Battlestar Galactica

Episode #209 - "Flight of the Phoenix"

This document is ©2005, John Larocque. All rights reserved.

47,853 survivors in search of a home called Earth.

The Cylons were created by man. They evolved. They rebelled. There are many copies. And they have a plan.

Synopsis

Helo and Tyrol are next to Sharon's Raptor in the hangar. Tyrol says, "Sharon flew 47 missions in this thing. Still couldn't trap a landing worth a dramn. Had to bend the undercarriage back into place after every landing." "Approaches made her nervous. She was afraid you'd be watching." "I usually was." "Hey! Look, Chief. I never intended for Sharon and I to... You know, it just kind of evolved." "Just a couple lovesick kids, huh?" "I know how she felt about you, OK? She loves you." "Did she fill you in on the rest of the plan? She and I were going to muster out at the end of our service. You know, then we would get married. Maybe we would have children. I guess I'm just a big frakkin' idiot, though, huh? Probably that goddamn toaster's plan all along." "Don't call her that." "Sucker some moron into giving her a kid... You know what? I should probably be grateful to you. You know why? Because that freak in her belly could have been mine." "Hey, you OK? I'm sorry." "Son of a..." Tyrol starts swinging at him and they begin fighting. "Come on, you damn toaster lover!" He's about to hit Helo's head with a wrench but pulls back. "I don't even know why I'm mad at you. My Sharon's dead. That thing in the brig, that isn't Sharon."

Racetrack concedes to Kara and folds in her hand. "You're folding with three up? Are you crazy?" "Not when you've got me beat. Prince high red, right? Been playing with these cards for so long, I know every fold." "So life's a bitch. What do you want to do, cry about it?" "No. I just want it to end, OK? The bad food, the endless rotations, pretending that a card game is the high point of our day." "It's not going to last forever, all right? Earth is out there." "Right. We could all be chasing our tails over some half-assed planetarium show." "And you guys can all go to hell. I'm going to find Helo." "Good idea. Maybe that Cylon whore taught him a few tricks." Kara turns around, walks over to Racetrack, grabs her by the neck and slams her into the card table.

In CIC, Dualla receives some feedback noise in her receiver. Tigh asks, "What the hell is that?" Gaeta replies, "It was us, sir. But I can't find a source for the transmission. Something's triggering our comm system to broadcast an automatic signal." "Which the C ylons could trace to get a fix on our position." Adama tells them, "Let's assum that for now. update and distribute the emergency jump sites just in case they show up again. Dee, get me a..." Her control panel explodes. "I'm OK, sir." "Stay down. We'll get you up to Doc Cottle, make sure everything's OK." Gaeta reports, "A power surge energized the board. System's been twitchy ever since the Cylons infiltrated our network." Adama remarks, "Mr. Gaeta, this is more than a glitch." Tigh adds, "Commander's right. I don't care if you have to go through this program line by line. Fix it." "Sir, I'm running every diagnostic we've got. Checking each line of code could take days." "I am not interested in excuses. Fix it!" "It's not an excuse, sir. It's a frakking fact!" Adama orders Gaeta to pull himself together. "What the hell is his problem?" "Months on the run, and what do we have to show for it? Casualties. Deteriorating conditions. This crew needs a reset. It's finally hitting them, that's all. Our old lives are gone. The only thing we have to look forward to is this."

In the hangar, Lee asks Tyrol, "Hey, Chief, where's 289? I need her for drills today." "Ship's grounded, sir.... permanently. We're salvaging what we can, but it's gone." "Damn it, I need that ship online." "What can I tell you, captain? Engine mounts are shot. Cockpit's seals are cracked. If it was a horse, I'd shoot it." "Chief, come on. Work with me here. I need your help." "What do you want me to do, work my crew to death?" "No, just do your best. Nobody's expecting any miracles." "Maybe that's the problem."

