Death, sex and the Cylon - College of Liberal Arts

Death, sex and the Cylon 

Living authentically on Battlestar Galactica 

Lewis Call 

The second half of Battlestar Galactica’s four-season narrative arc constitutes an extended, 

energetic and effective commentary on the philosophy of death initiated by Martin Heidegger’s 

Being and Time. The Cylons demonstrate the crucial links between death, sexuality and 

reproduction. At first, the Cylons are infinitely downloadable and thus effectively immortal. 

D’Anna pursues a radical experiment in being-towards-death, deliberately and repeatedly 

‘killing’ herself in a perpetual quest to understand the nature of being. For her, death has 

the status of a sexual fetish. Season four concerns the quest by certain individual Cylons to 

overcome Cylon immortality, the fulfilment of which permits some Cylons to attain what 

Heidegger calls an authentic being-towards-death. The end of Cylon immortality radically 

foregrounds the importance of sexuality and biology. The Cylons become obsessed with 

discourses of reproduction and racial purity, but their story ends with a radical endorsement 

of difference. The child Hera, a human–Cylon hybrid whose parents are played by multi-ethnic 

actors, becomes the ancestral mother of humanity. The show thus concludes by rejecting 

decisively both the old fears of racial miscegenation, and the newer fears of the techno-organic 

cyborg. BSG argues for a future of hybridity in which species merge, nations intersect and the 

biological and the cybernetic come together, leading us to a place where death establishes the 

possibility of meaning, and the love of bodies permits the fulfilment of that meaning. 

An immortal person is a contradiction in terms. 

– Emmanuel Levinas, God, Death and Time 

The re-imagined Battlestar Galactica (2003–9) is a remarkably philosophical 

creature. Strange as it may seem, the second half of BSG’s four-season narrative 

arc constitutes an extended, energetic and effective commentary on one of the 

twentieth century’s most important philosophies of death. This philosophy was 

initiated by the chapter on death in Martin Heidegger’s 1927 masterpiece Being 

and Time. The subject of this chapter is, by Heideggerian standards, relatively 

straightforward, and is largely expressed in the chapter’s title: ‘Dasein’s Possibility 

of Being-a-whole, and Being-towards-death’. As I argue below, these also 

become the fundamental concerns of BSG’s cybernetic organisms, the Cylons. 

Heidegger argues that Dasein (‘being-there’, his term for a person) is defined 

by the way in which it comports itself towards death, its being-towards-death. 

He speaks of an attitude which truly recognises death as the ultimate limit of 

Dasein’s possibilities, an attitude that derives meaning from that limitation. 

Heidegger dubs this attitude ‘authentic’, and seems to endorse it. So the chapter 

Science Fiction Film and Television 5.1 (2012), 85–113 ISSN 1754-3770 (print) 1754-3789 (online) 

© Liverpool University Press doi:10.3828/sfftv.2012.5

86 Lewis Call 

on death appears to be an existential cry for us to embrace our finitude. But as 

we shall see, everything depends on the meaning of ‘death’. 

The Cylons provide a well thought-out example of embodied artificial intelligence. 

This machine species provides us with an intriguing ontological ‘test bed’, 

a place where experiments about being can take place. The Cylons model the 

concerns of Heidegger’s Dasein in interesting ways, and reflect those concerns 

onto an audience of organic real-world humans. There are 12 models of humanoid 

Cylons. There are also at least three distinct types of Cylon identity; this 

is important, because only one of these types has the potential to experience 

(and thus comment upon) being-towards-death. First, there is the Cylon, the 

machine species as a collective whole. 1 Second, there are the 12 distinct models, 

each with its own specific characteristics. A reliably essentialist Number One 

Cylon (Dean Stockwell) observes in ‘Six of One’ (11 April 2008) that ‘millions 

of Twos have that nose. Millions of Sixes possess that mouth. Eights share those 

breasts, and Ones have this brain. We’re mechanised copies.’ 2 Third, and most 

importantly for our purposes, there is the individual Cylon: a consciousness 

and a set of experiences which exists across a sequence of identical bodies. The 

individual Cylon turns out to be a good deal more than a mere mechanised copy 

of its siblings. This Cylon comes to resemble Heidegger’s Dasein quite closely; 

indeed, the individual Cylon may even have the potential to attain Heideggerian 

authenticity. But when BSG’s narrative begins, this is a fairly remote possibility, 

for individual Cylons are almost immortal. Provided with an endless series of 

replacement bodies into which they may download upon ‘death’, these Cylons 

are infinite and limitless. The narrative arc of seasons three and four concerns 

the quest by certain individual Cylons to overcome Cylon immortality. 

The story of the Cylons is the story of Dasein’s journey towards a resolute 

existence, the kind of existence that can only be attained through an authentic 

being-towards-death. BSG tells this story in the language of sf, rather than that 

of Being and Time, but the story is the same: all of this has happened before, 

and all of it will happen again. The attainment of mortality makes authenticity 

possible for the Cylons. This dramatic event also foregrounds issues of sexuality 

and reproduction, as the usually sterile Cylons struggle to survive in a world 

1. The Cylon are a diverse race. In addition to the humanoid models, the Cylon also includes ‘lower’ 

forms such as the robotic Centurions and the semi-sentient living spacecraft known as Raiders. The 

Hybrids represent a ‘higher’ form: these hyperintelligent beings are the brains of the Cylon baseships, 

and at least one humanoid Cylon model (the Twos) consider the inscrutable, non-linear chaos of 

Hybrid speech to be the literal word of God. 

2. Most dialogue quotations are drawn from Sadgeezer transcripts, available at www.twiztv.com/ 

scripts/battlestar/. I have made a few minor corrections. Dialogue quotations from the second half of 

season four are my own.

‘Downloaded’, Battlestar Galactica. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 

Death, sex and the Cylon 87 

where they must die. As BSG meditates on bodies, it first connects death with 

sex. It then connects sex with life, and it does so in a way which endorses evolutionary 

biology while soundly rejecting the eugenic theories and fears of racial 

miscegenation which sometimes haunt that paradigm. 

Of course, neither Heidegger nor the Cylons were the first to note the connection 

between sex and death. In 1920, seven years before Being and Time, 

Sigmund Freud had already gone Beyond the Pleasure Principle to introduce 

the concept of the death drive. Freud immediately recognised that the death 

drive might be connected to the sexual instinct in a very intimate way. Indeed, 

he gave sadism as his first clear example of the death instinct, and used it to 

explain ‘the familiar ambivalence of love and hate in erotic life’ (Beyond 65). In 

Civilization and Its Discontents (1929), Freud continued to hold up sadism and 

masochism as examples of the ‘strong alloy’ or ‘union’ that could form between 

love and the destructive instinct (78). 3 But by then, with the shadow of fascism 

spreading across Europe, Freud had bigger problems. Thus his mature position 

held that the death instinct and its ‘main representative’, the aggressive instinct, 

shared ‘world-dominion’ with the erotic instinct (82). This allowed Freud to 

claim, boldly, that he had uncovered ‘the meaning of the evolution of civilization’: 

‘the struggle between Eros and Death, between the instinct of life and the 

instinct of destruction’ (82). 

3. By 1943, Sartre’s Being and Nothingness would identify love and hate, along with sadism and masochism, 

as basic modes of being-for-others (see part two, chapter three). This suggests that these concerns 

are not unique to psychoanalysis, but are also vital to the existential analytic.

88 Lewis Call 

The Freudian analysis is brilliant but ultimately too limited. The problem 

is that Freud underestimated the magnetic attraction between sex and death. 

He continued to view the union between them as exceptional (e.g. sadomasochism), 

and so tended to idealise the functions of Eros. Freud attributed to Eros 

an implausible purity, making her into a virtuous maiden who would bravely 

defend herself in the eternal struggle against Death. Thus for Freud, ‘civilization 

is a process in the service of Eros, whose purpose is to combine single human 

individuals, and after that families, then races, peoples and nations, into one 

great unity, the unity of mankind’ (Civilization 81). Freud presented these processes 

of racial expansion and nation-building in a profoundly positive light, 

but he could only do that by assuming that Eros was perpetually opposed to the 

death instinct. In fact, the creation of races, peoples and nations has frequently 

entailed violence, conquest and colonisation. 

The existential analytic allows us to see what Freud could not. By analysing 

the structure of Dasein’s Being, including being-towards-death and being-forothers, 

we discover that there is a deep, basic connection between death and 

sex. Freud found this connection mainly in sadomasochism; perhaps that is 

why he viewed sadism and masochism as ‘the most common and the most significant 

of all the perversions’ (Three Essays 23). For Freud, the perversions were 

pathologies to be treated by psychoanalysts. But the things that Freud diagnosed 

as perversions are now tolerated and even celebrated as ‘kinks’ in many 

alternative sexual communities. Indeed, sadomasochism might be even more 

common and more significant than Freud imagined, since it may point to a 

fundamental aspect of our existence, a basic link between sex and death. Such 

a link would be found at the ontological rather than the psychological level. 

