The Farm

This page covers the episode "The Farm." For the Farms themselves, see Farms.

"The Farm" An episode of the Re-imagined Series
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Overview

Kara Thrace is shot and wakes up in a remote hospital facility on Caprica, and learns that her friendly doctor has his own plans for her future.

Summary

On Caprica

• Starbuck, Helo, and two members of the Resistance (Anders and Sue-Shaun, who were introduced in the last episode) devise a plan to escape from Caprica by commandeering a Cylon Heavy Raider from a nearby airstrip. They will fit as many people as possible onto the craft, and will dispatch a rescue mission for the remainder upon return to Galactica.
• As the team is about to assault the airstrip, they are ambushed, and Thrace is hit by a bullet that grazes off her head and gets lodged in her abdomen. She loses consciousness.
• Thrace wakes up in a hospital. She is being attended to by a doctor named Simon, who tells her that she was brought into the hospital by Anders, and that Anders died from a shrapnel wound. Thrace is devastated.
• Thrace spends the next few days conversing with Simon, who muses that women capable of bearing children are a rare "commodity" now that the Cylons have nuked the Colonies, and suggests that Thrace should consider giving birth to a child.
• Simon speculates that Thrace's reluctance to have children stems from her mother having abused her when she was young, as evidenced by a pattern of fractures in her fingers. This topic upsets her.
• Thrace wakes to discover a new scar on her abdomen. Simon tells her it's from an operation he did to stop some bleeding, but Thrace doesn't believe him, particularly after he calls her "Starbuck"--her pilot call sign, which she has never told him.
• Thrace fakes sleep after crimping her intravenous drip filled with sedative. When Simon leaves, she follows him into the hallway, where she overhears him having a conversation with a copy of Number Six about the "complete removal" of her ovaries scheduled for the next day.
• A short time later, Thrace stabs Simon with a broken mirror shard and escapes the room. Lurching around the deserted hospital, she stumbles upon a room full of semi-conscious women wired horrifically to machines. Among them is Sue-Shaun, who begs Thrace to destroy the "baby machines" and end their misery. She obliges with a prayer, a pair of medical tongs, and a primal scream.
• Thrace staggers outside, braining a Six model with a fire extinguisher in the process, only to find a another Simon standing there to greet her. At that moment, Helo and the rest of the resistance emerge from the woods. They pepper Simon with bullets, but soon get bogged down in a firefight with a squad of Centurions. A second rescue occurs in as many minutes: Caprica-Valerii swoops down in a stolen Heavy Raider and blows the Centurions away.
• Thrace relates her experiences in the hospital to the others. Valerii explains that the humanoid Cylons have a flaw which renders them unable to reproduce biologically. The Cylons have been holding human women in "farms" to try to implant them with human/Cylon embryos. This effort has failed, however, leading the Cylons to believe that conception requires "love." Based on this theory, Valerii was able to conceive with Helo because of their love for each other.
• Helo, Sharon, and Starbuck leave Caprica on the Heavy Raider. Starbuck promises Anders to return someday to rescue the Resistance. In the meantime, Anders says he will try to destroy as many farms as he can.

On Galactica

• Commander Adama returns to duty, and is greated by applause in CIC. He tells the crew that he loves them all.
• To try to rally support to the president, Zarek wants Lee Adama to make a recording denouncing his father. Adama stops in the middle of it and says he can't go through with that. It's left to Laura Roslin to win over the Fleet.
• Roslin plays the "religious card." She transfers to the Astral Queen from where she transmits a message imploring the Fleet to follow her and the path the Lords of Kobol have set out for her. An infuriated and staunchly secular Adama doesn't board the Astral Queen because he thinks only three or four ships would seriously listen to her "religious nonsense." Instead, 24 ships ("almost a third of the Fleet") leave with her.
• Cally is thrown in the brig for killing Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, now known as a Cylon agent and traitor. Chief Tyrol implores Commander Adama to release her, due to her trauma by events on Kobol. Adama gives her a light sentence of charging her with discharging a firearm without permission: Cally will spend only one month in the brig.
• Adama asks Tyrol if he could love Boomer despite the fact that she was a machine. Tyrol isn't quite sure, but it becomes apparent that Adama is asking himself the question as much as he is Tyrol; Adama loved all of his pilots like his children.
• Adama visits Boomer's body in the morgue. He asks "Why?" then breaks down crying over her body.

