All of This Has Happened Before and It Will All Happen Again but the Questions Remains

'It'due south funny, isn't information technology? Nosotros're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I encounter the dearest that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Flesh and Os' (ane.08)^[1]

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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, tv shows are made upwardly as they go along, evolving along the way. Sometimes the changes are large, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of accent and shifting focus, yet either way they ensure that every bit the years pass no tv show is always the evidence it started equally.

It'south interesting therefore, as SciFi Channel'due south Battlestar Galactica enters the 2d one-half of its fourth and final season, 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 formulation, developing from an already interesting and original take on genre television into something far richer and stranger.

Watching those early episodes again, it'due south difficult non to run into the way the bear witness already pushed confronting the conventions of science fiction television. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a futurity – or possibly a past – that looks surprisingly like our present. Confined for the most part to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the show'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 state of war more familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, an often hallucinatory collage of handheld photographic camera and jump-cut editing^[2]. Even the swelling orchestral score that has defined science fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced past Bear 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 to the lowest degree i occasion, actually is Philip Glass)^[3].

Notwithstanding confronted with Battlestar Galactica's increasingly haunted and haunting 3rd season, and the extraordinary kickoff half of its quaternary, their vision of 2 societies deranged by state of war and shadowed by visions of both salvation and devastation, information technology is even so hard to believe that the foreign, troubling and oft beautiful creation the show has become was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and often visceral border that marks the early episodes remains, it has become just one chemical element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and frequently deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties almost war and terrorism and the chapters of violence and trauma to unmake society and individuals, as well equally an intensely disquieting meditation on the shifting boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, u.s. and them, Man and Other.

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For those who grew up in the 1970s and 1980s every bit I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is likely to exist familiar from the original series of the same name. Humanity, spread across the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is almost annihilated in a surprise attack by the Cylons. In the chaotic aftermath of the assault a ragtag fleet of refugees manage to escape and, banding together under the protection of the concluding remaining battlestar, embark upon a search for the mythical thirteenth colony, World.

The original serial is ane of the camp 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 single season, producing mean solar day of idiot box and a universally derided spin-off series, 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 historic period 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 take been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.. . . . Some believe that there may notwithstanding exist brothers of man who fifty-fifty now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original prove )something of the original series wove its mode into the popular consciousness, equally did its 1 indelible paradigm, that of the single cerise 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 Cold War paranoia, the story of the attack and the fleet's desperate flight is grounded in early twenty-first-century, mail-nine/11 anxieties nearly terrorism and the decline of the West. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series take go the last remnants of a shattered club quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the chivalrous gaze of Lorne Green'south original Commander Adama, the fleet is now divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can practice footling to comprise. Even the physical universe is contradistinct, no longer a place of wondrous ice planets and shimmering lights, but a common cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken just by isolated planets devoid of all just the simplest organic life.

Nevertheless it is the Cylons who are the about haunting creation of the revisioned series. Where in the original series they are a faceless race of lizard-like aliens, in the revisioned serial they accept been reborn as bogus beings, some, replicant-like, duplicate from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Ii, Three, Six, Eight), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy limited by inbuilt constraints.

Created non in some alien lab but, as the opening credits inform us in a terse, telegraphed series of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created past Homo. They Rebelled. They Evolved. There Are Many Copies. And They Have a Plan'^[four], by humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a hidden but revelatory dazzler, and uncanny, often greatly disturbing simulacra of human beings, they are at in one case like just unlike, manufactured however alive, Homo yet profoundly Other.

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Technically speaking of form, 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 call signs of central characters such as the armada's commander, William Adama, his Executive Officer, Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Adama'southward son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), and the narcissistic scientific genius, Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Others, such as Katee Sackhoff'southward Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the show's armed forces, an system in which men and women fight, wash and sleep together (fifty-fifty the toilets are unisex).  At least 2, Boomer and Tigh, take too been transformed into Cylons, in both cases as sleeper agents, initially unaware of their own identity^[5].

Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (M.01) we are informed that forty years have passed since the ceasefire that ended the war between 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 equally a museum.

Thus the revisioned series is placed in a universe in which many of the elements of the original series remain, present nonetheless absent. The war of forty years earlier is presumably the same war in which the original series took place, yet the attack itself lies in the futurity, non the by. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both as cultural memory and in specific appropriations and allusions, nonetheless the show is not bound by it in any fashion^[6].

