Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit and Steel (Investigating Cult TV Series)

It is no accident that the only coherent non-white culture we are shown in BSG is that line of preverbal savages on Earth II. If you talk about race in American culture, sooner or later your examples will be drawn from African-American history. Race makes people feel anxious and sometimes angry. Everyone recognizes the need to show black people in key roles. The same kinds of characters repeat. There is the Uhura character, a comely and college-educated black girl, on the bridge, most often in something like communications. This character has a tendency to marry Lee or Wash.

Not surprising, as there seem to be no young, commanding black males around. They end up dead. There is only one commanding black male in BSG: Despite his big build-up, he is only in one episode, clearly named after him: Other black characters in BSG are congruent with the most readily available images of African Americans: You get a sense of it by imagining what is not there, what options are ignored, not available or rejected because they are too disruptive.

This is partly because society has baked into layers that resist change. It is also because structural racism makes it very much easier to imagine certain people in some roles rather than in others. You imagine a gangster to be black. And, as for validating even those inherited images and social structure, it probably depends on who is watching.

Target Africa As I was writing this essay, the summer issue of a British lifestyle magazine, Intelligent Life, ran a cover story: This sense of African origins is having a popular impact. They are passed only through the female line. So Eve is the most recent common ancestor as traced through the female line using mitochondrial DNA. It means that everyone on the planet has mitochondrial DNA that can be traced back to her.

There are many more common ancestors of all mankind and for various reasons, not least harems, they are likely to be male. The most recent common ancestor is now calculated to have lived about 3, years ago. Fossils, except in the rarest cases, do not preserve proteins, so no DNA. BSG could be an origin myth for mitochondria. Mitochondria are evidently something the Cylons decided to include in the Eight model. The show intends Hera to be the most recent ancestor of us all, not just the earlier common ancestor following back mitochondrial DNA.

This would mean, incidentally, that none of the progeny of the Caprica colonists has survived. Hera is one of the drivers of the plot; half the cast seem to have prophetic visions of the Opera House and her centrality. It is a battle for the creation of humankind. Adama and Mitochondrial Eve 51 To make again one very obvious point: The source of humankind in BSG is not African.

Her children would have interbred with Africans, yes. But all people on Earth II have a white man as their common ancestor too. If you wish to think of the Caprican settlers as founding the white homelands, perhaps without any interbreeding with blacks at all, you are perhaps more comfortable still. So Africa via Egypt did not contribute monotheism to Western culture, nor are Africans the ancestors of us all. White people have their origin among the stars. Certainly not in primates. If Hera is the source of humankind, then we all carry Cylon blood.

That part of our genome is not inherited or shared with higher mammals.

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Part of us shares no common ancestry with apes. We can only assume that white Capricans evolved from Kobolian primates, but who is to say? What we do know is that the Earth II part of human genetic inheritance does share genes with gorillas. Blacks in the world of Battlestar Galactica are to a greater degree evolved from primates, and our African ancestors needed whites to give them language.

Crazily, the show appears unable to distinguish evolution from intelligent design. To give one example of the use of the term. The Final Five have decided to set the Centurions free. They are the product of intelligent design. They are their own intelligent designers. This has nothing to do with the process of genetic change over eons. Is this the voice of a character, rather than the show itself?

That is not a character talking loosely about evolution. Plainly, skin jobs did not evolve. They were intelligently designed by Ellen. The title is nonsense. To take another example. Doc, Adama, Baltar and others observe the dark-skinned indigenes. How is that possible. The odds against that are. One might even say that there was a divine hand at work. He means human beings evolving out of mammals. It happens because no system of copying is perfect. Genes change over time.

Our Cylon inheritance is clearly the result of intelligent design. But so is the natural evolution of our African ancestors. How are two alien races able to interbreed? Religion Religion is a plot function in BSG. The show has a deus-ex-machina plot. Deus-ex-machina plots take the solution out of the hands of your characters, which can be disappointing for readers or viewers.

Also, a deus-ex-machina plot could end at any point in the story. Why go through all those battles, trips back to Caprica, on to Kobol and on to the Temple of Jupiter? Kara could have been killed in episode two, come back as an angel in episode three and led us to Earth II in episode four. A deus ex machina can happen as soon as the ratings drop or networks lose commitment to a project. Deus-ex-machina plots also establish and clarify moral schemes. If a god tells you what is just, and who is good, then there is moral certainty.

A Plot Excused by Mysticism God and magic drive this story. A magic book prophecies that a dying leader shall appear turns out to be right. Leoben accurately says that when he looks at Kara he sees an angel. Her mother forecasts a great destiny. You keep telling people it will happen until it seems inevitable. Instead of, for example, Caprican scientists spending years scanning the heavens for spectroscopic and infra-red evidence of Earth-type planets, you can have Kara Thrace mystically intuit jump coordinates to a beautiful new Earth.

