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Maybe I'm just a cynical old fart, or
a cold-blooded bitch, or maybe I've watched too many
war movies, but honestly, what is with the wailing
over military expediency? The good of the many over
the good of the few? Sacrifices for the mission? It's
one thing to say "I feel wracked with guilt over
my decision." It's another to say "I feel
wracked with guilt because I followed my orders and
protected the mission to preserve the existence of
my species." Tigh and Roslin have it right. Soldiers
are expendable, higher-ups make decisions, and the
Cylons didn't commit genocide
over one tiny act.
I laughed when Roslin suggested putting
Baltar's portrait in the bathroom, because I would
have said the same thing!
I was surprised that Starbuck herself
didn't pick up on the idea that the third Raider, the
one being chased by the other two, might have been
a non-Cylon intelligence. The enemy of my enemy is
my friend, after all. And for all that she gasped later
on that the two Cylon Raiders didn't nail Bulldog's
Raider, she and Kat -- the two Top Guns, the crackest
of the crack pilots on Galactica -- sure do
take their sweet time about lining up a shot on a supposed
enemy vessel which is headed directly for their home
ship! Not to mention those two chasing Raiders blew
up reeeeeeeeally easily, didn't they?
Good to see M.A.N.T.I.S. is
still getting work. (Don't bother writing me about Alias;
we never watched it.) Actually Carl Lumbly did a good
job. He took a macguffin character and inhabited him
with some believable dimension and emotion.
So did Cottle take Baltar's magical Cylon
detector and really streamline it into a ten-minute
procedure, or did he find some other marker which shows
up on a cell stain or something? He announces to Adama
that Bulldog is human, not Cylon, but Baltar's contraption
took something like 12 or 15 hours to work, if I recall
correctly. Or is that supposed to indicate that 12
hours have passed and Bulldog still looks like he's
afraid someone's about to whack him upside the head
with a spanner?
They did bleep Adama! Bulldog makes a
joke about "the accommodations" on the baseship,
and Adama says he was worried the Cylons had "beaten
the bulls--- attitude out of you." Granted that
I'm bleeping the word myself, but I'm just a touch
surprised to see it cut out on screen.
Adama does, sort of, admit to what he
did to Roslin and in front of Bulldog, straight off.
He says it's a bad call. Why isn't that sufficient
for him in reality? He didn't come up with the orders
to spy on the Cylons (as we later find out). It wasn't
his tactical choice. It was a black ops mission, meant
to get a sense of the strength of a completely unknown
enemy, to determine how much danger the Colonies -- seventy billion people,
let's not forget -- might be in. Why does the loss
of one man agonize him so?
It's a measure of the trust between Roslin
and Adama that she does just let him say "Trust
me on this, I'll clean up my own mess." She figures
that for the moment, he doesn't gauge it enough of
a threat to have to reveal it to her, and if she needs
to, she can come back and clean his clock another day.
She isn't happy about it, but she lets it go because
she trusts him not to hurt her or the Fleet.
Hey look, a THREEsome! {rimshot} Okay
really, was that the result of Baltar's febrile
rantings? That Threena takes both him and Rebel Six
to bed? (I guess she's forgiven Rebel Six for whacking
her last life.) Is he working his way through the various
models to gain their support? We know the Brother Cys
like to shtup humans, and at least one of the Leobens
is interested, but I think Doral might be a challenge.
I wonder if repeated downloads have a
cumulative effect on the Cylon psyche. Is Threena's
apparently growing fascination with death, or the pause
between lives, related to just having downloaded recently?
The one Brother Cy whined about his increasing headache,
and Rebel Six said she felt disjointed when she first
downloaded on Caprica proper, but Buckin' Leoben was
either unaffected or already psychotic so it couldn't
scramble his little brain any further. Threena has
the centurion shoot her after her startling dream about
the Colonials executing her. Has she done this cycle
before? Recently?
WHY do the Cylons have this fetish for
SPOTLIGHTS on the floor under everything?! And what
attraction would an enormous four-poster Victorian
bed have for robots? (Nice camera work preserving the
modesty of all the actors in that scene, I must point
out.)
We veeeery briefly suspected Adama might
have deliberately sent Bulldog to Tigh, knowing Tigh's
state of mind and capacity, so that Adama wouldn't
have to confess himself, but Adama isn't the type.
If he has to deny something, he knows why, and it's
not out of cowardice. If he felt that Bulldog should
know, then like he did with Lee, he would just say
it straight up.
And speaking of that scene with Lee:
it's rare on BSG that the characters act so strangely
that I'm thrown out of the story. This was one of those
times. We're practically back to first season, Lee
behaving wet behind the ears and Adama wretched with
angst over his decisions. These men are tougher than
that. They've been through hell in the last two years.
The tears made no sense (not that Olmos's performance
wasn't marvelous, but I didn't buy the why of it).
Lee's protestations were hollow and had no experience
behind them. (Then he says "You had no choice," and
we yell "Drink!")
