Razor's Edge

Cain: When you can be this, for as long as you need to be, then you’re a Razor.

In Battlestar Galactica’s new in-series movie, Razor, we go back in time to the command of Admiral Helena Cain and the path which lead her Battlestar, the Pegasus, on it’s controversial path in the wake of the Cylon invasion of the Twelve Colonies. To guide us on this journey, we have the introduction of Kendra Shaw, an officer who found her first day aboard the Pegasus the same as the Cylon attack, marking her as the witness, and eventually the embodiment of Cain’s actions and decisions in the days and weeks to follow.

We also see Shaw closer to the present, chosen as Lee Adama’s XO as he is given command of the Pegasus after the deaths of the previous three commanders, beginning with Cain’s own death at the hands of her former prisoner and Cylon spy, Gina Inviere. Shifting back and forth between the two important timelines of her service on the Pegasus, Kendra is chosen by Lee because of her close association with the philosophical standards enforced by Admiral Cain. In her own words, she is “Cain’s legacy”.

So, to understand Shaw, and what she represents, we must see the journey of the Pegasus through her eyes and her experiences. And we must gain insight into the choices made by Helena Cain, her beliefs and the notorious actions she took in the name of the survival of her ship and struggle against the Cylons.

Taken out of context, many of those actions appeared questionable to outright horrific. We learned through the drunken confidence of the Admiral’s XO her original second in command had been killed by Cain herself, shot in the head when he refused to carry out her order in the midst of a battle. We also saw the condition of Gina, her Cylon prisoner who had been subjected to intense physical abuse, and even sexual abuse which was made something of a sport among her crew. And finally, we learned that Cain had stripped a civilian fleet of their valuable components and personnel, taking both by threat of the deaths of the families of those who refused to comply. Threats which were carried out against the first few who refused the orders.

In Razor, we see these same actions through the eyes of Kendra Shaw, who not only witnessed many of the actions but was the first to carry out Cain’s order to shoot the families of the civilian fleet. The story of how she grew from a new officer, lost on her way to reporting to her Admiral, to a soldier ready to carry out orders, regardless of consequences or conscience, is the key to understanding those decisions themselves.

It is a journey taken by degrees, first with the initial attack which left their ship crippled and about to be destroyed, sending the Pegasus on a blind FTL (Faster Than Light) jump which could have taken them anywhere in the galaxy, including the inside of a sun. Having no time to calculate their destination, Cain ordered the jump in the face of repeated nuclear strikes against her ship, with two more missiles inbound to complete the ship’s destruction. Kendra is the officer who is ordered to make the jump, at first questioning the decision, but in the end carrying it out just before the ships destruction.

Thrown clear of the immediate threat of war, the Admiral has to make the choice of what their next course of action will be, what to do in the face of the destruction of their society. The Galactica, left in a similar position at the end of the original mini-series, finds a disheartened and demoralized crew and civilian fleet given a rousing speech by, then Commander, William Adama, where he blatantly lies to his crew, telling them he knows the location of a lost colony known as Earth and inspiring them with the promise of finding a new home far away from the Cylon forces. In the end, his crew is left chanting “So say we all!”, having been given something to focus on and hope for in the face of their tragedy.

Admiral Cain’s speech defines a much different path for her own crew. She tells them:

Cain: When faced with untenable choices, you should consider your imperative.

Looking around her Battlestar, she sees a ship designed for war, and a crew more than inspired to fight. She defines their purpose as continuing the war, extracting revenge on the Cylon forces in any way they can, and that so long as their ship survives, the war will never be over. Unlike Adama, who had to coax and cheerlead hope and the chants of “So say we all!” from his own crew, the Pegasus takes up the chant slowly Cain having appealed to their hatred instead, the chants coming from deep in the hearts of her crew until the entire ship is united in voice and purpose.