The audience will accept it. Remind You of Anything? Our greed and need for comfort generating human-made climate change? Any good story gives the reader room to make up her own mind. Not one moment of curiosity about same-sex lovemaking? Why is Admiral Cain and Abel?

For someone like me, this last scene takes the tone of a traditional, prophetic jeremiad. It backwashes over the rest of the series. Do you mean cures for cancer? Do you mean the very system of communications through which BSG is distributed? The technology that chills your designer water and transports it round the globe, and which means you can buy cheap toys from China and go there for the Olympics?

That kind of science and technology? Or are you a prisoner of your own tropes? It loves toys and comforts, prays for a colour television, but distrusts science. That distrust has existed for a long time and not just in America, because science changes its mind. God-given holy writ does not. Science forces change on authority and on ordinary people. Science brings you evolution, a universe billions of year old, dinosaurs without human beings, and the idea that climate change is our fault. For BSG, the main problem with human beings is their science.

The creators needed to explain why the Caprican colonists left no archaeological remains. Adama protests at how vulnerable the colonists will be without technology. But we can give them that. I mean we can give them the best part of ourselves, and not the baggage, not the ships, the equipment, the technology, the weapons. Our science charges ahead, our souls lag behind. Something that makes sure it keeps pace with something called our soul?

In this myth, technology and science are wrong. They have locked us into a repetitive cycle of destruction, described by Head Baltar in that last scene. He lists Kobol, old Earth, Caprica, all part of a cycle of history driven by science. Eternal America In this myth something like America will always develop, and — to be fair to the show — that is not a good thing.

But that still makes America primal, original, central and special.

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Bad science allowed old social relations to go unchallenged; aspects of American life could seem inevitable, eternal if not actually ordained by God. Science would also have blown away the wonderful characters to whom we can so easily relate and the topicality of the storylines. Works Cited Battlestar Wiki. Star Trek and History: Race-ing Towards a White Future. Rutgers University Press, Intelligent Life summer Reproduction is certainly a key concern and a source of iconic images in the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, where it becomes an overtly public issue because of two underlying premises.

The Cylon attacks on the Twelve Colonies that begin the narrative reduce the human population to a fragment forced into a quest for survival where replenishing the population is imperative.

Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel (Investigating Cult TV)

And how does it negotiate related issues like gender and sexuality? Frak Me 61 Reproduction as Public Since the show makes population a public issue for Cylons and humans, reproduction becomes both political and social. Something similar occurs in Battlestar Galactica with the birth of Hera, as discussed below, but early in the show any reproduction is shown to be of public note when President Laura Roslin starts to track the changing population.

Right after the Cylon attack. Dr Cottle has been performing terminations requested by young women who sometimes have to be smuggled onto Galactica for fear of religious reprisals, with obvious allusions to how various interest groups argue the right to life or the right to choose. This treatment of reproduction as a public issue is consistently revisited, though the show sometimes displaces it onto individual characters as with Athena, Helo and Hera Agathon , regularly switching between political drama and melodrama in negotiating it.

Other texts play out this potential and Ximena Gallardo C. The use of horror or comedy helps manage anxieties inherent in blurring biological distinctions between men and women. Such reproductive role reversal is not highlighted in Battlestar Galactica. Instead, reproduction and Cylon technology are feminized. She is not sure whether she is among friends the Resistance or has been captured by the Cylons. Eventually she escapes, discovering that the Cylons are using human women like her in reproductive experiments.

This is demonstrated by the female transgenics of Dark Angel; the female Cylons operate in the same fashion. Because of this, both humans and Cylons seem to operate under compulsory heterosexuality. Two instances of alternatives to heterosexuality are associated with Cylons and with characters of dubious moral standing among the humans arguably the latter also becomes true of Gaeta, who is eventually executed for mutiny.

Replenishing the population may be a top priority for humans in Battlestar Galactica yet Hera is the only child seen regularly. Instead, reproduction is most insistently visualized as Cylon reproduction, technological and feminized. The Cylons are an image of reproduction: Battlestar Galactica retains elements of the uncanny and this, too, tends to be aligned with the female, especially with the abject female body. Both the nakedness of the Eights and the design of the baseship work to feminize and sexualize this uncanny replication.

Cylons are equally penetrable and penetrating.

The use of liquids as an interface on the baseship could also be read as a more feminized mode and becomes increasingly dominant. It is notable that Cavil attempts to keep Ellen subordinate leaving her in the resurrection chamber with no clothes, for instance , while she tries to retain agency by verbally resisting and reminding him of their shared past. Cavil sees his human body as abject in and of itself; she embraces the abjection if such it is of humanity, as her alcoholism and hypersexuality demonstrate. She is not generally seen as a person, a subject, tending to be mythologized as the saviour of both humanity and the Cylons.

