Everything Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again Battlestar Galactica

'It'south funny, isn't it? Nosotros're all God, Starbuck. All of u.s.a.. I see the love that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Flesh and Bone' (1.08)^[1]

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1 of the curious features of serial tv is its incompleteness. Where a novel, a painting or even a play arrives fully formed, its early drafts or preliminary sketches subsumed into a consummate and unified whole, television receiver shows are made up as they go along, evolving along the way. Sometimes the changes are big, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of accent and shifting focus, all the same either manner they ensure that as the years pass no television prove is always the show it started every bit.

Information technology's interesting therefore, every bit SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica enters the 2d one-half of its quaternary and last season, to wonder how clearly Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-serial foresaw the way the testify would apace exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original take on genre television into something far richer and stranger.

Watching those early episodes again, it'southward difficult not to see the style the evidence already pushed confronting the conventions of science fiction telly. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a future – or possibly a past – that looks surprisingly similar our present. Confined for the almost part to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the show's claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the trend of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their identify the testify offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Individual Ryan or Band of Brothers, an ofttimes hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and bound-cutting editing^[2]. Fifty-fifty the swelling orchestral score that has defined scientific discipline fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Bear McCreary'south hauntingly minimal soundscapes of endless taiko drums and wind 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)^[three].

Yet confronted with Battlestar Galactica'southward increasingly haunted and haunting tertiary season, and the boggling first half of its fourth, their vision of ii societies deranged by war and shadowed by visions of both salvation and destruction, information technology is even so hard to believe that the strange, troubling and oftentimes cute cosmos the testify has become was in its creators' minds from the commencement. For although the intense and often visceral edge that marks the early on episodes remains, information technology has go simply one chemical element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and ofttimes deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties about 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 betwixt humanity and inhumanity, us and them, Human and Other.

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For those who grew upwards in the 1970s and 1980s as I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is likely to be 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 assault by the Cylons. In the cluttered aftermath of the attack a ragtag 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, Earth.

The original series is one of the camp classics of 1970s sci-fi boob tube. One part Star Wars, one function a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson'southward Mormon heritage, it survived a single flavor, producing xx-four 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 arrival of their cousins from the stars.

Withal for all its woozy 1970s new historic period trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('There are those who believe that life here began out there, far beyond 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 notwithstanding 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 pop consciousness, equally did its one enduring image, that of the single red Cylon eye, moving inexorably from side to side in the visor of their chrome-plated helmets.

The revisioned Battlestar Galactica recasts the concept of the original series in contemporary terms. No longer an expression of Cold State of war paranoia, the story of the attack and the fleet'south drastic flight is grounded in early twenty-beginning-century, post-9/11 anxieties about terrorism and the decline of the Due west. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series take become the terminal remnants of a shattered social club quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the chivalrous gaze of Lorne Dark-green'south original Commander Adama, the fleet is at present divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama tin can do footling to incorporate. Fifty-fifty the physical universe is contradistinct, no longer a place of wondrous water ice planets and shimmering lights, but a common cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken only by isolated planets devoid of all merely the simplest organic life.

Yet information technology is the Cylons who are the near 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 have been reborn as artificial beings, some, replicant-like, indistinguishable from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Two, Three, Half-dozen, Eight), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy express past inbuilt constraints.

Created not in some alien lab simply, every bit the opening credits inform us in a terse, telegraphed series of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Human being. They Rebelled. They Evolved. In that location Are Many Copies. And They Have a Plan'^[four], past humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit past the knowledge of a hidden just revelatory beauty, and uncanny, ofttimes profoundly disturbing simulacra of human being beings, they are at once like but dissimilar, manufactured yet alive, Human being yet greatly 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 to the lowest degree the names and call signs of central characters such equally the fleet'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 equally Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the testify's military machine, an organisation in which men and women fight, wash and sleep together (even the toilets are unisex).  At least two, Boomer and Tigh, have also been transformed into Cylons, in both cases equally sleeper agents, initially unaware of their ain identity^[five].

Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (M.01) we are informed that forty years have passed since the armistice that ended the war between the humans and the Cylons, forty years in which the Cylons have remained invisible across the demarcation zone. The Galactica herself, pride of the fleet in the original serial, 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 yet absent. The war of 40 years earlier is presumably the same war in which the original serial took identify, yet the attack itself lies in the time to come, not the by. The prehistory of the original serial intrudes, both as cultural retention and in specific appropriations and allusions, yet the show is not leap by it in any way^[6].

The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate as The Aeneid, The Volume of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, every bit 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 religion. Like the playful cribbing of science fictional tropes such as the term 'skinjobs' to describe the replicant humanoid Cylons from Ridley Scott'south Bract 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'due south Minority Study, or the more than subtle incorporation of sacred texts and language (Kobol, the name of the planet from which the humans fled prior to the founding of the Twelve Colonies, means 'Heaven' in Western farsi, while the show'southward 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 made more powerful by the repeated proffer 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 time in which by and future are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the bear witness's core, 'All of this has happened earlier, and will happen over again'^[8].

This blurring of the familiar and the unfamiliar is a narrative strategy Battlestar Galactica besides employs to anchor its political subtexts. For all that its gimmicky political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety about apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of ceremonious social club by the military, torture and religious extremism, in that location is seldom any piece of cake correlation betwixt events in the series and events in the real world. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified by the events of the first four episodes of the third series. Following the discovery at the end of the 2d season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar's defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the first gratuitous elections held afterward the attack, much of the fleet abandons their ships to settle on the planet, now called New Caprica, only to notice themselves, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, living under Cylon occupation.

With Galactica gone, the colonists are left undefended, forced to resist the Cylons in whatever way they can. Some, similar Baltar, have lilliputian choice but to piece of work with their Cylon masters; others refuse to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. Every bit the Cylon regime resorts to always more than fell tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more than extreme, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to kill Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human law.

Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral gild of usa and them, correct and wrong, Human and Other implicit in the evidence's conception, these episodes do non but undermine the easy identification between insurgent and terrorist, but past explicitly invoking the retentiveness of quisling governments such as Vichy, suggest the simplistic historical parallels often drawn between the war in Iraq and the Second World War are far less comforting than they are unremarkably assumed to be.

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This sort of destabilisation is of course the point and ability of science fiction, yet Battlestar Galactica deploys it with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Bone' (ane.08), a Cylon agent is plant within the human being fleet. Convinced its information will be worthless, Commander Adama argues it should be thrown out an airlock but President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the agent, a Two known as Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), be interrogated.

Starbuck is assigned the chore of interrogating the convict Cylon, a task she takes to with disturbing zeal, brutally beating Leoben until at concluding President Roslin interrupts. Seemingly appalled at what she has constitute, President Roslin demands to know what is going on. Unabashed, Starbuck responds, 'It's a car, sir, at that place's no limit to the tactics I tin 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 near the use of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is non debated, nor is there any suggestion the characters regret their actions. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in straight breach of her ain offering of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock simply moments after he provides the information she seeks.

At 1 level these instances of brutality on the part of the human being characters are of a piece with the recurrent proffer that the Twelve Colonies may have been a less than ideal guild, for all its democratic trappings. When in 'Guardhouse 24-hour interval' (ane.03) it is discovered the political agitator and terrorist Tom Zarek  is incarcerated on a prison house transport ship within the fleet, Apollo admits to having read his books at academy, despite them being banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the thought, the series toys for a time with the notion that Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original series, might serve as a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his quondam self). In another episode, 'Hero' (3.08), we learn the armed forces may have provoked the Cylon set on with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of xl years before. And while its exact nature is left ambiguous, the administration in which President Roslin served before the attack seems to have been both politically inept and surprisingly cruel: in a scene set only hours earlier the attack President Adar demands Roslin'south resignation because she has managed to defuse a teacher's strike Adar had planned to intermission up with troops in order to provide an example to other groups seeking to sway the government in similar means.

