By Chris Snellgrove | Published
One of the greatest things that separated Ronald Moore Battlestar Galactica The restart is that he faced the political and social problems of the time without fear. The most persistent problem that the spectacle tackled was the war against America’s terrorism and how it prompted people who are otherwise good to support or even get involved in completely immoral acts. On an occasion, however, this almost derailed the show when the leaders of Syfy pushed the episode “Flesh and Bone” for its frank torture performances.
Flesh and bone
According to the executive producer David Eick, “flesh and bones” is “notorious” because “this probably represented the period of tension and the most extreme disagreement between us and the network”. This is because “there were drafts of the script which were quite extreme in terms of what Kara was going to do to Leoben, and they were emblematic of what was going on in Guantanamo and places like that.” In a real irony, the spectacle wanted to emphasize what makes torture so bad, but Syfy feared that these scenes put the uncomfortable audience, which was the very goal of producers.
Eick recognized that in “Flesh and Bone”, the “connection with our own culture was probably a little more literal and precise and less metaphorical than it had been” in the previous episodes. Perhaps because of this, the producers and the leaders of Syfy ended up having the same arguments behind the scenes that Ronald Moore wanted the public to have looked. As Eick pointed out, they found themselves asking questions to the network like: “It’s not a person, why do you tell us to cut the scene where they go away?”
After saying that, Eick admitted that the preceding “flesh and bones” sketches did not have that exact Type of torture in them, but that it was a representative sample of the scenes that made producers ask Syfy: “Why do you give us sorrow on this subject?” The problem, in the end, was that “we were trying to take something real and force the public to have the same problem with that as the network had”. But the very fact that the network had problems with these scenes almost prevented this episode of falling the limit of seeing daylight.
It seems that Moore, Eick and the rest of the Battlestar Galactica The creative team wanted to emphasize both the immorality of real world torture in places like Guantanamo Bay and mental gymnastics carried out by those who tolerated these actions following September 11. When reports on detainees of the United States military torture came out, many defenders quickly justified what was obviously atrocities of war crime by clinging to the dehumanizing language of the government. For example, they were not prisoners of war, it was “enemy fighters” who were members of “the axis of evil”.
The common replica of this dehumanization was that torture is always Bad, it doesn’t matter to whom it is done and definitively surrounds all those who participate. We can see this speech taking place in “Flesh and Bone”, where Starbuck is accused of questioning a cylon which claims to have planted a nuclear bomb on one of the ships of the civil fleet. She uses torture to try to obtain the information she needs, and the public naturally becomes more and more uncomfortable by looking at what she does, even how many lives are potentially at stake.
This is the point, of course: Starbuck has no trouble torturing a cylon in “flesh and bones” because it does not consider it as a person but rather as a soulless machine. But we become uncomfortable because he hugs, bleeds and even preaches like a human, and the more we look at our hero torture him, the more we worry about losing an essential part of his own soul. It was the big mirror that David Eick and Ronald Moore were trying to hold society, confronted with those who approved torture at Guantanamo Bay with the ugly that the practice of deliberately causing horrible pain is really.
However, the producers were a little too good in their work. The first scripts for “flesh and bones” were brutal enough for the network to be worried about putting this torture on the screen. At the same time, the creative team behind the show feared that if they did not show how really this kind of thing was, more of their audience would happily support it. Fortunately, the last episode always makes its point of view in a powerful way, and (to the relief of the network and, frankly, ourselves), we did not have to look at Starbuck Gouge the eyes of Cylon before the roll of the Credits.
