All of This Has Happened Before and Will Happen Again Meaning
'Information technology'due south funny, isn't it? We're all God, Starbuck. All of usa. I see the dearest that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Flesh and Os' (one.08)[ane]
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Ane of the curious features of series television is its incompleteness. Where a novel, a painting or fifty-fifty a play arrives fully formed, its early on drafts or preliminary sketches subsumed into a complete and unified whole, goggle box shows are fabricated up as they keep, evolving along the fashion. Sometimes the changes are large, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of emphasis and shifting focus, yet either way they ensure that as the years pass no television bear witness is ever the prove it started as.
It's interesting therefore, as SciFi Aqueduct's Battlestar Galactica enters the second half of its fourth and terminal flavor, to wonder how conspicuously Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-series foresaw the fashion the prove would rapidly exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original take on genre goggle box into something far richer and stranger.
Watching those early episodes again, it's difficult non to see the way the prove already pushed against the conventions of science fiction television. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a time to come – or possibly a past – that looks surprisingly like our nowadays. Confined for the near role to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the evidence'south claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the tendency of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their identify the show offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, an ofttimes hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and jump-cut editing[ii]. Even the swelling orchestral score that has divers scientific discipline fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Deport McCreary's hauntingly minimal soundscapes of endless taiko drums and wind chimes, music that sounds more than like the Philip Glass of Akhnaten than John Williams (and indeed, on at to the lowest degree one occasion, actually is Philip Glass)[3].
However confronted with Battlestar Galactica's increasingly haunted and haunting 3rd flavour, and the extraordinary showtime half of its fourth, their vision of two societies deranged by war and adumbral by visions of both conservancy and destruction, information technology is still difficult to believe that the strange, troubling and often beautiful creation the bear witness has become was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and oftentimes visceral border that marks the early on episodes remains, information technology has become just one element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and often securely unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties nearly war and terrorism and the capacity of violence and trauma to unmake lodge and individuals, as well as an intensely disquieting meditation on the shifting boundaries between humanity and inhumanity, united states of america and them, Human and Other.
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For those who grew upward in the 1970s and 1980s as I did, the premise of Battlestar Galactica is probable to be familiar from the original series of the same proper name. Humanity, spread across the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is almost annihilated in a surprise attack by the Cylons. In the cluttered aftermath of the attack a canaille fleet of refugees manage to escape and, banding together under the protection of the final remaining battlestar, embark upon a search for the mythical thirteenth colony, World.
The original series is one of the camp classics of 1970s sci-fi television receiver. One part Star Wars, one part a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson'due south Mormon heritage, information technology survived a unmarried season, producing 20-iv hours of television and a universally derided spin-off series, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally found Earth, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the arrival of their cousins from the stars.
Still 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 at that place may yet be brothers of human who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original show )something of the original series wove its manner into the popular consciousness, as did its one enduring paradigm, that of the single red Cylon middle, 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 assail and the fleet's desperate flight is grounded in early on twenty-starting time-century, post-9/11 anxieties about terrorism and the pass up of the W. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series take get the last remnants of a shattered society quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the chivalrous gaze of Lorne Green'due south original Commander Adama, the fleet is now divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can practice little to contain. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a identify of wondrous water ice planets and shimmering lights, just a common cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken only by isolated planets devoid of all merely the simplest organic life.
However information technology is the Cylons who are the most haunting cosmos of the revisioned series. Where in the original serial they are a faceless race of cadger-similar aliens, in the revisioned series they have been reborn equally artificial beings, some, replicant-similar, indistinguishable from ourselves and identified past their model numbers (Two, Three, 6, Eight), 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, equally the opening credits inform united states in a terse, telegraphed serial of bullet points, 'The Cylons Were Created by Human. They Rebelled. They Evolved. There Are Many Copies. And They Take a Plan'[iv], past humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a subconscious merely revelatory beauty, and uncanny, ofttimes profoundly disturbing simulacra of human beings, they are at one time like but unlike, manufactured yet live, Human even so profoundly Other.
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Technically speaking of course, the new Battlestar Galactica is neither a continuation of the original series nor a remake. Many narrative elements are retained, non to the lowest degree the names and call signs of primal characters such every bit the fleet'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's Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the show's armed forces, an organisation in which men and women fight, launder and sleep together (even the toilets are unisex). At to the lowest degree ii, Boomer and Tigh, have as well been transformed into Cylons, in both cases every bit sleeper agents, initially unaware of their own identity[v].
Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (M.01) nosotros are informed that forty years have passed since the armistice that ended the state of war between the humans and the Cylons, 40 years in which the Cylons have remained invisible across the demarcation zone. The Galactica herself, pride of the fleet in the original series, is at present 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, present yet absent. The war of forty years before is presumably the same war in which the original series took place, yet the assail itself lies in the time to come, not the past. The prehistory of the original serial intrudes, both every bit cultural retentiveness and in specific appropriations and allusions, notwithstanding the show is not leap by it in any way[six].
The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate equally The Aeneid, The Book of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, as well as suggesting other, more mystic parallels in the Zodiacal names of the Twelve Colonies (Caprica, Sagittaron, Gemenon and so 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's Blade Runner (in which Olmos also appeared) and the spectral images of the Cylon Hybrids that command the Cylon Basestars lost in waking dreams similar the Delphic precogs in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, or the more 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 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. It is a process fabricated more powerful past the repeated suggestion that the events depicted in the narrative are role of some larger whole (not for nada are nosotros told the Cylons 'Have a Programme' in the opening credits), some cycle of time in which past and future are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the evidence'due south core, 'All of this has happened before, and volition happen again'[8].
This blurring of the familiar and the unfamiliar is a narrative strategy Battlestar Galactica also employs to anchor its political subtexts. For all that its contemporary political resonances are deep, taking in anxiety nigh apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of civil society by the military machine, torture and religious extremism, there is seldom whatever 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 finish of the second season of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar's defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the first free elections held after the attack, much of the armada abandons their ships to settle on the planet, now called New Caprica, simply to find themselves, in a dramatic reversal of fortune, living under Cylon occupation.
With Galactica gone, the colonists are left undefended, forced to resist the Cylons in whatever way they tin. Some, like Baltar, have little choice simply to work with their Cylon masters; others reject to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. As the Cylon authorities resorts to always more than brutal tactics to control the insurgency, the methods of the insurgents themselves grow more extreme, culminating in a series of suicide bombings intended to kill Cylons and members of the Cylon-directed homo law.
Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral order of usa and them, right and incorrect, Human and Other implicit in the show's conception, these episodes practise non but undermine the like shooting fish in a barrel identification between insurgent and terrorist, but by explicitly invoking the retentiveness of quisling governments such as Vichy, suggest the simplistic historical parallels often drawn between the war in Republic of iraq and the Second World War are far less comforting than they are commonly causeless to be.
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This sort of destabilisation is of class the point and ability of science fiction, yet Battlestar Galactica deploys it with particularly unsettling results. In 'Flesh and Os' (i.08), a Cylon agent is found within the human armada. Convinced its information will exist 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 job of interrogating the captive Cylon, a task she takes to with disturbing zeal, brutally beating Leoben until at last President Roslin interrupts. Seemingly appalled at what she has plant, President Roslin demands to know what is going on. Unabashed, Starbuck responds, 'It's a motorcar, sir, there'south 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 whatsoever reservations about the utilise of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is not debated, nor is there whatever suggestion the characters regret their deportment. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in straight breach of her own offer of amnesty, President Roslin herself orders Leoben be flushed out an airlock only moments subsequently he provides the information she seeks.
At one level these instances of brutality on the part of the human characters are of a slice with the recurrent suggestion that the Twelve Colonies may have been a less than ideal guild, for all its democratic trappings. When in 'Bastille Mean solar day' (1.03) information technology is discovered the political agitator and terrorist Tom Zarek is incarcerated on a prison ship transport inside the fleet, Apollo admits to having read his books at university, despite them being banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the idea, the series toys for a time with the notion that Zarek, played by Richard Hatch, who portrayed Apollo in the original series, might serve as a mentor of sorts to the revisioned series' version of his former cocky). In some other episode, 'Hero' (iii.08), we learn the military may accept provoked the Cylon assail with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of xl years earlier. And while its verbal nature is left ambiguous, the administration in which President Roslin served before the attack seems to accept been both politically inept and surprisingly vicious: in a scene set just hours before the attack President Adar demands Roslin'southward resignation because she has managed to defuse a instructor's strike Adar had planned to break up with troops in social club to provide an example to other groups seeking to sway the regime in similar ways.
