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A few more crossroads reached, with mostly
predictable results. The various resolutions did feel
a little rushed, though, which is disappointing given
the show's usual pace of character development. But
we do get some chunks of the Cylon puzzle at last,
and the Adamas are back in charge of things.
I loved, loved the sun-in-camera
work of Baltar's beach scenes. We never need more than
the outlines of their physical interactions sketched
anyway, since their dialogue is really what's important,
and that kind of hedonistic setting is the exact opposite
of the cold, mechanical, featureless baseship he's
stuck in. Seeing them speak without actually being
able to watch their mouths move, paired with the clarity
of the looped dialogue, was really wonderful.
Ghost Six gives Baltar an important and
fascinating key: "Cylon psychology is based on
projection -- it's how they choose to see the world
around them. The only difference... is you choose to
see me." We find out later from Rebel Six that "how
they choose to see the world around them" is quite
literal. They sort of have mental holodeck abilities,
or every hall is a holodeck grid to which they're all
connected, and they can change their surroundings at
whim. So Rebel Six pictures a forest rather than a
redressed ship set. But this has a metaphorical slant
as well, which I think will be much more important
in future: Cylons project, they choose to see things,
rather than actually observe, perhaps? And if Baltar
has some of that ability, how? If Ghost Six is a chip,
as I still think, is she giving him a limited version
of that? Could he cause the Cylons to "see the
world" as he chooses? Or is it the conclusion
even Baltar leaps to, that he himself is one of the
five missing models? (Maybe they're like anti-Klingons
and they have ridged foreheads, causing the smooth-headed
ones no end of embarrassment.) But one of the Simons
comments about disease being an inevitable part of
having taken "human form." Did the other
five choose some other form? And the hybrid who sits
at the living heart of the basestar -- is she one of
the 12? (Although Threena snarls "she doesn't
get a vote.")
Okay, too far afield too soon. Nice new
piano score for the basestar scenes; kudos to the composer.
It's drowsy and heavy and hypnotic and portentious
all at once.
I thought Baltar was having the girls
on when he was talking about his work cross-cataloging
astrometrics with Earth's location, but the scene with
Gaeta seems to show he wasn't. Still, he couldn't have
had that much interest in it while he was president
of the Bunny Patrol, so it's a little convenient that
he remembers and Gaeta figures out the same business
about the pulsars at the same time. (I was also amused
to note the salt-and-pepper-shaker outfits of Threena
and Rebel Six as they play good cop/bad cop with Baltar.)
And why Earth? I think they want to get there before
the Colonials to wipe them out, and destroy whatever
might be left of the 13th colony, rather than having
any real desire to settle there themselves. Besides,
don't they have a home planet already? Where have they
been living the last forty-something years? What do
they need a "new" home for?
I am very pleased to see the pilots who
were out of the cockpit for the last 18 months or so
back on training missions. They've been doing other
things for a year and a half and they need practice.
And no matter how
good Starbuck was, or is, she's still too damn reckless
and she
still refuses to stay in formation. I am astonished
she's
lived as long as she has taking dumbass risks like
that. Yes, she's good enough to bring the dead Viper
in on literally sheer will, but she is a pilot and
a captain and she should know better about staying
where you're expected to be on the XYZ grid. She
is well overdue for some discipline -- which it seems
even she realizes at the end of the ep.
Very annoyed that Lee (whose Viper reads "Major" but
who knows what rank he really is) got to peel off the
latex that fast. Metaphorical softness or not, getting
that ripped that fast from as fat as his body double
was is just not credible. Ah well.
Will Apollo and Starbuck ever get to
be friends again? If Kara pulls herself together,
and Lee is "back in shape," will they be
allowed to get comfortable with each other again? Will
Adama forgive her if she cleans up? I understand the
need for drama, but the love among the extended family
is one of the joys of both Classic BSG and BSG2K, and
I don't want to keep wandering away from it.
