What Happened Befpre Wont Happen Again

'It's funny, isn't it? We're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I see the dearest that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Mankind and Bone' (1.08)^[1]

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One of the curious features of serial goggle box 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 set shows are made upwardly equally they proceed, evolving along the manner. Sometimes the changes are big, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of emphasis and shifting focus, nonetheless either manner they ensure that as the years laissez passer no television evidence is ever the prove information technology started as.

Information technology's interesting therefore, every bit SciFi Aqueduct's Battlestar Galactica enters the second half of its quaternary and concluding season, to wonder how conspicuously Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-serial foresaw the way the show would rapidly exceed the terms of its own formulation, developing from an already interesting and original have on genre television into something far richer and stranger.

Watching those early episodes over again, it's difficult not to run into the way the evidence already pushed against the conventions of scientific discipline fiction television receiver. Light amplification by stimulated emission of radiation rifles and aliens are notably absent-minded, in their identify is a future – or possibly a past – that looks surprisingly like our present. Confined for the most role to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the show's claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the tendency of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their identify the show offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Individual Ryan or Band of Brothers, an oft hallucinatory collage of handheld photographic camera and jump-cut editing^[2]. Fifty-fifty the swelling orchestral score that has defined scientific discipline fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Conduct McCreary's 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 to the lowest degree one occasion, really is Philip Drinking glass)^[3].

Nonetheless confronted with Battlestar Galactica'southward increasingly haunted and haunting third season, and the extraordinary beginning one-half of its fourth, their vision of ii societies deranged by war and shadowed past visions of both conservancy and devastation, information technology is withal difficult to believe that the strange, troubling and frequently beautiful creation the bear witness has become was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and frequently visceral edge that marks the early episodes remains, it has become just one element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and often deeply unsettling exploration of gimmicky anxieties nearly war and terrorism and the chapters of violence and trauma to unmake society and individuals, as well every bit 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 equally 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 well-nigh annihilated in a surprise attack by the Cylons. In the cluttered aftermath of the set on a canaille armada 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, Globe.

The original serial is one of the military camp classics of 1970s sci-fi television. 1 part Star Wars, one part a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson's Mormon heritage, it survived a single season, producing 20-four hours of television and a universally derided spin-off serial, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally found Earth, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the arrival of their cousins from the stars.

All the same for all its woozy 1970s new age trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.. . . . Some believe that there may yet exist brothers of man who fifty-fifty at present fight to survive somewhere across the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original show )something of the original serial wove its way into the pop consciousness, as did its i indelible image, that of the single red Cylon center, 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 gimmicky terms. No longer an expression of Common cold State of war paranoia, the story of the assault and the fleet's desperate flight is grounded in early twenty-first-century, post-9/11 anxieties about terrorism and the turn down of the West. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series accept go the last remnants of a shattered society quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the benevolent gaze of Lorne Green's original Commander Adama, the fleet is now divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can practise little to contain. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a identify of wondrous ice planets and shimmering lights, but a cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken only by isolated planets devoid of all but the simplest organic life.

All the same it is the Cylons who are the most haunting cosmos of the revisioned series. Where in the original series they are a faceless race of lizard-like aliens, in the revisioned serial they have been reborn as bogus beings, some, replicant-like, indistinguishable from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Ii, Three, Vi, 8), others, such as the robotic centurions and Cylon raiders, intelligent biomechanical or cybernetic creatures possessed of an autonomy limited by inbuilt constraints.

Created not in some alien lab but, as the opening credits inform us in a terse, telegraphed serial of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Man. They Rebelled. They Evolved. There Are Many Copies. And They Take a Plan'^[4], by humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a subconscious but revelatory beauty, and uncanny, ofttimes profoundly disturbing simulacra of human beings, they are at in one case like only unlike, manufactured yet alive, Human nonetheless profoundly Other.

