Battlestar Galactica: Season 2-05: The Farm

This episode in all honesty was probably the most controversial episode of the season, second only, maybe, to "Valley of Darkness" for much the same reasons. This episode is dark. This is a dark tale, this is a dark show many times. And the controversy on this show is how dark is too dark, how much is too much? Will this episode, and episodes like it scare the audience away? Actually, interestingly enough, the discussion became, will it scare the female audience away? Our research shows that more men than women watch the show, which is to be expected. It's typical in the scifi genre, and the question is, how do you get more female viewers? The question that I put to you, and you can answer it in a way that you see fit, is this show a good show for women? Here is a female character, hereoine, who we put the screws to all through the episode. It deals with a lot of fertility issues, reproductive issues, some of which may be potentially uncomfortable or distasteful. And the question is, does that drive female audiences away, or does it bring them to the party. In any case, regardless of the controversies, this is the episode that we made and fought for, and I quite strongly believe in, frankly.

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Viewers might notice that the wound jumped from left to right. That was something we knew in the editing room. It was a choice that the editor made, and we went with. It's not a mistake. It's part of the surrealness of what's going on. It's Kara's mind becoming unmoored from its moorings as she goes under.

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This man was almost killed. He was shot point blank in the chest [with] two bullets, lay in sickbay for a long time in literally a near-death experience. And that he shouldn't just come back from that exactly the way he was before. And what we start saying was that Adama's changed, Adama's different. The emotions are closer to the surface, things that the man has held down and tamped down for many years and for many reasons now come forth. Essentially his emotions tend to burst forth without his wanting them to. You can see them right here, just that little beat of him telling everyone how much they means to him. Isn't that something that the typical Adama would have done? He's much more stoic, keeps things closer to the vest. I love this little beat here where he says he feels closer to the ground somehow. And this will continue. You will see this aspect of Adama for the rest of the season.

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This was one of the most controversial scenes, which resulted in endless discussions. "Is this just too distasteful?" Is it just too awful to suggest that a woman is getting some kind of pelvic exam. Will it just drive women away? And my attitude was, "Oh come on, are you kidding?" It's nothing you don't see on ER or 50 other hospital shows. There's a concept pushed back from us on the show that says there's nothing that's too real, too graphic, too disturbing to put on the air. Personally, I just think there are very few boundaries that you can really say that's a step too far, that you've really pushed the audience tolerance into a place where they're going to turn off the show. I think there are people offended by individual scenes, people may be put off by something you say, but do they really just grab the remote and change the channel in a pique of outrage over something? I don't really think so. A lot of those fears are overlblown. But that's just me, what do I know?

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David Eick really felt that Simon should be able to get under [Kara's] skin as it were, much in the way Leoben did, and cut to the heart of who Kara is. That the Cylons have ways of getting inside your head and twisting things around and really understanding them in ways that you don't want them to. And that Simon got in there and figured out that all of her fingers had been broken, and essentially, we believe it's by her mother, because that's who we've set up. And it's a nasty bit of business, it's a nasty horrible part of who Kara is. It goes to the notion I've discussed on this podcast before. Well, if you're going to make Starbuck a rogue, and you're going to make her the hotshot pilot and does things her own way, and is the daredevil -- who is that person and why is she like that? It's a damaged person, it's a person who's really screwed up, and here's one of the reasons she's screwed up.

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This I think is interesting because Laura decides as a tactic to play the religious card, as it were. To embrace the path that she's on, about being a prophet and the scriptures, which she now believes do hold some very literal truths in them, and she embraces that role publically and calls people to her banner in the name of their faith. And then is has a consequence, people start looking at her differently, they ask for blessings, they look at her as a prophet, a spokeswoman for the gods, and that eventually that's going to come back and bite Laura on the ass. And I think that's interesting, I think think it's what began as something, a tactic of the moment, something to get her through a crisis, then it carries larger and more profound implications -- morally, spiritually, ethically -- down the line. I think that's really interesting stuff.

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There was a bit of business after they agree to let Sharon help them, where we were going to cut in cold, and you'd be on the tarmac on an airbase someplace, and the camera would pull back on the tarmac and find dead Cylons, Centurions and humanoid Cylons, all over just littering the tarmac, and then pull back again, all silent in one shot, and would be Sharon, standing on the tarmac with a gun in her hand, looking down at all the ones she had just killed in some ambush, and she'd just walk off camera towards the heavy raider.

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This whole bit of business here with the Cylon's interest in reproduction and biology and ultimately the plot of this episode, has to do with the Cylons' drive and desire to biologically reproduce. This is a direct outgrowth of season one, where the ongoing storyline between Sharon and Helo on Caprica, as I started to really seriously think, "OK, what's going on down there?" ... Why are the Cylons putting them together, what's the game that's going on, what are they trying to get out of him? It couldn't be any use for military information, he doesn't know where Galactica is or anything like that, he's just a pilot. What are they doing? This notion came out of long discussions about who the Cylons really are, what are the things they lack, what is it they want to be, what is their image of God, what does it mean to be a person?

And what I came to was, they can't biologically reproduce. They cannot have children, and they have tried. But they are unable to fulfil that role as biologically living people, because they can't have children. And that in their view, that makes them something less than people. God created animals and plants and people all of whom can reproduce. The Cylons can build many copies and many bodies and download consciousness and all these amazing things, but they cannot do the simple act of having a child. And that makes them something less than us. And they are determined to figure that out. So, they embark on these programs, and this farm that Kara is part of is one of many that are strewn all over Caprica and the other Colonies, trying to conceive, trying to figure out ways that they can reproduce... They're using human women and other facilities they are using human men, and then a variety of in vitro programs are being tested in test tubes, and all kinds of different projects.

Helo and Sharon were together in a very specific experiment, because the Cylons came up with this idea that maybe the one thing that was missing, maybe the reason they couldn't biologically reproduce, because they lacked God's love, and that God is love, and that without love, perhaps they can never truly be people. So they put Helo and Sharon as a way to try and make him fall in love with her. They knew things about Sharon, they knew that she and Helo had traded looks, that there was something going on, that there was an attraction there. So they put Helo in a situation where he's made to be protective of her, to guard her, to care for her. She saves him, and they are on the road together for a while, and they're bonding. And his true feelings for her come out and she responds. And Helo does fall for her, and the amazing thing is that Sharon fell in love with Helo, and that she turned on her own people out of love, and that was a wild card that they hadn't really anticipated. That love, true love, would cut both ways. And so Helo and Sharon then went on their own and did conceive a child. So the experiment worked. There really is a validity in this universe to the notion that there is such a thing as love, it is stronger than science, and perhaps it is bestowed by God or by the gods to people, and even Cylons, and that there's something special about that in the Galactica universe.

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And Kara is special, Kara has a destiny. She has something that Leoben alluded to, and that everyone mentions every once in a while, that Kara is not just another person. There is something that's going to happen to her. And what did they do to Kara? They took some of her ovaries. And what are they going to do with those? Are they going to be just rolling little Kara's back here on Caprica, if they can figure out ways to conceive children other than falling in love? Who knows? It leaves her damaged, it leaves her having taken a loss, and it leaves her changed as well. And she wants to go after these farms, and wreak havoc and vengeance on this whole thing.

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