Flesh and Bone is the eighth episode of the 2004 TV series Battlestar Galactica and aired during the show's first season.
Plot
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It is 25 days after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. President Laura Roslin is having a dream of being in a woodland environment and being confronted by a Number Five Cylon, who flies away. She is awoken by Billy Keikeya, who announces that a Cylon matching the description of Leoben Conoy has been found on the Gemenon Traveler. President Roslin wants him interrogated for information rather than executed, but Commander Adama - who met a Number Five at Ragnar Anchorage - believes this man will be just as manipulative. He assigns the job of interrogation to Lt. Kara Thrace.
Act 1Edit
At the hangar deck, Lt. Sharon Valerii pets the Cylon Raider, which gets Deck Chief Galen Tyrol's attention. She asks if his advice of treating it like an animal would work, which he says did. She tells him she is a Cylon, but he rejects it as a dark joke.
Raptor 719 arrives on the Gemenon Traveler. Before the interrogation begins, Lt. Thrace notes to the Captain that he is sweating; why a Cylon has to sweat interests her, but she does not care for why the Cylons wanted them to be able to. He notices her as she comes in, and tells her he was praying to God, which she ignores. Going straight to the questions, Lt. Thrace asks how many Cylons are in the fleet, and what he was doing onboard the Gemenon Traveler. He evades the first question, and answers the second saying he simply had a task to fulfil. He adds later that his mission was sabotage, but switches the subject to changing the humidity in the room. Lt. Thrace has lost interest and prepares to leave the room knowing Conoy is uncooperative. When he asks if she is "Lieutenant Starbuck", she returns to the table. Knowing she is the woman he wanted to talk to, he reveals he planted a nuclear device on a civilian ship which will explode in nine hours, and that she will have to report that to her command chain. Galactica begins radiological scans on the fleet.
Lt. Thrace returns to the interrogation, but Conoy refuses to tell her where the warhead is, instead asking about her religion, and how his faith in the One True God allows him to see the future. Conoy's meal is brought into the interrogation room, which Lt. Thrace begins consuming while he continues to talk about his faith in terms of swimming in a stream fixed in place. Handing over his dinner, she observes him to be starving, suggesting Cylons need to eat. He is then punched by a Marine. She observes he is bleeding and injured; if he can turn off the pain that will make him a machine rather than a living being like he claims. If he cannot turn off the pain, then he will eventually be forced to reveal the location of the warhead.
In Dr. Gaius Baltar's lab, Messenger Six point shim to Lt. Valerii's arrival in the room. Lt. Valerii asks to take the Cylon Detector test, but he is dismissive. At her insistence, he accepts her as a beta test subject.
On Cylon-occupied Caprica, the Five and Six from the city await the arrival of the Number Eight posting as Lt. Valerii. She comes out from the woods to meet, half an hour late, where she confirms they had sex as planned. Five has a cabin set up for she and Lt. Agathon to live in, and suggests she delay their arrival so it can be finished. Running back to Lt. Agathon, she finds him up and awake and tells him of new troop movements.
After his beating, Conoy resists the pain but cannot turn it off. He begins to give a sermon on God's love, and how God created the Cylons due to human sin. Lt. Thrace rejects his claims; he cannot feel love or understand it; God did not create the Cylons, and the genocide of mankind is a sin of which Cylons are proven evil for. When the Marine guard who administered the beatings leaves the room, Conoy warns her he could kill her and the guards with ease. She dares him to, and he throws the table over and holds her by her neck against the door.
On Galactica, Commander Adama goes to the morgue to look at the body of Leoben Conoy. There is just over 2 hours left for the nuke to go off, and he gives Col. Tigh the order that all ships are to be split apart to limit damage should one explode.
Back on Gemenon Traveler, the Marines return with a bucket of water, per Lt. Thrace's suggestion of him swimming in rivers and streams. They begin waterboarding him. She notes that if a Cylon can be downloaded into a new body, he shouldn't be willing to tell the truth anyway. She considers that the reason he was willing to talk at the start is because he was afraid he was too far away from the Cylon fleet to be downloaded and will be lost forever. Operating on this theory, torture will eventually work. He tells her he knows she is the victim of child abuse, and that her anger at the world is the result of her own internalised self-hatred trying to prove to her how bad she is.
Dr. Baltar is ready to start the Cylon Detector test. He asks her about her past, and she says she is a refugee from Troy, a mining colony which was destroyed in an accident. The test comes back positive for her being a Cylon. Messenger Six tells him she is probably a Sleeper Agent genuinely believing in her falsified backstory, and that if confronted with proof of her Cylon nature she will probably kill him.
President Roslin is woken from her nap by a dream of Conoy calling to her. There is less than an hour left before the bomb is to go off, and she insists on seeing him personally. On Gemenon Traveler, Conoy is nearly drowned. When he is allowed to talk again, he tells her how time is cyclical, and that she is destined to find Kobol. President Roslin arrives, where she dresses down Lt. Thrace for failing to find the bomb in 8 hours. President Roslin takes over duties, and has him removed from the room. She asks one final time where the bomb is, and offers his freedom. He consedes that there is no bomb and he lied about it so he would be in range of the Cylon fleet for resurrection as Lt. Thrace predicted. President Roslin orders his execution via airlock breach nonetheless, seeing his manipulative behaviour as a threat to mankind due to the large gaps between ships to shield from the nonexistent bomb's explosion. Before being sealed in the airlock, he tells President Roslin, "Adama is a Cylon".
Production Edit
- Written by: Toni Graphia
- Directed by: Brad Turner
Guest stars Edit
- Christina Schild as Playa Kohn
- Eric Breker as Gemenon Captain
- Biski Gugushe as Hamilton
