The President's been having wacky dreams, while a former flight-instructor with a bad leg and a serious attitude problem gets to torture a man who keeps spouting off religious babble.
...Man, this is a million miles away from the original series, isn't it?
There's not a lot to summarize here. They find another copy of Leoben and send Starbuck to interrogate him for some reason. He messes with her head for a while in between several near-drowning experiences, all the while claiming that he's hidden a nuke somewhere in the fleet. Then Roslin shows up and offers him a pardon, at which point he says that there is no nuke and that Adama is a Cylon. The President then kindly shows the tortured toaster to the airlock. Starbuck, visibly shaken, prays for his soul.
So anyway, the first time you see this episode, it comes off as some sort of statement on the effectiveness (or lack thereof) of torture. Depending on how much attention you pay to Leoben's ramblings, you may or may not (but my money's on not) grasp the real importance of this episode: this is the first encounter between Starbuck and Leoben. Also, the first mention of Starbuck's abusive mother, which comes from Leoben, who should really have no way of knowing this. (But, as we'll later discover, Leoben is all sorts of special.)
But maybe not, because we know that a) the writers were making things up as they went along, and b) Katee Sackhoff specifically requested that 3.17, "Maelstrom," be re-written to give her another enounter with Leoben. It's possible that the entire Starbuck-Leoben thing was thought up on the fly later on.
The significant things we get from this episode: Starbuck is going to find Kobol, Kobol will lead them to Earth. Fair enough, it's probable that they'd worked out the plot all the way to 2.7, "Home, Part 2" by this point. Also, Roslin's having visions which will tie directly into "The Hand of God," "Kobol's Last Gleaming," et seq.
Meanwhile, on Caprica, C-Boomer, having slept with Helo, now goes rogue and de-rails whatever last vestiges of the Cylon "plan" there were. And on Galactica, Baltar finds out that G-Boomer is a Cylon, but decides not to tell anyone, thus directly setting up the end of "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down," when he refuses to divulge whether or not Ellen's a Cylon and let the fandom stew over that question for the next two years (cf. 3.4, "Exodus, Part 2").
Insight from The Plan: Leoben intercepted Starbuck's wireless transmissions from "Act of Contrition" at the very latest (both because we see him listening to those transmissions and because she was out of action after that point). He also raved to Number One about how she was able to fly a Raider in "You Can't Go Home Again." (So, wait, does this mean Novacek is special too? cf. 3.08, "Hero.") Even without The Plan, it's clear that his obsession with Starbuck began before the events of this episode; The Plan just makes it more clear.
So it's a character piece with a political edge, which is a fairly accurate description of Battlestar Galactica as a whole. It appears on first blush to be a fairly standalone piece with the description I used at the top, but either this was never the plan or the writers liked the ideas in this episode enough to build on them further.
I will just say that I still hadn't really warmed to Leoben as a character the first time I saw this. Until Number Four showed up, Leoben had the role of the "creepy Cylon straight out of Blade Runner." (It's worth pointing out that Leoben's creepyness stems from his religious philosophy and his obsession with Starbuck, whereas Four's creepyness comes from the character's reliance on fact over faith and the character's clinical detatchment from everything. Except in The Plan.)
Side note, regarding these reviews: from now on, I'm going to do my best to leave vague hints but not actually spoil anything that happens in episodes after the one I'm reviewing (for example, leaving Number Four's identity and gender unmentioned in the paragraph above, and the vague hints about "Maelstrom" and "Exodus"). I'll try not to contradict any revelation in Season 4, but for the sake of the story I may occasionally say something slightly misleading in my analyses. Also, regarding the films: Razor is absolutely canonical. The Plan is a nice effort to tie up loose ends, but it smacks of retcon (because it, um, is), so I'll draw on it where it's convenient and ignore it everywhere else.
Friday, August 12, 2011
Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Admin: Battlestar Galactica Reviews
Some of these were written during my 2021-22 rewatch; others were written during or shortly after my 2011 initial watch. For Season 1, the only new reviews are 1.9 and 1.12-13. For Season 2, new reviews are marked with a *. For Season 3, the old reviews are 3.7, 3.10-12, and 3.16-17. For Season 4, the only old review is 4.12.
Season 1
1.1: 33
1.3: Bastille Day
1.4: Act of Contrition
1.6: Litmus
1.8: Flesh and Bone
1.9: Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down
1.10: The Hand of God
1.11: Colonial Day
1.12: Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1 (you can find a mini-review of both parts under "essays")
1.13: Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2
Season 2
2.1: Scattered*
2.2: Valley of Darkness
2.3: Fragged*
2.4: Resistance*
2.5: The Farm
2.6: Home, Part 1*
2.7: Home, Part 2*
2.8: Final Cut
2.9: Flight of the Phoneix*
2.10: Pegasus
2.11: Resurrection Ship, Part 1* (an old review, of sorts, can be found under "essays")
2.12: Resurrection Ship, Part 2* (ditto)
2.13: Epiphanies
2.14: Black Market
2.15: Scar
2.16: Sacrifice
2.17: The Captain's Hand
2.18: Downloaded*
2.19: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 1*
2.20: Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2*
Season 3
3.1: Occupation
3.2: Precipice
3.3: Exodus, Part 1
3.4: Exodus, Part 2
3.5: Collaborators
3.6: Torn
3.7: A Measure of Salvation (and addendum)
3.8: Hero (TNG 3.10: "The Defector")
3.9: Unfinished Business
3.10: The Passage
3.11: The Eye of Jupiter
3.12: Rapture
3.13: Taking a Break from All Your Worries
3.14: The Woman King
3.15: A Day in the Life
3.16: Dirty Hands
3.17: Maelstrom
3.18: The Son Also Rises
3.19: Crossroads, Part 1
3.20: Crossroads, Part 2
Season 4
Essays and mini-arc reviews:
The Quest for Caprica ("Kobol's Last Gleaming" mini-review and Helo's subplot through "The Farm")
A 2011 review of Resurrection Ship, Parts 1 and 2 that spends more time poking holes in the myth arc than reviewing the episode.
BSG: Litmus
The moral of the story, kids, is if your boss is too blinded by love to notice his robot girlfriend's glowing spine, don't lie under oath for him. It's not worth it.
The other moral of the story is that if your name is William Adama, you don't have to worry about the authority of independent tribunals. You can just call them witch hunts and then get your goons to arrest the chief investigator. Yay!
So basically this episode establishes the fact that marines will always, always obey the orders of the highest-ranking figure in their immediate vicinity, regardless of standing orders to the contrary (see also "Resistance" and "The Captain's Hand").
The story in a nutshell: there's another Number Five in the fleet that's been laying low all this time, only to surface and blow himself up now in a completely noncritical area. (If The Plan is to be believed, this particular Five is a blithering idiot, but he did suceed in kicking off a witch hunt, which is more than, oh, the other Two, the One, the Six, or even the Three managed to accomplish.) Hell, certain members of the Final Five have inadvertantly done more damage to the crew's morale than any self-aware Cylon infiltrator...
The blame seems to center on Chief Tyrol, whom Sgt. Hadrian suspects of being a Cylon agent. (So... it's safe to say that Hadrian was one of the mutineers, then.) The crew is lying for the chief, because he still hasn't stopped frakking his robot (and more importantly, officer) girlfriend. However, nobody bothered to check their stories beforehand, so everything quickly goes to hell. (Moral number three: always coordinate your lies! No wonder the Cylon models all only use one name each, except for Six. "I'm not Natalie, you idiot, I'm Caprica, whoops now everyone's looking at us funny," etc.)
