(2007, TV miniseries) "Do you wish to be forgiven?" asks the hybrid (god, man, or machine?) of Kendra Shaw (Staphanie Chaves-Jacobsen), XO of the Pegasus. Judgment is the prerogative of the gods (if one believes in them) or history.

This 100-minute episode, directed by Félix Enríquez Alcalá, takes place soon after Cmdr Lee "Apollo" Adama has taken command of battlestar Pegasus. "We can't always choose our circumstances," Apollo allows, "but we can choose how we handle them."

He has ordered a search-and-rescue mission, led by Maj Shaw and Capt Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, for the crew of a Raptor. "You make your choices and you live with them," Shaw reflects: "In the end you are those choices."

In an interview with Shaw, Apollo questions her about how after Adm Cain's having held her in high esteem, both her subsequent superiors could have regarded her as displaying "persistent insubordinate behavior." Fisk and Garner didn't deserve respect, she candidly answers.

Ten months earlier, before she became tough and angry, Lt Shaw was newly assigned to the Pegasus, docked at the Scorpion Fleet Shipyards for shore leave, just prior to the Cylon attack on the colonies. In short order she becomes acquainted with flinty Adm Helena Cain and her network specialist Gina Inviere (from Latin, Shaw recognized, meaning "resurrection"), as well as their having an intimate relationship. "Trust me, Lieutenant," says Gina, "we're all just human."

When the Cylons strike, Adm Cain is forced to make a blind FTL jump to avoid being destroyed along with the rest of the warships; believing herself and her crew to be the only survivors of the human race, she declares Ahab-like: "War is our imperative … revenge, payback." In reply the entire crew concurs: "So say we all."

Caught in a Cylon trap, Adm Cain shoots her XO Belzen in the head when he refuses to carry out her order. The Pegasus is boarded by Cylons, including another Number 6 model, whom Lt Shaw kills and recognizes having a resemblance to Gina. As punishment for having manipulated her emotions, cheating her of trust, Adm Cain gives Lt Thorne authority to be as creative as necessary - using pain, degradation, fear, and shame - in his treatment of the Cylon spy.

Coming upon 15 colonial civilian ships, Adm Cain heartlessly orders removal of valuable crewmen and equipment from the vessels, which will be marooned without FTL devices; her command to execute the family members of anyone who resists is carried out under XO Fisk and Lt Shaw ("Military needs must take priority") on the Scylla - ten die.

Impressed with Lt Shaw's performance of setting aside her fears and revulsion, Adm Cain (a glimpse of Helena's childhood loss at the end of the first Cylon war offers psychological motivation for her callous character) promotes Shaw to captain and expostulates on how one must become like a knife's blade, feeling neither anxiety nor regret for what it does: "This war is forcing all of us to become razors."

With a needle in her neck after Apollo has promoted her to major and his XO, Shaw's confronted by Starbuck ("Fear gets you killed; anger keeps you alive"), who has her own secret to be kept under wraps.

In the concluding hours of the first war with the Cylons 41 years before, just prior to the armistice, young Bill "Husker" Adama by accident (literally, after ejecting from his damaged Viper) came upon an experimental lab with people being used to interbreed with machines. The Pegasus has come across evidence that this old project of Cylons designing humans into hybrids ("the unthinkable now inevitable") appears to be an ongoing objective: enemies brought into physiological unity.

Kendra lets the hybrid have its say about another member of the colonies: "She is the herald of the Apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her." But is there justice? "All of this has happened before," reiterates the hybrid (whose children believe it is God), "and it will happen again."

(In a previous episode during the second season, Apollo has recall of a woman with whom he had a child back on Caprica. Either his father knew nothing about this grandchild when he remarks to Lee that not being a father he can't appreciate what he as Lee's father has been through - to which Lee makes no reply or emotional response - or the continuity editor has missed a biographical detail.)

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Copyright © 2009 Patrick Ivers. All rights reserved.
Reproduced with the permission of the copyright holder.

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