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Surprisingly predictable, and not as
daring as we might have come to expect from Moore and
Co., given the subject matter -- but given that most
of the daring or unpredictable choices would have left
us with Short Show Syndrome, I can't truly blame the
writers. Still.
Before the basestar blew up, we were
wondering if the Colonials could reanimate it like
they did with Starbuck's pet Raider and use it against
the Cylons...
While it makes sense for the Colonials
to bring their loyal Cylon officer on this away mission,
if all the Cylons themselves are lying around in various
states of dead, shouldn't anyone be wondering if it's
something
which could be transmitted to Athena? It's not just
because we as the audience know it's a virus; it would
be something I'd consider in any scenario -- when you
have a bunch of dead people with no obvious marks of
weapons injury, you have to think of another source
of danger, like a pathogen (or possibly computer-borne,
given that the Cylons are machines). If it can affect
them, it could affect Athena. A line or two of dialogue
might have addressed the concern even if they overrode
it for sake of information-gathering, which I would
understand.
Okay, Apollo is confirmed as a Major
(someone shouts to two redshirts "cover the Major").
Just wondering. I like keeping track of those details.
Convenient that one of each of the five
major models survives, isn't it? :) Sorry, sometimes
the seams show and we realize we're watching a TV program.
Nothing wrong with it.
The dying Eight calls Athena "traitor," but
then tells her to save herself... interesting divided
loyalties. Or is "Traitor" what they're calling
her now?
{Pause TiVo for speculation and discussion.}
evay: Athena's going to get the virus, so
now they're going to have to find a cure.
Moogie: No, they're going to send her back to the Cylons to infect
everyone -- or kill her so she spreads it to the Resurrection Ship.
evay: If she does resurrect and starts spreading it -- well, that
assumes they're going to let her resurrect --
Moogie: -- because they'll immediately know it's her, it's Sharon --
evay: Right, they could box her -- but if she does, she'll know Hera
is alive.
Moogie: Does Helo know?
evay: No, of course not, he thought he was spreading her ashes, remember?
What could Athena do, grab the baby and try to escape back to the Colonials?
Would she even want to? Could she, if she had the virus when she resurrected?
That would be cold, for her to resurrect and know her daughter is alive
but not be able to touch her because she knows she has this virus.
{Resume TiVo.}
Ooh, I forgot to check if it started
last week, but they went back to the S2 credits ("in
search of a home called Earth") and are down to
41,000-odd survivors. That's a loss of seven or eight
thousand, isn't it? dag.
I really love the creepy new piano theme
for Baltar. I do not love the repeated fade of camera
angles in and out.
I find it amusing that it's the Cylons
who demand to know how long Baltar has been planning
to betray them when in this instance he actually isn't,
but the Colonials never twigged to Baltar's deceptions
even though he was working against them since before
the initial assault on the Colonies.
Ghost Six's presence and her words are
quite interesting in this outing. If anything, this
is the first time when one really could make an argument
that she's a fragment of his own personality, trying
to protect himself against the torture. She coaxes,
cajoles, seduces, distracts, shouts at him things to
shout back at Threena -- anything to block out the
torment he's being subjected to. If she is a chip,
she's definitely working against the will of the collective
here. I'd find it a leeeetle hard to swallow that there
would be that many layers and counterlayers of manipulation,
that the chip would be working against Threena in order
to work with her in the long run... but hey, who knows.
At any rate, the idea that a victim of torture can
split his psyche so that only half of it is brainwashed
or abused has been floated before (I recall it from
the Sword of Truth series of books by Terry
Goodkind, although I've forgotten which one right now),
and it's nicely used here.
Now, it's after the first round, before
Ghost Six has really said much, that Baltar looks at
Rebel Six and tells her he loves her. At that moment,
it seems like he's forgiving her for what Threena is
doing to him. But later, when he's howling Ghost Six's
words ("I believe in you, don't stop, I love you
with all my heart!") at Threena, it utterly throws
her, to the point where she has to stop torturing him
because she's so completely befuddled -- is he god-touched?
brain-damaged? a saint? insane? So again, did Baltar
see that his own words to Rebel Six had an effect on
her and ran with the idea, or was it an unintended
side effect of Ghost Six's distractions that he was
yelling sweet nothings at Threena?
Looks like Athena is definitely not living
in her old cell, if the ailing five prisoners have
been moved into it.
Okay, it wasn't "the flu," but
it was the same idea, as I predicted last week: lymphacytic
encephalitis. While the real
disease as we know it is rarely fatal, I can buy
the idea that something one group has developed an
immunity to can still be deadly to another group. Although
if the Cylons based their biology on ours, wouldn't
you think they would have copied that handy li'l genome?
