All of This Has Happened Before and Apl of Rhis Eill Happen Again

'Information technology's funny, isn't information technology? We're all God, Starbuck. All of us. I see the love that binds all living things together.'
Leoben Conoy, 'Mankind and Bone' (1.08)^[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 drafts or preliminary sketches subsumed into a complete and unified whole, television shows are fabricated up as they go forth, evolving forth the way. Sometimes the changes are large, and discontinuous; sometimes they are incremental, matters of emphasis and shifting focus, withal either way they ensure that equally the years pass no tv set show is ever the show it started equally.

Information technology's interesting therefore, as SciFi Channel's Battlestar Galactica enters the second one-half of its fourth and final flavor, to wonder how clearly Ronald D. Moore and David Eick, the creators of the 2003 pilot mini-series foresaw the style the testify would rapidly exceed the terms of its own conception, developing from an already interesting and original take on genre tv into something far richer and stranger.

Watching those early episodes again, it's difficult not to see the way the show already pushed against the conventions of science fiction goggle box. Laser rifles and aliens are notably absent, in their place is a future – or possibly a past – that looks surprisingly like our present. Confined for the most function to the decks and corridors of Galactica herself, the testify's claustrophobic interiors and silent spilling space battles eschew the trend of most science fiction to strive towards the cinematic; in their place the show offers a vision of war more familiar from Saving Private Ryan or Band of Brothers, an often hallucinatory collage of handheld camera and spring-cut editing^[2]. Even the swelling orchestral score that has defined science fiction on the screen since Star Wars is gone, replaced by Comport 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, actually is Philip Drinking glass)^[3].

Yet confronted with Battlestar Galactica'southward increasingly haunted and haunting third flavour, and the extraordinary first one-half of its fourth, their vision of two societies deranged by state of war and shadowed by visions of both conservancy and destruction, it is even so difficult to believe that the strange, troubling and often beautiful cosmos the show has become was in its creators' minds from the beginning. For although the intense and often visceral edge that marks the early episodes remains, it has become simply ane element in a far larger narrative, a narrative that offers a powerful, and ofttimes deeply unsettling exploration of contemporary anxieties virtually war and terrorism and the capacity of violence and trauma to unmake society and individuals, every bit 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 up 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 name. Humanity, spread beyond the twelve planets of the Twelve Colonies, is virtually annihilated in a surprise set on past the Cylons. In the cluttered backwash of the attack a ragtag fleet of refugees manage to escape and, banding together under the protection of the terminal 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 television set. 1 function Star Wars, one office a homage to its creator, Glen A. Larson'due south Mormon heritage, it survived a single season, producing 20-four hours of tv set and a universally derided spin-off series, Galactica, 1980, in which the survivors finally establish World, and began secretly preparing the inhabitants for the arrival of their cousins from the stars.

Yet for all its woozy 1970s new age trappings and echoes of Erich von Daniken ('There are those who believe that life 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 still be brothers of human who even now fight to survive somewhere across the heavens, intoned Patrick Macnee over the credits of the original evidence )something of the original series wove its way into the popular consciousness, as 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 set on and the armada's desperate flying is grounded in early twenty-outset-century, mail service-9/11 anxieties nigh terrorism and the turn down of the West. The starry-eyed explorers of the original series accept get the final remnants of a shattered lodge quite literally struggling to survive. No longer united under the benevolent gaze of Lorne Dark-green'southward original Commander Adama, the fleet is now divided and suspicious, haunted by political dissent and religious extremism Edward James Olmos' Adama can do piffling to contain. Even the physical universe is altered, no longer a identify of wondrous water ice planets and shimmering lights, but a common cold and unforgiving emptiness, broken simply by isolated planets devoid of all merely the simplest organic life.