This link would thus exceed psychoanalysis’s interpretive powers: an existential 

analysis is indicated. 

Such an analysis of the sex-death connection can provide us with a fundamental 

ontology of kink. This ontology suggests that those who dwell in the 

world are, in a way, always already kinky. It suggests that there is something 

kinky right at the heart of our being. On this reading, Freud’s perverts (and 

today’s kinksters) may be closer to the place where sex meets death than others, 

but they are by no means alone. The fundamental ontology of kink suggests 

that we all live near the intersection of death and sex. Furthermore, it suggests 

that this is no bad place to live. While Freud feared the perversions for their 

ability to link sex and death, fundamental ontology suggests that kinks are to 

be admired for their honest recognition of that link. The fundamental ontology 

of kink valorises those ways of being which refuse to hide from the sex/death 

connection. This ontology, and the ways of being it endorses, point to a system


of sexual ethics based on the consent of minds and the desire of bodies. Such a 

system, already widely used by kinksters, could be useful even to those outside 

such erotic minority communities. If there is indeed a reciprocal link between 

sex and death, then surely all humans and Cylons stand to benefit from an open, 

honest engagement with that link. 

Sf may be the best place to explore the fundamental ontology of kink. I have 

argued elsewhere, for example, that the stories of James Tiptree, Jr effectively 

examine the ‘sex-death equation’, and that these stories articulate an ethical philosophy 

which accounts for that equation. Tiptree’s stories recognise erotic love 

and death as the ‘major components of our biological and ontological condition’ 

(Call 71), dramatically foregrounding the ethical choices we make within that 

condition. BSG articulates a similar existential ethics, revealing – like Tiptree’s 

stories – that our being-in-the-world is structured by both death and sex. From 

this basic existential situation, BSG deduces an ethical framework which accepts 

the ‘sex-death equation’, yet refuses to take that equation as grounds for despair. 

Instead, BSG uses sex-death in the service of an existential revision of the psychoanalytic 

narrative. The show’s conclusion allows us to imagine that it takes 

Death and Eros, working in tandem, to build the ‘great unity of mankind’. The 

thought that Death might be Eros’s partner now starts to look like a repressed 

memory or desire. The racism, misogyny and fears of Otherness which have 

haunted many attempts to build races, peoples and nations into that great unity 

now start to look like the neurotic symptoms of that repression. The Oedipal 

sadism of John, the original Number One, can easily be read in this light. John 

flees from death. He insists that Cylons must always continue to download into 

new bodies. He struggles to build a civilisation, while denying the death that 

must always be part of such a project. That which was repressed returns as terror 

and civil war. But existential analysis lets us conceive of a more open, more honest 

unity, one which engages Death instead of repressing it. This analysis allows 

us to understand the relationship between sex and death in ethical terms. 

The Cylons eventually establish a viable system of sexual ethics, one that 

embraces death while endorsing love as the foundation of ethical sexual relations. 

This ethical system rejects all essentialisms, including those of the racial 

and humanist types. BSG sanctions unions between many varieties of humans, 

but also between human and Cylon. The Cylons have always occupied the intersection 

of sex and death, ever since a Six dressed in red (Tricia Helfer) gave 

the Colonial diplomatic officer the kiss of death at the very beginning of the 

show. But things change once the Cylons themselves can die. The possibility of 

Cylon death makes possible the affirmation of new life. A sufficiently powerful 

affirmation of this type could create an entire new world, as scholars such as

90 Lewis Call 

Battlestar Galactica miniseries. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 

Hubert Dreyfus have suggested. This is precisely what happens at the show’s 

end. At the conclusion of BSG’s narrative, death even produces a strange new 

kind of immortality. Indeed, BSG suggests that a viable immortality can only be 

attained by embracing the inevitable connections between death and sex. This 

is a philosophy for all beings, human or Cylon. It offers options and possibilities 

for us, the real-world audience, just as it did for the humans and Cylons who 

were, according to the show’s mythology, our distant ancestors. 

Finitude and freedom: Heidegger’s analysis and the new Dreyfusards 

The analysis of death in Heidegger’s Being and Time is important but incomplete. 

Heidegger suggests that Dasein’s existence is structured by the finitude 

which death guarantees, but the ambiguous status of death in Heidegger’s work 

makes it difficult to see that structure. In the late twentieth century, an influential 

circle of philosophers around Hubert Dreyfus interpreted Heideggerian 

death as ‘world collapse’. For these philosophers, death might mean the end of 

whole cultures, worlds and modes of being. But this is not necessarily cause for 

despair. As Nietzsche observed, one must tear down a temple in order to build 

one; similarly, the collapse of old worlds could lead to the creation of new ones. 

Those new worlds appear to offer some striking possibilities. Among these is 

the possibility that the endless, infinite project of confronting death might lead 

to a strange new kind of immortality.


Heidegger’s original formulation of being-towards-death describes two basic 

attitudes towards death. There is the inauthentic attitude of the They (das Man, 

‘the Anyone’ in some English translations). The They is Heidegger’s term for 

everyday society with its idle talk (‘I heard that somebody died’, ‘Well, we all 

have to die sometime’, and so on). ‘In such a way of talking, death is understood 

as an indefinite something’ which presents no threat (297). But Dasein can also 

approach death authentically, recognising death as ‘the possibility of the impossibility 

of any existence at all’ (307), the ultimate limit of Dasein’s existence and 

therefore of all its projects. Heidegger argues that Dasein ‘is authentically itself 

only to the extent that . . . it projects itself upon its ownmost potentiality-for- 

Being rather than upon the possibility of the they-self ’ (308). Here Heidegger 

seems to be providing us with a recipe for an authentic existence, one which 

requires us to confront death boldly and honestly, rather than fleeing from death 

into the idle chatter of the They. Heidegger concludes his chapter on death with 

a courageous call for ‘an impassioned freedom towards death – a freedom which 

has been released from the Illusions of the “they”, and which is factical, certain 

of itself, and anxious’ (311). It would seem that for Heidegger, perfect existential 

freedom is to be found in this authentic attitude towards death, this absolute 

knowledge that one’s existence is finite. 

Dreyfus points out that if Dasein truly accepts death, then ‘the same structure 

that seemed to threaten all its secure projects and its very identity would 

be seen to be challenging and liberating’ (Being-in-the-World 317). This suggests 

that Heidegger’s thought of authentic being-towards-death is what is known in 

some quarters as a performative thought, and in others as a Jedi mind trick: it 

is a thought that makes something happen. Specifically, it makes possible a new 

mode of being. Heidegger’s term for this state of being is ‘resoluteness’, which 

‘signifies letting oneself be summoned out of one’s lostness in the “they”’ (345). 

So resoluteness is an openness to the possibility of authenticity, rather than an 

active choice. Strangely, this seems to imply a kind of existential pragmatism. 

Heidegger’s analysis suggests that it is pointless to pursue authenticity, but we 

may anticipate the moment when it will become a possibility for us. 

But should we anticipate that moment? This is surprisingly unclear in Heidegger’s 

original philosophy, since Heidegger is careful to avoid making normative 

claims about the phenomena he analyses. Havi Carel observes that 

Heidegger actually can’t make such claims, since he believes that the call to 

authenticity cannot be brought about deliberately (Life and Death 103). Yet it 

is clear that Heidegger finds authenticity to be an interesting and important 

alternative to the inauthentic. Bruce Baugh suggests that for Heidegger, authentic 

death ‘both has a meaning and is a source of meaning: the meaning of time

92 Lewis Call 

and being’ (74). And there are signs in Heidegger’s philosophy that signal his 

endorsement of the authentic. For example, authenticity seems to be the hallmark 

of a more mature Dasein; Carel notes that Heidegger always discusses the 

transition from inauthenticity to authenticity, never the other way around (Life 

and Death 103). 

It is also crucial to have a clear understanding of this ‘death’ towards which 

Dasein comports itself. For many years, critics like Sartre interpreted Heidegger’s 

‘death’ as the end of an individual Dasein. Sartre believed that one 

could expect ‘a particular death but not death’ (683). Recent criticism strongly 

suggests, however, that Heidegger is indeed asking us to expect death, if we 

understand ‘death’ as the ultimate end of all projects and possibilities. Commentators 

now tend to read Heidegger’s ‘death’ as the limit which establishes 

the horizons and thus the possibilities of meaning in our existence. This new 

interpretation suggests that the defining features of Dasein are its finitude and 

its awareness of that finitude. Dreyfus identifies the quest for a proper understanding 

of finitude as the basic motivation which underlies Heidegger’s entire 

philosophical project. He writes, ‘Heidegger is trying again and again to find 

the right way to describe the basic structure of finitude that makes possible our 

access to the world and to everything in it’ (‘Foreword’ ix). For Dreyfus and his 

followers, Heidegger must be talking about something much more radical than 

an awareness of our own personal mortality. On this view, Heidegger seems to 

be saying that existence itself is finite, and must be so, if it is to have any meaning 

for us. 

