"Now the gloves come off": the problematic of "enhanced interrogation techniques" in Battlestar Galactica

Battlestar Galactica (SciFi, 2004-2009) was a zeitgeist sci-fi series that critiqued the post-9/11 American political landscape. This essay considers one key episode, "Flesh and Bone," from the first season, to interrogate the ways in which the series engaged with its cultural context. As Susan A. George has noted, Battlestar Galactica (BSG ) "consistently addresses hard human issues" and "does not shirk at showing the worst of the human condition."2 Launched three years after the events of 9/11 and a year after the invasion of Iraq by US and coalition forces, the reimagined BSG is an erudite and politically motivated space opera.3 The traditionally Manichean sci-fi plot is problematized on a weekly basis as the series narrates the lives of approximately fifty-five thousand human survivors of the Cylon (human-made androids) attack on the Twelve Colonies.4 The survivors are forced to live a nomadic life in space as they search for a mythical destination: Earth. Each episode opens with the surviving-human roll call, a poignant reminder of the numbers of those dead and wounded not reported during the "war on terror" and the attacks in Iraq and Afghanistan. As commander of the Afghanistan operation General Tommy Franks stated, "You know, we don't do body counts."5 By contrast, the roll call of the number killed at the World Trade Center on 9/11 has been ritually counted and annually commemorated. BSG offers an echo of all of those lost, counted or not.