The baseship Hybrid seen in Season Three is another development along the same lines. Hybrid speech seems to be nonsense, though Caprica Six tells Baltar that some Cylons believe it is religious revelation and at various points it functions this way to further the narrative. Shot in the head during the mutiny aboard Galactica, Anders slips into a coma after brain surgery to remove the bullet.

He even has his brain drilled, the kind of invasive medical procedure previously associated with female characters. In other words, Cylon technology is feminized, even for male or ungendered Cylons. For Cylons, feminized reproduction is also associated with non-rational elements such as love and romance — elements that underpin patriarchal power and the traditional family in a heteronormative society.

Religious belief demonstrates that Cylons are not simply rational technology and the implication that Cylon—human reproduction followed as a religious commandment requires love adds a further irrational dimension. So Sharon and I. Initially, love or lust is introduced as a tactic on the part of the Cylons, both for Helo and Athena, as a means to an end, and when Six seduces Baltar to gain the access codes needed for the attack on the Twelve Colonies. However, things do not go entirely to plan.

Precocious evolutionary move, fashioning Cylons to be capable of experiencing it. Frak Me 73 Cylons may feel both desire and love, yet both are focused primarily though not exclusively on female Cylons. Thus Six can be both a femme fatale and an angel, as well as points between, encompassing a range of female roles, conventional and otherwise.

In only a handful of scenes do we see a known male Cylon engaging in sexual activity.

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This explicit scene with Cavil clearly demonstrates a gendered power dynamic: Like Sarah Connor in the Terminator cycle, Athena is the mother of the future and her mothering is not simply a personal matter. Yet Athena unlike the Sarah Connor of Terminator 2, is consistently presented as a good mother in the traditional, human sense. The very fact that Caprica and Tigh 76 Battlestar Galactica conceive a child suggests that they love each other, working on the model set up by Athena and Helo though here both are Cylons.

Certainly this is how Ellen reads the situation, and the tensions between her, Tigh and Caprica at least partly contribute to a miscarriage, leaving Hera again the only hope for the future of the Cylon race. All this suggests that the Cylons who become the most human are those who adopt recognizable gender and sex roles. Hybridity, Wholeness Hybridity is thus a key factor in this representation.

The Cylons, as their name implies and the show insists throughout, are cyborgs. The human characters are most concerned with maintaining clear distinctions between human and Cylon and persistently Frak Me 77 refuse to see the Cylons as people. Circularity brings together past and future and, although this conclusion is apparently all about reconciling oppositions, it insists on femininity as key to reproduction, evolution and survival of the species, maintaining binary constructions of sex and gender.

It is notable, though, that the uncanny elements inherent in the humanoid Cylons are reduced by hybridity with humans and especially via conventions of love and family. Works Cited Balsamo, Anne. Edinburgh University Press, Uncharted Territories of Sex and Science Fiction. Frak Me 79 Deis, Christopher. The Cylons as Racial Other. Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica. New York and London: Technology, Representation and the Feminine. Gallardo C, Ximena and Jason Smith. The Making of Lt. Constructing and Confronting the Cylons. Sharon Agathon and the Social Expression of Individuality.

Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction. Finding the Feminine in The X-Files. Syracuse University Press, Empire and Adoption in Battlestar Galactica. Resurrection and Bodies of Horror. Boundary Stories About Virtual Cultures. Technocriticism and the Material Body. This characteristic is explained as a result of the acquisition of copyrights that comes with buy-outs or take-overs of other broadcast media companies — and their archives — as monopoly status is further consolidated. Clearly something of this dynamic has survived, even with the contemporary propensity for the dilution 82 Battlestar Galactica of just such original programming, which structures an anaemic postmodern culture and nowhere more so than in the besieged culture of popular television , in which nothing is understood to be new, or can usefully aspire to break new ground.

Producing quality television, therefore, necessitates a tricky negotiation: The latter is not entirely a remake of the former, and not entirely a sequel to it, yet it is also not entirely a self-contained text, as separate from it. BSG is old and new; familiar and alien; of then but from now. And in these opening salvos, large slices of BSG1 are — and perhaps this is the most prosaic, and so most welcome description of the idea of a reimagination — simply rewritten for BSG.

But such intertextuality bolsters an enticing myth of reimagination: And those elements left behind point to the limitations of the surface political liberalism of BSG, and the way in which the process of reimagining reveals an ideological shift between the times that BSG1 and BSG were created. It is from this perspective that this chapter will conclude by questioning the ideology of BSG in respect to its times.

Ditching retrospective intertextual readings returns a consideration of BSG1 to its historical time and place: That is, BSG1 speaks of a popular television culture at the end of the celebrated phase of New Hollywood, with producers and television companies still unsure just what the kids want to see, but happy to follow discernible emergent market trends.