In a strongly worded passage from Being and Time, Heidegger defines death 

as ‘the possibility of the impossibility of any existence at all . . . It is the possibility 

of the impossibility of every way of comporting oneself towards anything, 

of every way of existing’ (307). Clearly, ‘the possibility of the impossibility of 

any existence at all’ means something much more than the end of an individual 

life. Heidegger seems to be talking about the end of the world here. And 

indeed, that is how members of the Dreyfus circle have been reading him. In 

Time and Death, Carol J. White advances a radical but highly influential interpretation 

of Heidegger’s concept of death. She argues that ‘Heidegger is talking 

about the possibility of existential death. It occurs when old worlds die and new 

ones are born’ (89). Although White’s original interpretation is uniquely hers, 

its influence has no doubt been enhanced by the endorsement it has received 

from Dreyfus. For White and Dreyfus, ‘Death is equated with the sort of worldcollapse 

that can befall a cultural epoch’ (Dreyfus ‘Foreword’ xxxi). This is death 

at its most serious and sobering: it is a statement of the finitude of all human 

projects, an awareness that all human worlds (even entire cultures) have limits


and endings. It is no easy thing to stare into the abyss of this death without 

blinking, and yet the White/Dreyfus reading suggests that this is the project 

of authentic Dasein. So let us call Dreyfus, White and their followers the New 

Dreyfusards. Like the original Dreyfusards, they champion an unpopular cause, 

because they hope that by doing so they can initiate a new world. 

The New Dreyfusards bring us a truly terrifying project, but fortunately this 

project offers an immense payoff. For the Dreyfusards, authentic being-towardsdeath 

anticipates a radical world-collapse, which in turn will enable an equally 

radical world-creation. White resorts to uncharacteristically poetic language to 

describe the significance of this event: ‘Authentic Dasein is the one who reaches 

into the depths of this well to find the new star, a new way of understanding 

the being of what-is, that becomes the culture’s new focal point as it navigates 

the twilight between its old world and the new way of disclosing its world that 

glimmers on the horizon’ (75). All this talk of new stars and horizons evokes 

Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, and indeed, when Zarathustra dreamed of 

weighing the world, what he loved about the world was its finitude: ‘How surely 

my dream looked upon this finite world, not inquisitively, not acquisitively, not 

afraid, not begging, as if a full apple offered itself to my hand, a ripe golden apple 

with cool, soft, velvet skin, thus the world offered itself to me’ (187). For Nietzsche, 

as for the Dreyfusards, finitude was a great gift, not something to regret. 

The Dreyfusard position has many virtues, not least of which is that it lets 

us understand how death might actually be ‘the possibility of the impossibility 

of any existence at all’. As the Dreyfusard William Blattner persuasively argues, 

‘the term “death” in Being and Time does not refer to an event that takes place at 

the end of every human being’s life. Rather, it is the name for a certain condition 

in which Dasein can find itself, viz., the condition of not being able to be anyone’ 

(67–8). This is the condition which results from the kind of cultural worldcollapse 

that Dreyfus and White have described. Blattner shows that Heidegger 

borrowed from Karl Jaspers the concept of the ‘limit situation’, that is, ‘the idea 

that one can define and delimit the concept of human existence by describing 

its limits’ (Blattner 66). Blattner argues compellingly that, for Heidegger, 

death is important mainly as a ‘limit-situation that defines the limits of Dasein’s 

ability-to-be . . . The condition Heidegger calls “death” is a limit-situation for 

that ability-to-be, one in which one confronts this limitation’ (67). Following 

Blattner, Carel suggests that ‘death is not non-existence but existence without 

the ability to press into any specific possibility. This explains Heidegger’s seemingly 

baffling definition of death as “the possibility of impossibility”’ (‘Temporal 

Finitude’ 549). So the Dreyfusard interpretation solves a significant interpretive 

problem regarding the meaning of ‘death’ in Being and Time.

94 Lewis Call 

The Dreyfusard view also gives us the important (and surprising) ability to 

speak about life. Heidegger always denied that he was doing life-philosophy. 

Blattner, however, suggests that his re-interpretation of Heidegger may give 

us new access to this denial (68). It seems clear that death, in the Dreyfusard 

view, is a phenomenon of life: death is the perpetual possibility of cultural collapse, 

the ever-present risk that Dasein will be unable to live any specific life 

at all. Thus, as Stephen Mulhall argues, ‘death shows up only in and through 

life, in and through that which it threatens to render impossible – as the possible 

impossibility of that life. Phenomenologically speaking, then, life is death’s 

representative, the proxy through which death’s resistance to Dasein’s grasp is 

at once acknowledged and overcome’ (305). It is through life, and only through 

life, that Dasein may engage with the possibility of death (i.e. the possibility 

that no particular existence may be available). Thus, as Mulhall argues, ‘beingtoward-death 

is essentially a matter of being-toward-life’ (305). 

Indeed, Heidegger already understood the intimate relationship between 

death and life. In the place where he sets out to distinguish the existential analytic 

of death from other possible interpretations, he acknowledges that ‘death, 

in the widest sense, is a phenomenon of life’ (290). Heidegger goes on to define 

dying, very carefully, as ‘that way of Being in which Dasein is towards its death’ 

(291). By Heideggerian standards, this is fairly unambiguous. Dying is a way of 

being for Dasein; specifically, it is Dasein’s being towards death. Dasein could 

not be towards the end of its own life, since that end stands outside its existence. 

Dasein could, however, be towards death in the Dreyfusard sense. Heidegger 

appears to authorise this interpretation in an interesting passage on the possibility 

of immortality. ‘If “death” is defined as the “end” of Dasein – that is to 

say, of Being-in-the-world – this does not imply any ontical decision whether 

“after death” still another Being is possible, either higher or lower, or whether 

Dasein “lives on” or even “outlasts” itself and is “immortal”’ (292). Here ‘death’ 

looks precisely like world-collapse: the possibility that Dasein will suddenly 

lose its ability to be in the world. Interestingly, Heidegger does not rule out 

immortality here, though he does rule claims about immortality ‘out of bounds’. 

The existential analytic cannot have anything to say about the possibility of life 

after death, or any other metaphysical questions. Thus Blattner is quite right 

to claim that ‘Heidegger is not asserting immortality’ (65). Yet he is not denying 

it either. Blattner goes on to emphasise, importantly, that ‘human life stops; 

neither existence nor understanding can be said to stop as such, however’ (65). 

Dasein could always find itself unable to embrace any particular mode of being, 

and thus unable to dwell in the world. Yet existence, and the project of trying to 

understand existence, continues indefinitely.


Carel argues convincingly that the concept of death must include not only 

‘finitude of possibility (the Dreyfus/Blattner sense)’, but also ‘temporal finitude’ 

(‘Temporal Finitude’ 547). Dasein should be understood as finite in the sense 

that it may find itself without projects and possibilities, but also in the sense 

that Dasein’s existence is temporal and temporary. ‘The question that emerges 

with respect to these two types of finitude’, Carel argues, ‘is not how one ought 

to die, but how one ought to live knowing that one will die, taking into account 

both mortality and finitude’ (548). Once again, death is important for the ways 

in which it structures life. There is also an interesting tension at work here, since 

Dasein is temporally finite (mortal), and yet Dasein’s general project of trying to 

understand its own being is infinite. This implies a peculiar kind of immortality, 

for Dasein is the being whose being is always an issue for it. Being continues 

to be an issue for Dasein in general, regardless of the ending of any particular 

individual. 

Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger attempts to exploit this tension. 

Derrida wants to demonstrate that death is an aporia, a gap which will 

prevent Heidegger’s thought from attaining systematic closure. He does this, for 

example, by trying to show how Dasein’s mortality leads back to an unexpected 

immortality. ‘There is no scandal whatsoever in saying that Dasein remains 

immortal in its originary being-to-death’, declares Derrida, ‘if by “immortal” 

one understands “without end” in the sense of verenden’ (Aporias 39–40). 

