All This Has Happened Before All This Will Happen Again
'It's funny, isn't it? We're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I come across the dear that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Flesh and Bone' (one.08)[1]
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One of the curious features of serial tv set is its incompleteness. Where a novel, a painting or fifty-fifty a play arrives fully formed, its early drafts or preliminary sketches subsumed into a complete and unified whole, television shows are made up as they keep, evolving along the way. Sometimes the changes are large, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of accent and shifting focus, withal either mode they ensure that as the years pass no television bear witness is e'er the evidence it started as.
Information technology's interesting therefore, every bit SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica enters the 2nd half of its fourth and final flavour, to wonder how clearly Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-serial foresaw the way the show would speedily exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original have on genre television set into something far richer and stranger.
Watching those early episodes again, it's hard not to run across the way the show already pushed confronting the conventions of scientific discipline fiction television. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a future – or mayhap a past – that looks surprisingly similar our nowadays. Confined for the most office to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the evidence'south claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the tendency of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their place the testify offers a vision of war more than familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, an often hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and leap-cut editing[2]. Even the swelling orchestral score that has divers science fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Conduct McCreary's hauntingly minimal soundscapes of endless taiko drums and air current chimes, music that sounds more like the Philip Glass of Akhnaten than John Williams (and indeed, on at least one occasion, actually is Philip Glass)[iii].
However confronted with Battlestar Galactica's increasingly haunted and haunting third season, and the extraordinary first half of its fourth, their vision of ii societies deranged by war and adumbral by visions of both salvation and devastation, it is even so difficult to believe that the strange, troubling and often beautiful creation the show has become was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and oft visceral border that marks the early episodes remains, information technology has go merely i chemical element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and oftentimes deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties about state of war and terrorism and the capacity of violence and trauma to unmake society and individuals, as well as an intensely disquieting meditation on the shifting boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, us and them, Human and Other.
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For those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s as I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is probable to exist familiar from the original series of the same proper noun. Humanity, spread across the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is almost annihilated in a surprise assail 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 last remaining battlestar, commence upon a search for the mythical thirteenth colony, World.
The original series is 1 of the camp classics of 1970s sci-fi idiot box. Ane function Star Wars, i office a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson's Mormon heritage, information technology survived a single flavor, producing xx-iv hours of television and a universally derided spin-off series, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally found Earth, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the inflow of their cousins from the stars.
Yet for all its woozy 1970s new age trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('There are those who believe that life hither began out in that location, 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 yet exist brothers of human being who fifty-fifty now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original show )something of the original series wove its way into the popular consciousness, as did its one enduring image, that of the single red Cylon centre, 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 Cold War paranoia, the story of the attack and the fleet'south drastic flying is grounded in early twenty-beginning-century, post-9/eleven anxieties virtually terrorism and the reject 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 chivalrous gaze of Lorne Green'due south original Commander Adama, the fleet is at present divided and suspicious, haunted past political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can exercise little to contain. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a place of wondrous ice planets and shimmering lights, just a cold and unforgiving emptiness, cleaved but by isolated planets devoid of all but the simplest organic life.
Yet it 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-like aliens, in the revisioned series they accept been reborn as bogus beings, some, replicant-like, duplicate from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Two, Iii, Half-dozen, Eight), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy limited past inbuilt constraints.
Created not in some alien lab but, equally the opening credits inform us in a terse, telegraphed series of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Man. They Rebelled. They Evolved. There Are Many Copies. And They Have a Program'[four], by humans, the Cylons are a securely troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a hidden simply revelatory beauty, and uncanny, oftentimes profoundly disturbing simulacra of man beings, they are at once like just dissimilar, manufactured withal 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 to the lowest degree the names and call signs of fundamental characters such as the armada'south 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 as Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the show'southward armed forces, an organisation in which men and women fight, wash and slumber together (even the toilets are unisex). At least ii, Boomer and Tigh, have too been transformed into Cylons, in both cases every bit sleeper agents, initially unaware of their own identity[5].
Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (One thousand.01) we are informed that twoscore years have passed since the armistice that ended the war betwixt the humans and the Cylons, forty years in which the Cylons have 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 as a museum.
Thus the revisioned series is placed in a universe in which many of the elements of the original serial remain, present nevertheless absent. The war of xl years earlier is presumably the aforementioned war in which the original series took identify, withal the attack itself lies in the futurity, not the by. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both equally cultural retentivity and in specific appropriations and allusions, yet the testify is not spring by information technology in any way[6].