Typically, the vehicle for just such a modish consciousness is the vicissitudes of fashion, and so BSG1 seems to have imbibed, and regurgitated, elements from another part of the popular cultural scene of its target audience: In this respect, with disco culture imported to provide a contemporary ambience, an ambience that works to temper the militarism, it becomes understandable why at least the politics of disco culture were not reimaginable. A battle-hardened space warrior is required for BSG: Disco Galactica 85 So what is abandoned? What did disco culture represent at the close of the s that is unwelcome in a contemporary Battlestar Galactica — essentially unremakeable, and so seemingly lost in reimagination, as it were?

Is this shift to the right not the context for a consideration of BSG? After all, from this vantage point, such a shift could be understood as the price for the surprising renaissance in quality television drama. Disco Sci-Fi The trappings of a late s disco culture, with disco as signifying the look and feel of the new, can be readily discerned in BSG1. But the wider disco culture that BSG1 drew upon was, for most commentators, the wrong one.

Thus a new and ambiguous liberation comes from the very heart of the machine, springing from the allotted pleasure-times in advanced Western techno-capitalist societies. Such a vision of a dehumanized near-future is apparent in THX , Dark Star and, most notably, in A Space Odyssey The paradox is present in Silent Running too, which pits ecological and technological futures against each other, with its hippie protagonist going so far as to assassinate colleagues who opt for the latter, and then attempt to humanize his worker drones while maintaining his spaceship-greenhouse for the revegetation of a post-nuclear war Earth.

However, the acceptance or even celebration of the radical potential of disco and the body without organs is rare, and certainly does not colour many Boogie Nights-style retrospective readings of the historical period. The peace initiative is nothing more than a Cylon ruse to raze humanity once and for all. The bumbling civilian Council of Twelve repeatedly block military initiatives resulting in the rapid formation of a political-military cabal of Adama, Apollo and Starbuck , with disastrous results.

A rightist reading of the US defeat by the North Vietnamese resonates in this dynamic: In these ways the subtexts and ideological positions of the dramatic narrative of BSG1 are as reactionary as one could expect. It is beneath this narrative, however, that an ideological position quite contrary to the aggressive military ethos can be discerned: Under or against or even lit by such a sensual colour scheme, Apollo and Starbuck have the look of Studio 54 busboys.

Indeed, in a way unthinkable in BSG, substantial subplots in BSG1 concern, or are given over to, the pursuit of pleasure. It is no exaggeration to say that, in the context of the plot, these party-going exploits endanger the existence of humanity. And the theme persists elsewhere, in terms of the overriding pursuit of pleasure: Even in the early, desperate hours, the checking of human survivors turns into a cruising-like social activity — indeed, a party is discovered to be in full swing.

The pursuit of pleasure coincides with the pursuit of women in BSG1; the series was remarkably free of exclusively male patterns of behaviour: And so the disco aesthetic is strongly present in the desired female, conveying their presence and availability in terms of the sexual pleasure of, or as, the future female. This is the quintessential Playboy woman of the s: But on the level of a future vision of frictionless free love, her role is pivotal: This LA woman does not break with the evolution of the female form of pleasure something attempted by Star Trek: Here, the LA woman represents the horizon of the libertarian imagining of a technological, pleasure-bound, post-feminist, post-late capitalist society.

Neither disco culture nor this sense and use of sizeable physical spaces make it into BSG; indeed the two — disco culture and space — are interconnected. This space odyssey is one in which endless 94 Battlestar Galactica possibilities present themselves — possibilities that necessitate substantial physical spaces for their staging, a space that restores agency to the characters, and gives freedoms to their free wills.

It is in the sizeable physical space that the body is free to explore, and free to gravitate towards the loci of desire: With the dawn of disco, only a few years later, this sensual type of galactic exploration becomes a chief mode for the exploration of other galaxies and interactions with their inhabitants. And such wide-ranging explorations, across such spaces, presuppose a general enlarging of scale: Disco Galactica 95 the geographical scope for unending sagas.

To traverse this space, or simply to exist in this space, is the condition of the picaresque adventure. At the discotheque, the rigid boundaries imposed by such institutions were thrown out with the careless disregard of someone discarding a spent popper bottle Marcuse 33 The spirit of this future form, in the sense of its animating force or its praxis, was to be the nascent disco culture: In this crucial respect and in respect of a poststructuralist reading , the Hawkish militarism of BSG1 is immediately diminished.

Its nominally foundational position in Disco Galactica 97 the text is almost always soon forgotten once the new mission begins, with disco values now recontextualizing militarism as a rearguard action — vanquishing the threatening, amassed enemies in order that the dancing can go on, so to speak.

