BSG 2.10., Pegasus
Had a stressful couple of days while my personal year is coming to a close; tomorrow is my birthday. Right now, I’m in Berlin with the Aged Parents. Which means very little online time. But I did have the occasion to watch the new BSG, finally.
The Pegasus episode was actually one of the two or three of the original Battlestar Galactica I had watched way back when, but the only thing I dimly recall was that the other (male) commander was called Cain, and had a daughter named Sheba who flirted with Apollo. I think there was some kind of conflict, but I’m not sure what it was about. One thing is certain, it can’t have been about the same things.
The episode is meta in a couple of ways; when Cain (female) suggests to Adama a Cylon attack, the viewer automatically, like her, expects Adama to say no, that the conflict will be about that. But that’s not it at all. In my review of “Flight of the Phoenix”, I talked about human ugliness as a big part of the episode, and of course despite the occasional space battle the new BSG has always been more about the conflict within than the conflict without. In retrospect, I think we can see a line here: from Leoben getting tortured and spaced in Flesh and Bone to the way Tigh interrogates Sharon (G) and Cally only getting a few days for killing Sharon (G), and a celebration, to Apollo and Starbuck using the image of Sharon (G and C) as casually for target practice as the other Cylons, to now the remaining Sharon getting abused and raped, or almost raped (I’m not sure whether or not Tyrol and Helo arrived on time - not that it matters much in terms of what Sharon went through) and the model of Six on Pegasus being chained, bruised, beaten, battered, and obviously raped many, many times.
Cain. Cain is the son of Adam and the one the biblical tradition burdens with the first murder, the murder of his brother. Am I my Cylon’s keeper? Imo, it’s not that the people from the Pegasus are so different from those on Galactica - they simply are a few steps ahead in the development of dehumanisation that has been going on on Galactica as well.
Which is not to say that Admiral Cain doesn’t have a few good points. (The biblical Cain has, too. He sacrificed, same as his brother, but God still ignored him. And it was Cain who survived, east of Eden.) Adama has shown outrageous favouritism to his kids in the past - there is no way the fleet would have remained as long as it did for, say, Racetrack during “You can’t go home again”; he did dissolve the independent tribunal when it behaved in a way he didn’t like. But, as Adama says to Tigh, context, context. Would Cain have listened to Adama re: Tyrol and Helo if Adama’s conduct in the past had been more impartial? Maybe, maybe not.
Military conduct and the rules thereof: Adama showed favoritism, he loves his crew and his crew knows it, and his two dearest subordinates do behave like children in front of him, not soldiers. Cain permitted her people - do we say her men, though there were some female members of the Pegasus crew spotted as well, just not in the crucial scenes leading up to the rape? - to abuse their prisoner in every possible way. The cards are stacked in Adama’s favour here, because clearly his blind spots had not similar horrible results. But again, I point to the line starting with Flesh and Bone. A matter of degrees. No, Adama would not have permitted a guard to rape a prisoner. But he permitted a climate in which this prisoner was called a “thing” on a regular basis, in which it was made clear that the lives of the prisoner and her kind did not deserve the same kind of consideration as human lives. Last week’s episode saw Cally celebrated for killing Sharon, and Racetrack calling the surviving Sharon a “Cylon whore”. This week again saw the deck personnel coming together, and the talk of Cylons that ended in smirking about rape started pretty much where the other conversation had left off. A matter of degrees. The crew of the Pegasus is not the Other, the mirrorverse to our crew. They are more extreme versions. And that’s frightening, and meant to me.
On the other hand in this pretty dark look at human nature, we get the character who started this show by unwittingly making genocide possible. Good old self-centered Gaius Baltar with the need to survive and his libido as primary motivations, no one’s idea of either a hero or a compassionate person. Starting with “Kobol’s Last Gleaming” and with the regrettable exception of “Final Cut” in which he’s used badly as cheap comic relief, he’s been getting really interesting ongoing character development, with Fragged as a particular but not the only important point. There is also Resistance, or was it another episode, in which Baltar interrogated the doomed Sharon and had that little exchange with Tyrol about love at the end. Which showed Baltar becoming both more ruthless and displaying real insight; he does get, and doesn’t doubt, that Cylons can love. Whether Baltar can is still open to debate. When he tells Six he loves her for the first time, in Six Degrees of Separation, he clearly doesn’t mean it - he’s the proverbial atheist in a foxhole converting and using any means he can think of to escape. His words, despite the phrasing, are all about himself and for himself.
This time, they don’t have necessarily to be true. But I think Baltar tells the Pegasus model of Six what he does for her sake. Not necessarily because he actually does love. Again, that’s open to debate. But he does want to help this battered and bruised creature, and these words are probably the one thing he could think of would get a reaction out of her.