Tigh seems to be making friends with
the bottom of every bottle, jar, and glass he sees,
it seems. Sad, but not surprising. He's always been
hard and a little bitter. He's always been fighting,
whatever the enemy is. When he thought Ellen was dead
the first time, he grieved, learned to cope, and found
a new purpose in serving with Adama. But this round
he's had to do some terrible things outside ordinary
warfare,
and no matter how necessary they were at the time,
they were still terrible things. Ellen is truly dead
now -- by his own hand. It's not merely grief but guilt
tearing him apart. And whatever his stoic bravery during
war, during peace he has great difficulty coping. It
took him what, four months? to quit drinking altogether
the first time? We thought we were going to see a suicide
attempt, frankly.
Okay, Kacey is cute and all, but would
she remember Kara from that brief interlude? Feels
convenient again. But it works, allowing us to see
at the end that Kara is choosing the path of responsibility
without having to spell it out for us, so I'll let
it go. (But the actor who plays Anders isn't slated
for more appearances, so it looks like that's still
kaput.)
Maybe I've read too many Classic
Trek novels, but for the scriptures to speak
of space travel and say anything about eyes, beating,
blinking, pulsing, etc. immediately says to me that
they're talking about stars with some sort of recognizable
quantity -- they flicker, they give off radiation,
whatever the plot calls for. The only difficulty
would have been finding which nebula.
Interesting that now Baltar is the one
squalling about "how difficult this is" and
how conflicted he feels, when before it was Rebel Six
whining about "how much I've given up for you." These
two are such a pair, using each other and shrilling
about it the whole while. (The camerawork here, with
the still shots interspersing with the moving ones,
didn't work quite as well as the beach shots, but at
least they were visually interesting.)
Was that a newly-ressurrected Eight/Sharon
making sure all her parts were in place, or does that
model prefer doing tai chi nekkid?
I wonder how good the mental projection
of the Cylons is. On a holodeck, you could never hit
a wall, because the combination of force fields and
transporters would keep shifting you around. But if
Rebel Six took a right in her forest hallway, would
there suddenly be a tree there, or would she bang into
empty air?
I think we can pretty well assume that
Ghost Six is not known to the collective consciousness
-- certainly Rebel Six acts like she doesn't know about
Ghost Six, since Ghost Six has slipped in and out while
Rebel Six was around and Rebel Six doesn't react. The
question still remains whether Ghost Six is an independent
personality who can access Cylon data. (and for the
record, Baltar should have said he was "thinking
out loud," since talking is "out loud" by
definition.)
Athena! :D nice tip of the hat to the
old series, and at last giving the moniker to someone
who actually has a role beyond looking cute and answering
phones (poor Maren Jensen). Plus it gives us something
besides "Sharon" to call the individual Eights
we've come to know and who love human men.
I don't recognize the pilot who's sitting
with Athena :) and Helo, but I have to imagine she's
one who stayed on Galactica and therefore has
come to know this particular Cylon as being on the
Colonials' side. I don't think everyone who was on
New Caprica would hate Athena on sight, but I doubt
any of them would be willing to play cards with her
mere weeks after escaping enslavement. To the credit
of all the pilots, though, most of the nicknames yelled
out -- Digital Dame, Windup Toy, Toaster Bait, Microchip,
Transitor, Titanium-- are affectionate jests, not epithets.
So she seems to have found some kind of place for herself.
The conversation with Starbuck and Tigh
jabbing at the pilots was important -- something I
thought we actually should have seen more of. It shouldn't
have been resolved in these one or two scenes. This
kind of fracture is going on all over the ship as people
reintegrate. Yes, the people on Galactica suffered,
but let's face it, it wasn't the privation and terror
of the people on the ground, and yet the people on
the ground chose to be there. (They didn't choose to
be invaded, however.) But the resentment on both sides
is real, and while it's well-represented here, we should
have seen it in other places and other characters.
