BSG: Scar

There's a reason this review has been in the tubes for a while. Actually there are two. One, I'm lazy as all hell, and two, I wanted to get far enough ahead so I wouldn't be caught flat-footed by a repeat of something that happened in my "Black Market" review.

(Just for the record, there is a method to this madness. I'm alternating back and forth between going in almost-order from the beginning of the show, and going in almost-order from the mid-season 2 cliffhanger.)

See, in my "Black Market" review, I said something to the effect of "Starbuck needing to be rescued would be detrimental to her character." I was complaining about the fact that the damsel-in-distress role for the episode was taken by a character we'd never met before and who, as it turns out, dies offscreen at the end of the season (presumably). I did that benefit-of-hindsight thing and said if Starbuck somehow got in over her head with the mob, and Lee had to bail her out, there might be more emotional depth to the show. Then I said what I said about Starbuck not needing rescuing. What I meant was that Starbuck should obviously never be relegated to the damsel-in-distress role in an episode where another character (in this case Lee) has the spotlight. But since I wrote the "Black Market" review the same day I saw it, I had no idea that Starbuck was going to need rescuing in the very next episode, which kind of forced me to eat my words.

So, having gotten all the way up to Season 3's "The Passage" (gee... what was that about putting a familiar face in over her head with the mob?), I'm pretty sure I won't wind up in the same situation with this review.

This is another one of those flashback-to-the-recent-past episodes, which works, I guess. It's getting a tad old and I'm glad to see it pretty much gone after this (see, "pretty much" being the operative term). Anyway, Starbuck and Kat are chasing down a Cylon Raider named Scar, who's the enemy ace. He's killed a lot of people who we meet in the various flashbacks. Their deaths really get to Kat, who pins a picture of one of the pilots' girlfriends on the memorial wall (again, call forward to "The Passage"). She also starts blaming Starbuck, mostly because Starbuck starts doing questionable things like getting blind drunk and nearly frakking Lee.

(Okay, legitimate question: why do I call Kara by her callsign when I call Lee by his first name? Partly because it seems to me like more people call her Starbuck and him Lee. Also, at this point in the series, he's barely in a cockpit anymore; he got to crash an important ship back in "Resurrection Ship," and he won't get back in a Viper until he destroys another important ship in "Exodus, Part II." I guess you can chalk it up to emotional distress and a bullet wound after "Sacrifice." So calling him by his callsign doesn't seem that appropriate.)

Until "Unfinished Business" came along and kind of ruined it (but in the best possible way), this was the best episode for teasing the Kara/Lee relationship, mostly because of their almost-sex-scene. Here, it gets broken off when Lee realizes he's just a substitute for Anders (or at least the audience realizes that; Lee's judgment when it comes to Kara is questionable at best).

But, surprisingly, the real tension is the conflict between Starbuck and Kat. Starbuck's a drunk who let a nugget die in her place because she was too hung-over to fly; Kat's a stim-junkie who put a gazillion divots in the landing deck because she didn't pull herself from the flight roster. Naturally, it's this crack team that gets paired together for the ultimate confrontation with Scar. Kara very nearly engages in a suicide run against Scar, because she's convinced Anders is dead and doesn't see the point in living anymore. But at the last second, she remembers her promise to come back for him, so she breaks away and sets Scar up so Kat can get the kill. Of course, Kat gloats about this and rubs it in Starbuck's face once they get back to Galactica, because, hey, if your superior officer was as frakked-up as Starbuck is, you would act like Kat too.

That said, if I actually had to go through and rank all the Galactica crew in the order I like them from most to least, Kat would probably end up near the bottom (she'd be ahead of Jammer, the only character whose death I actively cheered, but I don't know who else. Oh, Sgt "Don't You Know What an Independent Tribunal Means" Hadrian, and Crashdown, who went all Private Hudson on us the moment his last mission got frakked up). Once the writers found things for Starbuck to do (in other words, from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" on), I really started liking her more, whereas Kat was just a background pilot and a stim-junkie. That was how I felt about her at the time; it's worth pointing out that "Unfinished Business" was a huge blow to Starbuck's standing, and "The Passage" did a fair amount to rehabilitate Kat. But in this episode she seems like an usurper. We don't really expect Starbuck to be killed here, so it's her humiliation - she loses her status as Galactica's top gun to the woman who's been in her face for a while, and to whom she incidentally now owes her life - that creates the payoff for the story.

But then it's at this point that you end up wishing - in a complete 180 turn from Season One and "The Case for Another Pilot" - that there were fewer characters and plotlines now. Starbuck never really has to deal with losing her top gun status, and I'm pretty sure she and Kat only ever fly one more mission together ("The Passage" again). What we do get out of it is Starbuck's regained determination to rescue Anders, which she manages to accomplish before the end of the season.

And also some nifty dogfights. Let's face it, the Cylons are doing an absolutely awful job mopping up the last 49,593 humans in the Universe; we get three-and-a-half battles in Season 2.5 (the "half" basically consists of Galactica and Pegasus running away from New Caprica), and of those three, one ("Resurrection Ship") was instigated by the humans. Blah blah budgetary reasons, it's nice to get an episode with a dogfight that has no stock footage whatsoever. Yay.