In the tactical discussion, Lee asks "the
ugly question" of whether they should keep the
Cylon prisoners alive. He says they're ready to die,
because "Karl's wife" noted which prayer
they were saying. Karl is Helo's real name, of course,
but what's with referring to Athena that way? Does
Lee not see her as a person, or is this for this episode
only, meant to underscore his position in the dramatis
personae?
Now the Colonials know that Baltar is
alive (didn't occur to me that they didn't know that),
and that he is working for the enemy. No matter what
he tells them about Hera, I can't see them taking him
back. At least they're warned that the Cylons are also
looking for Earth, so they're not traveling unawares.
To genocide or not to genocide? At first
I was leaning towards Helo's position -- do the actions
of the leaders justify killing off the individuals
who have the potential to be Boomer or Athena? -- but
let's recall, those leaders, who were acting if not
completely then mostly in agreement with everyone (not
quite the Borg collective, but not a democracy by any
means), chose to slaughter seventy billion Colonials.
And Roslin reminds us that they weren't satisfied with
that, but came chasing after the fifty thousand survivors.
And weren't quite satisfied with that, but spent
a few months torturing most of them on a personal level.
Once again, we don't know what launched the original
Cylon war/rebellion, but at some point you have to
have enough vengeance. The Colonials were fleeing,
perfectly happy never to see a Cylon again. The Cylons
were rebuilding the structures on the Colonies and
could have lived there, if they chose. This relentless
pursuit makes them actively dangerous, an enemy you
can't even parley with. My second thought was that
rather than using the virus for genocide, they could
make an offer/threat to the Cylon High Command: we
have this bioweapon, and it doesn't affect us. You
will leave us the hell alone or we will use
it. It isn't quite the same thing which Picard faced
when returning Hugh/Three of Five to the Borg with
his individuality intact (a crappy bit of writing,
given what we later learn of the Borg in VOY) and is
a bit closer to what Janeway offered
the Borg against 8472. But, of course, any answer which
actually ends the enmity between Cylon and human once
and for all, for good or ill, is the end of the show,
so we have to go the more conventional route of either
not attempting genocide or the attempt not working.
Is that a photo of Roslin and Billy on
her desk? that's sweet.
Lee's argument "they're not human,
they were built" is felgercarb. Software-based,
hardware-based, flesh-based, life is life. If the Colonials
embark on genocide in self-defense, it's because they're
cornered, not because the Cylons are built rather than
born. Of course, Helo's completely insane assertion "they
tried to live with us on New Caprica" is beyond
absurd. That's not the reason to not kill them
either. (I love Roslin's icy yet somehow teacher-like
rebuke -- "you would serve your Fleet well if
you would remember that Cylons are a mortal threat
to the survival of the human race." Like she's
disappointed in a good pupil as well as disciplining
an officer. McDonnell is really chilling.)
I was almost expecting Baltar to stop
reacting to the nerve induction or whatever it was
Threena was doing to him; I guess the split-consciousness
was more interesting on a dramatic level. By the end
he was completely off at Key Largonewiththewind. I
like that he tried reasoning against her, but it seemed
that what finally got her was his "blind" response.
He seemed to her eyes to be in "forgive them,
for they know not what they do" mode, and then
in an ecstasy which she couldn't touch, which shamed
and confused her. I don't think she was swayed by his
logic and reason.
Can the mother really get immunity to
something from the fetus's antibodies? any reader with
a medical background care to share if that's feasible
or just mediTECH mumbo-jumbo?
Does Athena still harbor a bit of the
belief that "maybe humans don't deserve to survive
as a species" as she told Adama back in "Resurrection
Ship part 2"? We aren't all as tolerant as
we'd like to believe.
I thought perhaps Athena might die in
the dogfight with the Raiders while Helo was "saving" the
prisoners, as sort of karmic payback for disobeying
orders...
Is Helo going to be punished for what
he did -- taken off XO duty, maybe? or is Adama completely
going to bury this? I see why he would, in a way; the
damage is done, Helo had a certain amount of moral
high ground to his argument, and Roslin pardoned everyone
who might have collaborated on New Caprica so it's
not like there isn't precedent. But that would be a
way to get Tigh back in at some point if he ever stops
drinking.
What salvation is achieved here? Helo
saves the conscience of the humans from bloodied hands?
The Cylons are saved from biological warfare? Baltar
is saved from torture? |