The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate every bit 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 science fictional tropes such as the term 'skinjobs' to draw the replicant humanoid Cylons from Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (in which Olmos also appeared) and the spectral images of the Cylon Hybrids that control 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, ways 'Heaven' in Persian, while the show'due south melancholy theme music incorporates a Hindu Mantra)^[seven], these mythic elements are highly suggestive, generating parallels and allusions while simultaneously denying easy or reductive correlations. It is a process made more powerful by the repeated proffer that the events depicted in the narrative are function of some larger whole (not for nil are we told the Cylons 'Take a Plan' in the opening credits), some cycle of time in which past and hereafter are merged and which, in the words repeated past those Cylons privy to the secrets at the show's core, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen once 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 contemporary political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety about apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of ceremonious guild by the armed forces, 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 by the events of the showtime four episodes of the third series. Following the discovery at the end of the 2nd flavour of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar'due south defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the first free elections held subsequently the attack, much of the fleet abandons their ships to settle on the planet, at present 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 manner they tin. Some, like Baltar, have little choice but to piece of work with their Cylon masters; others pass up to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. Equally the Cylon regime resorts to ever more brutal tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more farthermost, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to kill Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human police force.

Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral club of us and them, right and wrong, Human and Other implicit in the show's formulation, these episodes do not but undermine the easy identification between insurgent and terrorist, merely by explicitly invoking the memory of quisling governments such every bit Vichy, propose the simplistic historical parallels oftentimes drawn between the war in Republic of iraq and the Second Globe War are far less comforting than they are unremarkably assumed to be.

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This sort of destabilisation is of course the signal and ability of science fiction, yet Battlestar Galactica deploys it with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Bone' (1.08), a Cylon agent is plant within the human fleet. Convinced its information will be worthless, Commander Adama argues information technology should exist thrown out an airlock but President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the agent, a Two known as Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), exist interrogated.

Starbuck is assigned the task of interrogating the convict Cylon, a chore 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, 'Information technology'south a auto, sir, there's no limit to the tactics I can use.'

It 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 any reservations about the apply 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 directly breach of her ain offer of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock simply moments after he provides the information she seeks.

At i level these instances of brutality on the role of the human characters are of a piece with the recurrent suggestion that the Twelve Colonies may take been a less than platonic society, for all its autonomous trappings. When in 'Guardhouse 24-hour interval' (one.03) it is discovered the political anarchist and terrorist Tom Zarek  is incarcerated on a prison transport ship inside the armada, Apollo admits to having read his books at university, despite them being banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the thought, the series toys for a fourth dimension with the notion that Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original series, might serve every bit a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his one-time cocky). In some other episode, 'Hero' (3.08), we learn the military may take provoked the Cylon attack with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of forty years before. And while its exact nature is left cryptic, the administration in which President Roslin served earlier the attack seems to have been both politically inept and surprisingly brutal: in a scene prepare just hours earlier the attack President Adar demands Roslin's resignation because she has managed to defuse a teacher'south strike Adar had planned to interruption upwardly with troops in society to provide an example to other groups seeking to sway the government in like 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 little in the manner of backstory (and on those occasions it does, 1 usually wishes it had continued to err on the side of silence). The vision of space information technology creates, its emptiness and blackness, is quite literally a identify of death, a fact reinforced past the recurring device of characters beingness blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions nosotros know side by side to zippo of the lives of the characters before the attacks: sometimes we 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 bulletin boards that sprung up in New York in the days subsequently September 11, the crew have pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but by and large the show inhabits a earth 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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Yet the implications of the events depicted in 'Mankind and Bone' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush-league administration's prosecution of the war on terror. While the human being characters run into the Cylons equally inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to run into them non equally an implacable Other, but every bit something both less and more familiar. For all that he does non fright death, Leoben feels pain, fear, hunger and, nearly unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual belief. 'I encounter the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might exist similar, 'I know that I'grand more than this body, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream simply in truth, I'm standing on the shore. The electric current never takes me downstream.'

In 'Mankind and Bone' and elsewhere, much of the pleasure of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie'southward disconcerting performance. With his scraggy pilus and dilapidated blond looks he most resembles some cracked, streetwise prophet, a human being whose optics see across this world, all the same whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously suggest something dangerously mercurial. By dissimilarity the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Os' is a woman swaggeringly certain of her own convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might be more than imitation.

The result is an see that blurs the distinction between Homo and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and past extension Colonial club as a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the thing she seeks to destroy^[9].

The boundary between human and Cylon has already begun to blur before the scenes with Leoben. We have learned Cylons are biological replicas of human beings, almost indistinguishable even at a cellular level^[10], as well as encountering at to the lowest degree two Cylons (both Eights), the Sharon known as Boomer and the Sharon assigned to breed with Helo on Caprica, who not only resist their programming, just also experience conflicted by human beloved, desire and loyalty. As well we have been offered many disquieting images of human cruelty, and of the horrors of war more mostly. (In the episode 'Flying of the Phoenix' (two.09) we witness a squadron of Vipers massacre hundreds of disabled and defenceless Cylon raiders. While the pilots and Galactica's bridge crew whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfy reactions.)