Later, Tyrol gets the idea to build a Viper from scratch. "Frak it. Why not?" He starts assembling the Viper frame in the hangar and tells the members of his crew, "All right, here's the deal. We are going to build a new fighter." "What about the rest of the ships? I'm three days backlogged on repairs as is." "This is strictly an off-duty project. Nobody takes one minute away from regular maintenance and repairs. You got it? You don't think we can do this?" "I wouldn't even know where to begin." To another crewman, Jammer comments, "He's talking about building a frame, avionics, life support. It's frakkin' impossible." "You know what, then? Forget you. I don't need you." Cally tells him, "Chief, wait. It's not like that." "I said forget it. Get back to work. That's an order." In sickbay, Laura asks Cottle, "How much time do I have?" "Weeks. A month at the outsisde." "Will I be able to work?" "Unless the cancer goes to your brain. That happens, you..."

Hot Dog, Lee and Kara are on the firing range. Both Lee and Hot Dog are firing at targets with Sharon's picture on top of them. "Someone's a tad aggresive." "Just shut up and shoot." "My gods, between you and Racetrack, it's like... having a conversation is like walking through a minefield." "And you're the last person who should be lecturing me about manners." "From what I hear, you've also been riding Chief Tyrol pretty good." "Press it. I just reminded him that I expect Viper maintenance to take precedence over his hobby project."

Oxygen levels start to drop. "Nice! I'm surprised he didn't take a swing at you." "Come on, Starbuck. You don't actually think that piece of junk's gonna actually fly, do you?" She laughs. "50 cubits says he gets it in the air." "Yeah? And who's gonna fly it? It's not gonna be me." "I'll fly it." "Why?" "Because, while everyone else is standing around whining... the Chief is doing something positive." Hogdog collapses and both of them are laughing. Kara says, "His lips are blue. You look like a blueberry." "There's no oxigen in here." She fires at the window and misses. Lee loads an explosive round into the window and it shatters the target, allowing air back into the room. "Nice shot."

In CIC, Gaeta tells Lee, "The environmental computer decided that the firing range was overpressurized and started bleeding out air to compensate." "Two more minutes, and we'd have been dead." Adama cites power fluctuations, equipment failures. "Sir, I think I've found what's causing it." Baltar explains, "It's a Cylon logic bomb. A heuristic computer virus. It's capable of learning, evolving, and probably running in parellel with every computer in the ship right now, just waiting to be activated. No dobut left behind when the Cylons infiltrated the network Colonel Tigh set up the day you were shot, sir." "That was weeks ago. Why now?" Gaeta replies, "Most likely, sir, it took this long for it to crack our encrypted passcodes. And once that happened, it started testing its ability to control our systems -- electrical, environmental." Adama asks, "How do you kill it?" Baltar answers, "That's the tricky part. If it's a Cylon virus, it is extremely difficult to eradicate." "Well, I guess I'm pretty lucky, then, 'cause I have an expert on board. Tell Helo to run this past our prisoner."

In the hangar bay, one of the crewmen volunteers, and attaches a Viper wing with Tyrol. In CIC, Dualla informs Adama they're continuing to experience power spikes and equipment failures across the ship. Adama and Tigh exchange remarks on Tyrol's Viper. "Have you seen this ship that the Chief is building?" "His imagininary fighter? I don't need to see it to know it's a waste of time." "The deck crew doesn't seem to think so." "We need to focus on the fleet we've got left, not get bogged down in some pipe dream. We should shut it down." "It may come to that. But this project, it's giving them something. I'm not going to take that way... until I have to." Dualla has been cleared by Cottle and is in the exercise room practicing fighting maneuvers with Lee. She falls on top of him at the point that Billy enters the room. "Billy, hey. How long have you been on board?" "I just arrived."

Helo is visting Sharon's cell and asks a question. "Do you have actual memories of being with the Chief before the Cylon attack?" "Yeah. I'm sorry. You asked." "Do you still love him?" "Helo. You're the father of my child. You're the first in my heart. And nothing is ever going to change that." "All right, we haev to get to this. Dr. Baltar said it's some sort of Cylon logic bomb. Do you see anything?" As he flips through the pages, she is fixated on the code. "Sharon, what's wrong? Sharon!" "I need to talk to Commander Adama. Right now." "Why?" "It's a Cylon virus, all right. It's been learning your systems, testing, adapting, finding weak spots." "For what?" "So they can turn Galactica's systems against you. Crash you into other ships, detonate your weapons stores, suffocate the crews." "What about you, the baby?" "I'm a liability to them, a mistake. Helo, this logic bomb will run its course in a matter of hours. Once it does, the Cylons will be on top of us. They're gonna kill us all." Adama visits her and tells her, "Whatever it is you have to say, make it quick."