The ambiguity these glancing references creates is left unexplored. Indeed given that the series is predicated upon unthinkable grief and loss, Battlestar Galactica provides picayune 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 information technology creates, its emptiness and black, is quite literally a place of decease, a fact reinforced by the recurring device of characters beingness blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions we know adjacent to nothing of the lives of the characters before 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 bulletin boards that sprung upwards in New York in the days after September eleven, the crew have pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but generally the show inhabits a earth 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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Notwithstanding the implications of the events depicted in 'Flesh and Os' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush-league administration'southward prosecution of the war on terror. While the man characters see the Cylons every bit inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come up to see them not as an implacable Other, but as something both less and more familiar. For all that he does not fearfulness expiry, Leoben feels pain, fearfulness, hunger and, about unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual conventionalities. 'I run across the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might exist similar, 'I know that I'chiliad more than this body, more than than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream just in truth, I'1000 standing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream.'

In 'Mankind 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 human whose optics run across beyond this globe, nevertheless whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously suggest something dangerously mercurial. Past contrast the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Bone' is a woman swaggeringly certain of her own convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might be more simulated.

The result is an encounter that blurs the distinction between Man and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben'due south humanity, Starbuck – and past extension Colonial society equally a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the affair she seeks to destroy^[ix].

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 duplicate fifty-fifty at a cellular level^[ten], as well every bit encountering at least two Cylons (both Eights), the Sharon known every bit Boomer and the Sharon assigned to breed with Helo on Caprica, who not only resist their programming, but also feel conflicted by human beloved, desire and loyalty. Too we have been offered many disquieting images of homo cruelty, and of the horrors of state of war more generally. (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 crew whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfortable reactions.)

Nevertheless it is not until the center of the show's second flavor, and what may well stand equally its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the distinction between human and Cylon has become. After surviving for more than than a year on the run, Galactica and the civilian armada encounter some other Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has likewise managed to survive the attack upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors quickly gives mode to disquiet. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew take become instruments of total state of war, loyal simply to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their cause.

The parallels with the Bush assistants's state of war on terror are axiomatic, not to the lowest degree in Cain's barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of civilian government that endures in the armada ('The Secretary for Education?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her first interview with him and President Roslin). But it is non the frighteningly conspicuously drawn portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic heart (in another of the serial' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama eventually agree the only fashion to contain Cain is to corrupt themselves, and murder her) simply the revelation that Pegasus has a Cylon prisoner in her brig.

When Baltar examines the prisoner and extracts what information he tin, he discovers a Six (Tricia Helfer), a model he has been in dearest with since before the attack on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her torso displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual assault.

The discovery is deeply disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, but it is the post-obit 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 8 known every bit Sharon (Grace Park)  who, having betrayed her race to aid the stranded Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) escape Caprica is at present held in Galactica's brig. In a series of viscerally disturbing scenes that cut between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica's flying deck and Galactica'southward brig, we circle inwards, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon'southward cell (constructed, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay's holding pens, of wire mesh within a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus crew boasting about their handling of the Six in their brig, see Sharon'due south doubtfulness turn to first to concern and and then terror as Thorne and the troops with him forcefulness 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 incertitude virtually the boundaries between the human and the Cylon Other would exist less effective if information technology were not embedded in Battlestar Galactica's broader interest in exploring the chapters of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the show's relentless downwardly spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more important, connecting the question of the human 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 refuse that is almost unique in series idiot box, its four seasons not charting humanity'southward triumph over adversity, but the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what  is left of human order. This alone would make for confronting viewing, yet the show 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 stop of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, it ticks ever down from its outset reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-as in the first survivor count afterwards the escape from New Caprica-drastically, but ever downwards, reaching, by midway through the fourth season, a mere 39,685.

In more human terms information technology is also visible in the gradual fraying of the fleet 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 nearly the reality of military life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive risk-takers, and at that place are more than than a few scenes that remind the viewer of the violence and dehumanisation that is a necessary part of military machine life. Simultaneously though we are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, human beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Likewise the many scenes of apparel uniform ceremonies that occur in early on episodes quickly fade, ceremony eroded by the need to survive.