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Technically speaking of course, the new Battlestar Galactica is neither a continuation of the original series nor a remake. Many narrative elements are retained, not to the lowest degree the names and telephone call signs of central characters such as the fleet's commander, William Adama, his Executive Officer, Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan), Adama's son, Apollo (Jamie Bamber), and the narcissistic scientific genius, Gaius Baltar (James Callis). Others, such as Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, Grace Park'southward Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the contradistinct gender relations of the prove'south military, an organization in which men and women fight, launder and sleep together (fifty-fifty the toilets are unisex).  At least ii, Boomer and Tigh, take also 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 40 years have passed since the ceasefire 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 serial is placed in a universe in which many of the elements of the original series remain, nowadays yet absent. The state of war of forty years before is presumably the same war in which the original series took place, nonetheless the set on itself lies in the future, not the past. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both every bit cultural memory and in specific appropriations and allusions, all the same the testify is not bound by it in any way^[6].

The revisioned serial is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate as The Aeneid, The Volume of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, as well as suggesting other, more mystic parallels in the Zodiacal names of the Twelve Colonies (Caprica, Sagittaron, Gemenon and and then on) and the idols and rituals of the Colonials' polytheistic religion. Like the playful appropriation of science fictional tropes such equally 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 Written report, or the more subtle incorporation of sacred texts and language (Kobol, the proper noun of the planet from which the humans fled prior to the founding of the Twelve Colonies, means 'Heaven' in Persian, while the show's melancholy theme music incorporates a Hindu Mantra)^[seven], these mythic elements are highly suggestive, generating parallels and allusions while simultaneously denying like shooting fish in a barrel or reductive correlations. Information technology is a process made more powerful past the repeated suggestion that the events depicted in the narrative are role of some larger whole (not for nothing are we told the Cylons 'Have a Plan' in the opening credits), some wheel of time in which past and future are merged and which, in the words repeated past those Cylons privy to the secrets at the testify's core, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen once more'^[viii].

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 civil gild by the military, torture and religious extremism, there is seldom whatsoever piece of cake correlation between events in the series and events in the real world. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified by the events of the first 4 episodes of the third series. Following the discovery at the end of the 2nd season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar'south defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the outset gratis elections held later the assault, much of the armada abandons their ships to settle on the planet, now called New Caprica, but to discover themselves, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, living nether Cylon occupation.

With Galactica gone, the colonists are left undefended, forced to resist the Cylons in whatsoever way they can. Some, like Baltar, have petty choice but to work with their Cylon masters; others refuse to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. Equally the Cylon regime resorts to ever more cruel tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more extreme, culminating in a serial of suicide bombings intended to impale Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed human law.

Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral society of us and them, right and wrong, Human and Other implicit in the testify'south conception, these episodes exercise not but undermine the like shooting fish in a barrel identification betwixt insurgent and terrorist, just past explicitly invoking the retention of quisling governments such as Vichy, suggest the simplistic historical parallels ofttimes drawn betwixt the war in Republic of iraq and the Second World State of war are far less comforting than they are usually causeless to exist.

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This sort of destabilisation is of course the point and power of scientific discipline fiction, yet Battlestar Galactica deploys it with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Bone' (1.08), a Cylon agent is found within the human being fleet. Convinced its information volition be worthless, Commander Adama argues it should exist thrown out an airlock merely President Roslin, who has encountered the model in a dream, disagrees, and insists the agent, a Two known every bit Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie), exist interrogated.

Starbuck is assigned the task of interrogating the captive Cylon, a task she takes to with disturbing zeal, brutally chirapsia 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's a machine, sir, there's no limit to the tactics I can employ.'

It is a sequence that is agonizing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that none of the characters involved evince whatever reservations almost the use of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is not debated, nor is at that place whatever suggestion the characters regret their actions. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in direct breach of her ain offer of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock only moments after he provides the information she seeks.