Indeed, there is no scandal. Dasein is temporal and finite. But Dasein’s central 

project, its attempt to confront the limits of its own being, is infinite. Dying 

continues forever. And dying is a way of being towards the eternal, ever-present 

possibility of the impossibility of existence. This way of being is always open to 

Dasein, and ‘immortality’ may simply be a name for this fact. But all of these 

options already exist in Being and Time. So why does Derrida so strenuously call 

our attention to this non-scandal? Perhaps he means to show that if Dasein’s 

‘immortality’ is not scandalous, it is at least aporetic. Derrida may mean to be 

provocative when he claims that ‘only a being-to-death can think, desire, project, 

indeed, “live” immortality as such’ (Aporias 55). But Derrida’s critique is 

ultimately unconvincing. His deconstructionist strategy is intended to reveal 

the hidden fissures in a text, but in Heidegger, those fissures are not so hidden. 

And even if Heidegger’s thought is unable to achieve theoretical closure, that 

inability does not reduce the power of the existential analytic. 

Derrida’s deconstruction does have at least one important effect, however: it 

makes an implicit possibility explicit. Where Heidegger spoke of being-towardsdeath, 

Derrida speaks of the vigil: a careful, patient anticipation of death. In The 

Gift of Death, Derrida traces this vigil back to Socrates, in order to connect the

96 Lewis Call 

vigil with philosophy itself: ‘the Phaedo explicitly names philosophy: it is attentive 

anticipation of death, care brought to bear upon dying, meditation on the 

best way to receive, give, or give oneself death, experience of a vigil over the possibility 

of death, and over the possibility of death as impossibility’ (14). Derrida 

preserves the major theme of existentialism; he declares that the vigil is ‘another 

name for freedom’ (17). He even preserves the basic ontological structure which 

Heidegger introduced: Derrida tells us that the link between the care of the 

being-toward-death and freedom is ‘a structure analogous to that of the Dasein 

as described by Heidegger’ (17). So Derrida retains the basic structural elements 

of Heidegger’s philosophy, even as he deconstructs that philosophy. Ironically, 

even Derrida’s deconstruction of Heidegger’s philosophy remains faithful to 

that philosophy and occurs within it. 

BSG models the Derridean vigil at least twice. The Cylon attack on the Colonies 

brings humanity to the brink of extinction, and forces the surviving humans 

to embark upon a constant vigil over death. But the Cylons are destined for an 

even more poignant vigil. The Cylon downloading technique is incompatible 

with finitude. As long as they maintain the false immortality of the download, 

the Cylons can never experience the care of a being-towards-death. Once they 

overcome that ‘immortality’, they are able to experience that care as no one else 

could, for they experience it fresh, as blank slates. This care, and the vigil which 

embodies it, point the Cylons towards a new and more sustainable immortality. 

End of line: the Cylons discover the importance of being finite 

During BSG’s first two seasons, the humanoid Cylons generally cannot die. 

David Vessey is quite right to argue that ‘a successful death is not available to 

the Cylons’ (295). He recognises how the impossibility of death impacts the 

Cylons: they ‘are not existentially preoccupied about whether a resurrection 

ship is nearby’ (295). At this point, their being is not an issue for them, and they 

are initially incapable of Heideggerian authenticity or Derridean vigils. 

All of this begins to change about a third of the way through season three. In 

‘Torn’ (3 November 2006), a deadly virus ravages a Cylon basestar. The Cylons 

send their human agent Gaius Baltar (James Callis) to investigate. He finds most 

of the Cylons aboard the basestar dead, the rest dying. He locates a Number Six 

Cylon, who begs him to kill her. Baltar, who has had erotic relations with Sixes 

both real and hallucinatory, is at first horrified: ‘You don’t understand. There is 

no resurrection ship nearby. You will not be downloaded into a new body. You 

will just be gone.’ Delirious, the Six accuses Baltar of bringing on the plague


which has decimated these Cylons. Baltar panics and strangles her. When the 

Cylons on the other baseship ask Baltar to report what he sees, he replies ‘I see 

nothing. Nothing of consequence.’ But of course, the amoral Baltar is an unreliable 

witness. What he has in fact witnessed is the possibility of meaning for the 

Cylon. 

The deadly disease quickly foregrounds the possibility of death, not just for 

individual Cylons but for the Cylon as a whole. Since the entire Cylon culture 

is at stake here, the Cylons are confronting death in the Dreyfusard sense. The 

Colonial humans discover that the disease could easily spread to all Cylons, via 

the Cylon resurrection apparatus. Here death asserts itself as a primal, cataclysmic 

force. It is the dark secret which lurks at the heart of the Cylons’ false 

immortality. Indeed, death threatens to destabilise that ‘immortality’ in a radical 

way. ‘We can destroy the entire Cylon race’, observes Major Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama 

(Jamie Bamber) in ‘A Measure of Salvation’ (10 November 2006). Captain Karl 

‘Helo’ Agathon (Tahmoh Penikett) is generally presented as the most ethical of 

the Colonial officers; he also happens to be married to a Number Eight Cylon. 

Helo protests: ‘Genocide? So that’s what we’re about now?’ Helo uses his own 

wife, Lieutenant Sharon ‘Athena’ Agathon (Grace Park), as an example to illustrate 

why this would be wrong: ‘She made a choice. She’s a person. They’re a 

race of people.’ Helo makes a compelling critique of the plan to wipe out the 

Cylons, but he’s not quite right. At this point in the narrative, the Cylons are 

different enough from humans that they seem more like another species than 

a ‘race of people’. And as long as resurrection remains possible for the Cylons, 

their default existential condition is radically different from that of Dasein. Resurrection 

precludes finitude. This means that the Cylons’ being cannot be a 

perpetual issue for them, as it is for humans. The Cylons are not quite people 

yet. 

But this is the moment when that begins to change, and the change comes 

first to Athena. The Colonial military to which she has sworn allegiance is contemplating 

the extermination of her species. ‘My people may die’, she acknowledges. 

‘My entire race may be wiped out.’ There is a long pause; a tight shot on 

her face shows the agony of incipient authenticity. She whispers, barely audible: 

‘Does a Cylon keep her word even if it means she’s the last Cylon in the 

universe? Can a human being do that?’ Here Athena confronts not her own 

mortality, but what the Dreyfusards would call world-collapse. She is considering 

the possibility of the end of her people, which is the end of the world, and 

she is resolute in the face of that horrifying prospect. Athena thus provides our 

first glimpse of an authentic Cylon existence. This seems especially significant 

given that she is the mother of Hera (Iliana Gomez-Martinez), who turns out to

98 Lewis Call 

‘Rapture’ and ‘Hero’, Battlestar Galactica. Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 

be the primal ancestor of Earth’s human race: authenticity must precede evolution. 

But Athena is not yet fully human. Death remains for her not a real limit, 

but something lovers do together, something that has to do with the bearing 

and raising of children, something more like sex. Thus in ‘Rapture’ (21 January 

2007), Athena begs Helo to find the courage to ‘kill’ her, so she can download to 

the Cylon baseship and rescue their daughter. The two swear their love to one 

another, and he shoots her in the belly. The scene is beautiful, to be sure, but it 

doesn’t take Helo or Athena any closer to an authentic understanding of death. 

Still, the prospect of racial extinction has made death an issue for the Cylons. 

In ‘Hero’ (17 November 2006), D’Anna (Lucy Lawless), a Number Three, begins 

to pursue a radical experiment in being-towards-death. In a dream, she runs 

through the corridors of Galactica, pursued by Colonial Marines. She reaches 

a hatch marked ‘End of Line’. (Computer programmers use this phrase to mark 

the end of a line of computer code. The Cylon hybrid which operates/is the 

Cylon baseship utters this phrase often, and uses it with increasing frequency 

as D’Anna begins her illicit investigation into death’s mysteries.) When D’Anna 

opens the hatch, she sees a brilliant white light. She turns, and the Marines fill 

her with bullets. She wakes up in bed with Baltar and Caprica Six. Death is 

again connected to sex. 

In the astonishing scene which follows, D’Anna orders a Centurion to kill 

her, initiating her own ‘death’ with an ironic command to ‘execute’ the program. 

The Centurion fills her with bullets, for real this time, and we get a vision of 

transcendence: the Opera House on Kobol, a tantalising glimpse of the Final 

Five Cylons, their faces too brilliant to see, and the hatch again, ‘End of Line’. 

Then D’Anna resurrects, and informs her fellow Cylons that ‘there’s something 

beautiful . . . miraculous, between life and death’. No one quite knows what to 

make of this. In ‘The Passage’ (8 December 2006), Baltar points out the futility 

of it all: ‘intentionally killing yourself over and over so you can download


over and over. Death’s just a revolving door, isn’t it?’ In the hybrid chamber 

with D’Anna, Baltar realises that this is where D’Anna got the idea to begin 

intentionally downloading. ‘Gestalt therapy and escape clauses’, says the hybrid. 