The revisioned serial is explicitly mythic, invoking sources equally disparate as The Aeneid, The Volume of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, likewise as suggesting other, more 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 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 similar the Delphic precogs in Steven Spielberg's Minority Study, or the more subtle incorporation of sacred texts and linguistic communication (Kobol, the proper noun of the planet from which the humans fled prior to the founding of the Twelve Colonies, ways 'Heaven' in Persian, while the bear witness'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 powerful by the repeated proposition that the events depicted in the narrative are part of some larger whole (not for nothing are we told the Cylons 'Have a Plan' in the opening credits), some cycle of fourth dimension in which past and time to come are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the show'south cadre, 'All of this has happened earlier, and will happen again'[viii].
This blurring of the familiar and the unfamiliar is a narrative strategy Battlestar Galactica also employs to ballast its political subtexts. For all that its gimmicky political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety well-nigh apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of civil social club by the war machine, torture and religious extremism, at that place is seldom any easy correlation betwixt events in the series and events in the real world. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified past the events of the get-go four episodes of the third series. Post-obit the discovery at the cease of the second season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar's defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the first complimentary elections held after the set on, much of the armada abandons their ships to settle on the planet, at present called New Caprica, merely to discover 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 any style they can. Some, like Baltar, have little selection merely to work with their Cylon masters; others pass up to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. Equally the Cylon regime resorts to ever more than savage tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more than farthermost, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to impale Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human being constabulary force.
Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral club of u.s. and them, right and wrong, Human and Other implicit in the show's conception, these episodes practice not merely undermine the easy identification between insurgent and terrorist, but by explicitly invoking the memory of quisling governments such as Vichy, suggest 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 point and power of science fiction, even so Battlestar Galactica deploys it with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Os' (one.08), a Cylon agent is found within the human fleet. Convinced its information will be worthless, Commander Adama argues information technology should be thrown out an airlock merely President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the amanuensis, a Ii known equally 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 chirapsia Leoben until at final 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 auto, sir, there'due south no limit to the tactics I can utilise.'
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 whatsoever reservations about the utilise of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is not debated, nor is there any suggestion the characters regret their deportment. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in direct breach of her own offer of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock simply moments subsequently he provides the information she seeks.
At one level these instances of brutality on the office of the homo characters are of a piece with the recurrent suggestion that the Twelve Colonies may have been a less than platonic society, 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 send send within the fleet, Apollo admits to having read his books at academy, despite them being banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the idea, the series toys for a time with the notion that Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original serial, might serve as a mentor of sorts to the revisioned serial' version of his former self). In another episode, 'Hero' (3.08), we learn the military may have provoked the Cylon assault with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of twoscore years earlier. And while its verbal nature is left ambiguous, the assistants in which President Roslin served earlier the attack seems to have been both politically inept and surprisingly vicious: in a scene set up only hours before the attack President Adar demands Roslin'southward resignation considering she has managed to defuse a teacher's strike Adar had planned to break up with troops in order to provide an instance to other groups seeking to sway the government 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 petty in the way of backstory (and on those occasions it does, ane 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 identify of decease, a fact reinforced by the recurring device of characters existence blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions we know next to nothing of the lives of the characters earlier the attacks: sometimes nosotros 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 up in New York in the days after September 11, the coiffure have pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but by and large the show 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 'Flesh and Bone' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's prosecution of the war on terror. While the human characters come across the Cylons as inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to come across them not every bit an implacable Other, only equally something both less and more familiar. For all that he does not fearfulness death, Leoben feels pain, fear, hunger and, most unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual belief. 'I meet the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might be similar, 'I know that I'm more than this body, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream merely 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's disconcerting performance. With his scraggy hair and battered blond looks he most resembles some croaky, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes see across this world, yet whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously suggest something dangerously mercurial. By contrast the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Bone' is a adult female swaggeringly certain of her ain convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might be more than than false.
The effect is an run into that blurs the distinction betwixt Human and Cylon upon which the bear witness is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and by extension Colonial society every bit a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the thing she seeks to destroy[9].
The boundary betwixt human and Cylon has already begun to mistiness before the scenes with Leoben. We have learned Cylons are biological replicas of human beings, about indistinguishable fifty-fifty 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, merely also feel conflicted by human dearest, desire and loyalty. Also we have been offered many disquieting images of human being cruelty, and of the horrors of state of war more by and large. (In the episode 'Flying 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 gratuitous to explore other, less comfortable reactions.)
However it is not until the middle of the show'south 2d flavor, and what may well stand as its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the distinction between human and Cylon has become. After surviving for more than a twelvemonth on the run, Galactica and the noncombatant armada encounter another Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has likewise managed to survive the set on upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors rapidly gives way to disquiet. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew have become instruments of total war, loyal only to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their cause.
The parallels with the Bush assistants'southward state of war on terror are evident, not least in Cain'south barely restrained antipathy for President Roslin, and the semblance of noncombatant government that endures in the fleet ('The Secretary for Education?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her outset interview with him and President Roslin). But it is not the frighteningly conspicuously drawn portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic center (in another of the series' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama eventually hold the only way to contain Cain is to corrupt themselves, and murder her) just 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 dearest with since earlier the attack on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her body displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual assault.