So one guy, Socinus, takes the fall, and the Chief has to go out there on that deck, knowing that one of his men is in the brig because he couldn't keep his fly zipped, and the Chief breaks things off with Boomer because apparently he can keep his fly zipped. We just had Adama blow his lid in the previous episode when told to call off the SAR for Starbuck, and now he gives the Chief a masterful dressing-down; much more of this, Bill, and you could lose your father-figure status and have a mutiny on your hands...
But that's not until much, much later. Anyway, this is a lot better-paced than "Water" was, and there's no need to internalize the struggle here. So even though "Litmus" is probably my second-least-favorite episode of Season One, it's still pretty frakking good.
The other moral of the story is that if your name is William Adama, you don't have to worry about the authority of independent tribunals. You can just call them witch hunts and then get your goons to arrest the chief investigator. Yay!
So basically this episode establishes the fact that marines will always, always obey the orders of the highest-ranking figure in their immediate vicinity, regardless of standing orders to the contrary (see also "Resistance" and "The Captain's Hand").
The story in a nutshell: there's another Number Five in the fleet that's been laying low all this time, only to surface and blow himself up now in a completely noncritical area. (If The Plan is to be believed, this particular Five is a blithering idiot, but he did suceed in kicking off a witch hunt, which is more than, oh, the other Two, the One, the Six, or even the Three managed to accomplish.) Hell, certain members of the Final Five have inadvertantly done more damage to the crew's morale than any self-aware Cylon infiltrator...
The blame seems to center on Chief Tyrol, whom Sgt. Hadrian suspects of being a Cylon agent. (So... it's safe to say that Hadrian was one of the mutineers, then.) The crew is lying for the chief, because he still hasn't stopped frakking his robot (and more importantly, officer) girlfriend. However, nobody bothered to check their stories beforehand, so everything quickly goes to hell. (Moral number three: always coordinate your lies! No wonder the Cylon models all only use one name each, except for Six. "I'm not Natalie, you idiot, I'm Caprica, whoops now everyone's looking at us funny," etc.)
So one guy, Socinus, takes the fall, and the Chief has to go out there on that deck, knowing that one of his men is in the brig because he couldn't keep his fly zipped, and the Chief breaks things off with Boomer because apparently he can keep his fly zipped. We just had Adama blow his lid in the previous episode when told to call off the SAR for Starbuck, and now he gives the Chief a masterful dressing-down; much more of this, Bill, and you could lose your father-figure status and have a mutiny on your hands...
But that's not until much, much later. Anyway, this is a lot better-paced than "Water" was, and there's no need to internalize the struggle here. So even though "Litmus" is probably my second-least-favorite episode of Season One, it's still pretty frakking good.
Friday, July 22, 2011
BSG: "You Can't Go Home Again"
As I sat down to watch this episode for the first time, I wasn't really expecting that much. I figured Kara would get back to Galactica and the whole "hey, remember that time you killed my brother?" thing would pretty much blow over.
In a nutshell, that's what happens, but summarizing the episode just like that is like saying Star Wars is all about a couple of walking tropes rescuing a princess from a guy in a silly helmet. It's true, but it doesn't do the story any justice.
So at the end of the previous episode, Kara got herself shot down because taking on eight Cylon Raiders is a lot less of a daunting task than trying to look Adama in the eye once he's figured out you killed his son. She survives, but before she can do too much, her knee gets smashed up and she has to hobble around for the rest of the season. In fact, there's even some doubt later on about whether she'll ever be able to fly again.
It turns out the answer is "yes." Not only will she fly a Viper again, eventually, she'll actually fly something in this very episode. Wandering around on the planet's surface, she finds the Raider that she shot down. It's intact, aside from a bullet hole in its head, so Kara climbs inside, scoops its brain out, and hijacks its body. Yes, these things are organic. Try to imagine this from the Cylon perspective. (Actually, we're still a full season and a half away from the first Cylon POV episode, and at this point they're still either faceless baddies, sex bombs, or sleeper agents, so seeing things from their point of view isn't too high on anyone's list.)
Meanwhile, the Galactica crew has used up an insane amount of fuel trying to rescue Kara, and it's really insightful seeing just how little of the planet they've been able to scan. They have DRADIS, which is basically radar, but they don't have sensors or scanners or anything that can easily detect life on the planet. It's a minor point, but it's yet one more difference between this show and the various Trek incarnations.
Roslin's annoyed about how much fuel they're using, especially once Starbuck's forty-six hours of air run out. So with extreme reluctance, Adama and Lee eventually concede and abandon the search-and-rescue attempt. Adama, in the episode's best scene, tells Lee that if it had been him [Lee] on the planet's surface, they would never leave. Lee is so overwhelmed by what constitutes an emotional outburst from his father that he magically teleports down to the hangar deck in time to intercept a Cylon Raider that has come out of nowhere.
Lee and the Raider (which Starbuck has commandeered) play tag for a minute before Starbuck gets him to see that she's written her callsign on the underside of the Raider's wings. Now, the reveal is pretty fantastic, but the underside of the wing is just about the least visible place on the Raider's entire body. (Okay, Starbuck had a bum leg, maybe she wasn't up to crawling around on top of it, but really, it seems to have been done that way for a dramatic effect.)
So, having very narrowly avoided shooting her down, Lee escorts Starbuck into the hangar, with orders to shoot her if she does anything unexpected. Now, 1) this is Starbuck we're talking about, so Adama should know better, and 2) this isn't the last time this exact scenario is going to play out. It's just that next time, she's going to be in a Viper instead of a Raider. Talk about all this happening before, and all of this happening again. Still, the reveal is handled pretty differently both times (though the music is undeniably cooler the second time).
Everyone celebrates the capture of Kara's new toy. Also, they celebrate her return, and, as predicted, Adama pretty much shrugs of the whole "You got Zak killed" thing.
Even though the ending was kind of predictable, this was still a great episode. As someone once said, it's not the destination but the journey that matters.
In a nutshell, that's what happens, but summarizing the episode just like that is like saying Star Wars is all about a couple of walking tropes rescuing a princess from a guy in a silly helmet. It's true, but it doesn't do the story any justice.
So at the end of the previous episode, Kara got herself shot down because taking on eight Cylon Raiders is a lot less of a daunting task than trying to look Adama in the eye once he's figured out you killed his son. She survives, but before she can do too much, her knee gets smashed up and she has to hobble around for the rest of the season. In fact, there's even some doubt later on about whether she'll ever be able to fly again.
It turns out the answer is "yes." Not only will she fly a Viper again, eventually, she'll actually fly something in this very episode. Wandering around on the planet's surface, she finds the Raider that she shot down. It's intact, aside from a bullet hole in its head, so Kara climbs inside, scoops its brain out, and hijacks its body. Yes, these things are organic. Try to imagine this from the Cylon perspective. (Actually, we're still a full season and a half away from the first Cylon POV episode, and at this point they're still either faceless baddies, sex bombs, or sleeper agents, so seeing things from their point of view isn't too high on anyone's list.)
Meanwhile, the Galactica crew has used up an insane amount of fuel trying to rescue Kara, and it's really insightful seeing just how little of the planet they've been able to scan. They have DRADIS, which is basically radar, but they don't have sensors or scanners or anything that can easily detect life on the planet. It's a minor point, but it's yet one more difference between this show and the various Trek incarnations.