Yet it is the Cylons who are the most haunting creation of the revisioned series. Where in the original series they are a faceless race of lizard-like aliens, in the revisioned series they have been reborn as artificial beings, some, replicant-like, duplicate from ourselves and identified by their model numbers (Two, Iii, Six, Viii), 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 conflicting lab merely, 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. There Are Many Copies. And They Have a Plan'^[iv], past humans, the Cylons are a deeply troubling presence. Simultaneously Rilkean angels, immortal beings lit by the knowledge of a hidden but revelatory beauty, and uncanny, ofttimes profoundly disturbing simulacra of man beings, they are at once like but unlike, manufactured yet alive, Human nevertheless profoundly Other.

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Technically speaking of grade, the new Battlestar Galactica is neither a continuation of the original series nor a remake. Many narrative elements are retained, non least the names and phone call signs of central characters such as the armada'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 equally Katee Sackhoff's Starbuck, Grace Park's Boomer and Michelle Forbes' Admiral Cain, are regendered reflecting the altered gender relations of the show's war 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 besides been transformed into Cylons, in both cases every bit sleeper agents, initially unaware of their own identity^[5].

Yet other elements are altered. In the opening episode of the miniseries (K.01) we are informed that twoscore years have passed since the armistice that ended the state of war between the humans and the Cylons, twoscore years in which the Cylons have remained invisible beyond the demarcation zone. The Galactica herself, pride of the fleet in the original serial, is at present an ageing relic scheduled for decommission, destined to serve every bit 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 forty years earlier is presumably the same war in which the original series took identify, yet the attack itself lies in the future, not the past. The prehistory of the original series intrudes, both equally cultural memory and in specific appropriations and allusions, yet the show is not bound by it in any way^[6].

The revisioned series is explicitly mythic, invoking sources as disparate as The Aeneid, The Book of Mormon, Exodus and Paradise Lost, as well as suggesting other, more than mystic parallels in the Zodiacal names of the Twelve Colonies (Caprica, Sagittaron, Gemenon and so on) and the idols and rituals of the Colonials' polytheistic religion. Like the playful appropriation of science fictional tropes such as the term 'skinjobs' to describe the replicant humanoid Cylons from Ridley Scott'southward Blade Runner (in which Olmos also appeared) and the spectral images of the Cylon Hybrids that command the Cylon Basestars lost in waking dreams like the Delphic precogs in Steven Spielberg'southward Minority Report, 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 Farsi, 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 easy or reductive correlations. It is a process fabricated more than powerful by the repeated suggestion that the events depicted in the narrative are part of some larger whole (not for naught are we told the Cylons 'Have a Plan' in the opening credits), some bike of time in which past and futurity are merged and which, in the words repeated by those Cylons privy to the secrets at the show'southward core, 'All of this has happened before, and volition happen over 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 near apocalyptic terrorist attacks, the erosion of civil gild by the military, torture and religious extremism, there is seldom any easy correlation betwixt events in the series and events in the real earth. This is a strategy powerfully exemplified by the events of the start iv episodes of the third series. Post-obit the discovery at the terminate of the second flavour of a planet capable of supporting human life, and Baltar's defeat of President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) in the commencement free elections held later the attack, much of the armada abandons their ships to settle on the planet, now called New Caprica, only to observe 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, similar Baltar, have little pick merely to work with their Cylon masters; others pass up to submit, joining a growing armed insurgency. As the Cylon authorities resorts to ever more brutal tactics to command 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 man police force.

Part of a broader destabilisation of the binary moral order of us and them, right and wrong, Homo and Other implicit in the show's conception, these episodes do not simply undermine the easy identification between insurgent and terrorist, merely past explicitly invoking the memory of quisling governments such as Vichy, advise the simplistic historical parallels often fatigued between the state of war in Iraq and the Second Earth War are far less comforting than they are commonly assumed to exist.

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This sort of destabilisation is of course the point and ability of science fiction, yet Battlestar Galactica deploys it with especially unsettling results. In 'Mankind and Bone' (1.08), a Cylon agent is plant within the human being armada. 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), exist interrogated.

Starbuck is assigned the task 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 found, President Roslin demands to know what is going on. Unabashed, Starbuck responds, 'It'south a machine, sir, at that place's no limit to the tactics I can use.'