At one level these instances of brutality on the part of the human characters are of a piece with the recurrent proffer that the Twelve Colonies may have been a less than ideal guild, for all its democratic trappings. When in 'Bastille Day' (1.03) information technology 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 university, despite them being banned (mayhap 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 equally a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his former self). In another episode, 'Hero' (3.08), we learn the military may have provoked the Cylon assail with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of forty years before. And while its exact nature is left ambiguous, the administration in which President Roslin served before the attack seems to have been both politically inept and surprisingly savage: in a scene set only hours before the assail President Adar demands Roslin's resignation because she has managed to defuse a teacher's strike Adar had planned to break up with troops in order 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 mode 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 information technology creates, its emptiness and black, is quite literally a place of decease, a fact reinforced past the recurring device of characters being diddled out airlocks. With a few exceptions we know next to zilch of the lives of the characters earlier the attacks: sometimes we glimpse photographs, occasionally names are mentioned, and on several occasions we come 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 later September 11, the crew have pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but by and large the show inhabits a world 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'southward prosecution of the war on terror. While the human characters see the Cylons every bit inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come up to come across them not as an implacable Other, merely equally something both less and more familiar. For all that he does not fear decease, Leoben feels pain, fearfulness, hunger and, virtually unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual belief. 'I run into the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might exist like, 'I know that I'thou more than this body, more than this consciousness. A role of me swims in the stream simply in truth, I'm standing on the shore. The electric current never takes me downstream.'

In 'Flesh and Bone' and elsewhere, much of the pleasance of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie's disconcerting performance. With his scraggy hair and battered blond looks he nigh resembles some cracked, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes run into across this globe, nonetheless 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 woman swaggeringly certain of her own convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might exist more faux.

The result is an encounter that blurs the distinction between Human being and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and past extension Colonial club every bit a whole – is dehumanised, condign, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the affair she seeks to destroy^[nine].

The boundary between man and Cylon has already begun to blur before the scenes with Leoben. We have learned Cylons are biological replicas of human beings, virtually duplicate even at a cellular level^[10], also equally encountering at least 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, simply besides feel conflicted by man love, desire and loyalty. Likewise we have been offered many disquieting images of human being cruelty, and of the horrors of state of war more generally. (In the episode 'Flight of the Phoenix' (2.09) we witness a squadron of Vipers massacre hundreds of disabled and defenceless Cylon raiders. While the pilots and Galactica's bridge crew whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfortable reactions.)

Yet it is non until the middle of the show's 2nd season, and what may well stand as its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives only how unclear the stardom betwixt man and Cylon has get. After surviving for more than than a twelvemonth on the run, Galactica and the noncombatant fleet encounter another Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has besides managed to survive the attack upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors quickly gives fashion to ailment. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew take become instruments of total war, loyal merely to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their crusade.

The parallels with the Bush assistants's state of war on terror are evident, not to the lowest degree in Cain's barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of noncombatant government that endures in the fleet ('The Secretary for Pedagogy?' Cain asks Adama incredulously afterwards her first interview with him and President Roslin). Simply information technology is not the frighteningly clearly drawn portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic heart (in some other of the series' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama somewhen concur the only style 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 tin can, he discovers a Six (Tricia Helfer), a model he has been in dearest with since before the assail on the Colonies, she is catatonic and immobile, her body displaying the marks of repeated brutality, torture and sexual assault.

The discovery is deeply disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, just 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 Eight known equally Sharon (Grace Park)  who, having betrayed her race to assist 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's flying deck and Galactica's brig, we circle inwards, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon's cell (constructed, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay's belongings pens, of wire mesh within a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus coiffure boasting most their treatment of the 6 in their brig, see Sharon'southward incertitude turn to kickoff to concern and then terror as Thorne and the troops with him forcefulness 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 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 involvement in exploring the capacity of state of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the show's relentless downwards spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more than 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 decline that is most unique in series television set, its 4 seasons not charting humanity's triumph over adversity, only the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what  is left of human order. This lonely 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 upwards at the end of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, information technology ticks ever downwards from its first reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-as in the showtime survivor count after the escape from New Caprica-drastically, but always down, reaching, by midway through the fourth season, a mere 39,685.