In the hangar, Lee inspects the Viper and tells Kara, "You've got the cockpit too far back. You're gonna run into CG problems when you maneuver." "We're not going for maneuverability, Captain. We're going for speed. Besides, you didn't think this thing would fly anyway." "Well, it sure as hell won't with the cockpit rammed up its. a... Dee?" He notices Dee is there and she informs him she's working on the ship's communications. "Chief's great with the hydraulics, but this comm system's a mess." Tigh arrives. "Had to see this with my own eyes. Won't be long before we have the whole CIC down here. You working on this class project too, Apollo?" "No, sir." "It's good to see someone has a little sense. Where's the Chief, the tool room?" "Ah, getting in some rack time sir."

The Chief is in the tool room, and he's distilling alcohol. "I'm making solvent, sir, to clean machine parts." "Solvent my ass. I know a still when I smell it. What the hell are you up to?" "I need booze to trade for parts. I'm scrounging most of what I can from the fleet, but I need engines. I know I need Commander Adama's permission to cannibalize one of the wrecks." "Engines or not, we both know this piece of crap out there is never going to fly." "I gotta try, Colonel." "What's the point?" "Because that ship, the work, that's all I've got left..." "I almost forgot. I promised the XO of the Baah Pakal I'd help him out. He's got some obsolete DDG-62 engines taking up space on his flight deck. They're probably crap, but I told him that I would have a crew in there to haul 'em out as soon as possible." "Glad to be of help, sir."

Laura visits Adama in his quarters and he informs her that her shuttle's ready. She returns the book he lent her but he doesn't want it back. "This was a gift." "Never lend a book. I know. But I've had it far too long. It belongs in your collection." They discuss the Cylon virus and tells her, "I've just been notified that this is a prelude to an all-out attack by the Cylons." He tells her that Gaeta and Baltar are trying to disable the virus but isn't hopeful, and asks for her advice. "I've just come from seeing our Cylon prisoner. She's offering a possible solution to the problem." "And you're wondering if you can trust her." "It took everything I have not to put my hands around her throat. I can't believe I'm contemplating this." "We both know the Cylons are experts at manipulation. They will do anything to confuse you." "This is not the one who shot me." "Can they really be that different from one another? Commander, if you're asking me if it's possible that your judgment's been clouded by your history with this particular Cylon model, well, I'd have to say yes. But... we created them. There's always a chance we might find common ground."

In CIC, Gaeta lets Tigh know they need to "completely erase our computer drives, cold restart the entire ship's system, then restore them using our prewar backups." "Leaving us with our pants down until we're back online. The Commander will never go for this." "I've spoken to him, sir... He's considering it." Baltar advises, "It's the only way to destroy this virus." "I thought the Commander told you to stay out of this." "I'm sorry. Do you want to survive this one or not, Colonel?" Tigh wants to jump to put some distance with the Cylons, but Gaeta tells him, "All of our systems are compromised, including navigation. The virus could drop us in the middle of a sun." Baltar warns them, "We're running out of time. Our signal's going to catch up with the Cylon fleet." "They'll take control of all of our systems, and then they'll have a hundred ways to kill us."

Sharon is led to CIC under heavy guard. She says, "We need to work quickly. We're on borrowed time." Adama orders, "Let her go." She asks Dualla. "Dee, do you still carry your father's pocket knife." Adama replies, "Give it to her." Mr. Gaeta, can you set me up with a fiber optic comm link? I need broadcast to all frequencies and direct link to the mainframe." Adama replies, "Do it." At that moment, Gaeta reports Cylon raiders on the dradis. Tigh comments, "Bastards tracked us, all right." Adama launches the Vipers, and Hot Dog and Apollo inform CIC the raiders are holding formation. Sharon continues. "OK, this is how it's going to work. The raiders are going to send a signal to activate the virus. It could take a few seconds. On my mark, initiate the computer wipe. Miss the window..." Gaeta finishes her sentence, "The virus takes over every system in the ship." "Wipe the hard drives now." "Do it."

