Cally Henderson Tyrol
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| Cally Tyrol | |
|---|---|
| Race | Human |
| Gender | Female |
| Portrayed by | Nicki Clyne |
| First appearance | Miniseries |
| Last appearance | The Ties That Bind |
| Rank | Specialist (BSG Miniseries - Season 3.5) Petty Officer 2nd Class (Season 3.5 - Episode 4.03) |
| Colony | Unknown |
| Affiliation | Colonial Fleet |
Callandra Henderson Tyrol[1] (also known as Cally or Crewman Cally, Deckhand Cally, or Specialist Cally) is a fictional character from the re-imagined Battlestar Galactica series. She is played by actress Nicki Clyne.
Cally works as an air maintenance Specialist on Galactica's flight deck and is married to her boss, CPO Galen Tyrol, with whom she has a son.
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[edit] Character biography
Cally joined the Colonial Forces to help pay for schooling as a dentist and was about to be honorably discharged following Galactica's decommission. The destruction of the Twelve Colonies changes these plans leaving her little choice but to stay on board as a member of the crew.[2]
Prior to the attack, and immediately following it, she worked as a Specialist in the air maintenance crew of Battlestar Galactica. The crew is led by Chief Galen Tyrol, on whom she has a secret crush despite his affair with Sharon "Boomer" Valerii. While on the Chief's crew, she is responsible for the maintenance of Vipers and Raptors, and sometimes Galactica herself.[3]
Cally gets her first experience with the hazards of field operations when she is assigned to a team sent to the prison ship Astral Queen to enlist volunteers from the inmates for water recovery from an icy moon. While the team is there, the prisoners stage an uprising and Cally becomes one of several hostages. She is shot by one of the prisoners when she fights off his attempted rape by biting off his ear.[4]
She recovers from her injuries and returns to work. Some time later, she is assigned to the Kobol landing party as part of a technical crew, along with Chief Tyrol, Vice President Gaius Baltar, Lt. Crashdown and a number of others. They are ambushed by Cylon forces on the surface and their Raptor crashes. On the run, with casualties mounting and the situation rapidly deteriorating, she is given a suicidal attack order by an increasingly unhinged Crashdown, her commanding officer at the time. Seeing that she is too scared to carry out the order, Crashdown threatens to execute her, only to be shot and killed himself by Dr. Baltar.[2]
Following their rescue from Kobol, she returns to regular duty, but soon after becomes involved in the death of Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, who had been discovered to be a Cylon sleeper agent. Enraged by Boomer's assassination attempt on Commander Adama, and the difficulties she created for the Chief, Cally shoots and kills the Cylon before any trial can start. Although the crime is clearly murder, Adama is lenient after hearing Chief Tyrol pleas, and she serves only 30 days for the minor offense of "unauthorized discharge of a firearm." Following her release, she is treated to a party by her comrades.[5]
Cally's relationship with Chief Tyrol becomes romantic under unusual circumstances. Finding him sleeping on the flight deck one night, Cally rouses the Chief from a violent dream and in his delirium he beats her severely before he becomes cognizant. Remorseful, he visits her in the hospital, where he mumbles that what he did to her was "unforgivable." Through her wired-closed broken jaw she tells him she forgives him and, in a deleted scene, admits her love for him.[6]
Though surprised by the admission at first, the Chief eventually returns her love and by the time of their demobilization and settlement on New Caprica, Cally has married Galen Tyrol, taken his last name and is pregnant with his child. Some time following the Cylon occupation of the colony she gives birth to their son, Nicholas Stephen.[6][7]
Galen Tyrol is a major player in the resistance movement on New Caprica and Cally supported him. As a result, she is one of the citizens who are rounded up during a major sweep by the New Caprica Police. She is visited in prison in good faith by Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, a direct resurrection of the one she had killed over a year ago, but she rejects her offer of help. Selected to be executed along with several other prisoners, Cally is freed by the policeman Jammer and is reunited with her husband and child.[8]
Following the evacuation, Cally and Galen re-settled aboard Galactica, at first in converted refugee barracks, then eventually in quarters. Reinstated in their old positions, they take turns watching over their son while carrying out their duties on the flight deck, a punishing schedule that begins to take its toll. Although they work well as a team during the exploration and subsequent escape from the Algae Planet, by this time Cally and Galen's marriage is starting to become strained. [9][10][11][12]