It is a sequence that is disturbing for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the fact that none of the characters involved evince whatsoever reservations almost the use of torture. The question of rights and wrongs is non debated, nor is in that location whatsoever proposition the characters regret their actions. Indeed despite her intervention in the interrogation, and in direct breach of her own offer of immunity, 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 suggestion 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 ship send inside the armada, Apollo admits to having read his books at academy, despite them being banned (perhaps seduced by the neatness of the idea, the serial toys for a fourth dimension 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 serial' version of his former self). In another episode, 'Hero' (3.08), we larn the armed forces may accept provoked the Cylon set on with unauthorised missions over the demarcation line agreed in the treaty of 40 years earlier. And while its verbal nature is left cryptic, the administration in which President Roslin served earlier the attack seems to take been both politically inept and surprisingly brutal: in a scene set only hours earlier the attack President Adar demands Roslin's resignation considering she has managed to defuse a instructor'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 similar ways.

The ambiguity these glancing references creates is left unexplored. Indeed given that the series is predicated upon unthinkable grief and loss, Battlestar Galactica provides piddling in the way of backstory (and on those occasions information technology does, one commonly 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 place of decease, a fact reinforced by the recurring device of characters being blown out airlocks. With a few exceptions nosotros know adjacent to aught of the lives of the characters earlier the attacks: sometimes we glimpse photographs, occasionally names are mentioned, and on several occasions nosotros see the galleries on Galactica's lower decks where, in a haunting reminder of the message boards that sprung upwardly in New York in the days after September 11, the crew have pinned pictures and messages and other memorabilia of the lost, but more often than not the prove inhabits a globe where the by has been, quite literally, obliterated.

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Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) and Leobon Conoy (Callum Keith Rennie)

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Still the implications of the events depicted in 'Flesh and Os' run far deeper than their uncomfortable reminders of Abu Ghraib and the Bush administration's prosecution of the state of war on terror. While the human characters run into the Cylons as inhuman, genocidal machines devoid of feeling or identity, the viewer has already come to see them not as an implacable Other, just as something both less and more than familiar. For all that he does not fear expiry, 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 similar, 'I know that I'chiliad more than this body, more than this consciousness. A part of me swims in the stream simply in truth, I'yard standing on the shore. The electric current never takes me downstream.'

In 'Flesh and Bone' and elsewhere, much of the pleasure of Leoben comes from Callum Keith Rennie's disconcerting performance. With his scraggy hair and battered blond looks he about resembles some croaky, streetwise prophet, a man whose eyes see beyond this globe, nonetheless whose sudden shifts in mood, from kindness to violence and psychological game-playing simultaneously advise something dangerously mercurial. Past contrast the Starbuck of 'Flesh and Os' is a woman swaggeringly certain of her ain convictions, unwilling even to entertain the possibility that Leoben's suffering might be more than simulated.

The result is an encounter that blurs the distinction betwixt Human and Cylon upon which the show is predicated. For by refusing to concede Leoben's humanity, Starbuck – and by extension Colonial society equally a whole – is dehumanised, becoming, in an unsettling reversal, precisely the affair she seeks to destroy^[9].

The purlieus between man and Cylon has already begun to blur before the scenes with Leoben. Nosotros take learned Cylons are biological replicas of human beings, almost indistinguishable fifty-fifty at a cellular level^[ten], every bit well as encountering at least 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, merely also experience conflicted by man love, desire and loyalty. As well we accept been offered many disquieting images of human being cruelty, and of the horrors 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 costless to explore other, less comfy reactions.)

Withal it is non until the center of the prove's second season, and what may well stand as its finest episode, 'Pegasus', that the viewer perceives just how unclear the distinction between human and Cylon has become. Afterward surviving for more a year on the run, Galactica and the civilian fleet encounter some other Battlestar, the Pegasus, which has also managed to survive the assail upon the colonies. But the initial jubilation over finding other survivors speedily gives way to disquiet. Pegasus commander Admiral Cain and her crew have go instruments of total state of war, loyal only to themselves and rejecting all moral constraints upon the prosecution of their crusade.