Nevertheless it is not until the middle of the testify's second season, 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 year on the run, Galactica and the civilian armada encounter another Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has also managed to survive the attack upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors rapidly gives way to ailment. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew accept become instruments of total war, loyal just to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their crusade.

The parallels with the Bush administration's war on terror are axiomatic, not to the lowest degree in Cain'southward barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of noncombatant authorities that endures in the fleet ('The Secretarial assistant for Education?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her first interview with him and President Roslin). But information technology is non the frighteningly clearly fatigued portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by upstanding constraints that gives the episode its thematic eye (in another of the series' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama eventually agree the simply manner to contain 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 love with since before the attack on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her body displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual set on.

The discovery is deeply disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, but information technology 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 every bit Sharon (Grace Park)  who, having betrayed her race to help the stranded Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) escape Caprica is at present held in Galactica's brig. In a series of viscerally disturbing scenes that cutting between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica's flight deck and Galactica'due south brig, we circumvolve in, watching Thorne go far in Sharon's cell (synthetic, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay's holding pens, of wire mesh inside a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus crew boasting about their treatment of the Six in their brig, see Sharon's uncertainty turn to first to business organization and so terror equally Thorne and the troops with him force her face up 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 doubt this game of shifting sympathies, and growing uncertainty about the boundaries between the human and the Cylon Other would be 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's relentless downwardly screw 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 most unique in series television receiver, its four seasons not charting humanity's triumph over adversity, but the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what  is left of human society. This solitary would make for confronting viewing, yet the prove goes further, weaving its depiction of this procedure into a grander mythic narrative.

In quantitative terms this procedure 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 always downwards from its start reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-equally in the start survivor count after the escape from New Caprica-drastically, but ever down, reaching, by midway through the 4th season, a mere 39,685.

In more man terms it is also visible in the gradual fraying of the fleet itself. Episode past episode the cost in lives weighs more than 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 slice, the show has few illusions well-nigh the reality of military 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 than a few scenes that remind the viewer of the violence and dehumanisation that is a necessary part of military life. Simultaneously though nosotros are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, human being beings, and of the psychological cost of their responsibilities. As well the many scenes of dress uniform ceremonies that occur in early episodes apace fade, ceremony eroded by the need to survive.

In this respect Battlestar Galactica often subverts one of the basic tenets of serial telly. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the most part, remain constant over time, information technology repeatedly places them in situations from which they can only emerge radically and irreparably contradistinct, a process that is most axiomatic in the episodes ready 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 as the series gain, information technology is in the person of President Roslin that the process is well-nigh starkly drawn.

President Laura Roslin, and indeed the entire notion of a surviving noncombatant government, is one of the masterstrokes of the series as a whole. The quondam secretary for education, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies after the forty-two members of the regime alee of her fail to report in line with emergency protocols. A former schoolteacher, and initially regarded as a soft-headed junior fellow member of a regime-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 footling-respected. At first her chief concern is preserving lives, only past the showtime episode of the start series, '33' (ane.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 journeying that sees President Roslin grow into a hawk of such swift brutality she unnerves even Adama (when, in 'A Mensurate of Salvation' (three.07), Roslin is offered a means to destroy the Cylons forever she does not blink at genocide).

Yet 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 between hyperspace jumps in which she is confronted with just how removed from human feeling she has become, unable to honey, unable even to feel  (the episodes of the starting time half of the 4th season also dangle the possibility that Roslin is herself a Cylon).

Nor is this focus on the deranging effects of state of war upon societies is not limited to Battlestar Galactica's portrait of human society. Although in the early episodes Cylon society remains essentially inscrutable, by the second and third serial 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.xviii), which is prepare not amidst the human being characters merely amid the Cylons on the at present-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.

Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer'due south contact with fully operation Cylon characters has been express to encounters with individual agents, such as the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the Three known as D'Anna in 'Final Cut'. The three standing presences in the starting time and 2d series-the Vi who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the showtime flavor 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 majority of Cylon society.

'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The offset is the Half-dozen who used Baltar to access the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the 2nd is Boomer, who, having been killed after her effort to assassinate Adama, has at present downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed as heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. Withal despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon society. Boomer, even so 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 as 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', likewise as afterward episodes focussing on Cylon characters (by the quaternary flavour the Cylons are often referred to in the singular, as 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and commonage 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, there is something profoundly unsettling nearly the idea of a order inhabited by duplicates (peradventure the more so in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the procedure of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the attack, engaged in some unexplained attempt to reproduce the homo world so recently extinguished)^[11].

