Battlestar galactica
valves, computers that barely deserve the name.’ Galactica is, he says, ‘a reminder of a time when we were so frightened by our enemies that we literally looked backward for protection.’ the clunky artefact of the cylon Wars contrasts sharply with the sleek cgi cylon centurions and the ethereal back-lit, runway model aura of Model Six (tricia helfer) on armistice Station. the viewer is thus positioned within this long take at a critical moment of temporal fragmentation, signalled by the material and televisual conditions of the antagonists’ distinct environments.
Foregrounding the materiality of BSG’s mise-en-scene, the sequence also alludes to the ways the show registers political tension through historical discourse. appearing three times in the shot, commander William adama (Edward James Olmos) plays a crucial role in this meta-historical spectacle. he practises a speech for the decommis-sioning ceremony, an event that also marks his retirement. ‘the cylon War is long over, yet we must not forget the reasons why,’ he begins, before being interrupted by Kara ‘Starbuck’ thrace (Katee Sackhoff) jogging through the crowded passageways. after a short exchange, he starts again, but the camera pans to a new point of interest before we can hear any more. he reappears twice more in the shot; twice more he repeats the phrase. it is significant that adama cannot answer the question he raises about remembrance on the day his ship is due to become a heritage site. the ‘reasons why’ hang ominously over the miniseries and provide an ethical context for the episodes that follow.
Later at the ceremony, he initially frames his speech within well-worn patriotic platitudes; ‘the cylon War is long over,’ he says, ‘yet we must not forget the reasons why so many sacrificed so much in the cause of freedom.’ the commander pauses at this point. haunted by the memory of a son lost in the service, he continues off-script:
Sometimes the cost is too high. you know, when we fought the cylons, we did it to save ourselves from extinction. But we never answered the question ‘Why?’ Why are we as a people worth saving? We still commit murder because of greed and spite and jealousy, and we still visit all of our sins upon our children. We refuse to accept responsibility for anything that we’ve done, like we did with the cylons. We decided to play god, create life. and when that life turned against us, we comforted ourselves in the knowledge that it really wasn’t our fault, not really. you cannot play god then wash your hands of the things that you’ve created.
Sooner or later, the day comes when you can’t hide from the things that you’ve done any more.
adama’s last act as a battlestar commander is a surprising one. he and his ship are relics of the war, but as a matter of public record adama troubles Galactica’s conscription into the flagship of colonial heritage.
after the cylon attack, humanity’s refugees will ‘look backward’ for protection in Galactica’s guns, but their survival will also require the battlestar-museum to negotiate its embattled history with the cylons.
this chapter argues that BSG’s central story arc of finding Earth is deeply immured in the material conditions and politics of remembrance.
While reminiscent of the epic home voyages of Exodus2 and the Odyssey—
and equally reminiscent of the original series’ search for the lost 13th tribe taken from Mormon beliefs and history—the fabula of Galactica’s journey is also an exploration through the space-time of archaeological sites. On the verge of a diaspora, the crew of Galactica and its cylon antagonists are poised at a moment of cultural transformation, in which, to borrow from homi Bhabha, the ‘natural(ized), unifying discourse of nation, peoples, or authentic folk tradition, those embedded myths of culture’s particularity, cannot be readily referenced’ (439). Material artefacts serve a complex diegetic purpose in BSG. at once chapters in the story of the home voyage, they also signal the deeper cultural codes and ideological conditions embedded within the heritage beliefs that the characters must navigate in their difficult journey to peaceful co-existence.
this journey will require new schema for interpreting the archaeo-logical remains that line the route to Earth. While executive producer ronald Moore is bound by the constraints imposed by a medium that requires the obfuscation of certain details in order to spin out the story arc over four seasons, there is nonetheless a coherence in obfuscation that i argue is broadly archaeological in nature. in BSG, archaeological sites are places of assembly, contestation and ultimately critical reflection on the dangerous antagonisms and imperial politics that have brought humanity to the brink of extinction. cylons and humans alike search for their origins, identity and even survival among the shards of material history.
as a mode of cultural production with ideological commitments consti-tutive of the issues of culpability raised by adama, archaeology plays a crucial role in both the physical and ethical dimensions of the journey to Earth. BSG creates through archaeological contestation the possibility of a future that is critical of the pernicious and partial chronotopes of progress
2 resisting the comparison to Exodus, grace Dillon argues that the original BSG and Galactica 1980 are better understood through diaspora theory. She contends that the shows’ portrayal of an embattled people seeking and settling upon the ‘promised land’ (17) is an elaborate allegory of regan-era economic imperialism.