The ambivalence these glancing references creates is left unexplored. Indeed given that the series is predicated upon unthinkable grief and loss, Battlestar Galactica provides little in the fashion of backstory (and on those occasions information technology does, one usually wishes it had continued to err on the side of silence). The vision of space it creates, its emptiness and blackness, is quite literally a identify of death, a fact reinforced past the recurring device of characters being blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions nosotros know next to zilch of the lives of the characters before the attacks: sometimes we glimpse photographs, occasionally names are mentioned, and on several occasions nosotros run into the galleries on Galactica's lower decks where, in a haunting reminder of the message boards that sprung upwards in New York in the days after September 11, the coiffure have pinned pictures and letters and other memorabilia of the lost, but by and large the bear witness 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 Os' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush-league administration's prosecution of the state of war on terror. While the human characters see the Cylons as inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to see them not as an implacable Other, but as something both less and more familiar. For all that he does non fearfulness death, Leoben feels hurting, fear, hunger and, most unsettlingly, professes ecstatic spiritual belief. 'I see the patterns,' he tells Starbuck, in an eerie glimpse of what Cylon consciousness might be like, 'I know that I'grand more than this torso, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream simply in truth, I'thou standing on the shore. The current never takes me downstream.'
In 'Flesh and Bone' and elsewhere, much of the pleasure of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie'southward disconcerting performance. With his scraggy pilus and battered blond looks he about resembles some cracked, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes meet beyond this world, all the same whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously suggest something dangerously mercurial. Past dissimilarity the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Bone' is a adult female swaggeringly certain of her ain convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben'south suffering might be more than simulated.
The outcome is an encounter that blurs the distinction between Man and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and by extension Colonial guild equally a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the matter she seeks to destroy[9].
The boundary between homo 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], too every bit 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 just resist their programming, but also feel conflicted by human being honey, desire and loyalty. As well we have been offered many disquieting images of human cruelty, and of the horrors of war more generally. (In the episode 'Flying of the Phoenix' (ii.09) nosotros witness a squadron of Vipers massacre hundreds of disabled and defenceless Cylon raiders. While the pilots and Galactica'southward bridge coiffure whoop and cheer, the viewer is free to explore other, less comfy reactions.)
Yet it is not until the heart of the show'south second season, and what may well stand as its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the distinction between homo and Cylon has get. After surviving for more than than a year on the run, Galactica and the noncombatant fleet meet another Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has also 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 coiffure take become instruments of total war, loyal only to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their cause.
The parallels with the Bush-league assistants's war on terror are evident, not least in Cain'southward barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of noncombatant government that endures in the fleet ('The Secretary for Education?' Cain asks Adama incredulously later her first interview with him and President Roslin). But it 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 eventually agree the only way to contain Cain is to decadent themselves, and murder her) only 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 attack.
The discovery is deeply disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, but it is the following scenes that complete the reversal of roles that is prefigured in 'Mankind and Bone'. Unbeknown to Adama and President Roslin, Cain orders her intelligence officer, Lieutenant Thorne, to interrogate the 8 known equally Sharon (Grace Park) who, having betrayed her race to help the stranded Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) escape Caprica is now held in Galactica'due south brig. In a serial of viscerally disturbing scenes that cut between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica's flight deck and Galactica's brig, we circumvolve inwards, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon'south jail cell (synthetic, in a visual echo of Guantanamo Bay's holding pens, of wire mesh inside a larger cargo bay), hear Pegasus crew boasting most their treatment of the Half dozen in their brig, meet Sharon's uncertainty turn to showtime to business and so terror as Thorne and the troops with him force her face down on her bed and rape her.