Roslin's annoyed about how much fuel they're using, especially once Starbuck's forty-six hours of air run out. So with extreme reluctance, Adama and Lee eventually concede and abandon the search-and-rescue attempt. Adama, in the episode's best scene, tells Lee that if it had been him [Lee] on the planet's surface, they would never leave. Lee is so overwhelmed by what constitutes an emotional outburst from his father that he magically teleports down to the hangar deck in time to intercept a Cylon Raider that has come out of nowhere.
Lee and the Raider (which Starbuck has commandeered) play tag for a minute before Starbuck gets him to see that she's written her callsign on the underside of the Raider's wings. Now, the reveal is pretty fantastic, but the underside of the wing is just about the least visible place on the Raider's entire body. (Okay, Starbuck had a bum leg, maybe she wasn't up to crawling around on top of it, but really, it seems to have been done that way for a dramatic effect.)
So, having very narrowly avoided shooting her down, Lee escorts Starbuck into the hangar, with orders to shoot her if she does anything unexpected. Now, 1) this is Starbuck we're talking about, so Adama should know better, and 2) this isn't the last time this exact scenario is going to play out. It's just that next time, she's going to be in a Viper instead of a Raider. Talk about all this happening before, and all of this happening again. Still, the reveal is handled pretty differently both times (though the music is undeniably cooler the second time).
Everyone celebrates the capture of Kara's new toy. Also, they celebrate her return, and, as predicted, Adama pretty much shrugs of the whole "You got Zak killed" thing.
Even though the ending was kind of predictable, this was still a great episode. As someone once said, it's not the destination but the journey that matters.
Thursday, July 21, 2011
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
BSG: Dirty Hands
Season 3, Episode 16
So apparently somebody from the production office time-traveled from 2006 to 2011, read my blog, realized that I was threatening to write an essay entitled "Is Battlestar Galactica Really a Liberal Show?" and decided to create some evidence for the defense.
Now, we had a bit of that earlier in Season 3, what with the suicide bombings done by our heroes, but then episode five went out of its way to show us that Tigh et al had gone a bit bonkers as far as extreme measures go (though that episode did also kill off my least favorite character, so at least there was that). So the jury's still out on that part. Then, much later in the season, along comes this episode.
Now I should point out right off the bat that I don't hate this episode. I have yet to see a BSG episode I actually hate. I didn't like the ending of "Epiphanies," and while I had my problems with "Black Market," I didn't think it was the awful schlock the fandom seems to think it is. Same with "The Woman King," but that's another story for a different day. The point is, this episode was enjoyable, and, like the Doctor Who serials written by Malcolm Hulke, didn't offend my political sensibilities to the point where I couldn't enjoy it. That said, I am going to pick it apart, just because I can and because there's some stuff in it that deserves to be picked apart.
It's a story where the working class is exploited by the elite. You know, the fighter pilots who put their lives on the line every day (or at least every week if the FX budget is up to it) to keep the Cylons from destroying or enslaving the last remnants of humanity. These tired men and women, some of whom didn't even get to muster out during the New Caprica year, have finally had enough...
Oh, wait. It's not the pilots. It's a bunch of guys we've never seen before, slaving away to create fuel for the aforementioned pilots. Because, you know, even after we have ships capable of making FTL jumps, we'll still use manual labor.
(Now, somebody's going to jump on me for the "manual labor" comment, and say something like "well, you know what happened when they got machines to do their jobs for them? The Cylons happened. That didn't end too well." To which I say we've got machines on assembly lines in the country's remaining production plants, and they aren't about to nuke us all. There's a huge difference between "build me a machine that can process fuel for me" and "build me an A.I. that can beat me at chess, lie about the functional capacity of my ship, read my lips, and remote-pilot a pod so it crashes into me." In the miniseries, Roslin was talking about putting a computerized network on Galactica, so it's not like everyone's a Luddite like Adama.)
(Or you might complain about machines putting people out of work, which is fair enough if you're willing to ignore what Zarek said back in 1.11, "Colonial Day," about how people are still doing their jobs even if money doesn't mean anything anymore. Suddenly we're back on the subject of compensation, and yeah, a lot has happened since then, but you'd think if there was a genuine economy all of a sudden, it would have been brought up before now.)
So anyway, the refinery ship starts sabotaging its own output because they want better working conditions and so on. Which, let's face it, is a kind of stupid game to play when you're facing off against the only thing standing between you and the Cylons (or dehydration; see 1.2, "Water"). And it gets the captain arrested for his trouble, but more because he started quoting Baltar's book at Roslin, which was another stupid thing to do.
Oh, Baltar. He's stuck in prison because he collaborated with the Cylons, and he's either writing Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. His lawyer is helpfully smuggling it out for him, because "stumps don't have freedom of expression" (1.3, "Bastille Day," so apparently someone who watched Season 1 did a small amount of editing on this episode).
But before I rag on the workers of the fleet too much, I'll pause and aim some venom in the other direction. There's a subplot in this episode about a background mechanic named Ceelix, who applied to be a pilot. Now, nobody in the fleet ever read Atlas Shrugged, so Adama doesn't know what a bad idea it is to chain somebody to their desk. So Ceelix is told her current job is too important for her to leave. I'm no expert on politics, but I'd think that if you're suddenly down to 41,400 people, you draft every man, woman and child capable of using a tool and find something for them to work on, and award promotions or transfers based on merit. (Now you might be thinking that's what Cain did, but not really. She just took the best and brightest, and left everyone else to rot.) So if Ceelix has what it takes to be a pilot, you find somebody else to take over her mechanic job. Like Farmboy.
Back to the main plot. Cheif Tyrol is told to get the refinery ship back in line, but the workers demand to be put on a rotation cycle. So Tyrol drafts every civilian with farming experience (because farming=working with machines), including Farmboy. Farmboy is a kid who spent a few months on a farm in order to pay for college, and he's none too happy about getting shut up in the refinery ship. This is what I like to call "denial." See, even though the Cylons nuked his home planet and that college he wanted to go to, he somehow thinks that his getting assigned to actual work is a "mistake."
Sure enough, something goes wrong on the refinery ship and Farmboy gets hurt for it. What exactly goes wrong and how badly Farmboy gets hurt is something you'll have to watch the episode to figure out, but it looks to me like somebody decided it'd be a fun idea if they couldn't just turn off the conveyor belt without first having to push the "stab my arm" button. (And this is right after Tyrol and Cally almost died because they couldn't override an airlock in the previous episode. Honestly, how has the fleet lasted this long?)
Anyway, this is the last straw for Tyrol, and he goes on strike. Then Adama threatens to shoot Cally, and he goes off strike. Then he gets to talk to Roslin, and turns the Colonial One passengers into janitors and laundry-folders. This is the part of the episode I really like; see, part of the reason Tyrol goes on strike is because he's afraid what happened to Farmboy could one day happen to his son, and he doesn't want that. But he also doesn't want his kid to grow up without a mother, so when Adama threatens to shoot Cally, he's put in a really uncomfortable position. This is what good drama is about: you put your character in a position where, no matter what choice they make, they lose something (see also "Exodus, Part II" and "Crossroads, Part I" for other fantastic examples this season, invovling Tigh and and Lee, respectively). Unfortunately, in this case it's undermined because once Tyrol caves, he gets to negotiate with Roslin anyway and basically gets what he wants.