In this respect Battlestar Galactica often subverts one of the basic tenets of serial television. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the almost part, remain abiding over time, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can simply sally radically and irreparably altered, a procedure that is most evident in the episodes set during the occupation of New Caprica. Yet while all the characters are implicated in this ofttimes cruel procedure of psychological and social disintegration, growing increasingly embittered and damaged every bit the series proceeds, it is in the person of President Roslin that the process is near starkly drawn.

President Laura Roslin, and indeed the unabridged notion of a surviving civilian government, is 1 of the masterstrokes of the series as a whole. The former secretary for education, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies after the twoscore-two members of the regime ahead of her fail to written report in line with emergency protocols. A former schoolteacher, and initially regarded equally a soft-headed junior 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 lilliputian-respected. At first her main business concern is preserving lives, only by the first episode of the first series, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to give the social club to destroy a ship carrying 1500 civilians because she believes a Cylon agent on board threatens the entire fleet. This blooding begins a journey that sees President Roslin grow into a hawk of such swift brutality she unnerves even Adama (when, in 'A Measure out of Conservancy' (3.07), Roslin is offered a means to destroy the Cylons forever she does not glimmer at genocide).

Nevertheless this transformation is not without its costs. By the quaternary 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 but how removed from human feeling she has become, unable to dear, unable even to feel  (the episodes of the first half of the fourth season 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 order. Although in the early episodes Cylon club remains essentially inscrutable, by the second and third series information technology is less and so, as the series explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the state of war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (ii.18), which is set not amongst the human characters but among the Cylons on the now-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.

Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer's contact with fully functioning Cylon characters has been limited to encounters with private agents, such as the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the Three known as D'Anna in 'Final Cut'. The three continuing presences in the first and second series-the Six who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the first 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 mode from the majority of Cylon society.

'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The kickoff is the Six who used Baltar to access the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the second is Boomer, who, having been killed after her attempt to assassinate Adama, has at present downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed as heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. Nonetheless despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon lodge. Boomer, still horrified by the discovery of her true identity, exists in a state of existential rage and despair, while the Vi is haunted  by the knowledge of her role in the deaths of and then many billions besides every bit by her dear for Baltar.

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A Three (Lucy Lawless) wakes in a resurrection pod

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The question of individuality and what information technology might mean haunts 'Downloaded', as well as afterward episodes focussing on Cylon characters (past the fourth season the Cylons are often referred to in the singular, as 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and collective nature of Cylon society). Just like the images of a San Francisco populated by conflicting replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman's 1978 film Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, there is something greatly unsettling well-nigh the idea of a society inhabited past duplicates (perhaps the more so in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the process of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the attack, engaged in some unexplained effort to reproduce the human globe so recently extinguished)^[11].

Yet as we come to understand more about Cylon society it becomes articulate exactly why Caprica Six and Boomer'south resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon club is collective, a unit in which decisions are made past the group, the models voting as blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the majority. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to exist within and exterior some sort of hive heed, sharing memories and experiences withal notwithstanding individuated. To deny the group is therefore to deny the whole, a violence of a profound and almost unimaginable kind.

In this respect the Cylons (or Cylon) are a disquieting creation, uncanny copies both of each other and of their human creators. At once human and non, alive yet undying, created beings that both simulate and experience emotion, desire, pain, their presence drives a radical instability of significant, one that echoes precisely the instances of doppelgangers and simulacra that Freud describes equally instances of the uncanny^[12] (the mantra of the Cylons, 'All this has happened before, and will happen once again', might also 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 almost 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 society glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might be to be Cylon. Moving silently through space in their beautiful, geometric Basestars, the immortal Cylons seem to exist both within and exterior time, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.

It is this unity the Caprica Six and Boomer's resistance threatens, kickoff by its very nature and later on, more directly, by their decision to impale a fellow Cylon in order to foreclose her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In and then doing they spark a serial of events that pb first to the doomed effort to alive aslope the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and civil war that divides Cylon gild in Season Four.

