Real war crimes almost condemned the classic episode of Battlestar Galactica

According to Chris Snellgrove
| Published 31 seconds before

One of the biggest things separated by Ronald Moora Battlestar Galactica Reboot is that he fearlessly faced political and social issues of that time. The earliest problem she had dealt with was the American war against terror, and how it made otherwise good people to support or even participate in completely immoral acts. On one occasion, however, it almost derailed the show when Syfy Execs pushed back against the episode “Flesh and Bone” for their sincere depiction of torture.

Meat and bone

According to executive producer David Eick, “Flesh and Bone” is “notorious” because “probably the most extreme period of tension and disagreements between us and the network.” This is because “there were concepts of script that were quite extreme in terms of What Kara does to Leoben, and were symbolical of what was happening in Guantanamo and such places. ”In real irony, the show wanted to emphasize what was doing so evil, but Syfy fears that these scenes will be worrying, which was the goal of producers. .

Eick acknowledged that in “Flesh and Bone” “connection with our own culture was probably a little more literal and accurate and less metaphorical than it was” in previous episodes. Maybe because of this, producers and executors ended up with the same arguments for the scenes that Ronald Moore wanted the audience to have after watching. As Eick emphasized, they found that network questions were asking: “Isn’t he a man, why are you telling us to cut the scene where his eyeballs came out?”

After saying that, Eick admitted that earlier “meat and bones” proposals had no exact Type of torture in them, but that it was a representative sample of scenes that made the manufacturers asked Syfy: “Why do you give us sorrow?” The fact that the net had problems with these scenes had the same problem with this.

Moore, eick and the rest seems Battlestar Galactica The creative team wanted to emphasize the immorality of torture in the real world in places such as Guantanamo Bay, and mental gymnastics performed by those who condemned these events as a result of September 11th. When reports of military detainment of the United States, many defenders quickly justified what was obviously the cruelty of war crime by holding on the dehumanizing language of the government. For example, they were not prisoners of war, they were “hostile fighters” who were members of the “axis of evil”.

The joint appreciation of this dehumanization was that torture is always No matter who does it, and permanently touched anyone who participates in it. We see that this discourse plays in “Flesh and Bone”, where Starbuck is accused of interrogation of a cylone, which claims to have planted a nuclear bomb aboard one of the ships in the civilian fleet. In an effort to obtain the information he needs, he resorts to torture, and the audience naturally becomes more unpleasant to watch what she does, although she knew how many lives were potentially at stake.

This is the point, of course: Starbuck has no difficulty in torturing the cylone in “Flesh and Bone” because he does not see him as a man, but instead as a greedy machine. But we are uncomfortable because hungry, bleeding and even preaches as a man, and the more we watch him tortured that our hero is tortured, the more we fear that he loses some necessary part of his own soul. It was a large mirror that David Eick and Ronald Moore tried to endure society and faced those who approved torture in Guantanamo Bay, with the ugly practice of intentional causing terrible pain.

However, the producers were too good in their work. The first scripts for “Flesh and Bone” were brutal enough to take care of this torture on the screen. At the same time, the creative team feared during the show that if they did not show how bad this kind of things was, their audience would not understand it more. Fortunately, the final episode still has its opinion in a powerful way, and (to relieve the network and, frankly, we were alone) did not have to follow before the credits rolled out.