From Chris Snellgrove
| Published
One of the greatest things that Ronald Moore separated Battlestar Galactica The restart is that it was fearless with the political and social issues of time. The most stubborn problem that the show attacked was America’s war against terror and how it otherwise prompted good people to support or even participate completely immoral actions. Once, however, this almost slips when Syfy Execs pushed back against the torture episode “meat and bones” because of its open representations.
Meat and bones
According to the executing producer David Eick, “meat and bones” is “notorious” because “it was probably the most extreme time of tension and disagreement between us and the network”. This is because “there were drafts of the script that were quite extreme in terms of what Kara would do with Leoben, and they were a symbol of what was going on in Guantanamo and places of such places.” In a true irony, the show wanted to highlight what makes torture so bad, but Syfy feared that these scenes would make the audience uncomfortable, which was the goal of the producers.
Eick admitted that in “meat and bones” in previous episodes the “connection to our own culture was probably a bit more literally and more precise and less metaphorical than it was”. For this reason, the producers and Syfy managers had the same arguments behind the scenes that Ronald Moore wanted to watch after. As Eick emphasized, they asked the network questions like: “It is not a person, why do you tell us, we should cut the scene in which she stretches out his eye apples?!”
After Eick said that, Eick admitted that the earlier “meat and bones” tuts did not have Exactly Type of torture in them, but that this was a representative sample of the scenes in which the producers asked Syfy: “Why do they give us grief about it?” The problem was ultimately that “we tried to take something real and the audience Forcing the same problems with it as the network. ”But the fact that the network had problems with these scenes made this border push episode almost from seeing the light of the day.
It seems that bog, eick and the rest of the Battlestar Galactica The creative team wanted to highlight both the immoral of real torture in places such as Guantanamo Bay and the mental gymnastics, which were carried out by those who tolerated these actions after September 11th. When reports on the United States Military, who tortured prisoners, came out, many defenders quickly justified the atrocities of the crime crime crime by adhering to the government’s dehumanism. For example, these were not prisoners of war, these were “enemy fighters” who were members of the “axis of evil”.
The joint response of this dehumanization was that torture is always Wrong, regardless of who is done, and permanently everyone who takes part in it. We can see that the discourse plays in “meat and bones” in which Starbuck is accused of questioning a cylon who claims to have planted an atomic bomb on board one of the ships in the civilian fleet. She uses torture to obtain the information she needs, and the audience is of course increasingly unpleasant and observed what she is doing and know how many life may be at stake.
This is of course the point: Starbuck has no problems torturing a cylon in “meat and bones” because it does not see it as a person, but as a soulless machine. But we become uncomfortable because he starved, bleed and even preached like a person, and the more we torture ourselves from our hero, the more we fear that it loses a significant part of her own soul. This was the great mirror that David Eick and Ronald Moore tried to capture society, and confronted those who were really terrible pain to cause torture in Guantanamo Bay.
However, the producers were a little too good in their work. The early scripts for “meat and bones” were brutal enough to worry about the network that these torture was set on the screen. At the same time, the creative team worried behind the show that if they did not show how bad something like this was, more of their audience would support it. Fortunately, the last episode still makes its point in a powerful way, and (to facilitate the network and frankly ourselves) we didn’t have to see how Starbuck the eyes of a cylon went before the credits rolled.
