BSG: Pegasus

It's been a while, and I apologize. And no, I'm obviously not doing the BSG episodes in order.

"Pegasus" was the first BSG episode to get a "mature content" warning. No way to get around it: this is the darkest episode of BSG I've seen so far. I can't really discuss the episode without discussing one particular scene, so consider yourself warned...

So way back in the 90s, Ron Moore wrote a TNG episode about a ship called the Pegasus and the insane Admiral commanding it. Just saying. (Yes, there was a Pegasus in the original BSG. I'm not ignorant of that.)

Anyway, it turns out that another ship, the eponymous Pegasus, survived the Cylon attack. Because its commander, Admiral Cain, outranks Commander Adama, she gets command of everything. Ultimately Adama realizes that she's absolutely frakkin' nuts, and goes head-to-head against her. And then the show goes on hiatus for a few months.

See, BSG knows how to make a mid-season cliffhanger. Steven Moffat should have taken note, because even in spite of the two problems I have with this episode, this is a billion times better than "A Good Man Goes to War."

So maybe I'm just a paranoid wingnut, but I can't help but notice that all the Pegasus crewmembers carry pistols with them at all times, whereas the Galactica crew does not. Okay, it's a really simple way to tell the crews apart from a distance, and I'd be willing to bet that the average viewer didn't notice it, but I can't help but think that the show is trying to send the message "guns=bad." (Then again, by this point we've already given President Airlock her nickname in "Flesh and Bone," so it's not exactly like the show has a terrible ideological bent one way or the other.)

The other problem I have with this episode from a purely artistic standpoint is the fact that after a season and a half of not-at-all traditional music, this episode gives us a psychedelic electric guitar at the beginning and some very traditional Trek-esque stuff at the end. If they'd limited it to just the Pegasus, I could see the reason for it.

Now then, on to the episode's very controversial scene. It's not just enough to have the Pegasus XO relate horror stories about the Admiral, and it's not enough to see an obviously-abused Number Six (props to the network for letting that many cuts and bruises air), we have to see a Pegasus officer sexually assault Sharon.

If you're disturbed by that scene, congratulations, you're human.

(Note, in this and future reviews I'll refer to the Number Eight copy that shot Adama as "Boomer" and the one carrying Helo's child as "Sharon.")

It's weird: Boomer getting shot in "Resistance" was simple, straightforward, and clean. More to the point, it's over very quickly; Boomer's terrible ordeal has finally come to an end, and she's probably at peace. Six's cuts and bruises are clear evidence of months of abuse (and on that note, anyone who thinks Tricia Helfer's just on the show to show some skin needs to check out her acting here, both as BSOD abuse-victim Six and as clearly-distrought hallucination-Six). And the show has alluded to sexual assault before, in both "Bastille Day" (and even more so before the scrip was re-written to let Cally bite her attacker's ear off) and "The Farm." But it was still shocking and disturbing to see it happen on-screen.

(And in the back of your head, you know that Tyrol and Helo are going to get there in time. In the Extended version, they don't.)

So the obvious question is, did we need to see this? Well, the midseason cliffhanger is the last two Human warships in the Universe turning their guns on each other, so we need a good reason to get to that point. Adama's whole perspective is that his crew is his family, so if Cain tries to have one or two of them killed, he'll absolutely turn on her. Both Tyrol and Helo have feelings for Sharon and will kill to protect her. And, having already established that the Galactica crew will treat their Cylon prisoner with some level of decency, it makes it easy to show the Pegasus crew are a bunch of sociopaths by not having them act the same way. In order to justify the last two Human military forces left anywhere going to each others' throats, we need to see one of them (obviously, the ones we haven't been following for a year and a half) do something morally despicable. And as TvTropes will tell you, rape is a special kind of evil.

So yeah, dark. Really, really dark. Also it raises the question of why Adama didn't have a guard on the cell or anything. (Oh right, because as both "Litmus" and "Resistance" have shown, Galactica's marines will obey the most powerful person in the room, regardless of outstanding orders.)

Still, the most intriguing thing about this episode is that Cain and the Pegasus crew could very well be exactly what Adama and the Galactica crew would have become if not for Roslin. Think I'm kidding? Look at Starbuck's treatment of her prisoner in "Flesh and Bone." Check out Lee's line in a deleted scene from "Resurrection Ship, Part 1" about how Galactica's crew isn't raping anyone yet. The only two people on Galactica who definitely think of Sharon as a human being with rights are Helo and Tyrol. Even more obviously, Cain's attitude towards Roslin is exactly the same as Adama's was in the miniseries. Roslin's grasp on power, as Zarek pointed out in "Bastille Day," is very tenuous, and it's only going to get even more so as her cancer gets worse. (Speaking of Zarek, in the very next episode Roslin tells Adama that Cain has to die. She seems just as much afraid of Zarek taking over as she is of Cain, but she doesn't order a hit on her political opponent...)

It's a simple fact that we'll empathize with anything that has a human face, and you can tell that the writers decided to capitalize on that with this episode. Let's not forget that the Six in the Pegasus brig killed 800 people - but even so, what happened to her is wrong, and I hope every viewer, of every political stripe, got that. What happened to Sharon, who's actually the closest thing to a Cylon who is totally on our side (that is, aware that she's a Cylon and aware of all her programming, and still on our side), is terrible.

So where does that leave us? An undeniably dark, but also undeniably very good episode.

(Much lighter sidebar: according to the commentary, Cain was originally supposed to have a rhythm stuck in her head and be constantly drumming it on tables and the like, but Michelle Forbes had no sense of rhythm, so that idea was dropped. Did RTD ever listen to that commentary track prior to 2007?)

The next review I intend to do is for DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," but that'll have to wait until I can dig up my Season 7 box set, as I have no idea where it currently is. I also want to do "Homefront/Paradise Lost" soon (are we sensing a pattern here?) but I also don't know where my Season 4 box set is. If I don't find either of them, I'll do another BSG tomorrow.