Comments on: Battlestar Galactica Comments

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 21:15:16 +0000

The scene you are thinking of has the appearance of setting up some sort of plot: Helo is “captured” by Six and a centurion and then “Boomer” rescues him. They go to find “her” Raptor, but it too is captured, so – conveniently – they pick up the signal from a beacon and go to Caprica City in search of it. Anyway, while making, ironically enough, toast, two centurions find him, “Boomer” appears during the fight, and, when it is over, she is gone. But Helo is left with a storehouse of weapons. Throughout it all, Six and “Doral” comment on how good “Boomer” is at their deception – whatever it may be. So, yes, the shooter is “Sharon,” but not the one on Galactica, but, rather, another incarnation.

So far, almost halfway through the first season, there is Six and office Armistice Station, Six and Helo, Starbuck and the raider. It appears that it is always Six who asks the question, thus, presumably, creating a parallel of some sort between Starbuck and Six. Leoben and Doral models don’t seem to ask the question. Yet, of course.

By: Mandos

Mandos — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 07:55:30 +0000

Actually, I didn’t think of that one—I saw that episode quite a while ago now. But there’s ANOTHER inversion in the first season, if I remember correctly. Blonde Lady has captured Helo (in the Midsummer Night’s Dream parallel story arc), he’s tied up, and she asks him, “Are you alive?” Since by this point, most of the Cylons are still mechanically replaying their scripts. And gets she gets shot. So, I guess the answer was no. (Am I remembering this scene correctly?)

But the shooter was Sharon, and the question is, is *she* alive?

So that’s at least 3 instances of inverting the “Are you alive?” motif. BlondeLady+Helo, Starbuck+raider, and the one you haven’t seen yet.

Also, the “hesitant chime” music that we hear whenever we discover something interesting about the humaniform Cylons is iniitally called “Are you alive?” on the soundtrack, but that may just be because of where it first appeared in the miniseries.

By: Craig

Craig — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 04:26:38 +0000

The problem is, I think, a bit more complex. The first inversion takes place in “You Can’t Go Home Again” when Starbuck, speaking to no one really, says to the downed Cylon raider after opening it up, “Are you alive?” The point, of course, is that the Cylon is an inverted human: humans, in order to exist require their machines and, it turns out, Cylons, to do the same, require biological material. As the Marxists like to say: shells and kernals.

By: archive : s0metim3s | Frakking blogs | October | 2006

archive : s0metim3s | Frakking blogs | October | 2006 — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 04:34:09 +0000

[...] Theoria: Let us, finally, remember that Roslin and Adama agree on one thing: there is no war – they have already lost. That is, the exception doesn’t exist in a positive sense, but in a negative sense – it is the refusal or disavowal of recognizing that there is an exception in the first place. [added: datetime=2006-10-16 | T14:29] [...]

By: Mandos

Mandos — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:58:50 +0000

“While the point of the show is, most likely, something to the effect of ‘anyone can be the enemy, what we should read here is the logic of the Terror. This is, in a sense, governing through fear – and, hence, the ever present danger of tyranny.”

So, wrt the Cylons, the point of the Cylons is not merely that they can infiltrate humanity (and thus anyone can be the enemy). The Cylons are themselves faced with the irresoluble dilemma of what *they* are.

You saw the pilot, right?

“Are you…alive?”

“Uh…yes?”

“Prove it.”

BOOM.

Near the end of the second season, this is neatly inverted.