and heritage exemplified in turning Galactica into a cylon War museum (Liedl; rizvi, 197), an act that perpetuates through commemoration the simmering hostility between the races. and if Moore has been successful in his plan to ‘comment on things that are happening in today’s society, from the war against terror to the question of what happens to people in the face of an unimaginable catastrophe’ (qtd. in Bassom, 12),3 then BSG’s archaeological imagination is not simply a means to reanimate the mytho-religious environment of the original series, but a way of exposing it to the real-world geopolitical tensions that impress the BSG reboot with contemporary relevance for its viewership.
the miniseries concludes with adama announcing his plan to search for the distant ancestor of humanity described in the Sacred Scrolls, the enigmatic ‘thirteenth tribe’ who emigrated from Kobol and settled on Earth some 2,000 years before the remaining tribes left to form the twelve colonies (10 December 2003). Like many colonials, adama thinks that Earth is a myth, but draws upon the scriptural narrative in order to give the survivors hope of a friendly destination (E. Silverman, 1991, 192). the irony of Galactica’s museumification is actualized in the fleet’s exodus into the depths of their mythic past. But here, too, irony bites, for what they discover completely undermines all sense of their origins. With the help of a rebel cylon faction, a joint archaeological expedition finds in Earth’s irradiated soil material proof of their common ancestry, their common humanity in their shared materiality. Sifting through the detritus of the thirteenth tribe, each race is left to ponder its purpose and identity as agents of the kind of imperialist power that has led to cataclysms past and present. Over the course of the painful journey to Earth, colonials and cylons come to appreciate the artefacts they encounter as footprints of shared, bio-material existence. in this way, BSG patiently exposes an ‘archaeology of the future,’ a utopian possibility latent in humanity’s rediscovery of its deep-seated hybrid history with the cylons.
this sense of material, cultural and historical interconnection is signalled in a phrase repeated by humans and cylons alike, ‘all this has happened before, and all this will happen again.’4 these words are spoken first by the Model two cylon known as Leoben conoy (callum
3 the numerous readings of BSG’s engagement with 9/11 and the war on terror include Dinello; Erickson; Johnson-Lewis; Leaver, 2008; Mchenry;
Melançon; Mulligan; Ott; Peters; Pinedo; and rawle.
4 E.g. ‘Flesh and Bone’ (25 February 2005), ‘the hand of god’ (11 March 2005), ‘home: Part 2’ (26 august 2005), ‘razor’ (24 november 2007),
‘revelations’ (13 June 2008), ‘no Exit’ (13 February 2009) and ‘Daybreak:
Part 2, 3’ (20 March 2009).
Keith rennie) in ‘Flesh and Bone’ (25 February 2005). Focusing on Kara’s interrogation and torture of the captured cylon, who claims to have planted a nuclear warhead somewhere in the fleet, the episode is a shocking reminder of cia waterboarding of al-Qaeda suspects and the dehumanisation of prisoners at abu ghraib (Bassom, 74;
cf. Johnson-Lewis, 24–25; Kind, 123–24; and Leaver, 2012, 133–34).
its grisly scenario notwithstanding, the episode represents the most intimate encounter between cylons and colonials to date in the series.
as a torturer, Kara seeks truth by exposing the cylon to his own physicality. She is astonished by what she finds, a grotesque parody of human weakness that feels pain and humiliation, has hunger and bleeds. if ‘you cut him open,’ she casually observes, ‘there’s blood, guts, the whole thing.’ her dawning sense of their mutual fragility—she herself is nursing a broken leg—disrupts the formidable version of the evil machine-like ‘other’ she expects to find in the interrogation room.
She becomes ‘unbalanced’ (Sharp, 71) as a consequence. the audience, too, is positioned within the torture, vis-à-vis a frontal shot taken from inside the water bucket into which Leoben’s head is thrust. the camera frames the moment within the very medium of torture, a disturbing perspective that compels the audience to bear witness to a cruel act.