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Admiral Adama (James Lee Olmos) and Saul Tigh (William Hogan)
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No dubiety this game of shifting sympathies, and growing doubt virtually the boundaries between the human and the Cylon Other would be less constructive if information technology were not embedded in Battlestar Galactica'southward broader involvement in exploring the chapters of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the bear witness'south relentless downward spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more important, connecting the question of the relationship between the Human and the Cylon Other to the question of the survival of both.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica presents a vision of decline that is well-nigh unique in series television, its 4 seasons non charting humanity'southward triumph over adversity, just the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what is left of human society. 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 procedure is charted in the number that flashes upward at the cease of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, it ticks ever downwards from its commencement reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-equally in the first survivor count afterward the escape from New Caprica-drastically, just e'er downwards, reaching, past midway through the fourth season, a mere 39,685.
In more than human 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 defence. Although the men and women of Galactica are the heroes of the piece, the bear witness has few illusions virtually the reality of armed services life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive risk-takers, and 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 nosotros are constantly reminded that they are, for all their faults, man beings, and of the psychological toll of their responsibilities. Likewise the many scenes of dress uniform ceremonies that occur in early episodes rapidly fade, ceremony eroded by the demand to survive.
In this respect Battlestar Galactica oft subverts 1 of the basic tenets of series telly. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the nigh part, remain constant over fourth dimension, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can only sally radically and irreparably altered, a process that is well-nigh evident in the episodes set during the occupation of New Caprica. Yet while all the characters are implicated in this often roughshod 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 nigh starkly drawn.
President Laura Roslin, and indeed the entire notion of a surviving civilian regime, is i of the masterstrokes of the series every bit a whole. The former secretary for education, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies subsequently the 40-two members of the government ahead of her fail to report in line with emergency protocols. A former schoolteacher, and initially regarded as a soft-headed junior member of a government-Adama himself admits to non having voted for her: 'President Adar was an idiot,' he remarks at one point-President Roslin assumes the reins of power essentially unknown and little-respected. At outset her primary concern is preserving lives, but by the get-go episode of the first series, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to give the order to destroy a ship carrying 1500 civilians because she believes a Cylon agent on board threatens the entire 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 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 merely how removed from human being feeling she has become, unable to love, unable even to feel (the episodes of the first half of the fourth season as well 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 gild. Although in the early episodes Cylon society remains substantially inscrutable, by the second and third series it is less and so, as the serial explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the war. This process actually begins with 'Downloaded' (2.18), which is set not amid the human characters simply among the Cylons on the at present-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.
Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer'south contact with fully functioning Cylon characters has been limited to encounters with private agents, such as the Leoben in 'Flesh and Bone' or the 3 known as D'Anna in 'Terminal Cutting'. The three continuing presences in the offset 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 commencement season and culminates in its shocking finale; and the Eight known as Sharon who helps Helo escape from Caprica-are all either unaware of their true identity or separated in some way from the bulk of Cylon society.
'Downloaded' focuses on two Cylons already encountered in very different circumstances. The first is the Half-dozen who used Baltar to access the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the 2nd is Boomer, who, having been killed after her endeavour to electrocute Adama, has now downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed as heroes past their Cylon brothers and sisters. Nonetheless despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon gild. Boomer, still horrified past 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 role in the deaths of and then many billions equally well as by her love for Baltar.
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A Iii (Lucy Lawless) wakes in a resurrection pod
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The question of individuality and what information technology might mean haunts 'Downloaded', likewise every bit after 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 similar 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 thought 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 attempt to reproduce the human world then recently extinguished)[eleven].
Nevertheless equally we come up to empathise more than about Cylon guild it becomes articulate exactly why Caprica Half dozen and Boomer's resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon club 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 within and outside some sort of hive mind, sharing memories and experiences yet all the same 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 in one case man and not, alive even so undying, created beings that both simulate and experience emotion, want, pain, their presence drives a radical instability of meaning, ane that echoes precisely the instances of doppelgangers and simulacra that Freud describes as instances of the uncanny[12] (the mantra of the Cylons, 'All this has happened before, and will happen again', might besides be seen as 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 most powerful expression in the scenes and episodes aboard the Cylon basestars in Seasons Iii and 4. In contrast to the relatively banal simulation of human society glimpsed in 'Downloaded', these episodes beget 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 outside fourth dimension, passing their existences in meditation, and release into the whole.
Information technology is this unity the Caprica Half-dozen and Boomer's resistance threatens, first by its very nature and later, more straight, by their decision to kill a beau Cylon in order to forestall her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In so doing they spark a series of events that lead beginning to the doomed attempt to live 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 disharmonize that begins the serial. It is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, yet it is also a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the effect 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 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 likely to prove challenging, not least because any resolution will need to fulfil the demands of the words that take haunted the series, 'All of this has happened before, and volition happen once again.'