On another level: this is Baltar saying out loud, for the first time ever to another being not in his head, what happened. Confessing. On a ship where you get condemned to execution within minutes for protecting a Cylon from abuse, so you can imagine what you get for confessing being involved with a Cylon on Caprica and dooming the human race. True, there are no other people in the cell, but paranoid Baltar in the first season still wouldn’t have risked it. What happened on Kobol changed him in this regard.
I also think that Baltar still wants to help Baltar. But if all he wanted was to save his own skin, yet again, he could have killed the Pegasus model of Six with that handy thing he used on Tyrol in Resistance - catatonic as she was, nobody would have suspected something, and it would have ensured she couldn’t betray him.
Speaking of Six: if the one in Baltar’s head isn’t lying throughout, this underlines, as the final scene of Final Cut did, that she can’t be in contact with the other Cylons right now. I remember there was some debate in Valley of Darkness about whether or not the skulls she showed Baltar as examples of humans sacrificing each other were real or not, lies or not, and my take was that while they were of course used by her ina manipulative way, I do think they were the truth. (As there were human bones and talk of sacrifice in the tomb of Athena in Home, I’m even more convinced of it.) So, would Six be capable of presenting Baltar deliberately with a broken version of herself in order to strengthen his emotional distance from the humans and growing closeness to the Cylons? Probably. But I think her reaction in this particular case was genuine. Watching her alter ego in that cell was horrible to her.
Moving from the man who may not love a Cylon but definitely knows more about them than any other humans to the men who love a Cylon: Helo and Tyrol unite in this episode to save Sharon, and may I say that I can’t help it, I loved that the Chief was the one who had his priorities straight and pointed out to Helo that instead of getting in a fight with the Pegasus guys, they needed to help Sharon now?
What I’d like to know: did the guard lie and forgot to mention Helo killed the “interrogating” officer when the later was in the process of raping a prisoner, or, more chillingly, didn’t the guard have to lie and could just tell the truth, and that didn’t matter anyway, because hey, the prisoner was a Cylon, and Cylons are things. There is no such thing as “a bit of torture”. If you condone beatings, near drownings, and the entire enchilada, you condone rape as well. Again: what the crew of the Pegasus does is more extreme than what the Galactica crew does, but they’re on the same path. So take a good look, people. What have “we” become?
The Pegasus episode was actually one of the two or three of the original Battlestar Galactica I had watched way back when, but the only thing I dimly recall was that the other (male) commander was called Cain, and had a daughter named Sheba who flirted with Apollo. I think there was some kind of conflict, but I’m not sure what it was about. One thing is certain, it can’t have been about the same things.
The episode is meta in a couple of ways; when Cain (female) suggests to Adama a Cylon attack, the viewer automatically, like her, expects Adama to say no, that the conflict will be about that. But that’s not it at all. In my review of “Flight of the Phoenix”, I talked about human ugliness as a big part of the episode, and of course despite the occasional space battle the new BSG has always been more about the conflict within than the conflict without. In retrospect, I think we can see a line here: from Leoben getting tortured and spaced in Flesh and Bone to the way Tigh interrogates Sharon (G) and Cally only getting a few days for killing Sharon (G), and a celebration, to Apollo and Starbuck using the image of Sharon (G and C) as casually for target practice as the other Cylons, to now the remaining Sharon getting abused and raped, or almost raped (I’m not sure whether or not Tyrol and Helo arrived on time - not that it matters much in terms of what Sharon went through) and the model of Six on Pegasus being chained, bruised, beaten, battered, and obviously raped many, many times.
Cain. Cain is the son of Adam and the one the biblical tradition burdens with the first murder, the murder of his brother. Am I my Cylon’s keeper? Imo, it’s not that the people from the Pegasus are so different from those on Galactica - they simply are a few steps ahead in the development of dehumanisation that has been going on on Galactica as well.
Which is not to say that Admiral Cain doesn’t have a few good points. (The biblical Cain has, too. He sacrificed, same as his brother, but God still ignored him. And it was Cain who survived, east of Eden.) Adama has shown outrageous favouritism to his kids in the past - there is no way the fleet would have remained as long as it did for, say, Racetrack during “You can’t go home again”; he did dissolve the independent tribunal when it behaved in a way he didn’t like. But, as Adama says to Tigh, context, context. Would Cain have listened to Adama re: Tyrol and Helo if Adama’s conduct in the past had been more impartial? Maybe, maybe not.