And why is Lee so damn surprised that
the Admiralty knew the Cylons were out there? He commanded
a battlestar for over a year. Can he still be that naïve?
I know the audience doesn't know the story of the Cylon
wars, but shouldn't Lee? He's an officer and the son
of a high-ranking officer. Even if they had a falling-out,
that was over Zak, and Adama has been in the service
longer than Lee's been alive. He should have a much
better grasp of tactics and long-range planning than
that. The Admiralty wanted to do their jobs: to protect
humanity. If the Cylons were massing an army on the
Colonials' doorsteps (and they were), the Admiralty
needed to know that. Even if one lone stray
ship could provoke a war -- and even the Romulans forgave
a goodly number of transgressions, given the alternative
-- wouldn't it be better to know that their
enemy is that trigger-happy and to shore up defenses
for it, rather than having a tourist ship set off a
conflagration? Adama's recon pilot did not set off
the attacks; Roslin is right. The Cylons didn't spend
forty years growing daisies and baking pies and suddenly
because one single-person ship crosses an imaginary
line in the sand decide more or less en masse to retool
their entire society into weaponry so they could wipe
out seventy billion of their former masters.
This was forty years in the planning -- possibly conceived
of before original Cylons fled and started the first
war. We don't know the cause of the original conflict.
But when the Cylons escaped, it was not merely to flee
and hope they never saw humans again. They deliberately
took on human form despite its flaws, as one of the
Simons pointed out in "Torn." They
planned this retributionary genocide since they day
they left, and probably before that. Bulldog wasn't
even the straw that broke the camel's back. If he had
been, if this was a startling new development for the
Cylons, wouldn't they have questioned the hell out
of him? Wasn't Baltar with Caprica Six on Caprica for
a few years at the time of the attacks? It took her
a while to get into the defense mainframe and
mess around with things. This was not impulsive, emotional
flailing around. This was planned for a long time,
with much malice aforethought. Bulldog might have been
interrogated (and conveniently doesn't remember it)
for updated tactical information which Caprica Six
might not have had, or for independent corroboration.
I'm not saying whatever the Colonials did to spark
the first Cylon war was justified. But slaughtering seventy
billion people isn't right either.
I did like how the two scenes interspersed
-- we didn't have to hear the story told twice to get
both sets of reactions.
What was Threena seeing and reaching
for in her vision? It sort of looked like a person.
Was that supposed to be the Cylon god? What did the
six pillars represent?
Bulldog's reaction to Adama -- beating
the crap out of him and trying to kill him -- only
makes sense if we think the Cylons are somehow behind
it. Because a soldier on a black-ops mission should not hold
it personally against his CO that he was left behind
for the greater good. That's the whole meaning of "black
operations." If he's captured, the Fleet doesn't
know him. He's a non-entity. James Bond is a black-ops
agent. That's why M commented on his cyanide pill in Die
Another Day -- that kind of soldier is in fact
supposed to end up dead so the enemy doesn't have the
chance to torture him for information. Yes, it's ugly
and brutal and nobody wants to die, but is that not
how these "secret" organizations work? Adama
may have trusted Bulldog's piloting skills, but either
he's brainwashed by the Cylons or he was never correctly
briefed about the nature of this mission to begin with
(which would be Adama's fault, and that is something
he could legitimately feel guilty over).
Tigh clobbers Bulldog with the pipe and
then yells "Stay down!" and all I could think
was "Sit! Stay! Bad Bulldog! No biscuit!" :D
Looks like Tigh finally bottomed out,
and has decided to try climbing back up again. Good
for him. This is the kind of "elapsed time" I
was talking about with Starbuck and Tigh fomenting
dissension among the crew -- it didn't have to go on
forever or be a major plot point, but this feels like
the proper amount of time has gone by for Tigh to finish
wallowing in his guilt and to try to start getting
back to normality.
Can I just say again how I love McDonnell?
:) And Roslin has another good point about the Admiralty
wanting "a war" -- let's not forget that
even though she was Secretary of Education, she was
in Adar's administration, and she was his girlfriend,
so she may well have had access to high-level intelligence.
Obviously the Admiralty had no idea what they were
up against, and if they did want a war, it would have
been one on "their terms" which they could
finish off quickly and decisively to eliminate the
nagging, uncertain threat.
I had a brief thought that Roslin might
bust Adama back down to Commander, which would have
been amusing. But I rather like the idea that she made
him get up there and grin through his guilt, and endure
the accolades he believes he hasn't earned, to serve
the people. Since his transgression is all in his head,
his punishment will be there too. I think every president
should be a teacher.
The question still remains: why did the
Cylons let Bulldog escape? Clearly it was permitted
on some level. His story is awfully tidy. There was
no reason for the door of his cell to be so conveniently
open, and Starbuck was right about the Raiders shooting
like Classic BSG Cylons. How could the Cylons know
about the nature of the mission, or how about how Adama
chose to shoot down one of his own men to hide the Valkyrie's
position? I hope we get some answers and this isn't just
loosely dropped. |
