|
Something of a letdown after the gasping
roller-coaster ride of the Pegasus, but I think
the point of this ep was mostly to clean up Roslin's
journey and to set new arcs in motion for the remainder
of the season. The literal deus ex machina (god
coming out of the machine) to cure Roslin's cancer
in hours was lifted almost directly from VOY's "Prophecy," where
B'Elanna's quarter-Klingon/three-quarters Terran baby
had the necessary hybrid stem cells to cure the other
Klingons of their ailment. Baltar reminds us that he's
a cowardly, egotistical slimeball, however brilliant
a scientist. Lee and Kara are Reset Buttoned™ back
to their pre-Cain positions. Roslin was
Adar's girlfriend?!
Roslin's interactions with the head of
the educational group were instructive in that we see
she had some political toughness and astuteness before
the Cylon attack -- "Madame President" didn't
spring fully formed from the brow of Zeus, as it were
-- but the parallels between the teachers fighting
for whatever and the Demand Peace group were clunky
and obvious. And speaking as the daughter of two teachers,
I would eat a box of chalk before a group of teachers
would commit violence so bad it required troops to
put them down to achieve their labor ends. Strike?
Sure. Chain themselves to a fence? Well, possibly,
depending on what the issue was (schools literally
crumbling and threatening student lives, kids with
handguns, child molesters -- I could see doing it for
that kind of thing). But putting cops in the hospital?
For pay? Sorry, go back and rewrite that.
Kudos to Makeup for the Death's Door
Palette....
We thought at first it was somebody from Pegasus who
was sabotaging the ammo on Galactica's Vipers
only, to get their pilots out of commission. The Passive
Aggressive Resistance movement was almost a letdown.
Separately, though, I liked the idea.
We've heard extremely little about life from the civilians'
point of view. Aren't there elections coming up? Will
we ever know what the people think of the problems
with Cain, or Sharon's existence, or Zarek? It's sad
but not unthinkable to have a group who wants "peace
at any cost," whatever they perceive "peace" to
be. There are those who think that any aggression has
to be Our Fault and that if we just gave Them what
they wanted they'd go away, or that we're karmically
responsible for any evil which befalls us. Not that
we don't sometimes bring crap onto ourselves, or that
we don't reap what we sow, but the Colonials are pretty
much running for their lives. Pegasus might
have been trying to kill as many Cylons as they could
on the way to oblivion, but Galactica is trying
to find an escape from the fighting because fighting
will not win the day. We the audience see this because
we have omniscient access into the lives of all the
major players, but the rest of the people in the fleet?
What do they see, and know, and guess, and pass rumors
about?
Will Roslin remember that she remembered
in her delirium that she saw Baltar with one of the
Sixes? She reacted to him while on the hospital bed,
but what happens next? Is she going to keep him where
he is so she can keep an eye on him, now that she's
cured?
So what threat did Roslin think the baby
might be? Morale? (Bad enough that they look like us;
now they're going to breed us out.) Target for the
Cylons to come get her, and to destroy Galactica in
the process? The success of the cybrid would encourage
more Farms?
It is rather creepy to think of Baltar
as being President of the Colonies. Fortunately, we
know Roslin isn't going anywhere, so it was never a
real possibility for the audience, but still. And Six
is wrong about Baltar not wanting power. He prefers
to be the mover behind the scenes rather than having
direct responsibility for good and bad things. Six
isn't subtle about power and leaders -- she thinks
he should be making nuclear threats! -- so she doesn't
understand that. When Roslin disses him in the letter,
in his view she's discounting his efforts, so he's
insulted and slighted; he doesn't have as much influence
as he thought he did. But Six has more influence than
Baltar lets her know, or perhaps more than he'll admit,
because he takes her advice laterally and gives the
bomb to Gina and the PAR (which is one of the dumbest frakking
things he could conceivably have done). And why? He
looks at Gina and tells her "I will not be responsible
for the destruction of mankind." Why else would
he give her the bomb? Does Roslin's jabs at his faults
enrage him that much, that he's willing to write
off the whole species in revenge? (If the Cylons
are looking for "murderous, petty, and flawed," he's
their walking example.)
Poor Helo. Not very bright, but give
him credit, he picked his side and stuck to it loyally.
He loves Sharon, whatever threat she might be
(and it's a lot more dangerous to piss her off than
threaten the unborn kid, so far as we know), and he
loves his child, and he begs Adama as one father to
another not to carry out Roslin's order. To Adama's
credit, he's sympathetic about the whole thing, although
not yielding.
The entire PAR party line pisses me off.