The parallels with the Bush-league assistants's war on terror are evident, non least in Cain's barely restrained contempt for President Roslin, and the semblance of civilian government that endures in the armada ('The Secretary for Didactics?' Cain asks Adama incredulously after her first interview with him and President Roslin). But it is not the frighteningly conspicuously drawn portrait of the corrupting nature of power unchecked by ethical constraints that gives the episode its thematic heart (in some other of the series' uncomfortable reversals President Roslin and Adama somewhen hold the only way to contain Cain is to decadent themselves, and murder her) but the revelation that Pegasus has a Cylon prisoner in her brig.

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

The discovery is securely disturbing, for both Baltar and the viewer, but it is the following scenes that complete the reversal of roles that is prefigured in 'Flesh and Os'. Unbeknown to Adama and President Roslin, Cain orders her intelligence officer, Lieutenant Thorne, to interrogate the Eight known as Sharon (Grace Park)  who, having betrayed her race to help the stranded Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) escape Caprica is now held in Galactica's brig. In a series of viscerally disturbing scenes that cutting between an off-duty drinking session on Galactica'south flying deck and Galactica's brig, we circle inward, watching Thorne arrive in Sharon's 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 about their treatment of the Vi in their brig, see Sharon'southward doubtfulness turn to first to business organization and then terror every bit Thorne and the troops with him force her face downwards 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 homo and the Cylon Other would be less effective if it were not embedded in Battlestar Galactica's broader interest in exploring the chapters of war and trauma to derange societies. Implicating it in the prove's relentless downward spiral transforms what might be an engaging diversion into something far more important, connecting the question of the relationship between the Human and the Cylon Other to the question of the survival of both.

In this respect Battlestar Galactica presents a vision of pass up that is nearly unique in series television, its four seasons not charting humanity'south triumph over adversity, simply the alarmingly rapid unravelling of what  is left of human social club. This lonely would make for confronting viewing, however the show goes farther, weaving its depiction of this procedure into a grander mythic narrative.

In quantitative terms this process is charted in the number that flashes up at the cease of the opening credits of each episode recording the number of survivors, it ticks ever down from its first reading of 49,998, sometimes slowly, sometimes-every bit in the commencement survivor count after the escape from New Caprica-drastically, simply ever downwardly, reaching, past midway through the 4th flavor, a mere 39,685.

In more human terms it is also visible in the gradual fraying of the fleet itself. Episode past 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 prove has few illusions near the reality of military life. With the exception of Apollo and a few others, Starbuck and the other pilots are aggressive chance-takers, and there are more 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. Besides the many scenes of clothes uniform ceremonies that occur in early episodes quickly fade, ceremony eroded past the need to survive.

In this respect Battlestar Galactica often subverts ane of the bones tenets of series telly. For rather than accepting that characters should, for the most part, remain abiding over time, it repeatedly places them in situations from which they can simply emerge radically and irreparably contradistinct, a procedure that is most evident in the episodes gear up during the occupation of New Caprica. However while all the characters are implicated in this often brutal 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 procedure is well-nigh starkly drawn.

President Laura Roslin, and indeed the unabridged notion of a surviving noncombatant government, is one of the masterstrokes of the series as a whole. The erstwhile secretary for educational activity, she assumes the presidency of the Colonies later the forty-two members of the regime ahead of her fail to report in line with emergency protocols. A one-time schoolteacher, and initially regarded as a soft-headed inferior member of a regime-Adama himself admits to non having voted for her: 'President Adar was an idiot,' he remarks at one indicate-President Roslin assumes the reins of ability essentially unknown and little-respected. At first her chief concern is preserving lives, but by the first episode of the first series, '33' (1.01), she is prepared to give the guild 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 blink at genocide).

