By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
Ronald D. Moore’s Battlestar Galactica reboot remains one of the best sci-fi series in modern TV history. One reason for this is that the show’s characters are allowed to be messy: unlike on Star Trek: The Next Generation (where Moore got his start), BSG’s colorful characters constantly make mistakes because they are, as the Cylons might say, only human. Most of the time, the fallout from these mistakes is relatively minimal. On one occasion, however, a character engages in cold-blooded murder that potentially doomed what was left of humanity. That character is Cally, who, in the episode “Resistance,” executes the Cylon Boomer in a fit of passionate rage.
On paper, Cally had plenty of reason to do what she did. The episode deals with the fallout of some major previous drama, including Boomer’s attempted assassination of Commander Adama. Cally shoots the traitorous clanker when she is being transported to a specialized prison cell. Some could empathize with her actions: after all, this is the Boomer that nearly killed Adama, and she’s part of a robot race that wiped out almost all of humanity. However, Cally actor Nicki Clyne confirmed that her character killed Boomer as an emotional overreaction. That’s bad enough, but killing this Cylon before she could be properly interrogated nearly doomed the entire fleet.
Cally, Get Your Gun
In a 2006 interview with SciFi Brain, Nikki Clyne opened up about Cally’s actions in “Resistance.” Why did her character execute a defenseless Cylon who no longer posed a threat? “I think Boomer represented all the things that were wrong for her at that time, including her relationship with Tyrol,” she said, referencing how her romantic feelings for the chief were complicated by his problematic affair with Boomer. “So, I think she just saw Boomer as this symbol of what was wrong for her at the time. She couldn’t see any other way to deal with it.”
Did her character at least feel guilty about what she did? Not really. In the interview, Clyne emphasized that she, personally, was mortified because “I don’t think it is right to kill anything.” As for Cally, though? The actor revealed that there was a scene cut from “Flight of the Phoenix” featuring a startling interaction between Cally and Tyrol. In that scene, Clyne says, her character “finally approaches the Chief, when she is finally sick of him ignoring her, after she has gotten out of jail, she says, ‘If I had a chance, I would do it all over again.’”
Cally Forth
So, Clyne revealed that her Battlestar Galactica character killed Boomer more out of selfish reasons than righteous ones. How, though, did that doom humanity? In “Resistance,” Gaius Baltar has an opportunity to ask Boomer questions, and he was planning to do a full interrogation with her before she was executed. Obviously, Baltar is slimy, but at this time, he was working on a plan to extract information from a Cylon’s subconscious. If he could have gotten this to work on Boomer, he might have gotten crucial information that could help the fleet survive. When Cally murdered the Cylon, gaining any additional information became impossible.
Eventually, it all worked out: there are multiple Boomers, and Helo brings a tame one back from Caprica. While the Battlestar Galactica crew is understandably wary of her, she eventually proves to be an asset, one that is trusted implicitly by Commander Adama. This gave them access to a friendly resource of major Cylon intel. However, Cally had no way of knowing that in “Resistance” and decided that murdering someone in cold blood was easier than the alternative: just going to therapy!