The entire ship save one, of course. Because aboard the Pegasus is a Cylon, a model number Six, known as Gina Inviere. Under the guise of a civilian system’s analyst, tasked with updating the Pegasus with the software designed to cripple them in the face of the upcoming Cylon attack, Gina has become romantically involved with Helena Cain in the process. The reason for this involvement probably parallels that of Caprica Six, who became involved with Gaius Baltar in order to gain access to the defense mainframe. And as with the very first number Six, who makes her entrance in the teaser for the original miniseries, this model appears to explore the idea of life and humanity through her sexuality, asking a Colonial representative if he is alive, and then asking him to “prove it” with a kiss even as his station and is being destroyed.

She has no reason to fear death after her mission is completed and the ship destroyed, because the Cylons simply download their consciousness in a new body and are reborn. In fact, we are told that Gina’s last name, Inviere, means ‘resurrection’, a constant reminder of her essential immortality and sense of invulnerability.

We learn of Gina and Helena’s involvement, also through the eyes of Kendra Shaw, who sees them together at a meal and gleans their relationship from the subtle touches and glances between them. Later, as she discusses their relationship with Shaw, Gina uses the implied trust to get Shaw’s access codes, allowing her to leave the ship vulnerable to the Cylons in an upcoming attack.

Gina speaks of her relationship with Cain to Shaw, saying in part that even though they had tried to hide their involvement:

Gina: Guess that’s hard when you truly care for someone.

One of the dichotomies of the Sixs is that it’s possible for both sides of her nature to be genuine. It’s possible that in her own way she did truly care, or perhaps even love, Helena even as she facilitated her death and the destruction of her ship. It’s questionable, for example, why she wouldn’t have had the ships systems up and running, corrupted software in place before the attack happened, given that she’d been working with Cain for weeks, to complete her task of crippling the ship in anticipation of it’s destruction.

Certainly it seems she pushed Cain and the Pegasus into a trap as they were to begin their guerilla campaign against the Cylon fleet. The Cylons mistake however, is sending another Six in among the attack forces. Killed by Kendra, the identical model is their means of identifying Gina as a spy, taking her into custody rather than the death she had counted on, and leaving her to answer for the hundreds more lives lost in the thwarted attack. But even as she grabs a gun to fight off her captors, Gina has the opportunity to kill Cain herself, but hesitates just long enough to allow for her capture, once more calling into question how much of her feelings for the Admiral were genuine.

It is the revelation of her lover’s betrayal which causes the most dramatic turn in Helena Cain’s character. She describes to Kendra how Gina was able to mimic human feelings in order to manipulate her and gain her trust, guessing Gina’s software might be vulnerable to human weaknesses as well. As such, she orders the torture and torment of her former lover in order to find her weaknesses and limits, and to gain whatever knowledge of their enemy she could give them.

But most importantly, Cain now has a new understanding of the Cylons and their tactics. Gina had signified the one sense of humanity and vulnerability Cain allowed herself to feel, a subject discussed by Gina and Kendra earlier. Her imprisonment represents a constant reminder of the Admiral’s need to excise that vulnerability. Feeling this weakness in her was responsible for the newest destruction and loss of life on her ship, it is in this mindset that Cain finds herself with access to a civilian fleet, and orders it to be used to replenish what she has lost.

She stands outside Gina’s cell, seeing her beaten and bloody, a sight which should engender sympathy, or even pity to one who had loved her, but now sees those emotions as nothing more than weaknesses her enemy would use as a means of her destruction. So she makes the decision to turn her back on those aspects of her humanity, to become more of a machine in order to fight these machines who would mimic human feelings in order to prey on them. In this mindset, she orders the families of the unwilling recruits killed, determined as she would later describe to Kendra, “to show the enemy our will”.

And Kendra, herself, is the means to this demonstration. She is the one to pull the first trigger, take the first innocent life in the name of continuing the fight. The action earns her a promotion and praise from Cain, who appreciates that she was able to overcome her revulsion and natural inhibitions in order to do what needed to be done. Cain toys with her razor, as the symbol of her philosophy, using it as the personification of what the crew would need to become.

