of and then many billions as well equally by her love 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 equally later episodes focussing on Cylon characters (past the 4th season the Cylons are often referred to in the singular, equally 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and collective nature of Cylon lodge). Just like the images of a San Francisco populated by alien replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman'due south 1978 film Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, at that place is something profoundly unsettling about the idea of a society inhabited past duplicates (maybe the more than so in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the process of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the assail, engaged in some unexplained endeavour to reproduce the homo world and so recently extinguished)[xi].
Yet every bit we come up to understand more than about Cylon gild it 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 grouping, the models voting as blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the majority. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to exist within and outside some sort of hive mind, sharing memories and experiences withal still individuated. To deny the grouping 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 once human and not, alive yet undying, created beings that both simulate and experience emotion, desire, pain, their presence drives a radical instability of meaning, one that echoes precisely the instances of doppelgangers and simulacra that Freud describes as instances of the uncanny[12] (the mantra of the Cylons, 'All this has happened earlier, and will happen again', might as well be seen every bit another instance of this Freudian pattern of recurrence, or indeed of that other most uncanny sense of repetition, déjà vu).
This strangeness is given its nearly powerful expression in the scenes and episodes aboard the Cylon basestars in Seasons Three and Four. In contrast to the relatively banal simulation of human social club glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might exist to be Cylon. Moving silently through space in their cute, 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, first past its very nature and afterward, more direct, by their decision to kill a fellow Cylon in order to prevent her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In so doing they spark a series of events that lead commencement to the doomed attempt to alive alongside the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and civil war that divides Cylon society in Season Four.
Such a grade is the fulfilment of the Oedipal disharmonize that begins the series. It is the wages of the Cylon'southward original sin, yet it is besides a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the effect of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the two species. Now they are in disharmonize 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's producers intend to resolve the remarkable web of narrative and thematic complexities the serial has created over the past four seasons in the ten episodes that remain. Making sense of the many competing allusions and expectations they create is likely to bear witness challenging, non to the lowest degree because any resolution will demand to fulfil the demands of the words that have haunted the serial, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen once again.'
But in a way the path is already set and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica's tertiary flavour, in the climactic scene of Baltar'south trial for crimes against humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned speech calling for his acquittal. As he speaks he gropes towards the reason and then many are set on killing Baltar, a man he and many others hate.
'Because you're weak,' Apollo says 'Because yous're arrogant … Because you're a coward, and nosotros the mob, desire to throw you out of the airlock considering you didn't stand up up to the Cylons and become yourself killed in the process. You lot should have been killed back on New Caprica, just since you had the temerity to live, nosotros're going to execute you.'
Just as Apollo speaks we run across him begin to empathise the respond to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This example is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame … And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one homo and so affluent him out the airlock, and promise that just gets rid of information technology all. And so that nosotros tin can live with ourselves.'
It is a cathartic moment in more ways than one. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in gild to defend a human being both hold in antipathy, it signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.
But it too signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not clear to those present, simply which attain into the heart of the show. For in recognising that Baltar, the cast out, the abject, must be admitted back into the fold, Apollo articulates the possibility of resolution of the deeper conflict that gives the series breath, that betwixt humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were once their children, but rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come up to be explored in the prove's terminal season. For in the cease there is no us and them, no human and Other. We are them, and they are us. And all of this has happened before, and volition happen once again.
Starbuck (Kara Thrace)
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Notes:
i In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified past the series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode iv of series ii is denoted by the number ii.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired every bit a separate stand-lone episode, is assumed to form the first two episodes of Series iv (four.01 and iv.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted 1000.01 and Chiliad.02. Where differences exist between the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode ii.x, 'Pegasus', for case, includes some fifteen minutes of actress material), references are to the version released on DVD.
2 Much of Battlestar Galactica's very particular (and extremely coherent) visual way is the work of the Australian director, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (M.01 and Chiliad.02) and more than a third of the first 3 and a one-half seasons.
3 For a fuller word of Battlestar Galactica'southward utilize of music, run across Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Audible Space', in Tiffany Potter and C.West. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended word of Comport McCreary's influences and his Battlestar Galactica score can be found in Tina Huang's review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 original soundtrack album. Philip Glass'south 'Metamorphosis Five' is used as a recurring motif during Starbuck's visit to her abandoned flat on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (2.02).
4 The opening credit montage alters subtly across the four seasons. In Flavour 1 it also includes the additional phrases 'They expect and feel human. Some are programmed to call up they are human', while in Season 4 nosotros are told 'Twelve Cylon models. 7 are known. Four live in secret. Ane will be revealed'.
5 Given the generally heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix mostly notable for the relatively small number of black characters, information technology is maybe interesting that Boomer, the 1 African-American grapheme in the original series, has not simply been transformed into a woman, only into an Asian adult female.
6 The revisioned series also deliberately invokes the outdated technology of the original series, in details such equally the Korean Army telephones that are used on Galactica and visual jokes, such equally the Cylon uniform from the original series glimpsed equally a museum exhibit in the first episode of the mini-series (One thousand.01) and in Razor (four.02), and as a plot device (Galactica survives the initial attack considering its antiquated systems are not networked, and therefore are protected from the Cylon virus that disables the defence networks (M.01)).
7 The Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rig Veda: "OM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât (may nosotros accomplish that excellent celebrity of Savitar the God / so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://world wide web.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/trivia).
viii A more extended give-and-take of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is available in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall'due south insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).
9 For a fuller discussion of this signal see Erika Johnson-Lewis' 'Torture, Terrorism and Other Aspects of Human Nature', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 27-39.
10 The exact nature of the skinjobs' biology remains somewhat mysterious. Despite being informed Cylons are essentially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, nosotros acquire the early biological Cylons were hybrids of human and car) and it being articulate Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode we have besides seen Athena insert a computer cable into her arm and interface with Galactica'due south reckoner systems straight, suggesting their bodies have functions that exceed the homo and hark back to their cybernetic origins.
11 It is perhaps non accidental that the Cylons seem most focused on creating a replica of what looks similar a Starbucks in their reconstruction of Caprica.
12 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin, 2003. For a fuller Freudian estimation of Cylons and Cylon corporeality, see Alison Peirse, 'Uncanny Cylons: Resurrection and Bodies of Horror', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 118–28.
Originally published in Meanjin, Vol 67, No 4, 2008. © James Bradley, 2008.
Source: https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happened-before/
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