"Battlestar Galactica": Union, YES?

If you caught the most recent episode of "Battlestar Galactica" (episode 16), you know it was a critical rereading of Marx and Engels's The Communist Manifesto. I don't say that pejoratively; I thought the episode handled several related themes rather deftly.

The main story in that episode, titled "Dirty Hands," is about labor problems aboard the tylium refining vessel, whose interior is reminiscent of a mine shaft. The vessel is crucial to the survival of the "ragtag fugitive fleet," because it refines the raw tylium (mined many, many episodes ago, and now almost gone) into fuel used by every large colonial ship, every Raptor, and every Viper.*

Early in the episode, an accident occurs in which a Raptor, piloted by Racetrack (damn, that woman's cute), experiences engine trouble and slams into Colonial One, the president's vessel. The Raptor pilots manage to eject before the crash, and the problem is traced to poorly refined fuel. It is then discovered that the refining problems stem from quality-control issues, themselves the product of workers who have been working daily 18-hour shifts since the original attack on the colonies, well over a year previous.

The rest of the episode is about Chief Tyrol's attempts to resolve the labor problem, but it is also about the currently-imprisoned Gaius Baltar's attempts to spread discontent throughout the fleet by secretly publishing a manifesto titled My Triumphs, My Mistakes. The manifesto, it turns out, paints Baltar as a man of the people, a farmboy of humble Aerelonian origins, and argues that the fleet is dividing itself into a permanent underclass and a permanent overclass. It is implied that this book may have sparked the drop in quality control aboard the refinery vessel.

Chief Tyrol, who gets hold of a copy of the underground book (more a pamphlet, really), confronts Baltar in the brig about his claims to be from Aerelon, which was essentially a blue-collar farmworld before the Cylon attack. Baltar offers the disbelieving Tyrol a convincing rendition of the Aerelonian accent (Wikipedia trivia: this was apparently James Callis's attempt at a Yorkshire accent—see here), which seems at least partially to convince Tyrol that Baltar might not be lying about his past. At the end of their conversation, Baltar asks Tyrol whether he thinks the commander of this fleet will be anyone other than an Adama.

Tyrol, in a move recalling his old role on New Caprica as a labor leader, goes to the refinery ship and, after a young boy is injured on the line, calls a general strike. The strike is intended to affect not only civilians working in the refinery ship, but also the laborers on other ships as well as the Galactica's deck crew.

The consequences of this are immediate for Tyrol as Admiral Adama throws him in the brig. Adama gets right to the point: this isn't a labor strike—having officers disobey orders is mutiny, and mutineers are shot. Adama tells some soldiers to collect Tyrol's wife Cally, and when Tyrol demands to know what Adama is doing, Adama informs him that his wife is to be shot as one of the strike's ringleaders. Tyrol is horrified. After her, Adama says, he'll shoot the rest of the mutinous deck crew. What's more: "I'll shoot ten Callys," he says, if that's what it takes to maintain order. The point is not to break Tyrol's spirit, nor is it to settle a labor dispute. As Adama points out, in a military chain of command, orders are not optional, and the survival of the ship depends on the chain of command's absolute reliability.

Tyrol gives ground and calls off the strike, then lies to his wife and says Adama is the one who caved first. His wife, who was in custody at that moment, is unaware how close she came to being put against a wall and shot. Adama immediately releases Tyrol from the brig and bids him to go see President Roslin, with whom Tyrol had originally wanted to speak about the labor problems. Adama also orders Cally to be released.

Tyrol goes to Roslin; he argues, perhaps echoing Baltar, that if things continue, children will inherit the jobs of their parents, thereby establishing a permanent, hereditary underclass. Roslin agrees that this is a bad trend, and she and Tyrol decide to implement shift rotations that will allow the overworked refinery crew some much-needed time off while giving white-collar workers, such as those aboard Colonial One, a chance at some real physical work for a change.

One of the show's subplots involves crewman Seelix, who had applied to pilot training school and been rejected because she was needed as a deck hand. At the end of the episode, Seelix is given a pin marking her as an ensign; she has been accepted into the pilot training program, thereby breaking the stereotype that only the rich, privileged, and educated people from the more prosperous and influential colonies could become pilots while those from the lower-class worlds could only be deck hands and laborers.

What to make of this episode?

One thing the show does is provide us with an ambivalent, but still somewhat left-leaning, view of unions. The first labor leader we encounter in the episode, Xeno Fenner, behaves in a sneering and vaguely threatening manner toward President Roslin, and when he quotes a line from Baltar's book, his behavior is enough to get him thrown in the brig. Fenner embodies traits that most anti-union people can't stand about unions and their members: the tendency to become demanding, then threatening. At the same time, more benevolent figures like Chief Tyrol and Cavett (a refinery foreman) present us with a sympathetic picture of the overworked working man just trying to get through the day with all his fingers intact.

The episode also throws us a curve by reminding us that labor disputes in the fleet aren't analogous to labor disputes here on Earth: in the fleet, you don't fuck with the military. A simple strike by the civilian workers might have been handled differently, but because Tyrol also called a general strike meant to include the Galactica's deck hands, the dynamic changed significantly. Adama's view that this was mutiny was correct. The show, then, seems to be drawing a clear boundary delimiting a union's power in the colonial fleet.** A union might have pull with the civilian authority, but there would be no negotiation with the military.

I think the show may have gone overboard, though, in suggesting that those at the top should get their hands as dirty as those at the bottom. How does Tyrol expect the fleet's government to function if a large fraction of the government is constantly rotating out to help with tylium refinement? Tyrol, to his credit, was not suggesting the dissolution of the civilian political hierarchy, but I have to wonder just how workable his and Roslin's scheme will be, and whether future episodes will deal with this.

We haven't seen the Cylons for a couple episodes now (unless you count Baltar's hallucination of Six), which I suppose has given the show's writers a chance to focus more on the human realities of being on the run, living in cramped spaces, and trying not to kill each other. As I said, this episode handled several issues deftly, and while the resolution isn't entirely to my liking, it's at least plausible for this fictional universe. As a critical rereading of The Communist Manifesto, the show comes down on the side of liberal democracy, not Marx and Engels's utopian vision of a classless society. The episode does, however, leave open the possibility of mass revolt by the working (wo)man—though perhaps not so much because of economic pressure as because of external pressure, e.g., the relentless pursuit by the Cylons. This is, however, counterbalanced by the absolute need for a military hierarchy to maintain peace and safeguard the fleet.

Foreboding coda: the next episode (#17) is supposedly the last episode of the season to feature Starbuck. All season long, we've been wondering which main character will, as advertised, die. Could it be Starbuck?

Nah.

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*The question of why this fleet seems to be running on liquid gasoline—which is what we see at the beginning of the episode—is something I'll reserve for later. In fact, there's a lot that's fishy about the depiction of the refining process. Not being an expert in this area, I'll leave it to better minds than mine to parse the tylium issue and point out its weirder aspects.

**Tyrol notes that he is not acting on behalf of any union because the formalized union on New Caprica was dissolved when the colonists left that planet. All the same, the episode is about labor and advocacy—i.e., unions.


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