As for Adama's actions, on paper I don't for one moment suspect that he's actually going to shoot Cally. Objectively, it's totally against the most basic component of his character, that he's a father to his men. In the episode itself, Edward James Olmos sells it, because he's really good at his job. But what Adama's trying to do there is to get Tyrol to stand down; he knows Roslin will negotiate with Galactica's chief mechanic, but not with anyone who has any sort of power over her (see the very next episode to hear Roslin flat-out say she won't negotiate with terrorists).
So that's "Dirty Hands." Nice try, I loved the "I'm gonna have them shoot Cally" scene between Tyrol and Adama, and I like the resolution, that yes, everyone has to pitch in. Too bad the refinery ship looks more like a Gilded Age factory than a space-age fuel processor.
As a side note, as a Firefly fan, I approve of the music. (This season gives us Jane Espenson and Mark Sheppard as well! It's like somebody finally noticed the similar visual styles and decided to just run with it; Firefly even gets a mention in RDM's podcast for "The Son Also Rises.")
All right, I'm going to be back on schedule through at least Saturday; I don't know if I'll have a reliable internet connection after that. So here are the BSG episodes I'm going to try to get through by then: "Water," "You Can't Go Home Again," "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," "Colonial Day," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Because I just covered BSG's strike episode, I'd also like to work in DS9's "Bar Association," but I make no promises. I'll also put together a BSG page, listing all my reviews so far, like I have for Doctor Who. And speaking of Doctor Who, I'm going to get the extant Season 12 serials ("Robot" and "The Sontaran Experiment") covered before the end of August, as well as "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Caves of Androzani."
So apparently somebody from the production office time-traveled from 2006 to 2011, read my blog, realized that I was threatening to write an essay entitled "Is Battlestar Galactica Really a Liberal Show?" and decided to create some evidence for the defense.
Now, we had a bit of that earlier in Season 3, what with the suicide bombings done by our heroes, but then episode five went out of its way to show us that Tigh et al had gone a bit bonkers as far as extreme measures go (though that episode did also kill off my least favorite character, so at least there was that). So the jury's still out on that part. Then, much later in the season, along comes this episode.
Now I should point out right off the bat that I don't hate this episode. I have yet to see a BSG episode I actually hate. I didn't like the ending of "Epiphanies," and while I had my problems with "Black Market," I didn't think it was the awful schlock the fandom seems to think it is. Same with "The Woman King," but that's another story for a different day. The point is, this episode was enjoyable, and, like the Doctor Who serials written by Malcolm Hulke, didn't offend my political sensibilities to the point where I couldn't enjoy it. That said, I am going to pick it apart, just because I can and because there's some stuff in it that deserves to be picked apart.
It's a story where the working class is exploited by the elite. You know, the fighter pilots who put their lives on the line every day (or at least every week if the FX budget is up to it) to keep the Cylons from destroying or enslaving the last remnants of humanity. These tired men and women, some of whom didn't even get to muster out during the New Caprica year, have finally had enough...
Oh, wait. It's not the pilots. It's a bunch of guys we've never seen before, slaving away to create fuel for the aforementioned pilots. Because, you know, even after we have ships capable of making FTL jumps, we'll still use manual labor.
(Now, somebody's going to jump on me for the "manual labor" comment, and say something like "well, you know what happened when they got machines to do their jobs for them? The Cylons happened. That didn't end too well." To which I say we've got machines on assembly lines in the country's remaining production plants, and they aren't about to nuke us all. There's a huge difference between "build me a machine that can process fuel for me" and "build me an A.I. that can beat me at chess, lie about the functional capacity of my ship, read my lips, and remote-pilot a pod so it crashes into me." In the miniseries, Roslin was talking about putting a computerized network on Galactica, so it's not like everyone's a Luddite like Adama.)
(Or you might complain about machines putting people out of work, which is fair enough if you're willing to ignore what Zarek said back in 1.11, "Colonial Day," about how people are still doing their jobs even if money doesn't mean anything anymore. Suddenly we're back on the subject of compensation, and yeah, a lot has happened since then, but you'd think if there was a genuine economy all of a sudden, it would have been brought up before now.)
So anyway, the refinery ship starts sabotaging its own output because they want better working conditions and so on. Which, let's face it, is a kind of stupid game to play when you're facing off against the only thing standing between you and the Cylons (or dehydration; see 1.2, "Water"). And it gets the captain arrested for his trouble, but more because he started quoting Baltar's book at Roslin, which was another stupid thing to do.
Oh, Baltar. He's stuck in prison because he collaborated with the Cylons, and he's either writing Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. His lawyer is helpfully smuggling it out for him, because "stumps don't have freedom of expression" (1.3, "Bastille Day," so apparently someone who watched Season 1 did a small amount of editing on this episode).
But before I rag on the workers of the fleet too much, I'll pause and aim some venom in the other direction. There's a subplot in this episode about a background mechanic named Ceelix, who applied to be a pilot. Now, nobody in the fleet ever read Atlas Shrugged, so Adama doesn't know what a bad idea it is to chain somebody to their desk. So Ceelix is told her current job is too important for her to leave. I'm no expert on politics, but I'd think that if you're suddenly down to 41,400 people, you draft every man, woman and child capable of using a tool and find something for them to work on, and award promotions or transfers based on merit. (Now you might be thinking that's what Cain did, but not really. She just took the best and brightest, and left everyone else to rot.) So if Ceelix has what it takes to be a pilot, you find somebody else to take over her mechanic job. Like Farmboy.
Back to the main plot. Cheif Tyrol is told to get the refinery ship back in line, but the workers demand to be put on a rotation cycle. So Tyrol drafts every civilian with farming experience (because farming=working with machines), including Farmboy. Farmboy is a kid who spent a few months on a farm in order to pay for college, and he's none too happy about getting shut up in the refinery ship. This is what I like to call "denial." See, even though the Cylons nuked his home planet and that college he wanted to go to, he somehow thinks that his getting assigned to actual work is a "mistake."
Sure enough, something goes wrong on the refinery ship and Farmboy gets hurt for it. What exactly goes wrong and how badly Farmboy gets hurt is something you'll have to watch the episode to figure out, but it looks to me like somebody decided it'd be a fun idea if they couldn't just turn off the conveyor belt without first having to push the "stab my arm" button. (And this is right after Tyrol and Cally almost died because they couldn't override an airlock in the previous episode. Honestly, how has the fleet lasted this long?)
Anyway, this is the last straw for Tyrol, and he goes on strike. Then Adama threatens to shoot Cally, and he goes off strike. Then he gets to talk to Roslin, and turns the Colonial One passengers into janitors and laundry-folders. This is the part of the episode I really like; see, part of the reason Tyrol goes on strike is because he's afraid what happened to Farmboy could one day happen to his son, and he doesn't want that. But he also doesn't want his kid to grow up without a mother, so when Adama threatens to shoot Cally, he's put in a really uncomfortable position. This is what good drama is about: you put your character in a position where, no matter what choice they make, they lose something (see also "Exodus, Part II" and "Crossroads, Part I" for other fantastic examples this season, invovling Tigh and and Lee, respectively). Unfortunately, in this case it's undermined because once Tyrol caves, he gets to negotiate with Roslin anyway and basically gets what he wants.