This overall balance of values is articulated in the introduction to each BSG1 episode: Indeed, the eye-catching nature of these achievements, in themselves, seem to obscure the more fundamental shift between BSG1 and BSG. The beginnings of an answer to the question comes in the collision of two strategies that are in constant operation in BSG: It is often in this way that the danger of the world of BSG is communicated, and the viewer involuntarily measures his or her own dexterity in relation to it: In this later strain, CGI use is given over to the visualization of the spectacular: In this is an echo of the aesthetic tradition of German Romanticism: Thus Spielberg and Lucas remade their lost worlds, or attempted to realize new ones fully.

It suddenly and artlessly lurches into the image, a CCTV-like speed zoom, breaking the vista and restoring an urgency to, and introducing movement within, the image. When this kind of framing occurs for establishing shots on New Caprica, the onlookers rapidly retreat — into prison-camp tents and huddles of insurgents.

The resultant bunker aesthetic enforces intimacy of an imprisoned rather than erotic kind. In short, it is not what is seen, but who sees it. Thus the bodies of BSG1 were at ease in their surroundings, something also lost in reimagination. Rather, the bodies of BSG are taut, limber and anticipating action. Clothing, therefore, is utilitarian: Hair is practical; long gone is the big hair, now replaced by manageable crops, or hair tied back into a ponytail.

The quality of the skin is rougher too; stubble, blemishes, lines and dark under the eyes rather than the moisturized evenly tanned skin, glossed lips and the general male grooming of BSG1. Thus the reimagined state of war, or more precisely this new future era of war, a total war, a war seemingly without end, in which the battleground is the organic and the physiological — the very existence of the human body in itself — impacts at all moments, on all bodies.

The human body is the last line of defence and the zone of resistance: The human body that survives under these circumstances is one that invites a consideration of it as, micropolitically, fascist: That is, the elements of a rightist sensibility of BSG1 have come to determine the behaviour, use, understanding and ethics of the body rather than prompt the formation of bureaucratic organs of totalitarian fascism of yore in the cabal formed to overturn the Council of Twelve.

The future shock in BSG occurs inside the spacesuit, not outside it: This is crystallized in the abovementioned boxing match: However, Verhoeven also factors in massive military incompetence as beginning to engender dissent within the ranks; BSG collapses the distinction between the military and the non-military, substantially curtailing such a possibility. All spaces close in. In short, the diminished space of these sets further clamps down on the body, squeezing the leg-room needed for knee-jerk, instinctive survival-oriented actions: Disco Galactica As spaces shrink, the spectrum of possible actions tightens: They only furtively glance out of the cockpit when necessary, and then from under the brims of bulky helmets, to clock the whereabouts of fellow pilots.

As space is compacted, the space for secrets goes too. These scrutinized humans, like those of H. The militarized future of BSG is presented as an unfortunate necessity — the result of a paradigm shift in warfare so extreme as to prompt, in one much-discussed episode, the suicide bombing of occupying forces. The state of exception has become permanent and general; the exception has become the rule, pervading both foreign relations and the homeland.

Hardt and Negri, Multitude, 7; italics in original. Hardt and Negri share this reading with Baudrillard, where Baudrillard characterized the contemporary era as that of the Fourth World War Hardt and Negri, Multitude, The achievement of BSG is one in which a future speaks of such abstractions, making them concrete Disco Galactica in its ontology, even experienceable. For BSG as Bush-era popular entertainment, the symmetries are apparent: These occur in local instances of implied or implicit criticism such as the brutal nature of occupation and subjection — criticism that, in the best liberal tradition, seeks to present both sides of the argument, or, rather, simply withholds comment.

What, exactly, is mirrored? And, in the context of BSG, any such moral or warning would be pre-empted by the prior acceptance of the new parameters of the permanent state of exception. Rather, the relationship between the fantasy and the actual it mirrors has changed: But this is an exercise that — usefully — reveals the contours of the fevered imaginings of a future life in the permanent state of exception. Here, Manga comes to function as a doubly alienating aesthetic: The space ship was intended to descend from the ceiling and hover above the dancers.

Deleted scenes from BSG1 archived on the DVD release reveal that more overtly religious and homoerotic material was removed. The second put an end of Nazism. The third, note Hardt and Negri, was relatively quiet: Passavant and Dean —7.

Battlestar Galactica: Investigating Flesh, Spirit, and Steel by Roz Kaveney

And this society, at the close of the series, is suddenly revealed to predate our backwards present, rendering these underpinnings as a newly revealed mythology a device akin to the suggested Egyptian origins of the space colony of BSG1. Works Cited Biskind, Peter. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The Spirit of Terrorism. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Harvard University Press, Disco Galactica Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Complete Pirelli Calendar Book. Pan Books, London An Essay on Liberation, Middlesex: Reading Hardt and Negri.

