Jurgen Belzen: the Pegasus XO Helena Cain shot in her own CIC
Colonel Jurgen Belzen was Helena Cain's long-serving executive officer and friend aboard Pegasus. When he refused her order to launch every remaining Viper against fifteen squadrons of Raiders, she asked for his sidearm and shot him in the head in front of the CIC crew.
Colonel Jurgen Belzen was the executive officer of Pegasus and had held the post for a long time by the year of the Cylon attack. He was also a close friend of Admiral Helena Cain, which is why the manner of his death is the single fastest way to explain what Cain became after the Fall.
Why did Cain kill Jurgen Belzen?#
She killed him for refusing an order in front of witnesses, after he pushed her to recall the first Viper squadron and break off an engagement he judged unwinnable on those numbers.
The engagement had started as something small. Pegasus went after what its people believed was a minor Cylon communications relay, and the target turned out to be a large staging area. Fifteen squadrons of Raiders jumping in to seal the trap changed the arithmetic completely, and Cain's answer was to put every fighter she had left into the air.
Belzen's objection was professional and, on the face of it, correct. Throwing outnumbered Vipers at that force would spend the ship's air group for nothing. He said so, kept saying it, and then declined to carry the order out. Cain asked for his sidearm, took it, and shot him with it where the whole of the CIC watch could see.
Did Pegasus win?#
It did. The battle went the Colonials' way, and the losses were staggering, which leaves the argument between the two officers unresolved in the way that matters least and most at once.
Fisk moved up into the dead man's job. What Cain had demonstrated, to that crew and to every officer who heard about it later, was that she would kill a friend for hesitating, and Pegasus behaved accordingly for as long as she commanded it.
Was the story true?#
Yes. Fisk told it to Colonel Saul Tigh and then laughed it off as a joke, and Tigh never believed the retraction.
He was right not to. Ronald D. Moore confirmed on his blog that all of it had happened, and the shooting was later put on screen in "Razor," which settled the point. Belzen's opposite number in the original series was Tolen.
Sources
- WikiJurgen Belzen, Battlestar Wiki entry
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Followed from this entry
Helena Cain
Rear Admiral Helena Cain commanded the battlestar Pegasus, one of only two Colonial capital ships to survive the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. Ruthless and uncompromising, she waged a relentless campaign against the Cylons before her assassination.
Jack Fisk
Commander Jack Fisk was a Pegasus officer who survived the Fall, rose to command the battlestar after Admiral Cain's death, and was garroted for his grip on the fleet's black market.
Saul Tigh
Colonel Saul Tigh was the executive officer of the battlestar Galactica and William Adama's oldest friend, a hard-drinking and embittered soldier who later discovered he was one of the Final Five Cylons yet never stopped thinking of himself as a Colonial officer.
Colonial Viper
The Viper was the primary space superiority fighter of the Colonial Fleet, developed on Caprica before the Cylon War and fielded through seven major marks. The Mark II and Mark VII bookended its service from the first war to the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
Cylon communications relay
The Cylon communications relay was an installation the Battlestar Pegasus attacked after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, only to find it was a staging ground for Cylon forces. The costly engagement exposed the Cylon agent Gina Inviere and cost Admiral Cain dozens of Vipers.
Fall of the Twelve Colonies
A single day of Cylon attack killed more than twenty nine billion people across Colonial space. Barely fifty thousand escaped in a refugee fleet.
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