But once in a while Baltar gets it right: D’Anna will not find any escape clauses 

through her download fetish, and what she really needs is existential therapy, 

not gestalt. 4 

Brian Willems offers a provocative Heideggerian reading of the ‘D’Anna 

problem’. He sees her as ‘a non-human who learns her own life-in-death’ (89) 

and claims, remarkably, that she has ‘not only begun to learn her own facticity, 

but she’s also taken this new knowledge and applied resurrection technology 

to it in order to go beyond such knowledge; and she’s finding a way to access 

totality’ (97). But this position is hard to sustain. The ‘deaths’ which D’Anna 

experiences do not represent a limit for her, since they are never permanent 

or ‘real’ deaths. She never confronts the more significant existential death or 

Dreyfusard world-collapse. D’Anna wants to have her death and live it too, and 

that is cheating. She will not get to death that way. In fact, we can be pretty sure 

that until she gives up her cheap thrills, she will never develop a real understanding 

of death. Emmanuel Levinas reminds us that in order to be-for-death 

authentically, we must maintain the possibility of death as a possibility, without 

transforming it into a reality (52). D’Anna’s death fetish is an interesting form of 

play, but it has nothing to do with the kind of being-towards-death which might 

truly give the Cylons access to totality, or what Heidegger calls Being-a-whole. 

That comes later. For now, all that D’Anna’s experiment gets her is boxed. ‘Your 

model is fundamentally flawed’, declares an absolutist Number One. D’Anna 

maintains that she would do it all again. And that, replies the One, is why they 

have decided to box her entire line, placing all Threes in cold storage. ‘One must 

die to know the truth’, D’Anna asserts bravely. The trouble is, she still does not 

understand what death means. 

The Cylons, however, soon learn death’s meaning, for they practice a strange 

kind of democracy. With the Threes boxed, they have six remaining ‘known’ 

Cylon models: an even number, and no tie-breaking vote. This raises the possibility 

of a genuine schism in the Cylon, and that is the possibility of worldcollapse 

in the Dreyfusard sense. As the Cylons live that possibility, they move 

closer to authenticity. On the crucial question of whether the ‘lower’ Cylon 

models should be permitted to think independently, Boomer (Grace Park) 

votes against the other Eights, giving the Ones and their allies a razor-thin 

4. The existential approach in psychology was developed in the mid-twentieth century by Rollo May 

and others. Heidegger’s philosophy of death remains a major concern for analysts working in this 

tradition (see Mandic).

100 Lewis Call 

majority. The leader of the minority faction, a Number Six who becomes known 

as Natalie, protests: ‘No one has ever voted against their model.’ Here is more 

world-collapse for the Cylon. Natalie continues: ‘Our identities are determined 

by our models. Each model is unique. We belong together.’ Natalie is not quite 

right here: a certain kind of Cylon identity is determined by model, but a more 

interesting kind is determined, as we have seen, by continuous experience 

through a series of same-model bodies, which is why there can be such a thing 

as a Boomer or a Natalie, and not just Sixes and Eights. In any case, the die is 

cast: Natalie removes the behavioural inhibiter which prevents higher reasoning 

in the Centurions. Cavil, the chief spokesman for the Ones, reminds her 

that she cannot do anything without a vote. Natalie replies ‘no, we can’t do anything 

with one. So we’re finished voting.’ This is, among other things, the death 

of Cylon democracy. The Centurions turn against Cavil’s faction, and the Cylon 

disintegrates into civil war. This represents the disastrous failure of the first type 

of Cylon identity (‘the Cylon’); it is a world-collapse of the first magnitude. 

The two factions make an uneasy truce, but this soon falls apart. In ‘The Ties 

That Bind’ (18 April 2008), the Cylon fleet jumps, and Natalie’s ‘rebel’ faction is 

dismayed to learn that the resurrection ship has stayed behind. As Cavil’s forces 

attack, a new comprehension dawns in Natalie’s mind: ‘no Resurrection Ship . . . 

They’re really trying to kill us!’ For the first time, Natalie can experience death 

as a real possibility: not just the possibility of her own personal death (which is 

also very real and very new for her), but the possibility of the deaths of entire 

models, perhaps the death of the Cylon itself. In Dreyfusard terms, Natalie 

glimpses the end of the world at this moment. In Heideggerian terms, she has 

been offered an opportunity for authenticity. In Derridean terms, she may now 

establish a vigil over death. 

Natalie is the first Cylon to grasp fully the importance of death. She is resolute 

in her attitude towards death, and Heidegger points out that ‘when Dasein 

is resolute, it can become the “conscience” of Others’ (344). Natalie does indeed 

become the conscience of the Cylon. She is now ready to consider what was 

previously unthinkable: the elimination of Cylon immortality. Seeking human 

help in her quest to unbox D’Anna, Natalie negotiates with Colonial President 

Laura Roslin (Mary McDonnell). Natalie points out in ‘Guess What’s Coming 

to Dinner’ (16 May 2008) that ‘the boxing facility resides within the Cylon 

Resurrection Hub. This Hub controls the functions of every Resurrection Ship 

in existence.’ It is interesting that the Cylons have designed their resurrection 

network according to this vulnerable centralised architecture (rather than, say, 

a more rugged distributed architecture). Perhaps the Final Five designed this 

architecture knowing that one day the Cylon would need to encounter death in

‘Guess What’s Coming to Dinner’, Battlestar Galactica. 

Universal Studios Home Entertainment. 


a serious way. In any case, the opportunity is clear: ‘you destroy the Hub, Cylons 

lose their ability to download’, Natalie explains. ‘All of us’, she concludes, to 

emphasise the fact that she is choosing finitude for herself and all her brothers 

and sisters. Natalie is not merely confronting the possibility of world-collapse; 

she is actively embracing it. Roslin understands what this means: ‘once they’re 

gone, they can’t come back. Mortal enemies.’ It is a nice play on words, which 

reminds us that this choice may not end the human–Cylon war, but it will at 

least create equality and balance between the two sides. It will turn this conflict 

into a war between people. Horrific as those wars are, they are at least finite, for 

they reflect the finitude of their participants. 

Natalie makes her case in a speech to the Colonial legislature, the Quorum 

of Twelve. This emphasises the political importance of the decision which confronts 

the two species: 

In our civil war, we’ve seen death. We’ve watched our people die. Gone forever. As terrible 

as it was, beyond the reach of the Resurrection Ships, something began to change. We could 

feel a sense of time, as if each moment held its own significance. We began to realise that for 

our existence to hold any value, it must end. To live meaningful lives, we must die and not 

return. The one human flaw that you spend your lifetimes distressing over, mortality, is the 

one thing . . . Well, it’s the one thing that makes you whole. 

This is the testimony of Dasein, the narrative of Natalie’s journey towards 

authentic being. She and her comrades have been flying without resurrection 

ships for quite some time now, and they are feeling the existential effects. 

An awareness of their mortality and their finitude has given them a new and 

authentic concept of time, one in which moments have meaning. And Natalie is 

enough of a philosopher to understand the broader implications of this revelation: 

Cylon mortality (like its human equivalent) is a necessary condition for 

Being-a-whole. Finitude is what Romo Lampkin (Mark Sheppard) would call a


sine qua non. This Latin phrase provides the title of the episode (27 May 2008) 

in which Natalie dies. Speaking to Admiral Adama in a different context, Lampkin 

defines the phrase: ‘those things we deem essential, without which we cannot 

bear living, without which life in general loses its specific value. Becomes 

abstract.’ Here Lampkin describes death in the Dreyfusard sense: the inability 

to live any specific life, to be any particular person at all. Ironically, temporal 

finitude (personal mortality) is one of the things that gives us a fighting chance 

against this death. 

Shot twice by Athena in cold blood, Natalie dies on the operating table of 

Doc Cottle (Donnelly Rhodes). Natalie’s death may be predictable, but it also 

provides narrative satisfaction: this woman, who has become the foremost 

Cylon philosopher of death, has faced death with courage since her basestar 

first jumped beyond resurrection range. Ever since then she has been dying in 

the Heideggerian sense: she has been comporting herself towards death, and 

she has been open to opportunities for authenticity. More recently she has 

maintained a vigil over death. She has worked hard to find the right way to die, 

and she has found it at last: her vigil is at an end. Natalie goes bravely to her fate. 

She grips Cottle’s hand for strength, and she uses Cylon ‘silent projection’ to 

create a peaceful forest scene in order to calm herself as she dies. 

The Cylons are now free to become people at last. They feel it happening 

even before the attack on the Resurrection Hub. In ‘The Hub’ (6 June 2008), an 

Eight rallies sceptical human pilots just before that attack. She declares: ‘now 

all of these Cylons here, all of these people? They’re pilots like you, and they’re 

gonna be out in the soup with you, taking out other Cylons.’ Cavil and Boomer 

are aboard the Hub when the attack comes; they have just resurrected D’Anna. 

