Galen Tyrol

Chief Petty Officer Galen Tyrol was the deck chief of the battlestar Galactica, the enlisted man who kept its Vipers and Raptors flying through the long journey of the surviving Colonial Fleet. Respected by William Adama and fiercely protective of the crew under his command, Tyrol was in truth one of the Final Five Cylons, descended from the Thirteenth Tribe, sent to live among humanity with false memories. His life ran through the Fleet's deepest crises, from a doomed love affair with a Cylon sleeper agent to the discovery of his own true nature.

True origins#

Tyrol was born on the planet known as Earth at roughly the same time the Twelve Tribes abandoned Kobol. Guided by the Messengers, he joined a group of five scientists who foresaw a war between Earth's people and their mechanical servants. Killed in a nuclear blast at a market, his consciousness was downloaded into an artificially grown body aboard a ship in orbit. Lacking faster-than-light travel, the five spent some two thousand years reaching the Cyrannus Star System, where they found humanity at war with its own Cylon creations. The five negotiated an end to that war in exchange for the technology of organic memory transfer.

In the years that followed, the Cylons developed humanoid models with human form and emotion. The first of these, a Number One, turned against his creators; in the resulting revolt the Final Five were killed, and the lesser Cylons were stripped of self-awareness. As punishment for his love of humanity, Tyrol was later reactivated and sent into the Colonies with false memories of being the son of religious elders.

Deck chief of Galactica#

In human society Tyrol enlisted in the Colonial Fleet at eighteen and served aboard several battlestars, including Pegasus, Columbia, and Atlantia, before becoming Galactica's deck chief ahead of its decommissioning. There he fell into a relationship, against regulations, with Lieutenant Sharon "Boomer" Valerii, herself a Cylon sleeper agent unaware of her own nature. When Boomer's identity was exposed by her attempt to assassinate then-Commander Adama, Tyrol was suspected of being a Cylon and jailed; he mourned her death despite his professed hatred, and was cleared, for the time being.

Tyrol proved more than a mechanic. Stranded on Kobol, he displayed a firm grasp of tactics, and Adama held him in high esteem; Tyrol even modeled his leadership on the Admiral's. He could be irrational in his protectiveness when those under his command were hurt. He and Karl "Helo" Agathon accidentally killed the Pegasus officer Alastair Thorne while stopping his assault on Sharon Agathon, and were sentenced to death by Admiral Helena Cain before being released after her death.

New Caprica and the resistance#

Tyrol and Cally settled on New Caprica, married, and had a son they named Nicholas. As a union leader he urged a strike just before the Cylon occupation began. During the occupation he served as an active resistance fighter under Saul Tigh, bombing targets and recruiting members. After the Exodus he was appointed to the Circle, the secret tribunal that tried suspected collaborators, where he exonerated Felix Gaeta by revealing him as the resistance's inside source.

Back aboard Galactica, Tyrol's marriage frayed under his habit of volunteering them both for extra duty. On the algae planet he was drawn into the hills to discover the Temple of Five, a place his parents had revered, and searched it for the Eye of Jupiter; unable to bring himself to destroy the temple, he was knocked unconscious by Gaius Baltar before the humans withdrew. He later organized a general strike over conditions on the tylium refinery, backing down only when Adama threatened Cally's life.

The Final Five and the end#

In the Fleet's third year, drawn together by music only they could hear, Tyrol, Tigh, Anders, and Tory Foster realized they were Cylons, four of the Final Five; Tyrol described the moment as a switch going off inside him. His wife Cally, after overhearing a secret meeting, learned the truth and tried to kill herself and their son, only for Tory to intervene and murder Cally by airlocking her, a crime Tyrol did not yet understand. Grief drove him to near-suicide and to assaulting Baltar at a sermon, and Adama demoted him after a furious outburst.

Tyrol later learned that Nicholas was not his son but the child of Brendan "Hot Dog" Costanza. On the ruined first Earth, touching a wall bearing a silhouette that matched his own, he recovered the memory of his death there two thousand years before. During the Gaeta and Zarek mutiny he sided with Adama, used his knowledge of the ship to help end the conflict, and disabled Galactica's FTL drive to keep it from fleeing, dismayed to find metal fatigue spreading through the engine room.

When Boomer returned bearing the resurrected Ellen Tigh, Tyrol's old feelings stirred, and she showed him a vision of the life they might have had. He helped her escape from the brig, only for her to betray him and kidnap the child Hera. In the final battle, as the Final Five combined to transmit the secrets of resurrection to the Cylons, their minds briefly merged and Tyrol discovered that Tory had killed Cally. He broke the link and killed Tory in his rage, sparking the firefight that destroyed Cavil's forces; Tigh later forgave him, saying he would have done the same. On reaching the new Earth, Tyrol chose to live as a near-hermit on a northern island, apart from both Colonial humans and Cylons.