|
Sort of a bottle show, but then the genie
gets out of the bottle in the end. Questions which linger
in the mind of the audience are addressed (yay continuity!).
An astonishingly revealing shot of Lee, but in context
and in character, and not the focus of the plot or the
arc, so I'm fine with it. The next set of problems with
Pregnant Sharon gets underway. Adama and Roslin -- united
-- show surprising political coglioni.
The Fleet TV screen also has eight sides
(a rectangle with chopped-off edges) like their paper.
I just kept noticing it every time we cut to that grainy
footage.
Lucy Lawless, who played D'anna Biers,
based her performance on CNN reporter Christiane Amanpour.
She said in interviews that this is the first time she's
used her native New Zealand accent, and with the blonde
hair and altered makeup, I would never have recognized
her as Xena if I hadn't known who the actress was. Of
course, now that Xenanne ("Xenane," while
spelled correctly, looks weird, and "Xenanpour"
sounds like an etiquette instruction or a yoga movement)
has been revealed as the sixth humanoid Cylon model,
I imagine we'll be seeing her again, at least in Cylon
group scenes. She's a good actress, which was a pleasant
surprise (I didn't watch "Xena" so I have
no prior experience with her), and she held her own
with the very strong cast. We'll be happy to have her
return.
Now knowing the ending, the first scene
on Colonial One takes on a new flavor. "I
want to put a human face on the officers and the crew"
of the Galactica, says Roslin. In the end, that's
what the broadcast does -- we see the pilots and staff
as they are, both strong and weak -- but Xenanne hears
a human face differently. "You might not
like that face when you see it," she warns. As
a human reporter, she would be sniping that the precious
officers aren't as great as the leaders are making them
out to be. As a Cylon, she's sneering that their "human
faces" are full of savagery.
I was completely taken by the stalking-Tigh
plot. I really thought Lady MacTigh had set it up or
was doing part of it herself. She's certainly capable
of it. (And I laughed so hard I had to pause and rewind
the TiVo over Kara quoting poetry to disprove Lee's
belief in her innocence. "Can I be a suspect
again? Please?") Good camera work with the mirrors,
both framing the Tighs with the words and later when
they're talking and his reflection is in a slice of
mirror next to the locker. ENT tried that once or twice
and screwed up the angles.
If Lee was wrapping a towel around his
hips when Xenanne came in the locker room, does that
mean he was naked for his entire prior conversation
with Kara? I suppose it's intended to show that the
officers are accustomed to working together around their
gender differences, but hoo! Not to mention that
I think we caught a glimpse of the Brazilian border
when the towel fell. Again -- it worked in context,
Lee responded in character (as an officer being disturbed
during an off-duty moment), and it wasn't dwelled on
ad naseaum. Cable certainly is, uh, not UPN! More importantly,
however, in that scene we also saw Kat acting up and
being wild, which was the first hint that she was on
stims and not just excessively immature. It's hard for
me sometimes to keep track of the tertiary pilots.
Was Xenanne really affected by Dee's statement,
that she "just wanted to believe in something"?
Is any Cylon capable of being touched by humans, or
is it a "weakness" of the Sharon model?
Baltar's self-importance is so ridiculous
it's laughable. He plays hard-to-get with all the subtlety
of a 16-year-old. And Six is right there, feeding him
and provoking him. "This one can help us,"
she purrs. At first viewing, it's just her usual manipulation.
In retrospect, she probably knows Xenanne's larger agenda
of getting footage of Pregnant Sharon back to the Cylons
(although if Baltar's Six has access to the groupmind,
couldn't she just tell them? Or can she only
receive and not send?) or at the very least she assumes
that any Cylon is working to the advantage of the Plan.
Xenanne just thinks Baltar is very strange. I wonder
if she's looking at him from a Cylon-in-the-street viewpoint,
or from the vantage of knowing his part in the ongoing
schemes.
Lee's quiet but heartfelt defense of his
pilots was appropriate, moving, and impeccable. He's
the leader for a reason. He earned that rank; Daddy
didn't give it to him.
In the scene where Kara breaks up the
fight between Kat and Chief, and Lee leads her off,
there's an almost perfect balance between Lee and Kara,
the new characters of BSG2K, and Apollo and Starbuck
from Classic BSG: the authority and the firebrand, the
cool head and the hothead who are best friends regardless,
the two leaders keeping their people stable and in line.
It's a beautiful moment of character and plotting, and
all kudos to Ron Moore and his staff and the actors
who work so hard to make it look real and effortless.
My hat is off to you.
So since Tigh's ship was sabotaged and
he didn't get to that meeting on Cloud 9, is
he going next week or did the meeting happen without
him? And what did they discuss if it went on without
a representative from Galactica? These writers
don't drop plot threads like that and not follow up.