Military conduct and the rules thereof: Adama showed favoritism, he loves his crew and his crew knows it, and his two dearest subordinates do behave like children in front of him, not soldiers. Cain permitted her people - do we say her men, though there were some female members of the Pegasus crew spotted as well, just not in the crucial scenes leading up to the rape? - to abuse their prisoner in every possible way. The cards are stacked in Adama’s favour here, because clearly his blind spots had not similar horrible results. But again, I point to the line starting with Flesh and Bone. A matter of degrees. No, Adama would not have permitted a guard to rape a prisoner. But he permitted a climate in which this prisoner was called a “thing” on a regular basis, in which it was made clear that the lives of the prisoner and her kind did not deserve the same kind of consideration as human lives. Last week’s episode saw Cally celebrated for killing Sharon, and Racetrack calling the surviving Sharon a “Cylon whore”. This week again saw the deck personnel coming together, and the talk of Cylons that ended in smirking about rape started pretty much where the other conversation had left off. A matter of degrees. The crew of the Pegasus is not the Other, the mirrorverse to our crew. They are more extreme versions. And that’s frightening, and meant to me.
On the other hand in this pretty dark look at human nature, we get the character who started this show by unwittingly making genocide possible. Good old self-centered Gaius Baltar with the need to survive and his libido as primary motivations, no one’s idea of either a hero or a compassionate person. Starting with “Kobol’s Last Gleaming” and with the regrettable exception of “Final Cut” in which he’s used badly as cheap comic relief, he’s been getting really interesting ongoing character development, with Fragged as a particular but not the only important point. There is also Resistance, or was it another episode, in which Baltar interrogated the doomed Sharon and had that little exchange with Tyrol about love at the end. Which showed Baltar becoming both more ruthless and displaying real insight; he does get, and doesn’t doubt, that Cylons can love. Whether Baltar can is still open to debate. When he tells Six he loves her for the first time, in Six Degrees of Separation, he clearly doesn’t mean it - he’s the proverbial atheist in a foxhole converting and using any means he can think of to escape. His words, despite the phrasing, are all about himself and for himself.
This time, they don’t have necessarily to be true. But I think Baltar tells the Pegasus model of Six what he does for her sake. Not necessarily because he actually does love. Again, that’s open to debate. But he does want to help this battered and bruised creature, and these words are probably the one thing he could think of would get a reaction out of her.
On another level: this is Baltar saying out loud, for the first time ever to another being not in his head, what happened. Confessing. On a ship where you get condemned to execution within minutes for protecting a Cylon from abuse, so you can imagine what you get for confessing being involved with a Cylon on Caprica and dooming the human race. True, there are no other people in the cell, but paranoid Baltar in the first season still wouldn’t have risked it. What happened on Kobol changed him in this regard.
I also think that Baltar still wants to help Baltar. But if all he wanted was to save his own skin, yet again, he could have killed the Pegasus model of Six with that handy thing he used on Tyrol in Resistance - catatonic as she was, nobody would have suspected something, and it would have ensured she couldn’t betray him.
Speaking of Six: if the one in Baltar’s head isn’t lying throughout, this underlines, as the final scene of Final Cut did, that she can’t be in contact with the other Cylons right now. I remember there was some debate in Valley of Darkness about whether or not the skulls she showed Baltar as examples of humans sacrificing each other were real or not, lies or not, and my take was that while they were of course used by her ina manipulative way, I do think they were the truth. (As there were human bones and talk of sacrifice in the tomb of Athena in Home, I’m even more convinced of it.) So, would Six be capable of presenting Baltar deliberately with a broken version of herself in order to strengthen his emotional distance from the humans and growing closeness to the Cylons? Probably. But I think her reaction in this particular case was genuine. Watching her alter ego in that cell was horrible to her.
Moving from the man who may not love a Cylon but definitely knows more about them than any other humans to the men who love a Cylon: Helo and Tyrol unite in this episode to save Sharon, and may I say that I can’t help it, I loved that the Chief was the one who had his priorities straight and pointed out to Helo that instead of getting in a fight with the Pegasus guys, they needed to help Sharon now?
What I’d like to know: did the guard lie and forgot to mention Helo killed the “interrogating” officer when the later was in the process of raping a prisoner, or, more chillingly, didn’t the guard have to lie and could just tell the truth, and that didn’t matter anyway, because hey, the prisoner was a Cylon, and Cylons are things. There is no such thing as “a bit of torture”. If you condone beatings, near drownings, and the entire enchilada, you condone rape as well. Again: what the crew of the Pegasus does is more extreme than what the Galactica crew does, but they’re on the same path. So take a good look, people. What have “we” become?