Disrupting the viewers’ normative cinematic relation to the subject, the camera manipulates any stable sympathies we might have for colonial humanity, which is to say the biological side of the cyborg divide.
torture thus performs a critical cultural function. it establishes boundaries of inclusion and exclusion, civilization and savagery. But the barbarity of torture always threatens to destabilize and invert these binaries. Kara accuses Leoben of destroying her civilization, aware of the paradox that humans ‘frakked up’ by creating and then enslaving the cylons in the first place. the problematic and ultimately self-referential logic of torturing a thing—in this case an artefact from humanity’s history—raises a pertinent question about the ways we acquire knowledge: what can objects signify beyond the possibilities of truth offered by the interrogator?
Leoben’s torture, then, may be appreciated as an archaeological performance that connects contemporary images of war with finding the truth. Like torture, archaeology is a mode of truth-seeking that responds to the mutability of material existence. Sympathies emerge between archaeologist and artefact, between human and cylon.5 in ‘Flesh and Bone’ we observe an individual cylon struggling for being in time, an
5 Matthew gumpert, 144–46, also explores the unstable nature of the human/cylon binary in materialist terms.
alien concern for the virtually immortal cyborg. having ventured beyond the range of his resurrection ship renders acute Leoben’s longing for spiritual transcendence beyond his physical existence. at this moment he is, like his interrogators, a material being defined through entropy.6 We see in Leoben the first instance of how, as Lewis call relates, ‘Death establishes the possibility of meaning’ for the cylons (85). and also for the colonials, who begin, like Kara, to question the wisdom of received narratives of the material world. Both a meta-commentary on the war on terror and the construction of the alien other, ‘Flesh and Bone’
destabilizes through archaeological imagery the object/human categories upon which such distinctions are constructed.
Bringing things and people into symmetry is the first step towards dismantling the categories of difference so deeply embedded in the colonialist worldview. Exposing cylon materiality to human decay effects an amazing reversal. the tortured Leoben penetrates the torturer’s hard exterior, her own inscrutable materiality. ‘i look at you now,’ he says, ‘i don’t see Kara thrace. i see an angel blazing with the light of god, an angel eager to lead her people home […] you will find Kobol, the birthplace of us all. Kobol will lead you to Earth.’ these words amaze her, for she is unprepared for the cylon to recognize her own religious struggles. the empathetic bond between torturer and tortured collapses the object world into the social, allowing Leoben to expose in Kara’s imagination the prospect of inclusive and flexible narratives of origins for both races.
President Laura roslin (Mary McDowell), the secular leader of ‘her people,’ however defends entrenched binary distinctions. She reminds Kara that the cylon is ‘a machine. and you don’t keep a deadly machine around when it kills your people and threatens your future.’ roslin cannot accept a future defined by cylon subjectivity, an irony that unfolds in season two when she herself leads her followers on an archae-ological expedition to Kobol with the help of another cylon prisoner, Sharon valerie (grace Park). the manner of Leoben’s execution—which
6 the finality of Leoben’s death foreshadows the future of the cylon race itself. after the destruction of the resurrection hub, the leader of the cylon rebellion, the Six known as natalie, states, ‘We began to realise that for our existence to hold any value, it must end. to live meaningful lives, we must die and not return. the one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over, mortality, is the one thing, well, it’s the one thing that makes you whole’ (‘guess What’s coming to Dinner?’ 16 May 2008). Lewis call argues that she is ‘dying in the heideggerian sense:
she has been comporting herself towards death, and she has been open to opportunities for authenticity’ (102).
she invents on the spot for cylon war criminals—re-inscribes his status as an unwanted thing: ‘flushing’ the cylon into the vacuum of space.
Kara explains to roslin that Leoben is not afraid of death, but afraid, like all people of faith, that his soul will not find god. resigned to his fate, Leoben places his hand on the glass partition of the airlock.
Kara responds in kind. hands join momentarily in a gesture of prayer, then he is destroyed. the glass mirrors the frontal shot of the torture scene, situating torturer and tortured in a position of mutual sympathy.
replacing the objective views of the camera and water, the window renders transparent the deep-seated distinctions between object/person, origin/future and alien/kindred.