Predictably, Cavil rejects the existential explanation, retreating into a kind of 

liberal legalism: ‘that would be mass murder. Death would be permanent for 

all of us. They’ve gone insane!’ The freshly downloaded D’Anna, however, is 

much quicker on the uptake: ‘permanent death? Well, that makes this all the 

more meaningful.’ With that, she kills him. Jane Espenson’s script gives this 

crucial episode an appropriately literary quality: contra T. S. Eliot, the Cylon 

world ends with a bang and a whimper. The nuclear strike on the Hub provides 

the bang, and then as D’Anna observes, ‘with a whimper, every Cylon in the 

universe begins to die’. Athena dives in with a pro-death argument based on 

the principle of equality outlined above: ‘yes, that’s right. And it’s a good thing, 

D’Anna. Because now there’s no difference. We can all start trusting each other.’ 

Maybe, but for someone in D’Anna’s unique existential position, that trust will 

be a long time coming: ‘I’m mortal now’, she says. ‘In fact, I’m the only Three 

in the whole darn universe. So I gotta worry about protecting myself.’ Midway


through life’s journey and halfway through season four, D’Anna finds that her 

being has finally become an issue for her in a real and undeniable way. She is 

mortal, finite and explicitly unique. (Her fellow Cylons are now equally limited, 

though individuals in the other models still have large numbers of identical 

siblings.) 

Dreyfusard world-collapse has given the Cylons the opportunity to live 

authentically in the Heideggerian sense. But of course, authenticity is only ever 

a possibility, never a necessity. At this point in the narrative, D’Anna mainly 

seems interested in avoiding death. Here she risks falling into the inauthentic 

attitude of the They. Other Cylons will soon discover, however, that the collapse 

of their old world has created a surprisingly transcendent possibility. In the 

second half of season four, certain Cylons begin to treat the collapse of their 

world as an opportunity to establish a Derridean vigil over death. By the end 

of the series, this vigil will allow these Cylons to conceive (and the audience to 

conceive of ) an ontologically viable new form of immortality. 

‘Love outlasts death’: death, sex and reproduction in late season four 

David Farrell Krell begins his book on Heidegger and life-philosophy by observing 

that death is just one of the two ends which define Dasein’s finite existence. 

The other is birth: ‘Dasein natal, Dasein fatal’ (33). Of course, Heidegger does 

not want to talk about birth, because that would mean talking about sex. Of sex, 

as Derrida reminds us, Heidegger speaks as little as possible (‘Geschlecht’ 65). 

Yet Derrida’s critique of this silence is compelling: Heidegger insists that Dasein 

is sexually neutral, over and above Dasein’s neutrality towards any other kind 

of difference. Ironically, Heidegger thus ends up granting sexuality and sexual 

difference a peculiar privilege (69). It seems that Heidegger cannot escape discourses 

of the body, its life and its sexuality, much as he might like to. Indeed, 

it is his own analytic of Dasein that foregrounds these things. Krell notes that 

‘life thrusts itself to the fore in the analysis of the death of Dasein. It is almost as 

though Sein were Leben’ (88). By making death the central axis upon which the 

fundamental ontology of Being turns, Heidegger has ensured that life and its 

philosophy will continue to inhabit that ontology. 

This is perhaps bad news for Heidegger, who would no doubt prefer a simpler 

phenomenological analysis, untroubled by the messiness of bodies, sex and 

life. But it is good news for those of us who want to explore the fundamental 

connection between death and sex. If bodies must die, then bodies must also 

reproduce. We must reverse Krell’s formula: ‘Dasein fatal, Dasein natal’. This is


precisely the lesson the Cylons learn at the end of BSG. Once they can die, they 

must learn to live. To live as a species they must love: the Cylons firmly believe 

that their ability to conceive children sexually will depend entirely on their ability 

to love, and BSG’s narrative seems to endorse this remarkable philosophy. 

Their newfound mortality permits the Cylons to pursue meaningful projects, 

and those projects are primarily procreative. Frank Schalow describes a ‘special 

economy’ in Heidegger’s thought which ‘suggests a temporal cycle in which the 

replenishment of life springs from its cessation’ (90). This same temporal cycle 

suggests that the projects of those who live today gain meaning through the 

‘prospect of futurity’ (90). So death is a necessary condition for meaning, but it 

may not be a sufficient condition. Meaning may also require the possibility of 

new life. This is the possibility of the possibility of Dasein’s existence: the possibility 

of new projects, new generations, new worlds being born as old ones die. 

There is, however, a serious political danger here. Krell summarises the problem 

nicely: ‘Dasein natal is Dasein fatal. Its nativity implies nationality, and 

its nationality, at least in Heidegger’s case, although certainly not in his alone, 

entails a nationalism’ (179). If the Cylons are truly going to be a people, then they 

will do more than simply breed. Their breeding will become a project, it will have 

meaning for them, and they will call that meaning nation. Season four’s mortal 

Cylons speak of themselves with increasing frequency as ‘the Cylon nation’, 

and this is no accident. They have discovered what Krell calls ‘the daimonic 

nexus of god and Geschlecht, life and the body, sex and reproduction’ (204). 

Krell suggests that for Heidegger, this is a ‘volkisch node’ (204): it is the place 

where peoples are born, where nations happen. Heidegger was terrified of this 

node, and rightly so. As Derrida points out, Heidegger had hoped that he could 

embrace National Socialist politics while rejecting Nazi racism: he thought ‘that 

he would be able to distinguish between the national and nationalism, that is, 

between the national and a biologicist and racist ideology’ (‘Geschlecht II’ 165). 

Unsurprisingly, this proved impossible. Had Heidegger given the body its due, 

he might have understood why the nation inevitably becomes entwined with 

discourses of biology and race. Dasein natal is Dasein racial. Any given Dasein 

is always already a Dasein of a particular colour, a Dasein of a certain race and 

nation, a cybernetic Dasein, a biological one, or some curious hybrid of the two. 

Here is the real challenge for mortal Cylons. They have found death. If they 

can find life, then they can be a people. But they must at all costs find a way 

to do this without descending into nationalism and biological racism. BSG 

invokes a darkly Nietzschean eternal recurrence to underscore the risks: time 

and time again, organic humans have created cybernetic beings. Time and time 

again these two types of beings have warred against each other, driving one


another to the brink of extinction. All of this has happened before, but it must 

not happen again. The Cylons must learn a new way to live. They must lose their 

fears of miscegenation. They must abandon all concept of racial purity. They 

must embrace diversity in all its forms. This is precisely what they do in the 

final episodes of BSG. The story of the Cylon ends with a radical endorsement 

of difference. The future of the Cylon is a future of hybridity. It is a future in 

which species merge and nations intersect. It is a future in which the biological 

and the cybernetic may come together at last. 

Yet BSG’s vision of hybridity is far from utopian. This vision is, for example, 

quite heteronormative. On BSG, hybridity implies heterosexual reproduction. 

Indeed, homosexuality is almost entirely invisible in the series. The show’s main 

narrative contains no portrayals of homosexuality whatsoever. The television 

movie Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007) tells its story mainly in flashback and 

was not broadcast as part of the series. This marginal narrative provides us with 

BSG’s only representation of lesbianism: we learn that Admiral Cain (Michelle 

Forbes) was involved with the Number Six Cylon known as Gina Inviere. But 

when Cain discovers that Gina is a Cylon, she has her thrown in the Pegasus 

brig, subject to torture and gang rape. Cain becomes a caricature of a vicious, 

sadistic lesbian. Killed by a vengeful Gina, Cain conforms to every element of 

the so-called ‘Dead-Evil Lesbian Cliché’ (see Wilts): she plays into American 

television’s stereotypical portrayal of lesbians as evil, doomed, or in this case, 

both. 5 But there is an interesting ambiguity at work here. On the surface, Cain 

is punishing Gina for deceit and betrayal. Lurking beneath the surface, however, 

is Cain’s need to colonise and control Otherness. This is perhaps why Cain 

orders her male officers to rape Gina. These officers act as surrogates for Cain. 

They allow her to penetrate and claim the Other. This hybridity is about sexual 

access to the Other. It is a colonial form of hybridity whose ultimate aim is to 

eradicate difference. Here we see the dark side of hybridity: the possibility of an 

ethically catastrophic meeting of species characterised by the subjugation and 

conquest of Otherness. 