As for Adama's actions, on paper I don't for one moment suspect that he's actually going to shoot Cally. Objectively, it's totally against the most basic component of his character, that he's a father to his men. In the episode itself, Edward James Olmos sells it, because he's really good at his job. But what Adama's trying to do there is to get Tyrol to stand down; he knows Roslin will negotiate with Galactica's chief mechanic, but not with anyone who has any sort of power over her (see the very next episode to hear Roslin flat-out say she won't negotiate with terrorists).
So that's "Dirty Hands." Nice try, I loved the "I'm gonna have them shoot Cally" scene between Tyrol and Adama, and I like the resolution, that yes, everyone has to pitch in. Too bad the refinery ship looks more like a Gilded Age factory than a space-age fuel processor.
As a side note, as a Firefly fan, I approve of the music. (This season gives us Jane Espenson and Mark Sheppard as well! It's like somebody finally noticed the similar visual styles and decided to just run with it; Firefly even gets a mention in RDM's podcast for "The Son Also Rises.")
All right, I'm going to be back on schedule through at least Saturday; I don't know if I'll have a reliable internet connection after that. So here are the BSG episodes I'm going to try to get through by then: "Water," "You Can't Go Home Again," "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," "Colonial Day," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Because I just covered BSG's strike episode, I'd also like to work in DS9's "Bar Association," but I make no promises. I'll also put together a BSG page, listing all my reviews so far, like I have for Doctor Who. And speaking of Doctor Who, I'm going to get the extant Season 12 serials ("Robot" and "The Sontaran Experiment") covered before the end of August, as well as "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Caves of Androzani."
Sunday, July 10, 2011
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.
(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.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Star Trek Galactica
I've probably already done a post about the Star Trek reboot, but that was then and this is now, as a famous Slayer once said.
See, the first time I saw it (and numerous subsequent times, because though it is a fairly brainless action-fest, it is a very good fairly brainless action fest), there was always one shot in the movie that really annoyed me. It was during the space-jump sequence, when the camera does a shaky zoom-in and takes a second to correctly frame the divers. At the time, I thought it was a kind of heartless tribute to Firefly, which was full of shots like that, whereas Star Trek was not.
In actual fact, it was one of several little homages to Battlestar Galactica. Let's count the others.
2) The corridors on the Kelvin. You only see the Kelvin's corridors for a few brief seconds as the Captain is talking to George Kirk, but they do look... familiar. They're slanted the way Galactica's are, and they've got the same kind of lights on them. Granted they're on a much smaller scale (because in a world where mass is your enemy, why on Caprica would you have ceilings as high as the ones on Galactica), but still, they look pretty similar.
3) The DRADIS console in the Kobayashi Maru simulator. It's not an actual BSG prop (read on), but there is this round thing full of computer screens attached to the center of the ceiling.
4) The small, free-standing stack of computer screens. This is a BSG prop. It appears in the Starfleet hangar bay.
5) The Federation Seal. For the first time in the franchise's history, it's done in gold and black, and it dominates the back wall of the Starfleet hangar bay. The color scheme and placement reminds me of the Seal of the Colonies in BSG, and given the other things I've mentioned, I don't think this is a coincidence. But even if it was...
6) The communications officer is a tall thin (the original Uhura was neither of these) black chick who got shoved awkwardly into a relationship with one of the more important characters.
Yup. That pretty much does it.
See, the first time I saw it (and numerous subsequent times, because though it is a fairly brainless action-fest, it is a very good fairly brainless action fest), there was always one shot in the movie that really annoyed me. It was during the space-jump sequence, when the camera does a shaky zoom-in and takes a second to correctly frame the divers. At the time, I thought it was a kind of heartless tribute to Firefly, which was full of shots like that, whereas Star Trek was not.
In actual fact, it was one of several little homages to Battlestar Galactica. Let's count the others.
2) The corridors on the Kelvin. You only see the Kelvin's corridors for a few brief seconds as the Captain is talking to George Kirk, but they do look... familiar. They're slanted the way Galactica's are, and they've got the same kind of lights on them. Granted they're on a much smaller scale (because in a world where mass is your enemy, why on Caprica would you have ceilings as high as the ones on Galactica), but still, they look pretty similar.
3) The DRADIS console in the Kobayashi Maru simulator. It's not an actual BSG prop (read on), but there is this round thing full of computer screens attached to the center of the ceiling.
4) The small, free-standing stack of computer screens. This is a BSG prop. It appears in the Starfleet hangar bay.
5) The Federation Seal. For the first time in the franchise's history, it's done in gold and black, and it dominates the back wall of the Starfleet hangar bay. The color scheme and placement reminds me of the Seal of the Colonies in BSG, and given the other things I've mentioned, I don't think this is a coincidence. But even if it was...
6) The communications officer is a tall thin (the original Uhura was neither of these) black chick who got shoved awkwardly into a relationship with one of the more important characters.
Yup. That pretty much does it.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
BSG: Act of Contrition
Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of flashback episodes (or films). You can do a "Fool For Love"-style thing, with a plot going on in the present day, interlinked with a plot going on in the past. Alternatively, you could do something like "In the Pale Moonlight," where the "present" sections are just a framing device for something that happened in the more immediate past.
Battlestar Galactica's fourth episode, "Act of Contrition" is probably the only example I've seen of a sucessful combination of both techniques (other than, maybe sort-of, The Prestige). It's one of the fan-favorite episodes of Season 1, and the only reason it's not my favorite is because it's just a little bit too predictable that Starbuck will be forgiven in the next episode just because Adama's so glad she's alive.
The framing device for this entire episode is Starbuck in a Viper that's slowly burning up all around her, remembering how she got here. So technically the entire episode is a flashback, but as we'll see, there are flashbacks within that flashback. Anyone who was confused by The Prestige might as well stop here.
So the synopsis: a bunch of pilots are killed in an accident. (This scene is our very first glimpse of a much-less-disciplined, "off-duty" Lee, by the way.) Adama decides that Kara "Starbuck" Thrace would be the best person to train a bunch of recruits.
Now, later on in the season (specifically in the episodes "Flesh and Bone" and "Kobol's Last Glaming, Part 2"), I'm going to touch on this subject again, but this is the first instance of what I like to call "the case for another pilot." Basically, it seems like the writers weren't exactly sure what to do with Starbuck until the beginning of Season 2, and while her job in this episode at least stems from the fact that she was (somehow) a flight instructor before the war, it becomes evident when she's called on to be an interrogator in "Flesh and Bone" that she's just being shoehorned into episodes where, frankly, it doesn't seem like she belongs.
Now, look, this is nothing against her character, or the actress, or the writers. I love this show to death, but this issue does kind of stick out for me. She's the best pilot alive, but she has a serious attitude problem. So how exactly does she get picked for, well, any mission that doesn't involve flying a Viper? (Oh, and on that note, "Bastille Day" justifies her presence on the Marine squad by saying that she's "the best shot in or out of the cockpit." Tell that to whoever wrote "Sacrifice.")
As I said, this only really becomes a sticking point in "Flesh and Bone," and only in retrospect does this episode seem kind of odd. To their credit, the writers did set it up in "Bastille Day" that when Lee's off the ship, Kara is the top dog. And back in the miniseries, we established that she was (somehow) a flight instructor. So, yeah, this is at least somewhat believable, and certainly more so in the aftermath of the Cylon attack when there simply aren't any other pilots who are as good as she is who are also more disciplined.
Training doesn't go particularly well, and she washes everyone out. Lee tells her that the next batch will be even worse, and then tells Adama that she might be emotionally compromised because of what happened to Zak. See, throughout this episode we've been getting flashbacks to Starbuck's nights with Zak, where we find out that not only was Zak hot for teacher, they were actually engaged. Adama finds out about their engagement after Zak's death, and basically adopts Starbuck as a daughter.