Waiting for the Boat: Faber and Faber, Retort [Iain Boal, T. Clark, Joseph Matthews and Michael Watts]. Capital and Spectacle in a New Age of War. Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco. Travels in Gay America. In Defence of Lost Causes. One of the reasons why that tradition also includes so many nightmares is that we learned long ago that rationally constructed societies are often rules of the saints, in which not only the poets ejected by Plato from his Republic, but ordinary fallible people, have no place.

If war is a matter of survival and the enemy is not human, ethics, it is often argued, can be cast aside and war can be entirely virtuous — and of course it has always been possible to argue that, in some sense, enemies are not human, or not truly human, which has led to many of the worst atrocities of actual war.

The fact that the Cylons also commit acts of torture and rape is, of course, further evidence that — however much ideology on both sides claims that they are machines — they are human, all too human. The Military Organism Adama is a not a military genius, and strategic brilliance is shown as essentially a sign of imbalance: The show is innately distrustful of anyone in whom professionalism is at the expense of a rounded personality.

Part of this populism is a surprising level of tolerance for disrespectful behaviour among his subordinates; it is as if he has chosen to balance its consequences against the overall good presented by his easy-going manner. His tolerance creates real problems: In his personal life, of course, Adama is drawn into a sexual relationship with the woman he had earlier had arrested, a relationship that for a while is put into abeyance precisely Battlestar Galactica because of their feeling that their responsibilities are made too complex by it; it only becomes openly sexual at points where Roslin is out of power or when she is too ill to perform her presidential duties.

There The Military Organism has been a clear link between this and the military strain ever since Garrett P. Great vessels such as the battlestars and basestars and resurrection hubs of Battlestar Galactica are not just there as the weapons with which space war is fought — they have a romance all of their own. It is worth remarking here that one of the things that made the reimagined series possible was the advanced computer graphics technology of the decade in which it was conceived.

The battlestar, and the other battlestar, Pegasus, are not only hunks of metal; they are also, metonymically, symbols of their crews, and of the complex of relationships that make up both chains of military command and more general human interactions. As he does so, he notices that the structure of the ship has become hopelessly cracked and compromised. The divisions within the community of surviving humanity are paralleled and manifested as damage to the ship that is its protector. At the same time, it is a home and a ship of war, just as Commander later Admiral Bill Adama commands what is at the same time a military organization and, in some senses that transcend but include the literal, a family — a family that has the right patriarch in control.

Similarly, in the political realm, the show largely endorses Laura Roslin as the righteous leader who will bring humanity to a safe haven in spite of the fact that she will presumably die before they reach the Promised Land. All of these — with Gaeta only a partial exception — regard command as an opportunity to indulge their ego, where for Adama it is a matter of self-discipline and obligation.

His preparedness to do this balances out that tendency to nepotism that can be seen as his major weakness as a commander: His replacement of her with another Eight in the shape of Athena is not even slightly a mistake. Adama promotes people who are highly competent, and regards them as having a duty of loyalty to him. Sometimes these people gradually become assimilated to his extended family; for example, Dee marries Lee and does her best to make that marriage work, even when it becomes clear that his real interest is in Starbuck.

If at times Adama is overly prepared to forgive Lee and Kara gross insubordination, it is in part because on the principal occasions when they disobey him, they turn out to be right and he turns out to be wrong, and in part because they choose to obey other imperatives, such as respect for the civilian authorities. Adama is not the sort of commander who persists in error for the sake of unquestionable authority. The only person he does not, in the end, forgive is Felix Gaeta, who The Military Organism did not merely question, but actually overthrew his authority and ordered his execution.

He will forgive even active disobedience if it produces genuine success. Further, his preparedness to forgive extends productively to the genocidal enemies of humanity; he is in no position to forgive Boomer for attempting his assassination as he is still in a coma when she is shot by Cally, but he reserves judgement when another Cylon of the same model turns up on Galactica as a dissident and as partner to Helo. He has transcended the mediocre military record that led to his being beached for a while at the end of the Cylon War5 and left him at the end of his career a mere commander in charge of a battlestar about to be mothballed as a museum.

Adama has proved adaptable to changes in circumstances and prepared to back down gracefully and without looking weak from positions he would earlier have considered non-negotiable. However much he sometimes indulges particular men and women under his command, Adama is always someone whose role is primarily that of a man at the head of a structure; he possesses moral virtue but it is not through it that he has a right to rule. At the same time, he is the only commander to whom a sense of his command as family is quite this important, perhaps, paradoxically, because of the military structure in which Adama is embedded.

Outlaw crews are familial in the sense of being a band of brothers and sisters but not in terms of having a stern Battlestar Galactica father in control. Adama needs to be this particular sort of commander to be acceptable to the audience. This is a decision he makes partly on pragmatic grounds — he has, after all, to crew his ships — and partly through a belief that they were obeying orders from a legitimate source of authority; no Nuremberg nonsense on Galactica, clearly. This is not necessarily his wisest decision: Even after the mutiny and its bloodshed Adama restricts reprisals to the leadership, Gaeta and Zarek.