Hybridity is hardly innocent in BSG, but it does contain important options 

for being. In this sense BSG’s narrative about hybridity is comparable to that of 

early cyborg theorist Donna Haraway. Describing the form of writing which 

5. The show treats male homosexuality in similar terms. A series of webisodes called Battlestar Galactica: 

The Face of the Enemy was released midway through season four, but never broadcast as part of 

the series. These webisodes reveal that Lt Felix Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) was in a relationship with Lt 

Louis Hoshi (Brad Dryborough). Shortly after the webisodes appeared, Gaeta became an embittered 

mutineer and was eventually executed. Like Cain, Gaeta came out to the show’s audience – and was 

immediately shown to be both evil and doomed.


hybridity enables, Haraway declared that ‘cyborg writing must not be about the 

Fall, the imagination of a once-upon-a-time wholeness before language, before 

writing, before Man. Cyborg writing is about the power to survive not on the 

basis of original innocence, but on the basis of seizing the tools to mark the 

world that marked them as other’ (217). Cain and her rape gang represent a kind 

of hybridity which marks the Cylons as Other and simultaneously attempts to 

colonise that Otherness. But BSG also offers a positive kind of hybridity, one 

which lets the Cylons mark the world that marked them as other. BSG’s vision 

of human–Cylon hybridity is not innocent, and it offers no certainties. But it 

does offer the possibility of hope. The show’s beautifully ambiguous conclusion 

offers the hope of a positive, (re)productive hybridity. That same conclusion 

also suggests that hybridity could one day give way, once again, to fragmentation, 

segregation and fear. BSG will not let hybridity become an achieved utopia. 

Rather, hybridity must remain a constant project. It is something to die for, as 

do many BSG characters in the second half of season four. And it is something 

to live for, as do the human–Cylon hybrid Hera and her parents. 

Late in season four, it becomes clear that the survival of the Cylon will take 

one of two possible forms. One is Hera. But Caprica Six’s improbable union 

with a hallucinating Colonel Tigh (Michael Hogan) has produced something 

almost miraculous: she is pregnant, and the embryo is pure Cylon. So the second 

half of season four is immediately concerned with discourses of racial ‘purity’. 

In ‘The Oath’ (30 January 2009), anti-Cylon mutineers seize all Cylons aboard 

Galactica and throw them in the brig. ‘They’re gonna kill us’, laments Caprica 

Six. ‘Don’t you see? Our children represent everything that the humans hate! 

With resurrection gone, the thought that the Cylon race could survive through 

natural procreation terrifies them.’ Caprica is right about the hate, but her estimation 

of the captured Cylons’ probable fate is not quite correct. Racist humans 

will kill, certainly, to preserve their vision of a ‘natural’ procreative order. There 

are many real world examples of this. But the sadistic, Cylon-hating Specialist 

Gage (Mike Dopud) has already informed Helo that he is saving himself 

for Helo’s ‘sweet toaster wife’, Athena. Had Gaeta’s Rebellion succeeded, female 

Cylons would have been subjected to gang rape in Galactica’s brig. This type of 

sexual atrocity occurred, among other places, in some of the failed states which 

comprise the former Yugoslavia. This is a racially motivated form of rape which 

targets a despised racial minority; it is intended in part to dilute the blood of the 

minority with that of the dominant racial group. This is another instance of the 

kind of colonising hybridity represented by Admiral Cain. 

The Sartrean title ‘No Exit’ (13 February 2009) confirms the show’s existentialist 

credentials; in this episode, we see the aftermath of resurrection’s end


from the Cylon viewpoint. John, the original Number One Cylon, rants about 

being ‘trapped in this absurd body’. Here we learn that his insecurities about 

his own body are actually driving Cylon policy. He is the first to recognise the 

magnitude of the crisis which confronts the Cylon. ‘We can’t procreate biologically, 

so we’re going to have to find a way to rebuild resurrection.’ Without 

resurrection, the Cylon faces extinction. John is quite prepared to cut open the 

head of Ellen Tigh (Kate Vernon) to get the knowledge he thinks the Cylon 

needs. (She is one of the Final Five, refugees from an ancient Earth who brought 

resurrection technology to the Cylons.) The show suggests that John’s sadism 

is the consequence of his frustrations with his body, with his inability to reproduce, 

perhaps with his sexuality. His is also an Oedipal sadism: Ellen made 

John first, so he is essentially her eldest son. She recognises his sadism for what 

it is: ‘I’m sure you’ll make the procedure as long and painful as possible.’ When 

John denies this, she explicitly names him sadist, and accuses him of trying to 

give the Five ‘the right amount of suffering, the right amount of punishment, 

all weighed out. Then we could give you the approval that you’ve always craved.’ 

It is all true, and the show clearly rejects this kind of sadism in particular: the 

rational, measured, disciplined kind, which is to say the modern kind. 

So John models a calculating sadism, motivated by Oedipal and reproductive 

insecurities. On BSG, as in our world, this specific type of sadism is allied with 

an especially egregious scientific project: eugenics. The Cylons are obsessed 

with ideas of racial hygiene. Tori (Rekha Sharma) argues in ‘Deadlock’ (20 February 

2009) for ‘the survival of the original thirteenth tribe in its purest form’. 

Naturally, Caprica’s ‘pure Cylon’ embryo is central to this discourse. Tori points 

out that ‘Caprica Six’s unborn baby is pure Cylon. We can rebuild a pure Cylon 

civilisation.’ Ellen Tigh is certainly not thrilled to learn that her husband has 

impregnated a Six. After all, we now know that Ellen and Saul Tigh created 

the Sixes. So Ellen reacts, understandably, as if she has just learned that her 

husband has impregnated their daughter. ‘You are our children!’ she says with 

disgust. But the real problem is her jealousy: she and Saul could never reproduce 

sexually, and so she takes the very existence of Caprica’s baby as evidence 

that Saul loves the Six more than he loves her. 

As usual, Colonel Tigh cuts through all the frakking crap to tell us how it really 

is: ‘Pure human doesn’t work. Pure Cylon doesn’t work. It’s too weak!’ Caprica’s 

miscarriage confirms his argument. This event is a disaster for the eugenicists, 

but Jane Espenson allows this important pedagogic point to be overshadowed 

by the Colonel’s personal tragedy. Thus the crucial anti-eugenic argument is 

delivered subtly, and far more effectively. Saul asserts his love for the women in 

his life and for his stillborn child, while refusing to reduce that love to words:


‘Isn’t it enough that I feel it? I feel it! For her, for you, for Liam. I shouldn’t need 

to spout the words. I feel it less with words.’ This is an existential love; it exists 

prior to language and resists language’s attempt to capture its essence by naming 

it. This love will not be constrained by jealousy or by eugenics. 

As BSG reaches its conclusion, themes of sex, death and reproduction begin 

to align beautifully. Boomer declares her love for Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas): 

‘I’ve thought about you every day since that moment I died in your arms.’ Of 

course when she ‘died’, Boomer downloaded into a new body. Yet it appears that 

by sharing even this false ‘death’, Boomer and the Chief have been able to form a 

strong bond. The Chief helps Boomer escape from the brig. She promptly beats 

Athena senseless, binds her, gags her and stuffs her in a closet. When Boomer 

fraks the unsuspecting Helo, Athena can only watch, silent and helpless. Helo 

cannot tell Eights apart; when he sees one whom he identifies as his wife, he 

wants her. In an important sense, Helo is actually married to the entire Number 

Eight line, despite Roslin’s earlier comment to the contrary in ‘The Hub’. Thus 

Boomer is able to steal the desire which Helo and Athena share. She then steals 

the product of that desire, the child Hera, a unique human–Cylon hybrid. The 

show’s casting choices seem designed to emphasise Hera’s mixed heritage. At 

the end of season four, Hera is portrayed by Iliana Gomez-Martinez. Her mother 

is played by Korean-Canadian actress Grace Park. Her father is portrayed by 

Tahmoh Penikett, a Canadian actor with an English father and a mother from 

Yukon’s White River First Nation. Hera is all about hybridity: she is a multiethnic, 

multi-species cyborg. The show thus endorses a strikingly exogenous 

reproductive politics. 

It is understandable that the Chief would respond to Boomer’s actions by 

denying her humanity, but he goes further, rejecting the possibility that any 

Eight or indeed any Cylon could live an authentic existence. In ‘Daybreak: Part 

1’ (13 March 2009), Helo once again asserts that his wife Athena is a person. 

Chief Tyrol replies coldly: ‘She’s a blow-up doll, Karl. They all are.’ Tyrol has 

retreated into a joyless, loveless, masturbatory sexuality. He never really leaves 

this place. At the end of the series, he chooses to live out his days as a hermit 

rather than risk real love. Clearly his way is not the way. And Athena is much 

more than a blow-up doll. She is the mother of a being who holds the destiny of 

both Cylons and humans in her tiny hands. 

