[Rob Helmerichs]

The Admiral has GOT to either be a Spylon or just a plain psychopath.

Rob

Seems like a psychopath to me.

And I'm no expert on Colonial law, but in our universe raping a prisoner is a capital offense, so a strong legal argument could be made that Helo and the Chief were totally justified in their actions to prevent a crime that was being committed.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I will toss $50 down now that says that is NOT going to be how this shakes out.

For one thing, Pegasus can't survive--otherwise, it would become/remain the flagship of the fleet (being bigger, badder, and newer) and they'd have to change the title to "Battlestar Pegasus," and I don't see them doing it.

I'm not convinced that Pegasus HAS been fighting the Cylons, since as has been noted Admiral Ro has given no indication of how they could possibly have survived first contact with the enemy. And I'm more than a little surprised nobody on the show has raised the question, since it's a huge and obvious flaw in Ro's story.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I am in no way defending what they attempted to do, but remember, when Adama asked Cain how they could have gotten a fair trial, she said she took in to account several things including statements from the guards who were with the Cylon interrogator. And you KNOW they lied, so basically, it was "he said...she said" and we know how that goes with the Admiral.

Right, I'm just saying that the criminal acts of Admiral Ro's men, and her subsequent white-washing of them, give Adama a pretty strong legal excuse for taking action against her.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

Final Note: Is Michelle Forbes pregnant? She looked puffy on BSG. On ST: TNG she was, in Capt. Picard's words, "looking fit." Not saying she looked bad or anything, just definitely different.

Well, that WAS more than a decade ago...

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I found this interesting too. Either the cylon link isn't powerful enough to communicate from the Pegasus or maybe she's more linked to Baltar than we think.

...except Balthar's Six isn't a physical Cylon; she's in his head. She probably doesn't have the link.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

One interesting plot twist on Cain (if she were to remain on the show) could be her hooking up with Tom Zarek after losing her command. Some officers on Pegasus will stay loyal to Cain, plus Zarek will appoint Cain to command if he were to ever become the president.

I can't see her remaining on the show, or at least in the fleet. She's a full-bore psychopath, who routinely abuses her authority to condone or commit murder, rape, and who knows what else. She's also obviously power-mad. I can't imagine anybody seeing her as anything but a threat to human survival, considering the other threat to human survival that requires a certain level of human unity...

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I think the opposite is true. She makes a convincing psychopath and if she were the same rank as Adama, he wouldn't be obligated put up with any of her crap. No crew transfers, no interrogation of Boomer, etc. In TOS Adama was always one leg up on Cain by virtue of being a member of the Council of 12.

All true. On the other hand, Michelle Forbes is extremely young to be playing an admiral, which I think was the point of the poster you were responding to. She certainly handle the dramatic requirements of the role well, but her appeareance kind of yanks me out of the moment from time to time.

I mean hell, she's younger than I am! By close to a decade. I doubt if I had joined the Navy at 16 and been the best sailor ever I would be an admiral by now...

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I'm not defending her, but I just don't see where she's all wrong (and mad), either...

Well, for one thing she's trying to murder two of Adama's men to cover up a crime her people have committed...

For another, she thinks her little ship is The Fleet, not the group of ships led by the President...

The sheer glee her people take in the crimes they commit tells me that her ship has a much worse discipline problem than Galactica (obviously, their highly illegal and immoral actions are habitual and approved at the highest levels)...

And I have a very strong hunch that the story her XO told about the murder she committed (it's not an execution without a trial) was the sanitized version.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

This is almost certainly how the next season will begin. Good work! :up:

Well, that's a little premature--we still have 11 or so episodes to go this season!

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

It might be easier to call the person in Baltar's head Six and the blonde prisoner on Pegasus Shelley.

...although that downplays the fact that they are effectively the same person...

Hence, Caprica Boomer, Bondage Boomer, Deathstar Of Naked Boomers, etc.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I don't think Admiral Ro is just somebody who loves military discipline. I thnk she's a Lt. William Calley-type latent psychopath, whose psychopathic tendancies were given free reign by being placed in a perceived lawless state.

And I think Helo and Chief's defense of the rape victim were utterly justified; the death was clearly accidental; and the trial was clearly rigged in order to cover up the attempted rape. Ro doesn't give a s$#! about justice; she's covering up her own misdeeds. She realizes (on some level) that she is no longer the law, and she is desperately afraid of being held accountable for her actions. The judicial murder of Helo and the Chief will at least cover up the crimes her people committed on Galactica, where she is most likely to be held accountable.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

And the indisputable fact is that the Cylons are medically indistiguishable from humans. Calling them machines is pure bigotry. And I'm pretty sure that's the producers' intent--there's been a growing awareness among some characters in the show (especially Helo and the Chief, but also Adama and others) that despite their origins and enemy status, these are indeed human beings. It's pretty clear to me that the Spylons are a metaphor for the human tendancy to dehumanize enemies (hence my earlier My Lai allusion). And I suspect that beginning to see the Spylons as human--both by some humans and by the Spylons themselves--is going to play a very large role in the long-term development of the show. I wonder if Admiral Ro's horrific abuse of her prisoners (and her attempt to do the same to Galactica's prisoner) will help push this development into high gear..?