Adama regards the life and death authority of command as something to be used incredibly sparingly — his treatment of the strikers is relevant here, as is his endorsement of the amnesty in the aftermath of New Caprica. Zarek uses murder — of the chief who has replaced Tyrol — as a way of blooding the mutiny and giving Gaeta no room to compromise or back down. Adama is arguably almost too merciful, but it is seen as a virtue by comparison with the behaviour of those rival commanders who are trigger-happy.

Forester, produced in the same period, where Hornblower has a lieutenant called Bush. When Pegasus is destroyed, Galactica acquires its far larger complement of marines: These structures are largely copied from the US Navy, without any particular attention to logical nomenclature, with the exception of the NCO status of the chief.

In this he failed to think through that Deep Space Nine has a minimal crew and that, with a structure as large as Galactica or Pegasus, a more appropriate structure would be that of the Starship Enterprise, where the head of engineering is a commissioned post; much drama derives from the lower status of the engineering crews, but at the expense of logic.



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Lee is generally cautious and sensible, whereas Starbuck is dashing and charismatic; his besetting weakness is caution and hers is recklessness. In general the show is more indulgent of him than of her. Lee is good at managing his crews, Starbuck rather less so, partly because she would always rather be the hotshot pilot than the thoughtful commander.

This also contaminates her judgement: Certainly it has not made her a better commander than she was before. The Military Organism Notes 1 See, for example. If at times there are complexities to our reaction to this, they come in part from the way that some American Christians were stating, during the years that the show was broadcast, that the contentious elections which brought G.

Works Cited Kaveney, Roz. From Alien to Matrix. We take as a given the idea that the traditional space opera, with its stock characters, techno-double-talk, bumpyheaded aliens, thespian histrionics, and empty heroics has run its course and a new approach is required. That approach is to introduce realism into what has heretofore been an aggressively unrealistic genre. With the new BSG, the universe is a cold and empty place, with no inhabited planets, just the relentless Cylon pursuit.

Just after Starbuck has made her toast to old friends, Apollo stands and takes a step closer to the camera. BSG tends to deal with a heavy cross-section of the conventions of the genre: Thus, BSG is thoroughly grounded in fantasy, as much so as the original vision of the series. One of the key, if seemingly minor, changes to the format of the show Real-imagining Terror was to assign real names to the characters. While this reinforced the fantasy and quasi-religious allegory behind the series, there was little attempt to ground the characters in a contemporary Earth-style reality until the failure of the short-lived Galactica In his collection of essays, Welcome to the Desert of the Real: It is not that reality entered our image: As previously mentioned, the use of real-sounding names for its characters ensures a greater grounding for the series in a reality that is not so unlike our own Lou Anders 87—8 makes a similar point about fashion in the Real-imagining Terror series.

The constant negotiation between these two elements begins right at the opening of the miniseries M. The shots are a combination of styles: Eventually he hears a sound — the Cylons have arrived. The scene cuts outside the space station, to a low-angle shot as the Cylon baseship manoeuvres above the station. The shot begins to zoom out as a missile arcs around the station, destroying it. It is these real elements that will continue to hold sway throughout the political allegories that run throughout the series.

What follows is an impressive long take, lasting over three minutes, which carries most of the burden of introducing our main characters including the controversially female Starbuck and the technological makeup of the ship and its role in history. The shot begins by tracking back with Starbuck as she jogs past the camera, encountering a PR executive with a group of journalists.

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The camera follows him into CIC, where he discusses communications details with Lieutenant Gaeta, whom we now follow out into the corridor. Here, we are introduced to Colonel Tigh, drunk and supporting himself against the wall. The camera tracks with Tigh for a while, until we re-encounter Doral, still with the journalists. He gives us some key technological exposition regarding the lack of modern technology on Galactica, a hangover from the previous war with the Cylons: Where this combination of fantasy genre elements and realist aesthetic is most pronounced in BSG is during the episodes that engage most with the contemporary allegory that underpins the whole series.

The producers of Battlestar Galactica are not alone in this instance, however. Whereas non-network shows such as BSG, The Sopranos — and The Wire —8 have been exploring the moral uncertainty of our times, 24 collapses the moral ambiguity and ambivalence. The realism of the narrative structure then helps to reinforce this message. Even the Cylon occupations of the Colonies and New Caprica are exposed as unattainable political and military goals.

Both errors led to the same result. We became what we beheld. People should be true to who and what they are. We should be true to that. Be the best machines the universe has ever seen. But we got it into our heads that we were the children of humanity. Their reality is fundamentally altered, as the fantasy comes rushing into the reality they previously viewed as stable, self-evident and unchanging, despite the destruction of the Colonies. She continues to treasure the artefacts of her previous life, such as the hand-carved elephants given to her by her mother the day she left for the Fleet Academy.