"Yeah. Sometimes you gotta roll the hard six. Right, Commander?" Sharon cuts her hands and inserts the fiber into it and up her arm. Adama orders, "Stand by to execute computer wipe on my command." Tigh reports, "Weapons are still offline. No dradis. Systems down. We're looking at a godsdamned bloodbath. We're defenceless... Cylons are still moving in. She set us up." Hundreds of Cylon ships are closing in on Galactica. Adama asks for a Marine's sidearm and points it to Sharon's head. "If they're coming for you, they're gonna be very disappointed." Tigh tells him, "Do it. What are you waiting for?" Sharon answers, "This."

She concentrates hard, and then CIC comes back online, at the same moment the Cylon systems go offline. Gaeta informs them, "We just sent a signal." Lee radios CIC, "They seem to have lost power. They're drifting out of control." Tigh asks, "What the hell?" Adama replies, "Cylons sent a computer virus. But we just sent one back." Tigh orders Lee, "Apollo, this is Galactica. Kill the bastards." "Roger that. Vipers, weapons free. This, this is payback." The Vipers destroy the Cylon ships. In CIC, Adama orders the Marines, "Take this thing back to her cell."

In the hangar, they are putting the final touches on the ship. Kara tells Tyrol, "We are so damn close. There has got to be some extra metal lying around that we can use to skin this thing. Floorboards, extra bulkheads something." "Most of it's ticketed for Viper repair." Helo comments, "Who says you need metal?" Later, Lee looks at the completed Blackbird Viper with Kara. "Carbon composit." "Good call, Helo." "It's going to be hard as hell to see on dradis, but the question is, will it fly?" "Just watch me." CIC clears the Blackbird for a test flight. Kara is having trouble maneuvering the Blackbird to fly straight, but Lee thinks she is showing off. "OK. Let's see what this baby can do." She presses the throttle and disappears. "Starbuck, where are you? Kara are you OK?" The Blackbird appears in front of Lee's Viper. "Of courser you lost contact. It's a damned stealth ship, remember?"

Laura and Adama are present in the hangar for the ship's christsening ceremony. "Chief Tyrol? This is the Blackbird?" "Yes, ma'am. Madam President, this is an honor." "No, the honor's mine. It' remarkable." "Just a ship ma'am." "Oh, you're much too modest. After what we've been through, it would be very easy to give up, to lose hope. But no here. Not today. This is more than a sip, Chief. This is an act of faith. It is proof that despite all we've lost, we keep trying. And we will get through this, all of us, together. I promise." Members of the crew are placing their signatures on the engine. Tyrol hands Adama a bottle. "Madam President. This was supposed to be a surprise, but well.." The Viper is unveiled, and it has been given a name: Laura. She is in teras. "Thank you." Adama hands her the bottle. "If you'll do us the honor, Madam President." But she chooses not to break it. Racetrack tells Helo, "Hell of an idea, using carbon composites." She shakes his hand along with other pilots and crew.

She says to Adama, "That was lovely." "They wanted to do that for you." "Thank you. None of this would have been possible if you hadn't trusted the Cylon." "I took your advice, met on common ground." "What was that?" "We both wanted to live." Later, Tyrol goes down to Sharon's cell, picks up a phone and starts talking with her.

Ron Moore's Commentary

9/23/2005 -- "Flight of the Phoenix" began life very early in the season. We were talking about initial story ideas for this season. I had this image of Tyrol waking up in the middle of the night, going down into the hangar deck, taking a big piece of tape, laying out a pattern on the floor, and deciding, "I'm going to build a Viper." There was something about it psychologically that I liked for the character. There was something about the series and the mythos of the show and how the fleet operates that I liked about dealing this bit of the reality of the situation. They are losing Vipers and losing pilots and none of these things are being replaced from home. They all have to make do with what they got. And so I really liked the notion of doing a show that was centered around that concept. If not addressing all the needs of the fleet, in all the many ways, let's just do a show that talks about the difficulty of building one fighter...