But in a style the path is already ready and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica's tertiary 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 so many are fix on killing Baltar, a human he and many others hate.
'Because you're weak,' Apollo says 'Because yous're arrogant … Because you're a coward, and we the mob, want to throw yous out of the airlock considering you didn't stand up to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process. You should accept been killed back on New Caprica, but since y'all had the temerity to live, we're going to execute y'all.'
But every bit Apollo speaks we run into him begin to empathize the reply to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This case is built on emotion, on acrimony, bitterness, vengeance. But most of all, it is built on shame … And nosotros're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on one human being and then flush him out the airlock, and hope that but gets rid of it all. So that we can live with ourselves.'
It is a cathartic moment in more means than ane. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in order to defend a man both hold in contempt, it signals a moment of recognition and clarity of a sort he rarely enjoys.
But it also signals a deeper catharsis, the implications of which are not articulate to those present, just which reach into the heart of the show. For in recognising that Baltar, the cast out, the abject, must be admitted back into the fold, Apollo articulates the possibility of resolution of the deeper conflict that gives the series jiff, that betwixt humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were in one case their children, only rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to be explored in the show'due south final season. For in the stop there is no united states of america and them, no homo and Other. We are them, and they are united states of america. And all of this has happened before, and will happen again.
Starbuck (Kara Thrace)
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Notes:
i In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified by the series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode four of series 2 is denoted by the number 2.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired as a carve up stand-solitary episode, is causeless to form the first two episodes of Series 4 (four.01 and 4.02) and the two episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted M.01 and Thousand.02. Where differences exist between the episodes broadcast and those released on DVD (the DVD version of episode ii.10, 'Pegasus', for instance, includes some xv minutes of actress textile), references are to the version released on DVD.
ii 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 (Grand.01 and M.02) and more than a third of the beginning three and a half seasons.
three For a fuller discussion of Battlestar Galactica's use of music, see Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Aural Infinite', in Tiffany Potter and C.West. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Disquisitional Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended word of Comport McCreary's influences and his Battlestar Galactica score tin can be establish in Tina Huang's review of the Battlestar Galactica Flavour two original soundtrack album. Philip Drinking glass'south 'Metamorphosis Five' is used as a recurring motif during Starbuck'south visit to her abased flat on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (ii.02).
iv The opening credit montage alters subtly beyond the four seasons. In Flavor one it also includes the boosted phrases 'They look and feel human. Some are programmed to recall they are homo', while in Season four nosotros are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in clandestine. 1 will be revealed'.
5 Given the more often than not heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix mostly notable for the relatively small number of black characters, information technology is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the one African-American character in the original serial, has not just been transformed into a adult female, merely into an Asian woman.
half dozen The revisioned serial also deliberately invokes the outdated technology of the original series, in details such equally the Korean Army telephones that are used on Galactica and visual jokes, such as the Cylon uniform from the original series glimpsed as a museum exhibit in the first episode of the mini-series (Yard.01) and in Razor (four.02), and as a plot device (Galactica survives the initial set on because its antiquated systems are not networked, and therefore are protected from the Cylon virus that disables the defence networks (Chiliad.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 reach that excellent glory of Savitar the God / 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 bachelor in Tiffany Potter and C.Due west. Marshall'due south insightful introduction to Potter and Marshall (ibid).
9 For a fuller discussion of this point see Erika Johnson-Lewis' 'Torture, Terrorism and Other Aspects of Human Nature', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 27-39.
10 The exact nature of the skinjobs' biology remains somewhat mysterious. Despite being informed Cylons are essentially duplicate from humans (in the telemovie Razor, we larn the early biological Cylons were hybrids of human and automobile) and it existence clear Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode we have too 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 human and hark back to their cybernetic origins.
11 Information technology is maybe not accidental that the Cylons seem most focused on creating a replica of what looks similar a Starbucks in their reconstruction of Caprica.
12 Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny, Penguin, 2003. For a fuller Freudian 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.
Source: https://cityoftongues.com/non-fiction/all-of-this-has-happened-before/
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