The discovery is securely agonizing, for both Baltar and the viewer, simply it is the following scenes that complete the reversal of roles that is prefigured in 'Flesh and Bone'. Unbeknown to Adama and President Roslin, Cain orders her intelligence officer, 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 disturbing scenes that cut between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica'due south flight deck and Galactica's brig, we circumvolve inwards, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon'south cell (synthetic, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay'southward holding pens, of wire mesh within a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus crew boasting near their treatment of the Six in their brig, see Sharon'southward uncertainty plow to offset to business concern and so terror every bit Thorne and the troops with him force her face down 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 uncertainty this game of shifting sympathies, and growing dubiousness about the boundaries betwixt the homo and the Cylon Other would be less effective if information technology were non embedded in Battlestar Galactica'south broader interest in exploring the capacity of state of war and trauma to confound societies. Implicating information technology in the show'south relentless downward spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more important, connecting the question of the relationship between the Human and the Cylon Other to the question of the survival of both.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica presents a vision of pass up that is almost unique in series television, its four seasons non charting humanity'southward triumph over adversity, merely the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what is left of human society. This alone would make for confronting viewing, even so the show goes further, weaving its depiction of this process into a grander mythic narrative.
In quantitative terms this procedure is charted in the number that flashes upward at the end of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, it ticks e'er downward from its outset reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-equally in the first survivor count afterwards the escape from New Caprica-drastically, only e'er downwards, reaching, by midway through the fourth flavor, a mere 39,685.
In more homo terms it is also visible in the gradual fraying of the armada itself. Episode by episode the price in lives weighs more heavily upon the characters, in item the fighter pilots who are the front line of defence. Although the men and women of Galactica are the heroes of the piece, the show has few illusions about the reality of armed services life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive risk-takers, and in that location are more than a few scenes that remind the viewer of the violence and dehumanisation that is a necessary part of military life. Simultaneously though we are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, homo beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Likewise the many scenes of dress uniform ceremonies that occur in early on episodes quickly fade, ceremony eroded past the need to survive.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica often subverts one of the basic tenets of series television receiver. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the most part, remain constant over time, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can but sally radically and irreparably altered, a process that is well-nigh evident in the episodes set during the occupation of New Caprica. Yet while all the characters are implicated in this often fell process 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 most starkly drawn.
President Laura Roslin, and indeed the entire notion of a surviving civilian government, is i of the masterstrokes of the series as a whole. The former secretary for education, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies after the 40-two members of the regime alee of her neglect to report in line with emergency protocols. A former schoolteacher, and initially regarded as a soft-headed junior member of a government-Adama himself admits to non having voted for her: 'President Adar was an idiot,' he remarks at one point-President Roslin assumes the reins of power essentially unknown and picayune-respected. At first her chief 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 considering she believes a Cylon agent on lath threatens the entire fleet. This blooding begins a journey that sees President Roslin grow into a hawk of such swift brutality she unnerves even Adama (when, in 'A Measure of Salvation' (3.07), Roslin is offered a ways to destroy the Cylons forever she does not glimmer at genocide).
However this transformation is not without its costs. By the 4th series, 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 but how removed from human feeling she has get, unable to love, unable even to feel (the episodes of the kickoff half of the quaternary flavor also dangle the possibility that Roslin is herself a Cylon).
Nor is this focus on the deranging effects of war upon societies is not limited to Battlestar Galactica's portrait of human society. Although in the early episodes Cylon lodge remains essentially inscrutable, by the second and third series information technology is less so, equally the series explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (two.xviii), which is ready not amid the homo characters merely among the Cylons on the now-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.
Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer'south contact with fully functioning Cylon characters has been express to encounters with individual agents, such equally the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the Three known as D'Anna in 'Final Cutting'. The three continuing presences in the outset and second series-the Half-dozen who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the beginning 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 style from the bulk of Cylon social club.
'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The first is the Six who used Baltar to access the Twelve Colonies' defense networks; the second is Boomer, who, having been killed after her effort to assassinate Adama, has now downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed as heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. Yet despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon guild. Boomer, nevertheless horrified by the discovery of her true identity, exists in a state of existential rage and despair, while the Six is haunted by the cognition of her role in the deaths of so many billions equally well as 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 it might mean haunts 'Downloaded', as well every bit later episodes focussing on Cylon characters (by the fourth flavor the Cylons are frequently referred to in the singular, equally 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and collective nature of Cylon lodge). Just similar the images of a San Francisco populated by alien replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman's 1978 movie Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, at that place is something profoundly unsettling near the thought of a society inhabited by duplicates (peradventure the more so in 'Downloaded' considering 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 man world and then recently extinguished)[11].