Anyone who says "oh, we abhor violence and we
want to end war, so we'll blow up ships and kill people
to accomplish that end" should be airlocked. You
don't end war by attacking. You don't stop violence
with assaults. You get peace when both sides stop fighting.
Sometimes that means one side defeats the other, or
one side surrenders, or is destroyed, or both sides
call a truce. But suicide bombs don't make peace. Period.
Talking makes peace. Listening makes peace. Compromise
makes peace. Not sabotage.
How did Baltar know about the PAR, anyway?
He said last week (a few weeks ago in show time) that
he knew a place where he could take Gina where she'd
be safe. We didn't see Zarek or hear him mentioned,
so it's unlikely that he was involved. How did Baltar
know to send her to these Cylon sympathizers? If he
was getting privileged, classified information in his
position as vice president (which only comes up when
it's useful for him; he doesn't seem to have any real
duties), then Adama would have it also, and Adama doesn't
seem to know about it any more than Tigh or Lee when
he hands out the pamphlets. Although Adama doesn't
seem particularly surprised about it either -- maybe
he did know, and just chose not to tell Tigh and Lee?
So now Sharon is pissed off, and has
little motive to help the Colonials. Not perhaps Roslin's
brightest move. Now they have an angry, non-cooperative
prisoner, who went from being a tactical advantage
to a liability, and a baby who could be more of a liability
if Roslin's decision was based on anything more than
Plot Contrivance. I suppose it had to turn this way
at some point or Six couldn't claim the baby would
be hers and Baltar's to raise. Does this mean Sharon
will turn more violent and angry and Helo will support
her until they're both jailed or dead? That would suck.
Not that the promo with the fetus wasn't
creepy, but why run an ad for BSG in the middle of
BSG?
The faces of Doral and Leoben were passed
around at a news conference as being known Cylon agents.
Why wasn't Gina's face also passed around? Roslin has
a head shot of her. Has Sharon been publicly identified
as Cylon? Why wouldn't the PAR know who Gina was?
What does a machine need with eyeglasses?
Does she think she's Clark Kent?
Roslin was Adar's girlfriend?! That
puts a slightly different spin on her ascent to her
current position. What was she before? Did she sleep
her way to the job or did he seduce her in office?
She couldn't have been too much of a figurehead, unless
the flashback was the first time she ever showed political
cojones. (Then he casually says "You can stay
on in an advisory capacity; gods know we need your
ideas" even though her "ideas" were
what just got her canned. Not for anything, Adar was
an arrogant jerk. What did Roslin see in him?)
When Cottle gives the 10-minute warning,
Moogie notes that Adama asks those who are the praying
type to pray, and the others to "join me in keeping
her in our thoughts." Is he an atheist or just
not the praying type?
Give Sharon credit: Gina was defending
just herself, and she killed more than half a dozen
soldiers on Pegasus. Sharon is fighting for
herself and the sprog, and only wallops them with a
chair.
Li, one of the TripHammered Dozen, had
to ask what an antigen was before I put all the pieces
together to follow along with how Baltar comes up with
Roslin's cure. Google says an antigen is a blood factor
which causes an immune system response -- that is,
for the body to treat it as foreign, and reject it.
Baltar's point was that nothing in the Cylon blood
would cause Roslin's to reject it. Baltar looked at
Gina, who was amazingly recovered only a few
weeks after being rescued from gang rape and torture,
and realized or remembered their fast-healing abilities.
She clocked him and he saw blood on his fingers. He
put her super-healing and "blood" together
with the fetus's blood work and the cure clicked. (I
wonder if fast healing means a faster metabolism means
a faster pregnancy for Sharon?)
Moogie thinks that since Roslin has been
injected with Cylon blood, she's going to have some
kind of Cylon side effects. I think it's more like
Trek -- Neelix was injected with Seven's nanoprobes,
but he didn't become Borg. And since the blood came
from the cybrid baby, the cells are partly human anyway
-- sort of like AB and B blood mixing, if that were
possible.
Did Roslin ever say anything to Sharon
afterwards? Did she thank her, or apologize?
How is it that Baltar still has an intact,
working nuclear bomb? If he legitimately needed the
material for the Cylon detector (which I don't think
he did), he should have disassembled it for parts.
If the Cylon detector was declared a failure because
of Boomer, then Adama at the very least should have
asked for the radioactive stuff back. Baltar could
always tell him that it was integrated and no longer
extricable blah blah, but it would have been covered.
It is completely beyond belief that the bomb
was able to be removed from Galactica without some
alarm going
off. (And why do Gina and her buddy carry on their
conversation and then open the suitcase with the bomb
with the door open, and the guard standing outside
by the elevator?)
|