Cain: If we don’t, we don’t survive. And then we don’t have the luxury of becoming simply human again.

In the present, we see the price Kendra has had to pay for letting go of that humanity. She has become Cain’s Razor, a sharpened weapon in this war whom Starbuck discovers in the kitchen late at night, each of them looking for a means of “taking the edge off”. Kendra seeks in a drug some small measure of humanity to indulge in, something to make her feel in a place where circumstance has forced her to become unfeeling. Kara likes the idea that Shaw has some means of releasing tension, taking it as a sign that "The XO's human after all." But being caught keeps Kendra from indulging in her vice and the pressure valve it offered instead can only continue to build.

Perhaps one of the tragedies of the story of Helena Cain is that she never allowed herself the luxury of taking the edge off. In her first scene in Razor, we see Cain on a treadmill, looking at the schematics she had been working on with Gina, with her razor perched next to it like the two divergent sides of her nature. Her XO tries to get her to relax, telling her, “Every once in a while, it’s okay to get off the treadmill”, her unspoken response is to start running harder the moment he leaves. The idea of letting up is a luxury she wasn’t inclined to allow herself before the attacks, Gina representing perhaps the one exception to that rule. Afterwards, especially in light of her betrayal, Cain wouldn’t allow herself to let go of her edge, her anger, or her will. The endless axe she ground with Gina would eventually come back to destroy her.

Likewise, we see Shaw’s own inevitable destruction. After she is wounded on a mission, Shaw forcibly takes Starbuck’s place, intent on carrying out an order to sacrifice herself in order to destroy a Cylon vessel containing the product of the original Cylon experiments with humanity, a hybrid being who served as an interesting thematic counterpoint to Shaw’s own dual nature. She approaches death almost with a sense of release, in much the same way that Gina eventually would as well, the two of them so caught up in the pain of their experiences they can seem to find no other escape

After her death, the actions of Kendra Shaw and Helena Cain are discussed by William and Lee Adama, where the Admiral asks his son to consider a commendation for Shaw in the wake of her sacrifice, even as they share a stiff drink to take the edge off their own experiences.

Lee is uncertain a commendation would be appropriate, questioning the violent acts which called into question both Admiral Cain’s nature and Kendra’s, as the one who carried the empirical torch to Cain’s legacy. Admiral Adama, unlike when he first learned of Cain’s actions, has had the chance to review her logs, to gain insight into the reasons for her decisions. In light of his new understanding, he can find no real fault in the things Cain did, saying he, himself, might have made the same choices if put into her place. But having Roslin as champion of the civilian fleet and Lee, himself, as an ever present reminder of his conscience and responsibility, Adama found himself on a different path. He encourages Lee to give his implicit approval of the legacy Cain and Shaw represented, by writing the first version of the history which will remember them favorably in his logs.

In one of the final scenes, we see Starbuck toying with the Razor and considering Shaw’s sacrifice, which saved her own life. She comments it’s “Not a lot to show for a life, huh?” The self-deprecating irony that she, herself, is what is left to show of Shaw’s life, making her the uneasy bearer of the last remnants of Cain’s legacy.

When giving her rallying speech, Cain told her crew that as long as their ship survived the war would never be over. The promise became something of a curse, defining the ship and her crew’s purpose even as it trapped them in a never-ending cycle of pain and destruction.

The question we are left is if that cycle will continue on with the Galactica, having learned from the Cylon’s hybrid being of a prophecy that Kara Thrace is the harbinger of the apocalypse, the one who would lead humanity to its destruction. Even as she holds Cain’s razor and the legacy it signifies, Starbuck teases Lee about her destiny, giving the now ominous promising that she will be around until the end, and leaving us to wonder if that end was somehow hinted at or foretold by the ill-fated story of the Pegasus.