Kara’s ostensibly contradictory acts of torture and communion challenge roslin’s executive power to preserve exclusive categories of difference. She repeats this interrogative performance privately at a makeshift shrine to the gods of Kobol that she tends in her locker.
it is significant that she keeps these votive figurines close to her. as reproductions of primitivistic representations of the gods of the ancient, quasi-mythical homeworld, these fetishized artefacts stand in for the personal relationship she has just established with Leoben. Kara is uncertain about the status of the cylon’s soul, but she nevertheless asks her gods to ‘please take care of it.’ holding the promise of meaning in space and time for both parties, these artefacts resonate with the transformative experiences of the interrogation room and the promise that she will find Kobol, the home of cylons and colonials alike. yet
Figure 21. Battlestar Galactica, ‘Flesh and Bone’
(universal Studios home Entertainment, 2005).
this disturbing sense of equilibrium also encodes and echoes privileged notions of antiquity for the viewer. the Etruscan-looking figurines signify an a priori value lingering behind and before the technological culture embodied by the cylons. Part of BSG’s fascination for its audience is its ability to draw viewers into the diegetic search for origins survived by its archaeological mise-en-scene. Kara’s locker is, in fact, only one of several private collections stowed aboard the museum-ship. adama’s quarters, for example, are saturated with historical memorabilia of the vanished colonies. his many books, statues and old furniture occupy the same space as his navy paraphernalia, a model ship, cutlasses and even a samurai helmet evocative of a cylon head, a subtle connection between our own imperial past and the colonial wars depicted in the series.
Privy to the torture of Leoben, the audience, like Kara, can no longer enjoy the privileged position of coding the cylon as a static object of repetition or of unfeeling programming. in the episodes that follow, recognisable archaeological sites continue to disrupt these cultural categories of human and material. the dawning sense of interconnected existence in ‘Flesh and Bone’—the troubling figure of the cyborg that emerges when perceived dualisms keeping things and people apart collapse—is crucial for the next phase of the archaeo-logical journey: Kara’s search among the ruins of caprica for clues to the direction to Earth.
the opening ‘teaser’ for the first-season finale (‘Kobol’s Last gleaming:
Part 1,’ 25 March 2005) presents a series of pairings. adama and Lee (Jamie Bamber) spar in the boxing ring; the father knocks down the son. Kara and gaius Baltar (James callis) are having sex, which ends badly when she cries out Lee’s name; ‘virtual’ Six (i.e., Baltar’s former cylon lover who appears to him in visions) is deeply wounded by the betrayal. Sharon ‘Boomer’ valerie (hereafter ‘Boomer’) suspects she is a cylon sleeper agent, and considers shooting herself. Stranded on caprica after the attacks, Karl ‘helo’ agathon (tahmoh Penikett) shoots the Model Eight masquerading as Boomer sent to seduce him (hereafter
‘Sharon’); wounded, Sharon reveals that she is pregnant with his child and wants to defect to Galactica to raise it.
Father and son, lovers, friends, allies, cylon and human are bound to each other in conflict. in his podcast commentary, Moore relates that this is his favourite teaser of the first season, because it reflects the physical and psychological battles developing between the principal characters (Moore, 2005). these antagonisms are crucial in the search for Earth.
unforeseen and largely unconscious sympathies develop between the cylons and colonials depicted in the teaser. Once again, archaeology as praxis and critical idiom offers a way of framing these relationships, the
evolution of the home-journey narrative, and the critique of privileged notions of origins that BSG progressively undermines. On a scouting mission for supplies, Boomer locates a planet that roslin identifies from reconnaissance photos as the Kobol of myth and scripture. the president sees in the photo of ruins an inhabited city with features identical to the
‘Forum’ in caprica city. She literally cannot see the site as it is, only as a simulacrum, a manifestation of her desire to claim the aura of origins filtered through the Sacred Scrolls and an architectural reproduction at the colonial capital. acting under the misplaced belief that humanity will be welcomed by its ancestors, she envisions Earth as a version of the mythic Kobol, the land ‘where gods and men lived in paradise until the exodus of the thirteen tribes.’ ironically, her conviction is the product of the kind of repetition and simulation that colonials ascribe to the machine world of the cylons. the irony deepens when she echoes
‘Forum’ in caprica city. She literally cannot see the site as it is, only as a simulacrum, a manifestation of her desire to claim the aura of origins filtered through the Sacred Scrolls and an architectural reproduction at the colonial capital. acting under the misplaced belief that humanity will be welcomed by its ancestors, she envisions Earth as a version of the mythic Kobol, the land ‘where gods and men lived in paradise until the exodus of the thirteen tribes.’ ironically, her conviction is the product of the kind of repetition and simulation that colonials ascribe to the machine world of the cylons. the irony deepens when she echoes