Now in the sort-of-present, Adama finds out that Starbuck boosted Zak's failing grades to get him into the Viper he died in. Now, she's flunking the newbies because she refuses to let a subpar pilot into a Viper, because she doesn't want another death on her hands. The scene where he finds out that Starbuck basically killed his son is a tour de force for both Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. Olmos plays Adama at the complete opposite end of the scale from Avery Brooks' Captain Sisko on Deep Space Nine, which is to say he tremendously underplays the role. When he tells Starbuck to leave his cabin "while [she] still can," you don't doubt that he's on the verge of just completely snapping, but there isn't a sliver of emotion more than there needs to be on his face. Sackhoff's exit, complete with hair-grabbing, screams "kill me now." It's one of the most perfect scenes in the show's history.
Starbuck reactivates the newbies' flight statuses and takes them out on a training run, where they're ambushed by eight Cylon Raiders. Starbuck being Starbuck (and quite possibly having a death wish at this moment), does what she does best and takes them all on. She (with a bit of help from one of the nuggets) gets them all, but the last one damages her Viper, and she goes spiraling off towards a moon, out of control...
As I hinted at before, there are only two real problems with this episode. One, it is fairly obvious that Adama's basically going to forgive Starbuck once she gets back to Galactica alive (and, as it turns out, with a fancy new toy) in the next episode. Two, Starbuck is, in her own words, a frak-up (cf. "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1"), and as we learn later on, her problems did not start with Zak's death (cf. "The Farm"). It's clear from this episode that Adama did not meet Starbuck prior to Zak's death, so that raises the question: who else in the military was lenient enough to let her be an instructor?
As I also said, these are fairly minor quibbles, and yes, this is one of the best episodes of BSG's first season.
Battlestar Galactica's fourth episode, "Act of Contrition" is probably the only example I've seen of a sucessful combination of both techniques (other than, maybe sort-of, The Prestige). It's one of the fan-favorite episodes of Season 1, and the only reason it's not my favorite is because it's just a little bit too predictable that Starbuck will be forgiven in the next episode just because Adama's so glad she's alive.
The framing device for this entire episode is Starbuck in a Viper that's slowly burning up all around her, remembering how she got here. So technically the entire episode is a flashback, but as we'll see, there are flashbacks within that flashback. Anyone who was confused by The Prestige might as well stop here.
So the synopsis: a bunch of pilots are killed in an accident. (This scene is our very first glimpse of a much-less-disciplined, "off-duty" Lee, by the way.) Adama decides that Kara "Starbuck" Thrace would be the best person to train a bunch of recruits.
Now, later on in the season (specifically in the episodes "Flesh and Bone" and "Kobol's Last Glaming, Part 2"), I'm going to touch on this subject again, but this is the first instance of what I like to call "the case for another pilot." Basically, it seems like the writers weren't exactly sure what to do with Starbuck until the beginning of Season 2, and while her job in this episode at least stems from the fact that she was (somehow) a flight instructor before the war, it becomes evident when she's called on to be an interrogator in "Flesh and Bone" that she's just being shoehorned into episodes where, frankly, it doesn't seem like she belongs.
Now, look, this is nothing against her character, or the actress, or the writers. I love this show to death, but this issue does kind of stick out for me. She's the best pilot alive, but she has a serious attitude problem. So how exactly does she get picked for, well, any mission that doesn't involve flying a Viper? (Oh, and on that note, "Bastille Day" justifies her presence on the Marine squad by saying that she's "the best shot in or out of the cockpit." Tell that to whoever wrote "Sacrifice.")
As I said, this only really becomes a sticking point in "Flesh and Bone," and only in retrospect does this episode seem kind of odd. To their credit, the writers did set it up in "Bastille Day" that when Lee's off the ship, Kara is the top dog. And back in the miniseries, we established that she was (somehow) a flight instructor. So, yeah, this is at least somewhat believable, and certainly more so in the aftermath of the Cylon attack when there simply aren't any other pilots who are as good as she is who are also more disciplined.
Training doesn't go particularly well, and she washes everyone out. Lee tells her that the next batch will be even worse, and then tells Adama that she might be emotionally compromised because of what happened to Zak. See, throughout this episode we've been getting flashbacks to Starbuck's nights with Zak, where we find out that not only was Zak hot for teacher, they were actually engaged. Adama finds out about their engagement after Zak's death, and basically adopts Starbuck as a daughter.
Now in the sort-of-present, Adama finds out that Starbuck boosted Zak's failing grades to get him into the Viper he died in. Now, she's flunking the newbies because she refuses to let a subpar pilot into a Viper, because she doesn't want another death on her hands. The scene where he finds out that Starbuck basically killed his son is a tour de force for both Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. Olmos plays Adama at the complete opposite end of the scale from Avery Brooks' Captain Sisko on Deep Space Nine, which is to say he tremendously underplays the role. When he tells Starbuck to leave his cabin "while [she] still can," you don't doubt that he's on the verge of just completely snapping, but there isn't a sliver of emotion more than there needs to be on his face. Sackhoff's exit, complete with hair-grabbing, screams "kill me now." It's one of the most perfect scenes in the show's history.
Starbuck reactivates the newbies' flight statuses and takes them out on a training run, where they're ambushed by eight Cylon Raiders. Starbuck being Starbuck (and quite possibly having a death wish at this moment), does what she does best and takes them all on. She (with a bit of help from one of the nuggets) gets them all, but the last one damages her Viper, and she goes spiraling off towards a moon, out of control...
As I hinted at before, there are only two real problems with this episode. One, it is fairly obvious that Adama's basically going to forgive Starbuck once she gets back to Galactica alive (and, as it turns out, with a fancy new toy) in the next episode. Two, Starbuck is, in her own words, a frak-up (cf. "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1"), and as we learn later on, her problems did not start with Zak's death (cf. "The Farm"). It's clear from this episode that Adama did not meet Starbuck prior to Zak's death, so that raises the question: who else in the military was lenient enough to let her be an instructor?
As I also said, these are fairly minor quibbles, and yes, this is one of the best episodes of BSG's first season.
Saturday, June 25, 2011
BSG: "Epiphanies"
So these two are out of order, review-wise, because as I insinuated in my "Black Market" review, this episode really should have come after that episode.
...also because it's so much easier to criticize than to praise, and "Scar," the episode I saw today, was a return to form.
So anyways, in "Epiphanies," Roslin's cancer has progressed to the point where she has about a day left, and the orders she's handing down start to get... extreme. (This is another reason "Black Market" should have come first; Moore admitted that there was never really the notion that the black market was evil and needed to be eliminated; he could have gotten around that problem by making the order to get rid of it just another one of Roslin's crazy deathbed commands.)
Roslin orders that Sharon's baby be aborted because it's abnormal and might endager the fleet in some way. Um, Laura? Ever heard a famous quote by Hitler or Stalin (I know the answer's no, but just bear with me anyway) that goes something along the lines of "give me four years and your child will be on my side forever." Raise the kid as a human and chances are nothing can happen! Really, if you're gonna revert to President Airlock mode, your order should be to vent Sharon before she even comes to term. Fortunately, Baltar's been getting not-at-all subtle hints from Head-Six that he needs to protect this kid. And on top of that, everyone keeps telling him that he's going to be President very, very soon, so he'd better start acting like it.