Questions

• Caprica-Valerii says that she knows that Leoben Conoy told Kara Thrace she was special during his interrogation aboard Galactica. How could she have known this? How do the Cylon agents communicate to each other?
  • Since it is confirmed that Cylon agents do transmit their consciousness or updated information from body to body upon death, this implies that all models share memories between each other, no matter where they are. Caprica-Valerii seems to know much of Galactica's state of affairs when asked. If such communication is the case, wouldn't the relative strength of such a signal from the body be a tip-off for Colonials to locate the remaining Cylon infiltrators?
  • Valerii also says that she "hasn't accessed that data" when asked how many farms there are. Does this mean that Cylons transmit information only upon death? She knew about Leoben #2's "visit" with Thrace (Flesh and Bone) but she doesn't know the thoughts of the other Cylons on the planet who have not died. Conversely the Cylons seem unaware of her rebellious thoughts.
    • Has the rebellious Sharon Valerii severed her connection with the other Cylons? After she switched sides in "Flesh and Bone," the other Cylons seem unaware of her current thoughts and actions. Perhaps she only knows of events on Galactica before this point?
  • Leoben Conoy #2 appeared to acknowledge in "Flesh and Bone" that he was too far from Cylon forces for his personality to be recovered. Was he able to covertly transmit his memories to one of the basestars encountered in Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part II" or "Scattered" by way of another agent? (Likely answer)
• Will we see Simon again? (Answer) Is he one of the eight Cylon agents hiding in the Fleet?
• How did Simon know Anders name?
  • RDM's blog states that one of the member's of Anders' resistance was probably a Cylon (not necessarily any of the resistance members we saw on screen) who tipped them off to Anders, though this didn't make the final cut of the episode.
    • Could this have been a copy of Cavil, specifically, the copy that prays with the resistance before they leave Caprica in "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II?"
• Why does the Caprica resistance seemed more concerned about Thrace's disappearance than Sue-Shaun's? Did Thrace's love interest generate the greater concern?
• Could Commander Adama's evident grief upon viewing the corpse of Boomer in the ship's morgue mean that they were personally involved at some point? Or, perhaps, did the level of humanity that Boomer showed cause Adama to mourn her loss as he would a daughter or daughter-figure such as Kara Thrace? In any case, given her role in Adama's assassination attempt, this is strange and strong behavior.
• Would any viable embryos harvested by the Cylons be accelerated into mature adults or placed in vitro into a host? Would the host be Cylon or human?
  • Caprica-Valerii seemed to imply that no viable hybrid embryos had ever been produced by the Farms, at least up until this point. Then again, she said that they "weren't very successful," a somewhat vague answer suggesting inpregnation or growth but no viable fetuses.

Analysis

• What exactly did the Cylons do to Thrace's ovaries? Simon tells Six: "...pending lab test results on sample for ovaries, complete removal will proceed tomorrow". Starbuck escapes right after this, which means that the opportunity to "completely remove" her ovaries did not occur. This suggests at the very least that Starbuck can still have children. However, female humans only have two ovaries: how can you have a "sample" one?
• It would seem that the Cylons at least obtained several sample egg cells from Starbuck. Will this lead to developments later on?
• In Ron D. Moore's blog entry for October 14, 2005, after finishing the last scripts for season two he jokingly says he has "the reward of time spent thinking about something besides Kara's missing ovaries ("Now, where did I leave those ovaries? They were right here a minute ago...") ". What is meant by this?

Notes

• This episode's opening credits marks the return of the "blipvert" effect used in the first season episodes, which Ron D. Moore uses as an homage to "Space: 1999."
• As of the opening credits, the fleet population is now 47,857, a net loss of 4 since "Resistance". This reflects the deaths of four civilians on board the Gideon in that episode, but apparently not that of Boomer. Was she removed from the count immediately after her assassination attempt?
• According to Gaeta, this episode takes place "a week" after Apollo docked at Cloud Nine in the last episode, although apparently Adama hasn't been well enough to resume command until very recently.
• 24 ships, almost a third of the Fleet, have left with Roslin for Kobol.
  • This would mean the total Fleet consisted of over 72 ships. In the Miniseries, there are only about 40 FTL-capable ships able to rendezvous with Galactica at Ragnar Anchorage.
• Boomer's body is now in the morgue.
• Number Six mentioned that "procreation is one of God's commandments" in the first episode, "33."
• Helo and Caprica-Valerii's child is the first Human/Cylon hybrid conceived in love, and as a result appears to be the first and only successful hybrid; it seems that no other embryo survived nearly as long as it already has (it is now about five weeks old, since its conception in "Six Degrees of Separation").
• Boomer served aboard Galactica for two years, which means the Cylons had begun infiltrating Colonial society from at least that long ago. This matches the length of time of Six's affair with Baltar while on Caprica, suggesting that Cylon agent infiltration occurred around two years prior to the events of the miniseries.
• According to Simon's study (either from a Cylon dossier on Thrace or from medical exams) Starbuck was the victim of frequent physical abuse as a child; she's suffered many bone fractures in childhood, and all of her fingers have been broken at some point.
• Caprica-Valerii is aware of Leoben Conoy #2's interrogation by Starbuck in "Flesh and Bone," even of specific things he said during it, suggesting that Cylon agents sometimes have a collective knowledgebase (not a collective consciousness; see "Downloaded" for this confirmation) to occasionally draw from. This is supported by Boomer's information to Gaius Baltar of the number of Cylon agents remaining in the Fleet in "Resistance," as only such an knowledgebase would allow Boomer to know of this data.
• This episode introduces the fifth confirmed Cylon agent, Simon.
• According to a deleted scene, this episode takes place a week after "Fragged."
• After the final commercial break, as Simon enters Starbuck's room (right before she stabs him) you can see that her room is number "254". Not so coincidentally, this scene takes place in Season 2, episode #5, and this is the start of Act #4.

