BSG: "Water"

This is another case where I should point out that there's not a Battlestar Galactica episode I actually hate. That said, if I had to rank all the Season 1 episodes, this one would be pretty much at the bottom. I'd say "it has its share of flaws," but that would imply that the others do as well, and frankly, some of them don't.

The episode begins with an extended scene of Boomer, dripping wet and apparently unsure of where she is or how she got there. As she goes to change out of her flight suit, she discovers that there's a bomb in her bag. When she tries to put it back in the small arms locker, she discovers that six other bombs are missing. Shortly thereafter, five explosions go off in Galactica's water tank, thus precipitating the crisis that requires all that slave labor in "Bastille Day."

We the audience know that Boomer's a Cylon, but she doesn't know it yet, and neither do the others. This includes Chief Tyrol, who's been frakking her for a while (so he never noticed her glowing spine; that kind of limits the positions they used, doesn't it? Then again, that's not the only glowing spine the Chief failed to notice) and tries to cover for her. Unfortunately, Tyrol is no Gaius Baltar, so Boomer flips her lid when she finds out what he considers to be "help."

Meanwhile, Boomer and her new ECO, Crashdown, get sent off to go check out a planetary system for water. They find it, but there's a bomb under Boomer's seat, and her Cylon programming won't let her notice the water, or it will let her notice the water but is trying to get her to blow up her ship, or something... But then she does notice the water, and her ship doesn't blow up. I'll be honest, the reason I've been dragging my heels on this review has everything to do with this scene, because it's the one time in the first three seasons of the show where I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on. (According to the Battlestar Wiki, she's trying to report that she's found water while keeping her sleeper programming from blowing herself up. Yeah, that was really clear.)

They come back, and Tyrol again applies his special brand of "help" by giving the last bomb to the master-at-arms. Sharon again flips out, and then she storms out in a way that suggests that her sleeper personality has been activated and she's going off to do some other sabotage.

Ha ha, no, the next episode has nothing to do with her.

Frankly, the weak points of the show generally have to do with conveying the thought processes of the Cylon sleeper agents. "Crossroads, Part II" does it significantly better, but still not perfectly. Of course, "Crossroads" has so much else going for it, including a six-minute speech by Lee, and of course the music. "Water," not so much.

So between my condemnation of this episode and an offhand comment in the miniseries review, it might sound like I'm ragging on Grace Park. That's not really what I'm trying to do, and she does get better things to do later on (though as "Athena," not so much as "Boomer"). Is she capable of carrying an entire episode? Well, given that this was (at least through the end of Season 3) her one chance to do so, I'd say the jury's still out. The closest she gets after this are her pivotal scenes in "Home, Part II" and "Rapture," both of which are considerably better than this.