Battlestar Galactica: was Pegasus the real Colonial Fleet?

When the Battlestar Pegasus turned up in Battlestar Galactica (2004), starring Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell, it looked like a rescue. My argument is that it was the real threat. Pegasus was the more powerful ship, and it was exactly what the Colonial Fleet wanted. That should make you look at Galactica very differently.

For months, the people aboard Galactica believed they were the last warship in the Colonial Fleet. That's a lot of pressure to put on a ship that was supposed to be a museum. Then a contact jumped in and identified itself as the Battlestar Pegasus, and the whole room exhaled. The fleet's newest Battlestar had survived.

Pegasus returned as the Colonial Fleet the way it was meant to be

If you were seeing it for the first time, you probably felt what the crew felt: the grown-ups are here. That feeling lasted about two episodes. What came back out of the dark was the Colonial Fleet the way it was meant to be, its best hull under its chosen admiral with nobody left to answer to.

Within days, the civilians Galactica had spent months protecting were more nervous about Pegasus than about the Cylons. As rescues go, that's not great. So the question I want to settle is which of these two Battlestars really was the Colonial Fleet.

Galactica was a museum ship and Pegasus was the fleet's newest Battlestar

Galactica was the ship the fleet had already stopped caring about. On the day the Cylons came back, she was being turned into a museum. Her commander was retiring with her, and he had refused to let her computers be networked. The fleet never bothered to argue, because nobody fights a man about the wiring on a ship they're about to fill with display cases.

Pegasus was the opposite of all that. She was a Mercury class Battlestar, the newest generation the fleet had, far bigger than Galactica and built around the network systems Galactica never had. When the attack came, she was docked at the fleet shipyards for an overhaul. Galactica was getting a retirement ceremony. Pegasus was getting new everything.

So let's give the popular view its due, because on its own terms, it's correct. Put these two ships side by side in a fight and Pegasus wins. She has more firepower, more fighters and newer everything. If your entire framework for judging a warship is tonnage, you can stop here and I'll respect that.

The Colonial Fleet chose Helena Cain on purpose

The one thing a navy can't buy off a shipyard is the person in the big chair. So the fleet chose that, too. It gave the newest Battlestar to Helena Cain, and it made her an admiral before a single Cylon showed up.

Navies don't hand their shiniest toys to someone they consider a liability. Admiral Cain was, the Colonial Fleet looked at her career and decided, on purpose, that this is what command should look like.

How Pegasus survived the Cylon attack in Razor

Razor gives us the attack from inside Pegasus through a young officer named Kendra Shaw, who reports aboard less than an hour before it starts. As first days go, she's having a rough one. The Cylons hit the shipyards with nuclear weapons. Ships around Pegasus are torn apart, and Pegasus herself takes heavy damage and loses hundreds of her crew.

She's in the middle of an overhaul with her network down and no way to calculate a jump. Cain orders one anyway. Shaw points out, reasonably, that a blind jump could put them inside a star. Cain has never once in her life waited for the math, and she doesn't wait for it now. "Don't bother calculating. Just do it."

Later, Shaw learns how close it really came. The Cylons had been about to push their infiltration into Pegasus the same way they had into the rest of the fleet. The most advanced Battlestar in the colonies was exactly as exposed as every other modern ship that died that day. All that cutting edge networking turned out to be a cutting edge way to get hacked.

Galactica made it through the attack because she was never part of the network. Pegasus made it through because she happened to be half switched off in a shipyard, and because her commander was willing to gamble the whole ship on a jump to nowhere. So both Battlestars survived the end of civilization the same way: by being unplugged at the right moment and having a commander who didn't ask permission. Nobody at fleet procurement would probably put that in a brochure.

Helena Cain executes her executive officer and the ship keeps working

The fleet's newest hull came through that jump, but what really survived the shipyard was Helena Cain. Her answer to the end of the world was to keep fighting. Pegasus went on a hit and run campaign against the Cylons alone, with Cain answering to nobody. Hold on to that last part, because it's going to matter a lot.

The first test comes at a Cylon communications relay. Cain wants to press an attack. Her executive officer believes it will get the ship killed and refuses. Cain asks for a sidearm and, with the whole CIC looking on, she shoots him with it. Then she turns to the next officer, Jack Fisk, and he launches the attack she asked for.

Cain pulls the trigger, but look at the room. Dozens of trained Colonial officers just saw their admiral execute her XO for disagreeing with her, and the ship kept working. Nobody moved to relieve her, and Fisk accepted a job opening whose circumstances were, let's say, unusually public. One frightening officer can't make a whole CIC do that. The fleet had already taught them that the mission comes first and the chain of command doesn't get questioned.