Yet this transformation is not without its costs. By the fourth series, haunted by visions from the chamalla extract she has been taking in an endeavour 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 being feeling she has become, unable to love, unable fifty-fifty to feel  (the episodes of the commencement one-half of the 4th season also dangle the possibility that Roslin is herself a Cylon).

Nor is this focus on the deranging furnishings of state of war upon societies is not limited to Battlestar Galactica'south portrait of human society. Although in the early on episodes Cylon order remains essentially inscrutable, by the second and 3rd series information technology is less then, as the serial explores the growing malaise in Cylon society engendered by the war. This process really begins with 'Downloaded' (two.18), which is fix not amid the homo characters but among the Cylons on the at present-irradiated and largely ruined Caprica.

Prior to 'Downloaded', the viewer's contact with fully operation Cylon characters has been limited to encounters with individual agents, such as the Leoben in 'Flesh and Os' or the Three known as D'Anna in 'Final Cut'. The three continuing presences in the first and second series-the 6 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 every bit Sharon who helps Helo escape from Caprica-are all either unaware of their true identity or separated in some style from the bulk of Cylon society.

'Downloaded' focuses on ii Cylons already encountered in very dissimilar circumstances. The start is the 6 who used Baltar to admission the Twelve Colonies' defence networks; the second is Boomer, who, having been killed afterward her attempt to assassinate Adama, has now downloaded and been reborn. Both are hailed as heroes by their Cylon brothers and sisters. Yet despite this both are struggling to reintegrate into Cylon club. Boomer, still horrified by the discovery of her true identity, exists in a state of existential rage and despair, while the Six is haunted  past the noesis of her function in the deaths of so many billions likewise equally by her love for Baltar.

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A 3 (Lucy Lawless) wakes in a resurrection pod

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The question of individuality and what it might mean haunts 'Downloaded', as well equally later episodes focussing on Cylon characters (by the fourth season the Cylons are often referred to in the atypical, 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 alien replicants of its population in Philip Kaufman's 1978 film Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, there is something greatly unsettling about the idea of a lodge inhabited past duplicates (perhaps the more and so in 'Downloaded' because the Cylons are engaged in the procedure of re-creating the cities they destroyed in the assail, engaged in some unexplained attempt to reproduce the human globe and then recently extinguished)^[11].

Yet every bit nosotros come to understand more about Cylon gild it becomes clear exactly why Caprica 6 and Boomer's resistance to reintegration poses a threat to the Cylons. Cylon social 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 nevertheless nevertheless individuated. To deny the group is therefore to deny the whole, a violence of a profound and almost unimaginable kind.

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

It is this unity the Caprica Six and Boomer'due south resistance threatens, first past its very nature and later, more straight, by their decision to kill a fellow Cylon in order to forbid her from taking the life of a human resistance fighter. In so doing they spark a series of events that lead first to the doomed attempt to live alongside the humans on New Caprica, and finally to the schism and civil state of war that divides Cylon society in Flavor Iv.

Such a course is  the fulfilment of the Oedipal conflict that begins the series. It is the wages of the Cylon's original sin, notwithstanding it is also a manifestation of the series' preoccupation with the outcome of trauma upon societies and the blurring of the two species. At present they are in conflict their fates are necessarily entwined. The 2 are at present destined to get one, or perish.

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

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It will be interesting to observe exactly how Battlestar Galactica'due south producers intend to resolve the remarkable spider web of narrative and thematic complexities the series has created over the past four seasons in the x episodes that remain. Making sense of the many competing allusions and expectations they create is likely to show challenging, not least because any resolution volition demand to fulfil the demands of the words that have haunted the series, 'All of this has happened before, and will happen again.'

Merely in a fashion the path is already set and understood. In the final episode of Battlestar Galactica's 3rd season, in the climactic scene of Baltar's  trial for crimes confronting humanity, Apollo gives an impassioned speech communication calling for his acquittal. As he speaks he gropes towards the reason so many are gear up on killing Baltar, a man he and many others hate.