In more homo terms it is besides visible in the gradual fraying of the fleet itself. Episode by episode the cost in lives weighs more heavily upon the characters, in particular the fighter pilots who are the front line of defense force. Although the men and women of Galactica are the heroes of the piece, the show has few illusions well-nigh the reality of war machine life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive risk-takers, and there are more than 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, human beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Likewise 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 series television receiver. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the most office, remain constant over time, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can only emerge radically and irreparably altered, a procedure that is most evident in the episodes set up during the occupation of New Caprica. However while all the characters are implicated in this often fell process of psychological and social disintegration, growing increasingly embittered and damaged as the series proceeds, it is in the person of President Roslin that the process is nearly starkly fatigued.

President Laura Roslin, and indeed the entire notion of a surviving civilian government, is ane of the masterstrokes of the series equally a whole. The former secretary for education, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies after the 40-2 members of the government ahead of her neglect to report in line with emergency protocols. A former schoolteacher, and initially regarded every bit a soft-headed junior member of a authorities-Adama himself admits to non having voted for her: 'President Adar was an idiot,' he remarks at ane point-President Roslin assumes the reins of power substantially unknown and little-respected. At starting time her chief concern is preserving lives, but by the first episode of the first series, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to give the order to destroy a ship conveying 1500 civilians because she believes a Cylon agent on board threatens the unabridged armada. 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 means to destroy the Cylons forever she does not blink at genocide).

Yet this transformation is non without its costs. By the 4th series, haunted by visions from the chamalla excerpt she has been taking in an try to stave off the spreading cancer within her, President Roslin experiences a long hallucination in the moments between hyperspace jumps in which she is confronted with just how removed from human feeling she has get, unable to dear, unable even to feel  (the episodes of the start one-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 non limited to Battlestar Galactica's portrait of human gild. Although in the early episodes Cylon society remains essentially inscrutable, by the second and third series information technology is less and then, as the series explores the growing malaise in Cylon club engendered past the war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (2.18), which is set not amid the human characters merely amidst the Cylons on the now-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.

Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer'southward contact with fully performance Cylon characters has been express to encounters with private agents, such every bit the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the Iii known as D'Anna in 'Final Cutting'. The three continuing presences in the starting time and second series-the Vi who appears to Baltar in his tortured visions; Boomer, whose horrified realisation of her Cylon nature occupies much of the first season and culminates in its shocking finale; and the Eight known as Sharon who helps Helo escape from Caprica-are all either unaware of their true identity or separated in some manner from the bulk of Cylon society.

'Downloaded' focuses on 2 Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The first 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. Withal despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon society. Boomer, all the same horrified by the discovery of her true identity, exists in a state of existential rage and despair, while the Six is haunted  by the knowledge of her function in the deaths of so many billions also every bit by her love for Baltar.

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A Three (Lucy Lawless) wakes in a resurrection pod

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The question of individuality and what information technology might mean haunts 'Downloaded', equally well every bit later episodes focussing on Cylon characters (past the fourth flavor the Cylons are oftentimes referred to in the atypical, every bit 'the Cylon', implying a tacit understanding of the unified and collective nature of Cylon social club). Just like the images of a San Francisco populated past alien replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman'south 1978 picture show Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, in that location is something profoundly unsettling about the idea of a society inhabited by duplicates (perhaps the more than so in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the process of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the set on, engaged in some unexplained attempt to reproduce the human world so recently extinguished)^[xi].

Notwithstanding as we come to empathise more about Cylon order it becomes clear exactly why Caprica Six and Boomer'due south resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon order is collective, a unit in which decisions are made by the group, the models voting as blocks, and the whole acceding to the wishes of the majority. Individual 'skinjobs' seem to exist inside and exterior 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 near unimaginable kind.

In this respect the Cylons (or Cylon) are a disquieting creation, uncanny copies both of each other and of their human being creators. At once human and not, live yet undying, created beings that both simulate and experience emotion, want, hurting, their presence drives a radical instability of meaning, one that echoes precisely the instances of doppelgangers and simulacra that Freud describes every bit instances of the uncanny^[12] (the mantra of the Cylons, 'All this has happened before, and will happen again', might also be seen every bit some other instance of this Freudian pattern of recurrence, or indeed of that other most 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 bland simulation of human society glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes afford a glimpse of what it might be to exist Cylon. Moving silently through space in their beautiful, geometric Basestars, the immortal Cylons seem to exist both within and outside time, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.