You just knew that if the camera focused
on the control panel, which they never do, that something
bad was about to happen. On Classic BSG that was just
in the script as <STOCK SHOT // VIPER CONTROL PANEL>
to move things along from A to B....
Live flame for the remembrance candles?
On a spaceship?
Helo, tellingly mumbling that "it's
not that easy" to shut off emotion and become a
killing machine on duty. Poor guy, he can't know that
Xenanne knows more about the Plan and his role in it
than he does. Separately, how did he know Sharon was
in trouble? Telepathy? If the guard heard her gasping,
why didn't the guard call Sickbay himself? Why call
Helo?
A few too many lingering shots on Xenanne's
full glass and Tigh's rapidly emptying one (his eyes
light up: ooh, the good stuff!), but her ploy
was brilliant. He saw through it before she did too
much damage, though. He's not stupid -- he's
just not a leader, and he drinks way too much. And as
before, knowing that she's a Cylon, her questions ("So
you have no regrets whatsoever" about the deaths
of the civilians) are just as much about the Cylons
interrogating humans to prove to themselves the humans'
hostile nature as they are a reporter trying to get
at the truth.
Adama may be right when he says that nobody
involved in the Gideon problem has a free pass,
that they "all gotta live with it," but as
the Marine proved, some people are living with it better
than others, and even if they are living with it, there
has been no official response to the mistakes. Nobody
in the entire chain of command, so far as we can tell,
was even reprimanded. It's a very legitimate question
for the news to be asking. Adama's answer is basically
that he can't afford to lose Tigh because he ordered
something which went bad, and he won't hang the Marines
out to dry for even a fatal mistake. It's a difficult
question, and I'm not sure what I think. I don't know
if I agree that in times of war, critical personnel
can make mistakes without being punished. Lee was in
the brig while he was off-duty. Cally was sentenced
to thirty days on a weapons charge. I don't know if
a demotion or a letter of reprimand means anything any
more, but isn't some kind of official public
Bad Dog No Biscuit called for?
"I'm sick to death of people like
you questioning my patriotism," Xenanne snarls
at Adama. Huh? Shouldn't he be saying that to
her? Patriotism isn't what's behind governmental
or military censorship; it's morale and crowd control.
It's not unpatriotic not to shout "fire" in
a crowded theatre.
I sort of blinked mentally when Adama
said that the Fleet couldn't know that Pregnant Sharon
was aboard. We're so used to knowing what the main cast
knows that we forget that we're part of the privileged
group, who has access to all the secrets. I guess the
Fleet knows that Sharon is a Cylon model, but not the
rest of it.
I become more convinced with each episode
that Gaeta is a Cylon. Maybe his crazy-for-the-military
background is too pat, maybe it's not. But someone
had to be transmitting that unaired footage to the Raiders
so it could be relayed, and Xenanne was recording in
CIC and her caddy was recording on the flight deck.
Unless their cameras can record on one tape and transmit
from another simultaneously, either she had that tape
set up to broadcast remotely (or, knowing that the Raiders
were coming, she was broadcasting it before Baltar's
interview -- she checks tapes carefully before loading
it) or someone else on Galactica did it for her.
And in any case, why didn't someone catch the transmission?
We still don't know how they all communicate with each
other. Pregnant Sharon is definitely offline, or the
group in the theatre wouldn't have been surprised to
see her alive. If Gaeta is a Cylon, then he could be
sending the transmissions, or allowing them to be sent
and covering the tracks.
So what happens if Baltar were to "lead
the Fleet," as Six suggests? How does that help
the sprog? Or is she just saying whatever will feed
his ego?
What did the Cylons learn about the human
response which they didn't know, and which didn't make
the final broadcast? What did they learn tactically?
About supplies and resources? How are they going to
use that against the humans? And is Baltar's "detector"
considered completely useless now, that they don't even
try to screen anyone who comes aboard?
While the gritty, newsreel-type footage
was intermittently annoying, it was interesting to see
the dogfight literally through that lens, to sit with
Chief and worry and wait, to listen with Dee and Adama,
and not to know what's happening other than through
comm yelling. And yet how does that affect Xenanne?
Does she care? Does she see these people as real? Did
she believe a single word of her stirring conclusion?
I just about stood up and cheered to hear
the Classic BSG theme at the end of the documentary.
If the Colonials are hearing it, does that mean it's
their anthem?
Okay, The Man With the Screaming Brain?
Is this SCI-FI or the Saturday Afternoon Creature Double
Feature? Bruce Campbell has not achieved the stature
of William Shatner that he can invert his career into
mocking himself for a living.
|