Sharon, unsurprisingly, doesn't take the news very well. (Sharon, surprisingly, is suddenly very pregnant considering her condition at the end of the previous episode.) But there's nothing either she or Helo can do about it. But Baltar can! He suddenly has a brainwave and realizes that the hybrid baby has special blood that can... wait for it...
Cure cancer. At this point I think my jaw dropped a solid foot. See, at no point was this sort of solution even hinted at, and the episode kind of promised us Roslin would die, or at the very least spend a few episodes utterly bedridden. Anyway she's magically cured and Baltar congratulates himself, until he opens a letter Roslin left for him to open after she was dead. It bruises his ego and causes him to give a nuclear warhead to a group that thinks that peace with the Cylons is the way to go. Yeah, that makes sense. Oh wait, the group's leader is the version of Number Six that Baltar liberated from the Pegasus brig. Well, I guess that does make sense. It's not like Baltar had this huge revelation at the very beginning of the series that keeping his pants up might be a really, really good idea.
And Baltar tries to hug her earlier. Here's another problem with this episode; Tricia Helfer actually had to point out to the writers that a woman who was gang-raped wouldn't exactly welcome any sort of physical contact.
Anyway, the b-plot of this episode is the peace movement. A group of humans thinks that peace with the Cylons is a) possible and b) a better alternative to wiping the toasters out of the sky. Good thing you guys waited until after Cain was dead to start your terrorist activities. Yup, sabotaging Vipers and trying to blow up fuel ships is a great way to bring people over to your cause. Hell, never mind Cain; remember what happened when you tried to say "no" to Tigh? That didn't to too well.
So this episode establishes that a) Human-Cylon hybrid baby blood is the most valuable substance in the fleet, and b) there's a group of humans wanting to shut down the military. How come neither of these plot points came up in the very next episode, which was all about a group of humans flouting authority and trading in valuable substances?
But, really, the problem with this episode is the Deus Ex Machina ending. Whereas "Black Market" suffered because stuff wasn't set up ahead of time, this episode is the one that actually does have to handle the apparent end to a long-running plot, and it fumbles it badly. The magic Human-Cylon hybrid baby blood (hereafter referred to as MHCHBB) comes out of nowhere and doesn't get a single mention in either of the next episodes. There's not even as much as an "um, sorry I wanted to abort the kid that ended up saving my life" from Roslin.
Now, as far as what I did like in this episode, because there is some of that. During her cancer-induced delirium, Roslin suddenly realizes that Baltar was frakking Six back on Caprica before the end. At the end of "Black Market," now that she's back on her feet, she asks Baltar to resign. Baltar gives her the exact same answer she gave President Adar when he asked for her resignation: basically, go frak yourself. Poetic.
I liked the way Adama dealt with the college professor who thought peace with the Cylons was the way to go. Strangulation! In situations like this, it'd be a good idea to have a first officer who's capable of reigning in your more violent impulses... oh, right.
I guess it'd be churlish to mention Six's Clark Kent disguise, but in fairness, she's working with people who think a bunch of robots who launched a preemptive and near-xenocidal nuclear assault can be reasoned with.
So that's what I liked about the episode, but really: how did that go in the writer's room? "Here's what cures Roslin's cancer: Magic Baby Blood!"
Now, a word on the whole Deus Ex Machina thing. It means "God from the machine." In ye olden days, Greek plays would end by having a "god" descend to the stage on some sort of contraption and sort everything out for the protagonists. The meaning of "Deus Ex Machina" has since been twisted to mean "resolving a plotline in a completely unforeseen and unforeshadowed way." The series itself ends on a Deus Ex Machina in the ancient Greek sense of the term... but that's been actually set up, back in whatever episode it was where you figured out what Head-Six really was ("The Hand of God," "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2," and "Home, Part 2" are the obvious contenders). This is a show that eventually gives us Space Moses, Space John the Baptist, and Space Jesus, so really, "God did it" kind of makes sense in the finale; it's been hinted at all the way through, and especially in almost anything Baltar says in the last season. Compared to that, "Epiphanies" is still a Deus Ex Machina!
Okay, I get that the writers had (and not for the last time) painted themselves into a corner and needed to get out of it (see also: Fat Lee, "Hot Dog is the father," Number Seven). I'd be considerably more forgiving if they'd made clear that a) Roslin's cancer could (and would) eventually return, and b) when it does, the miracle cure won't work again. (I say it's the baby's blood here because that's what it sounds like on screen. It's actually Sharon's fetal blood or some such, meaning she'd have to get pregnant again. And it's not exactly like she and Roslin are really on the best of terms at any point after 3.12, "Rapture.")
...also because it's so much easier to criticize than to praise, and "Scar," the episode I saw today, was a return to form.
So anyways, in "Epiphanies," Roslin's cancer has progressed to the point where she has about a day left, and the orders she's handing down start to get... extreme. (This is another reason "Black Market" should have come first; Moore admitted that there was never really the notion that the black market was evil and needed to be eliminated; he could have gotten around that problem by making the order to get rid of it just another one of Roslin's crazy deathbed commands.)
Roslin orders that Sharon's baby be aborted because it's abnormal and might endager the fleet in some way. Um, Laura? Ever heard a famous quote by Hitler or Stalin (I know the answer's no, but just bear with me anyway) that goes something along the lines of "give me four years and your child will be on my side forever." Raise the kid as a human and chances are nothing can happen! Really, if you're gonna revert to President Airlock mode, your order should be to vent Sharon before she even comes to term. Fortunately, Baltar's been getting not-at-all subtle hints from Head-Six that he needs to protect this kid. And on top of that, everyone keeps telling him that he's going to be President very, very soon, so he'd better start acting like it.
Sharon, unsurprisingly, doesn't take the news very well. (Sharon, surprisingly, is suddenly very pregnant considering her condition at the end of the previous episode.) But there's nothing either she or Helo can do about it. But Baltar can! He suddenly has a brainwave and realizes that the hybrid baby has special blood that can... wait for it...
Cure cancer. At this point I think my jaw dropped a solid foot. See, at no point was this sort of solution even hinted at, and the episode kind of promised us Roslin would die, or at the very least spend a few episodes utterly bedridden. Anyway she's magically cured and Baltar congratulates himself, until he opens a letter Roslin left for him to open after she was dead. It bruises his ego and causes him to give a nuclear warhead to a group that thinks that peace with the Cylons is the way to go. Yeah, that makes sense. Oh wait, the group's leader is the version of Number Six that Baltar liberated from the Pegasus brig. Well, I guess that does make sense. It's not like Baltar had this huge revelation at the very beginning of the series that keeping his pants up might be a really, really good idea.
And Baltar tries to hug her earlier. Here's another problem with this episode; Tricia Helfer actually had to point out to the writers that a woman who was gang-raped wouldn't exactly welcome any sort of physical contact.
Anyway, the b-plot of this episode is the peace movement. A group of humans thinks that peace with the Cylons is a) possible and b) a better alternative to wiping the toasters out of the sky. Good thing you guys waited until after Cain was dead to start your terrorist activities. Yup, sabotaging Vipers and trying to blow up fuel ships is a great way to bring people over to your cause. Hell, never mind Cain; remember what happened when you tried to say "no" to Tigh? That didn't to too well.