This was one of those really long shows that came in and a lot of choices had to be made, and through the varying cuts, the thing that we kept coming back to was this story, the gathering of the family to accomplish the one task that he set out to, and the father figure coming down to seeing it. It all kept circling back to tell the story about the family. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- What's going to happen when these guys meet? What's going to finally take place between Helo and Tyrol get together? We talked at length what they would do when these two finally got together. You start with the most obvious idea, is the one we ended up with, which is that they fight... On some level you knew that the thing that was most in character for these two men, based on the people that we had seen them be, Helo down on Caprica and Helo dealing with people on Galactica and Kobol, that there's a lot of rage and a lot of frustration and a lot of self-hatred and ambiguity in both these men over the choices that they've made, over the people that they've chosen to give their hearts to. And the fact that they now come face to face with the representational other of themselves, how could you not want to beat the crap out of him?

The moment of [Tyrol] reaching for the wrench is interesting and telling about just how far the rage has built in these men. Actually, I got a note from Bradley Thompson and his partner David Weddle, who wrote this episode, and they objected to that moment. I must say, in their defence, I completely understand why they object to it, because it really says something pretty bad about Tyrol, which is why I like it. I like the fact that Tyrol, for a moment lost himself in that. He's been drinking, he picked up that wrench, and for a moment really thought about caving in Helo's skull with it. There's a seduction to that, and there's pull to that, and it's an emotion that I think the character would genuinely feel in those circumstances. There's a truth to it. Ultimately that's why I went with the fight. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- This scene with Laura and Cottle, there actually is quite a bit of dialog with this scene, but the director and the editor both decided to cut this scene silently and play all these emotional beats... You can tell this entire story visually, there's not that much dialog that's necessary for you to understand completely what's going on here. It was a really good instinct on the part of the director, Michael Nankin and Jacques Gravett, who cut this show. You gotta love it when Doc Cottle's feeling bad for you. When Cottle isn't messing with you and smoking at you and being a prick, it must be bad. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- This is the effect of hypoxia, this really happens. There's a lot of footage in various documentaries of pilot candidates being put into pressurized chambers where they have oxygen masks, and they slowly bleed the oxygen out of the room, and they're given various tasks. And you just watch the footage of these people slowly losing it. Some of them start giggling, some are just completely checked out of it, others get all panicky. There's a lot of variant reactions to the onset of hypoxia, which really gave us a chance to play the scene in a really disturbing key... The notion that Starbuck and Apollo did this together is something the actors came up with. They liked the idea of him steadying her hand to shoot out the window. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- There was a point where we were going to make "Pegasus" a 90 minute episode, and we were looking for ways to lengthen it... And one of the ways we thought about doing that was to open "Pegasus" with this scene... We did try a version of that and it was OK, but it kind of stuck out as it had nothing to do with the show. It really does belong here. We had been talking about doing the Lee/Billy/Dualla triangle for most of the season. The notion of putting them together came up and we were shooting "Resistance" when we decided definitively to do it, because in "Resistance" there's that whole little subplot of Lee and Dualla, her coming and being the one that would walk with him down the corridor every morning and give him a report, and idle conversation back and forth between two somewhat intimates. What I liked about extending that as a relationship was there was a certain logic to it, there was a certain emotional truth to the idea that Dualla is the voice the pilots always hear. There's a special relationship between her and the pilots, the pilots look on her very fondly. I think they are a bit protective of her. She probably talks to Lee more than the other pilots. He's the CAG, there's probably a lot of wireless communication back and forth between Lee and Dualla on a day to day basis. And it stood to reason that there could be a relationship between those two. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- You can see that we've moved the construction of the fighter in fairly big leaps. We could have chosen to parse out the building of the Viper over many episodes. This could have been a running B story that took three or four episodes to ultimately pay off. But there was something about doing it in one in one episode that seemed to really speak to the larger emotional arc of what's going on in the show. These people that are starting to have gotten to a place where Adama says everyone is depressed because they've realized this is what it's going to be for them... So it felt right to then do an episode that was centered around one man's effort to do something about that... The true timeline of how long it would really take Tyrol to actually build one of these things from scratch, it would be weeks realistically. But you'd rather tell the story in one package, hold the viewer in the moment of the scenes, make themselves invest in the effort and pay it off. You can fudge the timeline, there's no definitive statement in the episode of how long this is all taking. It's kept purposely vague... It's more important to tell the story than it is to really get bogged down in the details of exactly how long it takes him to build the thing. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- Technobabble has its roots in science. We try to be very faithful to what could really happen and to what most reasonably could happen but it's stuff we're making up as we're going along... And it's trying to serve a dramatic purpose within the show. And if you're successful you deliver on that promise of having it make sense while at the same time not getting so bogged down in the explanations and trying to cover every base and trying to deal with every possible ramification of a given problem. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- We got to go out on a limb, we got to do something different. I want to have a different sequence here, I don't want to just deal with some stupid space battle again. I think I was in a room with David and Bradley and said just off handedly, "I don't know if I want her like standing in CIC shoving conduits in her arm, as cool as that might be." We started joking about it and laughing and it just sort of happened. Let's do it, let's do something freakishly weird with her and remind the audience and ourselves that she is a machine. That she's not a human, that she is something quite different, that she operates in ways that we don't always understand...