Nevertheless, she continues to hold onto the reality that she now understands was a fantasy of a perfect life in order to help her achieve her Cylon goal. And then I betrayed them. I shot a man I loved. Frakked over another man, ruined his life. Bush himself set the tone for the war, and the separation of self and other that runs throughout BSG, although in a much less stable state than Bush himself would have intended.

Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. Nevertheless, the parallels between the Coalition invasion and occupation of Iraq and the Cylon invasion and occupation of New Caprica are plain to see: Other moments in the episode refer back to this narrative arc at the Battlestar Galactica end of Season Three.

So did he appear to cooperate with the Cylons? So did hundreds of others. The President issued a blanket pardon. They were all forgiven. Colonel Tigh used suicide bombers, killed dozens of people. Lieutenant Agathon and Chief Tyrol. Well, where do I begin? I shot down a civilian passenger ship, the Olympic Carrier.

Over a thousand people on board. And then on the very day when Baltar surrendered to those Cylons, I, as Commander of Pegasus, jumped away. I left everybody on that planet alone, undefended, for months! I even tried to persuade the Admiral never to return. To abandon you all there for good. Other events are resurrected during the mutiny: BSG has repeatedly debated issues of power and control, by military and the government, and has often returned to its neoliberal humanist agenda — nowhere more so than in the conclusion.

While this is Battlestar Galactica a typical use of realism in the show, it also provides an impetus to the narrative that underlines its pace and action. Much of this is directly concerned with the relationship between the real and fantasy aspects of the show. In his podcast commentary on the episode, Moore is again quick to distance this stylistic choice from the immediate political context of Iraq.

Nevertheless, the sequence is not necessarily motivated by the realism of the text. The dramatic choice seems motivated more by the need to draw a parallel with this real-life footage as an intertextual reference than a need for verisimilitude. The camera takes a detached perspective, as it had done in the previous sequence with Jammer and Cavil. Thus, the switch to night vision, despite seeing the NCP put on their goggles, is an arbitrary device to suggest an analogy with Battlestar Galactica news footage, rather than simply motivated by what we see in the events of the narrative.

Note 1 Detailed statistics on military, economic, quality of life and security data can be found, compiled month by month at , up to 20 August Works Cited Anders, Lou. University of California Press. Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? Chicago and La Salle: Identity, Alienation, and Evil.

Knowledge Here Begins Out There. Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: So Say We All: TV Against the Clock. London and New York: Real-imagining Terror Storm, Jo. Welcome to the Desert of the Real: Five Essays on September 11 and Related Dates. Somewhere between the present day and the future that the programme presents, the likes of me a short, chubby, bespectacled young thing were seemingly wiped out, eradicated from human diversity in favour of the perfectly square jaw lines and the bulging, muscled torsos that constitute the men of the ship.

I like Battlestar Galactica but, much to my chagrin, it does not seem to like me. Finding my particular, albeit unconventional, breed of masculinity pushed out of the plot and onto a civilian ship somewhere on the sidelines, I started to wonder what exactly it is about certain types of people that prevented them from becoming Butch Girls, Brittle Boys the action heroes of this saga, charging the frontlines shoulder to shoulder with the beautiful people. There is, it seems, a problem with the representation of nonnormative gender lurking at the heart of Galactica.

Somewhere at its core, beneath all the military manoeuvres and the political wrangling, something is rotten. As an inquisitive audience, as active participants in the consumption of the programme, we ought to be taking a good, hard look at these men and women, at who belongs in this future, who does not, and why.

The Bad Doctor Gaius Baltar clearly does not belong. It was Baltar, after all, who facilitated the annihilation of human civilization as we know it. It was, of course, the Cylons who actually launched the attack on the human colonies at the start of the series, while Caprica Six utilized her penchant for espionage to speed things on their way, but it was Baltar who engaged in the rather questionable practice of trading sensitive defence information for sex, thereby making the massacre possible.

The truth of the matter is that, however brave the square-jawed heroes of the military are, they can only do so much to protect humanity while Baltar is sleeping with the enemy within. He was, it seems, doomed to be a weak and treacherous man from the very start. So, then, what exactly is it about Baltar that makes him eligible for this kind of bedevilment? Though Baltar could not have known that Caprica Six was the enemy, disguised as she was by her human form, paying for this sexual encounter with state secrets was still a clearly dangerous, demonstrably immoral and probably criminal activity.

Through sleeping with Caprica Six, Gaius not only trades in the security of the colonies but he also displays weakness in the face of his biological drives. Since military and sexual transgressions are here indivisible, the condemnation we steep upon him is never solely aimed at his culpability for the attack on humankind, but is also aimed Butch Girls, Brittle Boys at his inability to resist engaging in the sexual act.

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