It is this unity the Caprica Six and Boomer'southward resistance threatens, first by its very nature and afterward, more than directly, by their decision to kill a fellow Cylon in gild to prevent her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In then doing they spark a serial of events that lead first to the doomed attempt to live alongside the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and ceremonious war that divides Cylon lodge in Season Four.

Such a course is  the fulfilment of the Oedipal disharmonize that begins the serial. It is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, however it is also a manifestation of the serial' preoccupation with the effect of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the ii species. At present they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The ii are now destined to become one, or perish.

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

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It will exist interesting to discover exactly how Battlestar Galactica'due south producers intend to resolve the remarkable web of narrative and thematic complexities the series has created over the by 4 seasons in the ten episodes that remain. Making sense of the many competing allusions and expectations they create is likely to prove challenging, not to the lowest degree considering whatsoever resolution will demand to fulfil the demands of the words that accept haunted the serial, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen again.'

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

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

But as Apollo speaks we come across him brainstorm to understand the answer to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This example is built on emotion, on acrimony, bitterness, vengeance. But nearly of all, it is built on shame  … And we're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one man and then flush him out the airlock, and promise that merely gets rid of it all. And so that we can live with ourselves.'

Information technology is a cathartic moment in more than ways than 1. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in order to defend a man both hold in contempt, information technology signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.

Merely it too signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not clear to those nowadays, but which reach into the centre of the bear witness. For in recognising that Baltar, the cast out, the abject, must exist admitted dorsum 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 once their children, just rose confronting their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to be explored in the evidence's final season.  For in the stop in that location is no us and them, no human and Other. Nosotros are them, and they are us. And all of this has happened before, and will happen again.

Starbuck (Kara Thrace)

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Notes:
1 In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified by the series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode 4 of serial ii is denoted past the number 2.04. In keeping with this organisation the telemovie Razor, while aired equally a separate stand-alone episode, is assumed to course 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 be between the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode 2.10, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some xv minutes of extra material), references are to the version released on DVD.

2 Much of Battlestar Galactica's very particular (and extremely coherent) visual style is the work of the Australian director, Michael Rymer, who directed both the original miniseries (M.01 and M.02) and more than a third of the showtime three and a half seasons.

three For a fuller give-and-take of Battlestar Galactica's use of music, see Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Aural 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's influences and his Battlestar Galactica score tin be institute in Tina Huang's review of the Battlestar Galactica Season 2 original soundtrack album. Philip Glass's 'Metamorphosis Five' is used equally a recurring motif during Starbuck'due south visit to her abandoned flat on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (two.02).

4 The opening credit montage alters subtly across the four seasons. In Season 1 it likewise includes the additional phrases 'They wait and feel homo. Some are programmed to think they are human being', while in Season 4 we are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in hole-and-corner. One will be revealed'.

5 Given the generally heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix generally notable for the relatively small number of black characters, it is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the one African-American grapheme in the original serial, has not just been transformed into a woman, only into an Asian woman.

six The revisioned series also deliberately invokes the outdated technology of the original series, in details such every bit 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 showroom in the kickoff episode of the mini-series (M.01) and in Razor (4.02), and every bit a plot device (Galactica survives the initial assail 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 nosotros attain that excellent glory of Savitar the God / so may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/trivia).

eight A more extended discussion of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is bachelor in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall'southward insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).

nine 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 essentially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, nosotros learn the early on biological Cylons were hybrids of human and machine) and information technology beingness clear Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode we have also seen Athena insert a computer cablevision into her arm and interface with Galactica's calculator systems directly, suggesting their bodies take functions that exceed the human and hark back to their cybernetic origins.

xi It is possibly not 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 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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