More Battlestar Blatherings

Mom's Comfy Lap
Originally uploaded by Sandra Maynard.

I have avidly watched the show since I saw the miniseries. But I finally knew I was hooked in a gut-level way with the last episode aired:

The last episode brought the Galactica fleet in contact with another Battlestar, the Pegasus. Instead of protecting a large number of civilian survivors and trying to find a safe haven away from the Cylons, the Pegasus is on its own and hunting the Cylon fleet. Or so her commander, Admiral Cain, says.

At first the Galactica group is delighted to find more survivors, even if the commander of the Pegasus outranks Commander Adama and takes over. But we learn that Cain is off her rocker and has been sending the crew on suicide missions and shooting those who refuse her orders. The brutalized crew in itself has become extremely brutal. They discovered a human-looking Cylon aboard their ship (the same model as Baltar's Six) and systematically raped and tortured her - what the hell, she's only a toaster.

And this gave me pause - Cylons can suffer! They can love, apparently, and they can suffer as well! This poor woman -er, robot, experienced an enormous amount of pain, humiliation, and fear. Look, you can rape a toaster all day long (helpful handy tip: unplug it first) and it just won'tcare so there's more to the Cylons than just another malevolent Artificial Intelligence. We are way beyond Skynet and Colossus here. Of course, they could just be faking....

Anyway when Cain gets word of Galactica's pet Cylon (Boomer 2.0, or rather Sharon 2.0 - no one is calling her Boomer) she sends her interrogator to question the pregnant toaster - and consequently to subject her to the same brutality the Cylon aboard the Pegasus is experiencing.

This is what I find cool - early on in the series we hear some Cylons theorizing why they haven't been able to reproduce as their God has commanded them to do. Yeah, they have religion. They think it has something to do with love. At first that sounded silly, but with this episode it started to make sense to me.

Remember Tyrol and Helo, who are both highly confused because they fell in love with the same model but different individual Cylons. Neither of them can bear to look too closely at what they really feel, I mean they didn't *know* she was a Cylon and they spend time whupping up on each other out of both jealousy AND revulsion.

Then they hear what the Pegasus' interrogator is going to do with the pregant Sharon. Tyrol and Helo in the space of a half a second set aside their differences and confusion and go rescue her. I thought one of the best-acted scenes ever filmed for television was Tyrol trying to keep a very upset Helo as calm as possible as
subtly as possible as they both listened in horror to a goon from the Pegasus relate how he and every other man aboard her violated their Model Six.

Of course they are both now set to be executed by the commander of the Pegasus (her 'interrogator' and would-be rapist was killed in the ensuing scuffle - yay!). For Commander Adama this order is the last straw and he has declared mutiny against Cain. Gee, Adama - after all this do you think you're going to reexamine your son's mutiny against you? At least you forgave him.

Anyway, am I getting at something? The Cylons are the children of humanity - they consider humans to be brutality incarnate, with the ability to kill one another as the ultimate expression of what it means to be human. The Cylons have decided to eradicate humans ostensibly for this reason (just a little ironic there), yet they have deliberately manipulated the survivors so that they can learn how to spontaneously reproduce.

In other words they are developing Cylon models that can mate with humans and produce viable offspring. In the meantime I'm wondering if they are trying to inject some more positive human traits into their existence - things like love. They kinda got the brutality thing down.

January 6th - Season 2, Part 2! Apollo still has a stick up his ass, I bet.