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

But Spylons are not legally slaves. They have not had their basic human rights taken away from them (as American slaves did), so there is no legal foundation for allowing the rape of prisoners, and probably intense legal foundation for barring it.

Just because they think they're right doesn't mean they are. And I think William Calley, who committed war crimes even though he thought he was right because he didn't see his enemies as human, is a much closer analogy than ante-bellum slavery.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

Slaves didn't have human rights "taken away". They weren't granted those rights to begin with. Neither were Cylons.

There was an extensive body of law defining exactly what slaves were (i.e., not legally human, except when counting population for political apportionment, in which case they counted as a fraction of a human). I am willing to bet that there is no law whatsoever that addresses the legal status of Spylons.

There are people today who think that black people are not real humans. Their opinions hold no legal weight. The Nazis did not believe the Jews were fully human. Their opinions did not prevent them from being war criminals. The opinions of the bigots who think that Spylons are not human also hold no legal weight.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

The treatment Boomer was getting was not worthy of any human or animal (or fruit and veggie for that matter ), but vigilante justice is never justified, and definitely not in this case. Two wrongs do not make a right. They should be punished; but to punish two skilled individuals that are needed with the death penalty serves no one.

It's not vigilante justice, it's their legal and moral obligation to stop a crime that is being committed. In our world, I'm pretty sure that if they had NOT intervened, they would be as culpable in the crime as the actual perpetrators.

And I say again, Admiral Ro's death sentence has nothing to do with justice and everything to do with covering up the crime. That is not an execution; that is judicial murder.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

What crime?

If Boomer were human, it would be rape. If she were an animal it would be animal cruelty or something like that.

There is no law dealing with what is and is not legal treatment for human-looking Cylons.

No law means that it was not a crime.

But there is NOT ONE SHRED OF EVIDENCE that they are not human. They should be (and I suspect under any rational system of law would be) treated as human until there has been some factual determination that they are not. The fact that the rapist and Admiral Ro (and just about everybody else) insist upon ignoring the overwhelming evidence that they are human does not excuse their crimes. (And yes, I'm pretty sure rape is a crime, even when interogating enemy prisoners.)

Which, since they pretty obviously are, will probably not be forthcoming.

If some whacked out Lt was raping a suspected Vietcong, and another Lt came upon the scene; he would not have been justified in killing the perpetrator. He would be obligated to object, perhaps try to intervene, and definitely to report it. He would not be culpable if he saw it, said, "hey, stop" then when ignored went to alert others.

I suspect he would be.

And bear in mind, there was obviously no intent to kill the rapist. The Chief threw the rapist off his victim; the rapist fell against a bolt on the bulkhead; and that's what killed him.

But I believe that he would in fact have been morally and legally justified in using lethal force to defend somebody from rape.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

Sure there is.

Are you forgetting how Boomer stopped the Cylon raider fleet? She hooked herself up to the communications system and the virus went out.

A human couldn't do that. She is not human, she just looks like one.

And you still haven't answered the question about whether or not you would still insist it was "rape" if it were a metallic-looking Cylon who was bent over that cot...

Something that is medically indistinguishable from a human couldn't do that, which is why I still think she faked it. It's not just that she looks human, it's that there is no way to tell whether she is human or Cylon (aside from Balthar's test, which doesn't seem to prove much of anything; you can do DNA tests that distinguish people of Asian origin from people of European origin), at least until multiple copies show up. She seems to have been grown from human DNA. I think what distinguishes her from the Colonials is her training, not her biology, and her biology seems to be trumping her training.

And a metallic Cylon is not medically indistinguishable from a human. It really IS a machine, indisputably, and thus, not being human, is not subject to human rights. Plus I suspect there is a pretty substantial body of Colonial law dealing with the place of Cylon robots in the legal system.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

But they're not Cylons, they're humans working for the Cylons. And there's nothing superficial about their appearance; they are humans down to the cellular level. Just grown and trained by Cylons (which, of course, creates an entirely different set of legal issues).

At this point, I don't think there's any point in arguing about it. You're obviously taking the position of most of the Colonials; I'm taking what I interpret as being the position of the writers. Until we get more information (in three months, sob), I don't see that there's much more to be said than what has already been said.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

...except it's not really a season finale; the remaining ten or so episodes will air beginning in January.

 

[Rob Helmerichs]

I'm STILL so confused...

Sci-Fi Channel divides its seasons into two parts. They air the first half during the summer, when the networks are in reruns, then go into reruns in the fall, when the networks are in first-run, then air the second half of the season starting around January.

They used to always call the last show of the summer half the "Summer Finale," and in fact that's what they called this year's batch on their web site. But some of their on-air ads called it a "season finale," which made an already confusing situation even more confusing.

But right now, they are halfway through the second season of Galactica, and the rest of the second season will air beginning in January.