An accident on the job brings them back together. Bickering with each other on a routine repair, Cally and Galen become trapped in a leaking airlock. Unable to get the inside door to cycle, the decision is made to get them out through the outer hatch and on to a rescue Raptor, a move that exposes the two of them to hard vacuum for a number of seconds. Both sustain serious decompression injuries as a result and Cally has to spend some time in a hyperbaric chamber. Realizing just how close he came to losing her, Tyrol reaffirms his commitment to her and their marriage.[10]
When he found out, Galen did not reveal to Cally he was a Cylon. The constant demands of his work, as well as his moodiness about his true nature, continue to strain their marriage. Cally becomes suspicious that her husband is having an affair with Tory Foster. After finding a suspicious note, she sneaks into a crawl space above a storage room in time to hear part of the secret Cylon meeting and learn unequivocally that her husband is one of them. Upon his return to quarters, she attacks and incapacitates Galen then takes her son to a Viper launch tube with the intention of killing both him and herself. Tory — who suspected they were overheard — follows her to the launch tube and talks her out of her plan, only to take the baby, knock her aside, then cycles the launch tube, killing her.[13]
[edit] Character creation and notes
Originally, Cally was supposed to be little more than a named extra, but soon after the series began the producers came to enjoy Nicki Clyne's performance enough to want expand the role into an important recurring character. The original script for "Bastille Day" had called for a prison ship inmate to rape and kill the character, but Clyne had asked Ron Moore if Cally could instead fight back. Producer David Eick, originally jokingly, had suggested that she would bite off the ear of her assailant. The idea stuck and the script was changed, thus saving the character.
[edit] Cally and her name
Until the third season, Cally, along with Doctor Cottle, were the only frequently recurring characters who had yet to be given a full name. Through the first and second seasons she was referred to as "Cally" in most of the spoken dialogue.
Up to the end of season three, the character was listed in the show credits as "Crewman Specialist Cally", implying that "Cally" was actually the character's surname. Tyrol even once referred to her to as "Specialist Cally" in "The Farm". In the non-canon novelization of the Battlestar Galactica mini-series, "Cally" is clearly identified as the character's surname with her first name given as Jane, so she was "Jane Cally". On the other hand, the Peter David tie-in novel Sagittarius Is Bleeding identifies her as "Callista Henderson". Following her marriage to Galen Tyrol, she is referred to in Season 3 as "Cally Tyrol".
Battlestar Galactica writer Bradley Thompson has appeared on the Battlestar Wiki discussion pages and said that Cally is the character's first name and her last name is Henderson. Thompson has also made comments to this effect at Comic-Con. According to him, the art department used the name "Henderson" to label her locker, uniform, and other in-show props that belong to the character, though none of these have ever been clearly seen on the show. Actress Nicki Clyne herself has acknowledged in interviews that although not spoken in dialogue so far, season three scripts had her listed as "Cally Henderson-Tyrol". The Battlestar Galactica: Official Season 3 Companion book by David Bassom also lists her character's name in season 3 as "Cally Henderson-Tyrol"
For the premiere of Season 4, Cally was included in the updated Cast section of the Scifi Channel's official website and her name is listed as "Cally Henderson Tyrol".
At her funeral in "Escape Velocity," her full name is stated as "Callandra Henderson Tyrol."
[edit] Motherfrakker
Cally was the first character to use the curse "motherfrakker" in the second season episode "Valley of Darkness". The line was written for her personally by Ron Moore. The use of it, particularly Clyne's sincere and emotional delivery, has become somewhat revered among Cally fans and the word has since gone on to find widespread usage throughout the Internet.
[edit] References
- ^ episode "Escape Velocity"
- ^ a b "Fragged". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Miniseries". Battlestar Galactica (TV miniseries).
- ^ "Bastille Day". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Resistance". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ a b "Lay Down Your Burdens". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Battlestar Galactica: The Resistance". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Precipice". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Collaborators". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ a b "A Day In The Life". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "The Eye of Jupiter". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "Taking A Break From All Your Worries". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
- ^ "The Ties That Bind". Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series).
[edit] External links
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