My read is that Cain wasn't the fleet going wrong. She was the fleet with the brakes taken off.

What Pegasus did to the Scylla convoy

The second test is worse. A week or so after the attack, Pegasus finds a small group of civilian ships that escaped the colonies, led by a ship called the Scylla. Galactica, in the same situation, built a fleet around its civilians. Cain looked at hers and saw a parts catalog. Her people take their FTL drives, their parts and anyone with skills Pegasus can use.

We first hear about this from Fisk. In Resurrection Ship Part 1, he tells Colonel Tigh what they did to the convoy: stripped it, drafted its people, shot the families of the ones who resisted, and left the rest behind without jump drives.

Razor shows us what that looked like up close, and it confirms everything Fisk admitted. The crowd on the ship pushes back, the situation tightens, and Kendra Shaw fires first. The Marines follow. And aboard Pegasus, a captured Cylon was treated in ways the show makes deliberately hard to sit through, which tells you how far that ship's sense of limits had moved.

Cain's defenders and the Gideon shooting on Galactica

Cain's defenders have two fair points. The first is that she kept her people alive, and she did. Pegasus spent months alone and kept fighting the whole time. The cost of that record was a convoy of civilians left drifting with no way to run. Fleet doctrine had no column for them, so Cain never had to count them. It's a very efficient way to run a war, as long as you're not the one left drifting.

The second is that Galactica did terrible things too, and that's also true. In Resistance, during Tigh's martial law, Marines from Galactica fire into an unarmed crowd on the Gideon, and four civilians are dead. The Gideon became a scandal. Journalists came aboard Galactica to investigate it, and the Quorum demanded answers. On Pegasus, no one asked.

Admiral Cain takes over Galactica and the two Battlestars face off

That brings us back to the moment Pegasus finds Galactica. Cain is an admiral and Adama is a commander, so the chain of command settles things in about four seconds. Adama salutes, and the fleet's preferred ship takes over the fleet's forgotten one. It's like a regional manager showing up at the only branch that's been turning a profit.

Cain then does to Galactica what the fleet would always have done to it. She breaks up its crew and pulls Galactica's best pilots onto Pegasus. She declines to resupply the civilian ships, presumably because they weren't in the budget. When two of Galactica's men kill a Pegasus officer in a fight over a prisoner, she sentences them both to death.

Adama's answer is to launch Vipers to bring his people home. Cain launches hers to stop him. For a few minutes, the last two Battlestars of the Twelve Colonies have their air groups pointed at each other, which is a lot of firepower for a species that could now fit in a stadium. The standoff breaks without a shot, mostly because both commanders find something they'd rather blow up: a Cylon resurrection ship. They agree to a truce long enough to destroy it.

Roslin, Adama and Cain's matching assassination plans

After that meeting, it's President Roslin, not Adama, who says the quiet part out loud. She tells him that Cain will come for him, and he'll have to kill her first. This is a former schoolteacher, by the way. So Galactica's civilian government wasn't gentler than Cain. Roslin was willing to have an admiral assassinated.

What separated her from Cain was who she was protecting. Roslin's whole job was the civilians, and Cain had already refused to resupply them. Pegasus had never had anyone in the room whose job was to ask about those people.

Adama tells Roslin he's not an assassin, and then he gives Kara Thrace the order anyway. Cain gives Fisk the same order about Adama. So the two most senior officers left in humanity go into a joint operation with matching murder plans. By Colonial Fleet standards, that's one of the healthier working relationships I've seen.

The resurrection ship goes down, and when the moment comes, neither commander says the word. Adama gives his reason in one line. Cain doesn't get to explain why she stood down. A Cylon she had held prisoner kills her in her quarters that same day. Pegasus then burns through two more commanders, a turnover rate that would worry HR anywhere else, and ends in the hands of Lee Adama, a Galactica officer.

Kendra Shaw's commendation and how Pegasus died

Razor adds one more scene, and it keeps this from being a clean answer. Kendra Shaw, the officer who fired first on the Scylla, dies saving the mission. Admiral Adama, the man who refused to become Cain, proposes a posthumous commendation for her. Lee objects that she and the rest of Cain's crew butchered civilians, and Adama doesn't back down.

Put the two shootings side by side. On the Gideon, nobody even knows who fired first, and Galactica still had to answer for it. On the Scylla, everyone knows who fired first, and she ends up recommended for a commendation by the most decent officer in the fleet.

Pegasus died under Lee, sent to get civilians off New Caprica, the one mission Cain would never have flown. So which ship was the Colonial Fleet: the one that came out of the dark as the fleet built it, or the one that only behaved better because it had civilians to answer to? Galactica's crew thought Pegasus was the fleet coming back to save them.