Noteworthy Dialogue

• Cylons discussion the surgical testing they are performing on Starbuck:

Simon:...pending lab test results on [sample for] ovaries, complete removal will proceed tomorrow. They've lab tested positive and subject will be removed to processing facility for final disposition.

Number Six: Is that regret I hear in your voice, Simon?

Simon: If it is, it certainly is none of your concern.

• Explanation of the Human/Cylon hybrid project:

Valerii: They were conducting research, into Human/Cylon breeding programs.

Starbuck:: Human/Cylon?

Helo:: 'Call them "Farms"...your gunshot wound looks fine...

Starbuck:: So "Farms", that's great...what were they going to do, 'knock me up with some Cylon kid?

Valerii: They were going to try to. We haven't been very successful so far.

Anders: Supposedly they can't reproduce...you know, biologically, so they've been trying every which-way to produce offspring.

Starbuck: Why?

Valerii: Procreation. It's one of God's commandments; "be fruitful". We can't fulfill it, we've tried. So we decided--

Starbuck: To rape human women?!

Valerii: You know, if you agreed to bear children it would be voluntary, maybe even set you up with someone you like.

Starbuck: And you two kids? [Helo and Caprica-Boomer]

Valerii: We're different.

Starbuck: What the frak is that supposed to mean?

Helo: They have this theory; maybe the one thing they were missing was love. So Sharon and I...were set up...

Starbuck: To fall in love?! They didn't ask Sue-Shaun if she wanted to fall in love, alright! They put a tube in her, and they hooked her up to a machine!

Valerii: They know who you are, Kara. You're special. Leoben told you that. You have a destiny.

Helo: [pointing out the other scar on Starbuck's lower abdomen] Starbuck what's the second scar?

Starbuck: I don't know. I don't think I want to know now. You know?

Valerii: No.

Anders: Alright, how many women do they have in these "Farms"?

Valerii: Hundreds, maybe thousands. I don't know, I haven't accessed that data.

• Adama wonders aloud about the nature of Cylons and humans

Tyrol: I don't believe she [Cally] was in her right mind when she shot Boomer--

Adama: Did you love her, Chief?

Tyrol: 'Scuse me?

Adama: Boomer. Did you love her?

Tyrol: Thought I did.

Adama: Well, when you think you love somebody, you love them. That's what love is. Thoughts... She was a Cylon. A machine! Is that what Boomer was, a machine? A thing?

Tyrol: That's what she turned out to be.

Adama: She was more than that to us. She was more than that to me. She was a vital, living person aboard my ship for almost two years! She couldn't have been just a machine. Could you love a machine?

Tyrol: No, sir. Guess I couldn't have.

AdamaCally discharged a firearm without permission, endangering life of her fellow shipmate. 30 days in the brig. Dismissed.

Tyrol: Thank you, sir.

Adama: You'll see her again, Chief.

Tyrol: Excuse me?

Adama: There are many copies. You'll see her again.

• Simon, talking about Starbuck's reluctance to have children but also perhaps talking about the Cylons view of themselves (and maybe the "human" cylons).

Simon: Children of abusive parents often fear passing along that abuse to their own children.

Official Statements

Ronald D. Moore mentions in his Podcast that because of Kara Thrace's promise to Anders to return with help, we'll probably return to Caprica.

Guest stars

• Richard Hatch as Tom Zarek
• Aaron Douglas as Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol
• Nicki Clyne as Specialist Cally
• Michael Trucco as Samuel Anders
• Tamara Lashley as Sue-Shaun
• Rick Worthy as Simon