'Because you're weak,' Apollo says 'Because you're arrogant … Because yous're a coward, and we the mob, want to throw you out of the airlock because y'all didn't stand to the Cylons and get yourself killed in the process. You lot should have been killed back on New Caprica, but since y'all had the temerity to live, we're going to execute y'all.'

But as Apollo speaks we meet him begin to empathise the reply to the question he has been struggling to articulate. 'This case is built on emotion, on acrimony, bitterness, vengeance. But nigh of all, it is built on shame  … And nosotros're trying to dump all that guilt and all that shame on ane man and then flush him out the airlock, and promise that only gets rid of information technology all. So that we can alive with ourselves.'

Information technology is a cathartic moment in more ways than one. For Apollo, who has resigned his commission and had his father disown him in order to defend a man both concord 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 articulate to those nowadays, just 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 breath, that between humanity and the Cylons, creatures that were in one case their children, simply rose against their parents in an act of Oedipal genocide, possibilities that come to be explored in the bear witness's final season.  For in the end there is no us and them, no human being and Other. We 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:
one In the interests of clarity, episodes are identified by the series and episode numbers contained in their production numbers. Thus episode 4 of series 2 is denoted by the number two.04. In keeping with this system the telemovie Razor, while aired equally a separate stand up-solitary episode, is assumed to form the first two episodes of Series 4 (4.01 and four.02) and the ii episodes of the miniseries, which lack a series number, are nominally denoted M.01 and Chiliad.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.

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

3 For a fuller give-and-take of Battlestar Galactica's utilize of music, encounter Eftychia Papanikolaou, 'Of Duduks and Dylan: Negotiating Music and Aural Space', in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall (eds), Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (2008), pp. 224–236 An extended discussion of Carry McCreary's influences and his Battlestar Galactica score can be constitute in Tina Huang'due south review of the Battlestar Galactica Flavour ii original soundtrack anthology. Philip Glass'southward 'Metamorphosis V' is used equally a recurring motif during Starbuck'south visit to her abandoned apartment on Caprica in 'Valley of Darkness' (2.02).

iv The opening credit montage alters subtly across the four seasons. In Season 1 it besides includes the additional phrases 'They look and feel human. Some are programmed to think they are human', while in Season 4 nosotros are told 'Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in secret. 1 will be revealed'.

v Given the generally heterogenous racial mix of the characters, a mix generally notable for the relatively pocket-size number of black characters, information technology is perhaps interesting that Boomer, the one African-American character in the original serial, has non just been transformed into a woman, only into an Asian woman.

vi The revisioned series 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 equally a museum showroom in the outset episode of the mini-series (M.01) and in Razor (4.02), and as a plot device (Galactica survives the initial attack because its antiquated systems are non networked, and therefore are protected from the Cylon virus that disables the defence force networks (M.01)).

7 The Gayatri Mantra, taken from the Rig Veda: "OM bhûr bhuvah svah tat savitur varçnyam bhargô dçvasya dhîmahi dhiyô yô nah pracôdayât (may we attain that first-class glory of Savitar the God / and then may he stimulate our prayers)", (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407362/trivia).

8 A more extended give-and-take of the intertextual elements of the revisioned series is available in Tiffany Potter and C.W. Marshall'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 being Nature', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 27-39.

x The verbal nature of the skinjobs' biology remains somewhat mysterious. Despite being informed Cylons are essentially indistinguishable from humans (in the telemovie Razor, we learn the early biological Cylons were hybrids of human and automobile) and it being articulate Cylons are able to reproduce with humans, in one episode we have also seen Athena insert a calculator cable into her arm and interface with Galactica's computer systems directly, suggesting their bodies have functions that exceed the human and hark dorsum to their cybernetic origins.

11 It is perhaps 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 amount, encounter Alison Peirse, 'Uncanny Cylons: Resurrection and Bodies of Horror', in Potter and Marshall, pp. 118–28.

Originally published in Meanjin, Vol 67, No four, 2008. © James Bradley, 2008.

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

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