Yet equally nosotros come to empathize more than virtually Cylon lodge it becomes clear exactly why Caprica Six and Boomer's 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 equally blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the majority. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to exist inside and outside some sort of hive mind, sharing memories and experiences even so all the same 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 man creators. At in one case homo and not, alive yet undying, created beings that both simulate and feel emotion, desire, pain, their presence drives a radical instability of meaning, ane 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 before, and volition happen over again', might likewise be seen as another instance of this Freudian design 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 3 and 4. In dissimilarity to the relatively banal simulation of human society glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might exist to be Cylon. Moving silently through infinite in their beautiful, geometric Basestars, the immortal Cylons seem to exist both within and outside time, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.
It is this unity the Caprica Vi and Boomer'due south resistance threatens, first by its very nature and subsequently, more than directly, by their decision to kill a fellow Cylon in order to foreclose her from taking the life of a homo resistance fighter. In then doing they spark a series of events that lead first to the doomed attempt to alive aslope the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and civil war that divides Cylon society in Season Four.
Such a form is the fulfilment of the Oedipal conflict that begins the series. It is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, all the same information technology is besides a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the outcome of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the two species. Now they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The ii are at present destined to become ane, or perish.
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Sol Tigh (Michael Hogan) interrogates Boomer (Grace Park)
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Information technology 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 by four seasons in the ten episodes that remain. Making sense of the many competing allusions and expectations they create is likely to prove challenging, not least considering any resolution will need to fulfil the demands of the words that have haunted the serial, 'All of this has happened before, and volition happen again.'
But in a mode the path is already gear up and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica'due south third season, in the climactic scene of Baltar'due south trial for crimes against humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned speech calling for his amortization. As he speaks he gropes towards the reason so many are assail killing Baltar, a homo he and many others hate.
'Considering you're weak,' Apollo says 'Because you're arrogant … Because you're a coward, and we the mob, want to throw yous out of the airlock because you didn't stand up upward to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process. Yous should have been killed back on New Caprica, just since yous had the temerity to live, we're going to execute you.'
But as Apollo speaks we run into him begin to understand the answer to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. But nigh of all, it is built on shame … And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one human being and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. And so that we can alive with ourselves.'
Information technology is a cathartic moment in more ways than one. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his male parent disown him in order to defend a man both hold in contempt, it signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.
Merely information technology also signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not clear to those present, but which accomplish into the middle 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 serial jiff, that betwixt humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were in one case their children, but rose against their parents in an human activity of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to be explored in the show's last flavor. For in the end 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 again.
Starbuck (Kara Thrace)
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Notes:
1 In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified past the serial and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode four of series 2 is denoted by the number 2.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired as a separate stand-alone episode, is assumed to form the first two episodes of Series 4 (4.01 and 4.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted M.01 and M.02. Where differences exist between the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode ii.10, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some 15 minutes of actress material), references are to the version released on DVD.
ii Much of Battlestar Galactica's very particular (and extremely coherent) visual fashion is the work of the Australian director, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (Yard.01 and M.02) and more than a tertiary of the first three and a half seasons.
iii For a fuller discussion of Battlestar Galactica's use of music, see Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Audible Infinite', in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended word of Bear McCreary'southward influences and his Battlestar Galactica score can be institute in Tina Huang'south review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 original soundtrack anthology. Philip Drinking glass's 'Metamorphosis 5' is used equally a recurring motif during Starbuck'due south visit to her abased apartment on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (2.02).
4 The opening credit montage alters subtly across the four seasons. In Season 1 it also includes the additional phrases 'They look and feel human being. Some are programmed to think they are human', while in Season iv nosotros are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in undercover. I will exist revealed'.
five Given the generally heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix more often than not notable for the relatively small number of blackness characters, it is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the one African-American character in the original serial, has not just been transformed into a woman, but into an Asian woman.
6 The revisioned series as well deliberately invokes the outdated engineering of the original series, in details such as the Korean Army telephones that are used on Galactica and visual jokes, such as the Cylon uniform from the original serial glimpsed equally a museum exhibit in the showtime episode of the mini-series (G.01) and in Razor (4.02), and equally a plot device (Galactica survives the initial attack because its antiquated systems are not networked, and therefore are protected from the Cylon virus that disables the defence networks (Yard.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 attain that excellent glory of Savitar the God / so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/championship/tt0407362/trivia).
viii A more extended discussion of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is bachelor in Tiffany Potter and C.West. Marshall'due south insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).
9 For a fuller word of this indicate run across 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, we learn the early on biological Cylons were hybrids of human being and motorcar) and information technology being clear Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode nosotros have also 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 homo and hark back to their cybernetic origins.
xi It is perchance not adventitious that the Cylons seem well-nigh 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 interpretation of Cylons and Cylon amount, 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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