The hybrid was a truly fascinating notion.
Since we know that the Raiders have a canine-level
intelligence, I wondered if the baseships had something
similar -- we knew they were alive after Boomer first
flew into one in "Kobol's
Last Gleaming" and
realized she was inside its thoracic cavity. It seems
that while the ship has some amount of bio-matter as
well as metal parts, the brain of it is a fairly coalesced,
if not coherent, personality. She seemed to be sort
of like the Borg Queen, with tubes and wires jacked
into flesh parts, but floating in the tub of mystery
goo that the newly resurrected awaken in. (Although
you'd think she'd be a complete prune by now, after
all these years immersed in liquid.) And of course
it's the woo-woo Leobens who think that the hybrid's
glossolalia
is straight from God's lips to hers.
Baltar is panicking about being forced
to volunteer for the mission to the infected ship.
But in convincing him, Ghost Six has a flaw in her
logic: she says "What are the chances that a human
could catch something that infects a Centurion or a
Raider?" But the High Command just stated that everyone,
all the models, on the basestar, were infected. And
if Athena and Helo proved that humans and Cylons can
interbreed -- that they are enough alike down to a
cellular level -- then it stands to reason that the
chances are very good that whatever infected
the Cylons could infect a human. Unless they prove
that it's the machine and not flesh parts which are
being attacked by the disease, Baltar has every reason
to be nervous. (I'm guessing it's just some ancient
Kobolian flu the Cylons have no antibodies for.)
Jumping seems to be particularly, uh,
enjoyable for the hybrid, don't you think?...
The actors who get to play the various
models must get a kick out of being able to have numerous
dramatic death scenes but still get to come back next
week. Especially Helfer -- how many times has a Six
died now? At least three I can think of.
Why were all the Cylons on the infected
ship barefoot? Was it a hippie commune kind of ship,
or did they access data streams with their toes?
The beacon came into view, and suddenly
I'm thinking of Nomad and
its mission to "sterilize imperfections" and
destroy "biological infestations."
Baltar really has a twisted relationship
with the various Sixes, doesn't he? Loves 'em, abuses
'em, worships 'em, strangles 'em, fears 'em.
Interestingly, the disease manages to
wreak havoc even on those it hasn't infected, as the
High Command splits half a dozen ways arguing what
should be done. Threena complained about the humans
dividing them and destroying their easy agreements,
but this crisis seems to have done the same thing just
as easily.
Adama's speech (and dare) to Starbuck
and Tigh is right on target... just one episode too
soon. This should have been allowed to fester. Having
said that, his ploy was perfect: if you're going to
kill me, just do it cleanly, not by bits and pieces.
And his dig at Kara, saying she's no longer a daughter
to him -- could he have cut her deeper, with just that
sentence? That alone was probably what moved her, not
threatening to toss her off Galactica and out
of the fleet. Kara still has feeling left. But Tigh
doesn't; he's burned out, feeling only pain and guilt
and anger and trying his damnedest to numb it all with
alcohol. So while he has enough honor not to shoot
Adama point-blank (besides having no motive), he has
no reason left to try to live up to Adama's expectations
any more. We were both expecting him to turn the gun
on himself at that moment.
I like that Kara's next two scenes have
no dialogue from her. She stares at herself in the
mirror, and finally chops off her hair. Then, dressed
properly in uniform, she goes to look for Kacey, and
while we see her speak, we can't hear her. It's irrelevant;
we see what she does, and the ache on her face.
What happens if they bring back something
from the infected ship and Athena gets sick? Do they
use her as a test case and create a cure? Do they offer
it to the Cylons in exchange for peace? Threaten them
with the disease as a weapon? Let Athena stay infected
and send her back to the Cylons as a living bomb? I
can't believe Adama would ask her to make that sacrifice,
though -- she's worked too hard and suffered too much
to ask her to turn not merely traitor but mass murderer. |