Such a course is  the fulfilment of the Oedipal conflict that begins the series. It is the wages of the Cylon'south original sin, even so it is also a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the consequence of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the two species. Now they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The two are now destined to become ane, or perish.

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Sol Tigh (Michael Hogan) interrogates Boomer (Grace Park)

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It volition 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 likely to evidence challenging, not least considering any resolution will need to fulfil the demands of the words that accept haunted the series, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen again.'

But in a way the path is already prepare and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica's third flavour, in the climactic scene of Baltar's  trial for crimes confronting humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned speech calling for his acquittal. As he speaks he gropes towards the reason then many are assail killing Baltar, a man he and many others hate.

'Because you're weak,' Apollo says 'Because you lot're big-headed … Because you're a coward, and we the mob, desire to throw you out of the airlock because you didn't stand up to the Cylons and go yourself killed in the process. You should have been killed back on New Caprica, but since you had the temerity to alive, we're going to execute you.'

But every bit Apollo speaks we encounter 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 near of all, it is built on shame  … And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on 1 human being and so affluent him out the airlock, and hope that just gets rid of it all. Then that we can live with ourselves.'

It is a cathartic moment in more ways than one. For Apollo, who has resigned his committee and had his father disown him in social club to defend a homo both hold in antipathy, it signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.

But it also signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not clear to those present, but which achieve into the heart of the show. For in recognising that Baltar, the cast out, the abject, must be admitted dorsum into the fold, Apollo articulates the possibility of resolution of the deeper conflict that gives the series jiff, that between humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were one time their children, simply rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to exist explored in the show's concluding season.  For in the end at that place is no us and them, no human and Other. We are them, and they are the states. And all of this has happened before, and will happen once more.

Starbuck (Kara Thrace)

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Notes:
1 In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified by the serial and episode numbers contained in their product numbers. Thus episode 4 of series 2 is denoted by the number two.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired as a separate stand-lone episode, is assumed to form the kickoff two episodes of Serial 4 (4.01 and iv.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted Thousand.01 and 1000.02. Where differences be between the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode 2.10, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some fifteen minutes of extra material), references are to the version released on DVD.

2 Much of Battlestar Galactica'due south very detail (and extremely coherent) visual style is the work of the Australian director, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (M.01 and 1000.02) and more than than a 3rd of the first three and a half seasons.

3 For a fuller word of Battlestar Galactica'south employ of music, see Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Aural 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 Deport McCreary'due south influences and his Battlestar Galactica score can be establish in Tina Huang's review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 original soundtrack album. Philip Glass's 'Metamorphosis Five' is used every bit a recurring motif during Starbuck's 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 expect and feel human. Some are programmed to remember they are human being', while in Season 4 we are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four alive in secret. One will be revealed'.

5 Given the generally heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix mostly notable for the relatively pocket-size number of black characters, it is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the 1 African-American character in the original series, has non just been transformed into a woman, but into an Asian woman.

half dozen The revisioned series also deliberately invokes the outdated technology of the original series, in details such as the Korean Ground forces telephones that are used on Galactica and visual jokes, such equally the Cylon uniform from the original series glimpsed as a museum exhibit in the first episode of the mini-series (Grand.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)).

seven The Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rig Veda: "OM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât (may nosotros reach that fantabulous glory of Savitar the God / and so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/trivia).

8 A more extended discussion of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is available in Tiffany Potter and C.West. Marshall's insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).

9 For a fuller word of this point encounter 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' biological science remains somewhat mysterious. Despite being informed Cylons are substantially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, we learn the early biological Cylons were hybrids of human and machine) and it being articulate Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in 1 episode nosotros have as well seen Athena insert a reckoner cable into her arm and interface with Galactica'southward computer systems directly, suggesting their bodies have functions that exceed the human and hark dorsum to their cybernetic origins.

11 It is perchance non accidental that the Cylons seem 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 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.

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

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