Yet as nosotros come to understand more than nearly Cylon club it becomes clear exactly why Caprica Six and Boomer'southward resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon gild is collective, a unit in which decisions are made by the group, the models voting every bit blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the majority. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to be within and outside some sort of hive mind, sharing memories and experiences still 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 cosmos, uncanny copies both of each other and of their man creators. At once human being and non, live 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 before, and volition happen once more', might also be seen as another case of this Freudian pattern of recurrence, or indeed of that other well-nigh 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 contrast to the relatively banal simulation of man order glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might be to exist Cylon. Moving silently through space in their cute, geometric Basestars, the immortal Cylons seem to be both within and outside time, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.

It is this unity the Caprica Vi and Boomer's resistance threatens, get-go by its very nature and later, more directly, by their determination to impale a beau Cylon in order to forestall her from taking the life of a human being resistance fighter. In then doing they spark a series of events that atomic number 82 first to the doomed endeavor to alive alongside the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and civil war that divides Cylon society in Season 4.

Such a course is  the fulfilment of the Oedipal conflict that begins the serial. Information technology is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, still it is too a manifestation of the serial' preoccupation with the effect of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the 2 species. At present they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The two are now destined to get 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 series 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 probable to testify challenging, not to the lowest degree because any resolution will need to fulfil the demands of the words that have haunted the serial, 'All of this has happened earlier, and will happen again.'

But in a style the path is already gear up and understood. In the last episode of Battlestar Galactica's third flavor, in the climactic scene of Baltar's  trial for crimes against humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned speech calling for his amortization. Every bit he speaks he gropes towards the reason so many are set on killing Baltar, a homo he and many others hate.

'Because you lot'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 yous didn't stand up to the Cylons and become yourself killed in the process. You should have been killed back on New Caprica, merely since you had the temerity to live, we're going to execute you.'

Merely as Apollo speaks we see him brainstorm to empathize the answer to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This case is built on emotion, on anger, bitterness, vengeance. Only 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 then flush him out the airlock, and promise that just gets rid of it all. And so that we tin can live with ourselves.'

Information technology is a cathartic moment in more ways than 1. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in lodge 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 articulate to those present, simply which achieve into the heart of the show. For in recognising that Baltar, the cast out, the apple-polishing, must be admitted back into the fold, Apollo articulates the possibility of resolution of the deeper conflict that gives the series breath, that between humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were one time their children, merely rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to exist explored in the show's final flavour.  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 series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode 4 of series two is denoted by the number ii.04. In keeping with this arrangement the telemovie Razor, while aired every bit a separate stand-alone episode, is assumed to form the first two episodes of Series 4 (4.01 and four.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted 1000.01 and G.02. Where differences exist betwixt the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode 2.ten, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some fifteen minutes of extra cloth), references are to the version released on DVD.

two Much of Battlestar Galactica's very item (and extremely coherent) visual way is the work of the Australian managing director, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (Thou.01 and M.02) and more than a tertiary of the commencement iii and a one-half seasons.

3 For a fuller give-and-take of Battlestar Galactica's utilise of music, run across Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Aural Space', in Tiffany Potter and C.Westward. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended word of Carry McCreary's influences and his Battlestar Galactica score can be plant in Tina Huang's review of the Battlestar Galactica Season ii original soundtrack album. Philip Glass's 'Metamorphosis 5' is used every bit a recurring motif during Starbuck's visit to her abandoned apartment on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (ii.02).

4 The opening credit montage alters subtly across the iv seasons. In Flavor 1 it also includes the additional phrases 'They look and feel human. Some are programmed to remember they are man', while in Flavor 4 we are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in hugger-mugger. One will exist revealed'.

v Given the more often than not heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix mostly notable for the relatively small number of black characters, it is mayhap interesting that Boomer, the one African-American character in the original series, has not only been transformed into a woman, just into an Asian woman.

half dozen The revisioned series besides deliberately invokes the outdated engineering science 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 series glimpsed as a museum exhibit in the kickoff episode of the mini-series (M.01) and in Razor (4.02), and as 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 (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 we attain that excellent glory of Savitar the God / and so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/championship/tt0407362/trivia).

eight A more than extended word of the intertextual elements of the revisioned serial is bachelor in Tiffany Potter and C.West. Marshall'south insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).

9 For a fuller discussion of this bespeak run across Erika Johnson-Lewis' 'Torture, Terrorism and Other Aspects of Man Nature', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 27-39.

ten The exact nature of the skinjobs' biology remains somewhat mysterious. Despite existence informed Cylons are substantially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, we learn the early biological Cylons were hybrids of homo and motorcar) and it being clear Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode we have also seen Athena insert a computer cable into her arm and interface with Galactica's computer systems straight, suggesting their bodies have functions that exceed the man and hark back to their cybernetic origins.

eleven It is perhaps non accidental that the Cylons seem most 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, 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 4, 2008. © James Bradley, 2008.

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Source: https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happened-before/

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