There was this interesting contradiction in [the Cylons] that they were machines that had tried very hard to emulate the human form, down to the microscopic level, that they were virtually indistinguishable from us. But logically, as incredibly advanced sentient beings that have evolved on their own and have evolved themselves in certain directed ways, one would think and expect that they had other methods of data sharing, that they chose to speak to us and to one another out of something more philosophical and more theological than technical necessity... They have other options but they choose to be human. They choose that this is what they think their God wants their form to take. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- We kept calling it the turkey shoot. There was an air battle in the Second World War in the Pacific. I believe it was in the Marianas. Essentially the Japanese sent one of their last great throes of aircraft at the American fleet, but the pilots were very green and the Americans were much more powerful and experienced then they were at the beginning of the war, and they just simply slaughtered the Japanese. They shot down hundreds of aircraft. It was called the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot, and it was a similar idea. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- This idea of it being a stealth ship instead of a fighter grew out of internal discussions of what they could realistically build. Having them build the Viper from scratch was a bit of a stretch, but I didn't think he could really build a combat fighter like a Viper. If he built an actual Viper, it seemed like we pushed it too far. So it seemed like, they could build something that would have a different purpose. And what would be a craft that would give them an advantage that would be useful for them to have, that maybe they didn't have sitting around already? If it was a stealth ship, that would be interesting and useful, and it's another way of connecting to the audience, because the audience is familiar with stealth technology at this point. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- This scene used to take place before the test flight of the Viper and we swapped it in editing, because this felt like the emotional climax of the show. Whereas in the story, we thought the emotional climax was the first test flight, and that's the way we wrote it. You watch the film, and this is the emotional high point of the show. I was there when they shot this scene, and I haven't been on the set a lot this season, not as much as I was last season. So, it was a rarity to be there to watch them shoot something with virtually the entire cast... I just became very moved by it, and I was just very touched by it, and I just was very much in love with these people and the show. You have these moments where you suddenly connect with the people doing the show, with the actors, with the crew. You're just so proud of being associated with these people and what they're doing, and it's such a privilege to be able to work on a show like this. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

9/23/2005 -- There was [originally] a bit of dialog where Tyrol talks to Sharon for the moment, and essentially says something like "I'm ashamed" and she says, "Of what?" and he says, "I'm ashamed of still loving you" was the idea... That was Michael Nankin and Jacques Gravett again, who came up with cutting out before we hear anything. And it doesn't really matter what they say to each other. We really don't want to know what they say to each other in a real way. All we really want to know is that he went down there and faced his demon, decided to talk to her, somehow, someway. And that that was the journey of the character. The character had started off the show by scrapping things, by being obsessed with this woman, about fighting with an officer about this woman, about all this pent-up emotional frustration that he chooses then to build a Viper with. Then he accomplishes that goal and does this successfuly, but that what really he needs to do is really needs to walk down to that brig and pick up that phone and say something to this woman. (source: Flight of the Phoenix podcast)

Commentary

Kara bets 50 cubits Tyrol's Viper will fly. Cubit is a term from the original 1978 series and is a monetary unit.

"We're concentrating a great deal on personal relationships, including how Helo and Tyrol react now that they know their lovers are Cylons. It opens a dual-sided question that we began to explore in 'Flesh and Bone,' can you hate a machine and treat it as a non-human if it's the enemy? Alternately, can you fall in love with a machine and, if so, does that inherently mean it can't be a machine?" -- Toni Graphica (co-executive producer) on 5/28/2005 (source: TV Zone)