In the end it is about family, as it always has been. Adam(a) has always been 

a patriarch. Like Adam, and like Lorne Greene’s Adama, Bill Adama is destined 

to found a people, but Edward James Olmos plays an Adama whose strange 

postmodern family includes numerous nonhumans and semi-humans. Most 

importantly for us, Adama’s extended family includes Helo, a kind of adopted


son, and Helo’s Cylon wife, Athena. It is this crucial fact that allows us to understand 

the semi-suicidal assault on the Cylon colony. Adama launches this attack 

knowing it will mean the end of humanity’s last battlestar. Why does Adama 

risk everything to save a single little girl? Perhaps he has accepted the opportunity 

for authenticity. Mortal Cylons have quickly immersed themselves in human 

death rituals, notably by posting photos of dead Cylons in Galactica’s memorial 

corridor. It is Adama’s final visit to this corridor that prompts his decision to 

rescue Hera. He sees her photo on the wall, sees her trapped in the rituals of the 

They, about to fade from memory along with the dying battlestar which carries 

her photo. Adama leaves the corridor. He stands for a moment with his back to 

the camera – resolute, perhaps? Here he is choosing his own death, choosing 

for the possibility of future life, for the possibility of possibility. This is a radical 

existential choice, and when in ‘Daybreak: Part 2’ (20 March 2009) he asks 

others to join him on this all-volunteer mission, Adama emphasises that he can 

only make such a choice for himself. Helo again emphasises the likelihood of 

death to his Raptor jocks, and again calls for volunteers. All hands go up. He 

congratulates them: ‘That’s my Raptor wranglers: always looking for new and 

interesting ways to get killed.’ Half of Galactica’s crew has chosen death for 

the sake of a single half-human girl. Many of the rebel Cylons make the same 

choice, and the show portrays this as a beautiful thing. Here again BSG models 

the Derridean vigil. At the end of the series, humans and Cylons come together 

to choose the best death, to find the best way to die. Even Boomer finds a good 

death in the end, sacrificing herself to return Hera to her parents. 

At the height of the battle, with Cylons pouring into Galactica at platoon 

strength, John holds a gun to Hera’s head in the CIC. He wants to use Hera as 

a bargaining chip, to force the Final Five to give him resurrection technology, 

but Baltar points out that this will not work: ‘You want to break the cycle? Break 

the cycle of birth, death, rebirth, destruction, escape, death? Well, that’s in our 

hands, and our hands only. It requires a leap of faith. It requires that we live in 

hope, not fear.’ If they want to become people, the Cylons must learn to die, to 

live, to love. 

Against all odds, Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) leads the surviving humans and 

mortal Cylons to another Earth. The fact that she does this by programming 

‘All Along the Watchtower’ into Galactica’s FTL computer makes us suspect 

that this is finally our Earth. A beautiful moon shot confirms this, as does a 

glimpse of the continents. The remnants of Colonial humanity land on the 

planet. Adama exercises the patriarch’s traditional right to name the worlds he 

creates, and calls the planet Earth. But what kind of world will this Earth be? 

The Colonials discover that the planet is inhabited by tribal humans, nomads


who live without language. In an amusing scene, the would-be patriarchs gather 

on a hillside to view the aborigines through field glasses, and think about the 

dynasty they might found. The group is all men, mostly old: Adama, Tigh, Doc 

Cottle, Baltar – and, in the role of favourite gay uncle, Louis Hoshi. Cottle confirms 

that the natives are not only humans but people: they have death rituals, 

they bury their dead. DNA analysis reveals that the natives are genetically compatible 

with Colonial humans – ‘meaning we can breed with them’, as Baltar 

is quick to point out. But this leaves a crucial question unanswered: who will 

breed with them? Approximately 39,000 humans landed on Earth, along with 

some Cylon Twos, Sixes and Eights. But out of all those living bodies, only one 

bred true. Young Hera Agathon moves confidently through the African savannah, 

her walking stick in hand. She looks up, into the sky. 

Human history, our history, begins in that moment. A flash forward takes 

us 150,000 years into the future. Series creator Ron Moore appears as himself, 

standing on a Manhattan street corner, reading a National Geographic article 

about Mitochondrial Eve, the most recent common ancestor of all realworld 

humans. The ‘angels’, Head Six and Head Baltar, take one last turn as 

the Greek chorus. Looking over Moore’s shoulder, they read about the mother 

of humanity. Head Six observes that ‘she lived in what is now Tanzania, over 

150,000 years ago’. Baltar gives the punch line: ‘along with her Cylon mother, 

and human father!’ So the show concludes by endorsing a radical form of evolutionary 

biology. The combination of Cylon and human is what breeds true. 

This reinforces the show’s argument: in evolutionary terms, survival depends 

on diversity. Moore has reimagined the human race, our human race, as the 

product of a striking miscegenation. He has retold our most ancient story, a 

myth about the creation of the human world, but this version rejects homogen- 

‘Daybreak: Part 3’, Battlestar Galactica. Universal Studios Home 

Entertainment.


eity in all its forms: certainly it rejects racial sameness, but it also abandons all 

fears of the techno-organic hybrid. The end of BSG confirms that Haraway was 

right the whole time: we are all cyborgs. Indeed, the conclusion of BSG looks 

very much like the kind of ‘cyborg writing’ she called for in her famous 1985 

manifesto: ‘in retelling origin stories, cyborg authors subvert the central myths 

of origin of Western culture. We have all been colonized by those origin myths, 

with their longing for fulfillment in apocalypse’ (217). The only longing in Battlestar 

Galactica is a longing to move beyond the eternally recurring apocalypse. 

This apocalypse, however, remains a distinct possibility right up to the show’s 

conclusion. ‘Commercialism, decadence, technology run amuck – remind you 

of anything?’, muses Head Six as she surveys our world. Head Baltar cites all 

the worlds where hybridity has given way to fear and destruction: Kobol, the 

scorched Earth that came before ours, Caprica before the Fall. When Six reminds 

him that all of this has happened before, Baltar asks the big question: ‘does all 

of this have to happen again?’ Head Six replies, ‘this time I bet “no”’. Baltar 

demands to know the reasons for her sudden and surprising optimism. ‘Mathematics’, 

she replies. ‘Law of averages. Let a complex system repeat itself long 

enough, eventually something surprising might occur.’ BSG insists that history 

(even the recurring kind) can be re-written. Thanks to the complexity of organic 

systems, new outcomes are always possible. Hybridity has failed before, but it 

need not fail again. The show ends with a series of visuals which seem designed 

to remind us, once again, of the danger. We see a homeless person’s boom box, 

a television programme about ‘advances in robotics’, and a band composed of 

toy robots who look a bit like miniature proto-Centurians. Humans are flirting, 

once again, with the creation of cybernetic slaves. But if the show’s ambiguous 

conclusion refuses to offer us unqualified hope, it also denies us the certainty 

of a despair based on destiny. Naturally, the boom box is playing ‘All Along the 

Watchtower’. As we watch the robots dance, the voice of Jimi Hendrix assures us 

that ‘there must be some kinda way outa here’. That way may be hybridity. BSG’s 

final image shows Baltar and Six blending and merging into a crowd of humans 

on the streets of Manhattan. Thus BSG’s finale offers the hope of a hybridity 

powerful enough to create and sustain a new species. This species bears witness 

to its own creation, via its representatives in BSG’s audience. The show’s final 

scene encourages that audience to nurture its hybridity always, lest that hybridity 

give way to segregation and isolation. 

Jane Espenson’s direct-to-DVD/television movie coda The Plan (2009) is 

largely an exercise in retroactive continuity; it might be better named ‘Recaprica’. 

Yet despite its limitations, The Plan offers solid confirmation of BSG’s 

central argument. We see the destruction of the Twelve Colonies once more,


but this time from the Cylon point of view. The Cylon hybrid disables the Colonial 

battlestar fleet and prepares to rain nuclear fire on the Colonies of man. 

‘Accepting scan. Love outlasts death’, intones the hybrid. Within the context of 

BSG’s concern for hybridity in general, the voice of those beings who are named 

hybrid gains a peculiar privilege. Their non-linear speech allows the hybrids to 

state the show’s major themes explicitly, without sounding didactic or preachy. 

Thus hybrid speech permits truth claims far more powerful than any a normal 

character might make. The entire narrative of BSG, especially its ending, seems 

to argue that the hybrid was right. Heidegger showed how death establishes 

the horizons of human life, the limits that make meaning possible. But he also 

showed how the human activity of dying can exceed those limits. Dying implies 

living; the conclusion of BSG suggests that it also implies love. 

Thus Battlestar Galactica completes a journey which Martin Heidegger 

began over eighty years ago. This journey has led us to a place where death is 

the beginning of meaning, and love is its culmination. Dasein dances between 

these twin poles of meaning. This is a dance of bodies, for it is bodies that die 

and live and love. It is no easy dance, but it is the dance that makes us people. It 

is the dance that lets us be in the world. If we would escape the grey half-life of 

the They, we should learn this dance. The Cylons can show us how. 6 

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Death, sex and the Cylon - College of Liberal Arts

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