Written by Toni Graphia
Directed by Brad Turner
“Each of us plays a role; each time a different role. Maybe the last time I was the interrogator and you were the prisoner. The players change, the story remains the same.”
If you didn’t find this episode exquisitely intense, then you’re most likely dead.
Another Katee Sackhoff tour-de-force, this time with Callum Keith Rennie in a virtual two-hander that is heavy on verbal sparring, even heavier on religious belief, and so weighty on the differences between machine and man that it would take a crane to lift it adequately.
Flesh and Bone is all about the truth: do we hide from it? How can one thing be true when the same thing is a lie to someone else?
It’s also about how truth conflicts with other truths. Can Boomer be BOTH a Cylon AND a human? Can Starbuck AND the President BOTH have lost perspective? Can Leoben the Cylon being lying and telling the truth simultaneously?
My truth is that I can barely write about this episode in any coherent way — it’s such an in-your-face, real time experience, and one that leaves behind questions that are deep, disturbing, and unanswerable…at least, unanswerable with any objectivity. So I’ll just leave it at that, and say it’s lightyears ahead of other torture stories, particularly Babylon 5’s Intersections in Real Time. It’s brutal, fascinating, and strange…which is what Battlestar Galactica is becoming more and more.
And it’s all the better for it.
10