So this episode establishes that a) Human-Cylon hybrid baby blood is the most valuable substance in the fleet, and b) there's a group of humans wanting to shut down the military. How come neither of these plot points came up in the very next episode, which was all about a group of humans flouting authority and trading in valuable substances?
But, really, the problem with this episode is the Deus Ex Machina ending. Whereas "Black Market" suffered because stuff wasn't set up ahead of time, this episode is the one that actually does have to handle the apparent end to a long-running plot, and it fumbles it badly. The magic Human-Cylon hybrid baby blood (hereafter referred to as MHCHBB) comes out of nowhere and doesn't get a single mention in either of the next episodes. There's not even as much as an "um, sorry I wanted to abort the kid that ended up saving my life" from Roslin.
Now, as far as what I did like in this episode, because there is some of that. During her cancer-induced delirium, Roslin suddenly realizes that Baltar was frakking Six back on Caprica before the end. At the end of "Black Market," now that she's back on her feet, she asks Baltar to resign. Baltar gives her the exact same answer she gave President Adar when he asked for her resignation: basically, go frak yourself. Poetic.
I liked the way Adama dealt with the college professor who thought peace with the Cylons was the way to go. Strangulation! In situations like this, it'd be a good idea to have a first officer who's capable of reigning in your more violent impulses... oh, right.
I guess it'd be churlish to mention Six's Clark Kent disguise, but in fairness, she's working with people who think a bunch of robots who launched a preemptive and near-xenocidal nuclear assault can be reasoned with.
So that's what I liked about the episode, but really: how did that go in the writer's room? "Here's what cures Roslin's cancer: Magic Baby Blood!"
Now, a word on the whole Deus Ex Machina thing. It means "God from the machine." In ye olden days, Greek plays would end by having a "god" descend to the stage on some sort of contraption and sort everything out for the protagonists. The meaning of "Deus Ex Machina" has since been twisted to mean "resolving a plotline in a completely unforeseen and unforeshadowed way." The series itself ends on a Deus Ex Machina in the ancient Greek sense of the term... but that's been actually set up, back in whatever episode it was where you figured out what Head-Six really was ("The Hand of God," "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2," and "Home, Part 2" are the obvious contenders). This is a show that eventually gives us Space Moses, Space John the Baptist, and Space Jesus, so really, "God did it" kind of makes sense in the finale; it's been hinted at all the way through, and especially in almost anything Baltar says in the last season. Compared to that, "Epiphanies" is still a Deus Ex Machina!
Okay, I get that the writers had (and not for the last time) painted themselves into a corner and needed to get out of it (see also: Fat Lee, "Hot Dog is the father," Number Seven). I'd be considerably more forgiving if they'd made clear that a) Roslin's cancer could (and would) eventually return, and b) when it does, the miracle cure won't work again. (I say it's the baby's blood here because that's what it sounds like on screen. It's actually Sharon's fetal blood or some such, meaning she'd have to get pregnant again. And it's not exactly like she and Roslin are really on the best of terms at any point after 3.12, "Rapture.")
Friday, June 24, 2011
BSG: Black Market
All of thirty seconds in to the commentary for "Black Market," Ron Moore confessed that he didn't think too much of this episode, and since I frankly preferred this one, flawed though it was, to its immediate predecessor, the Deus-ex-Machina-infested and yet Moore-approved monstrosity that was "Epiphanies," I knew that this was going to be the subject of today's review.
Moore's commentary, even though it's drowned out by background noise, is certainly insightful and does touch on some of the episode's flaws, most notably the fact that it feels more like a police procedural than an episode of Battlestar Galactica. But if you want my opinion, and since you're reading this that's a fair assumption to make, my issue with this episode has to do with the fact that it tries to be too much of a stand-alone episode instead of part of a greater whole.
As I mentioned back in "Bastille Day," Lee "Apollo" Adama is my favorite character on the show, and since "Black Market" is the most Lee-centric episode since then, maybe that's why I'm more forgiving than Moore is. But still, in this episode we're introduced to two more women in Lee's life out of literally nowhere and expected to care about them.
Okay, before I go much further, I guess a synopsis is in order. After "Pegasus" came "Resurrection Ship," a two-parter in which Cain died and Fisk suceeded her as the commander of the Pegasus. Also in that episode, Lee had to punch out of his ship and got stranded in space. A deleted scene showed him turning to drink for the first time (I think) and generally harboring much darker thoughts than we'd previously seen. At the end of the episode, Lee confesses to Starbuck (and also to Dualla, who happens to be eavesdropping) that he's not happy to be alive.
(There's another deleted scene in this episode where Dualla tells Lee that she wishes she died back on Caprica. There's enough Lee/Dee interaction onscreen to be able to guess where all this is heading, but yeah, I can see what the fans mean when they complain about just how much of their relationship got left on the cutting room floor.)
So in this episode Fisk is killed by some thugs running a black market. Roslin demands that the entire operation be shut down, and Adama appoints Lee to the job. (Gotta say, Bill, you do a terrible job when it comes to picking stable pilots for critical missions. First you had Starbuck interrogate a guy, then you had a clearly-distraught Boomer blow up a Basestar, and now you think Lee's got his head screwed on straight enough for this sort of investigation. Hell, Tigh may be a drunk, but he's never openly defied you...)
Meanwhile, Lee's doing the whole "Heart of Darkness" thing (Moore says as much in the commentary). In addition to the fact that he wishes he hadn't been rescued, he's apparently been having a long-term relationship with a prostitute.
Yeah this came out of literally nowhere, and while it wouldn't be surprising for him to do a onetime thing after his near death experience, it's implied that this has been going on for a bit longer than that. Or perhaps in the BSGverse, working girls regularly let their clients talk to their daughters. (Hell, when you get right down to it, the prostitute's daughter is the lynchpin of the problem. See, the Black Marketeers needed to do something so evil that warrants Lee shooting their leader at the end - as if killing a Colonial Officer wasn't enough* - so they kidnap the daughter for some nefarious purpose that, thankfully, isn't explicitly spelled out.
*Yeah, Fisk was a snake. But saying that diminishes his murder undermines what the writers were going for. More on that in a second.
Anyway, Lee's been seeing this prostitute because apparently he needs a stand-in for a girl whose heart he broke back on Caprica. And speaking of breaking hearts, he pretty much shoots Dee down in this episode (no, not in the dogfighting sense). We can see that he's clearly not the same person he was back in "Bastille Day." He's no longer so confident about the moral and ethical ground that he's standing on. This is called "Character Development," and Lee got more of it in a season and a half than certain DS9 characters got in seven years.
But this is still a tremendous amount of stuff to drop on us in the span of one episode, which is the main problem. See, the whole idea is to get Lee to the point where he basically kills a (bad) man in cold blood. Now if you're a longtime reader, chances are you know I'm pretty much cool with that. If you don't feel like reading that whole rant, the gist of it is that there's a huge difference between killing an innocent and killing a killer. (This is why it doesn't matter that Fisk was a snake, incidentally; if we're supposed to feel that Lee has crossed some horrible line in killing the black marketeer, then we should probably also care about Fisk.)
But Lee, who had a chance to do something similar in "Bastille Day" and didn't take it, apparently needs an extra push. Never mind the fact that he respects/respected Zarek, but clearly feels nothing for the black marketeer here. Never mind the fact that his sense of right and wrong has been crumbling ever since his father ordered him to help Starbuck put a bullet in Cain's head (at the very most recent).
So... why did the writers feel the need to introduce two more women in the life of Lee Adama, both of whom clearly mean something to him, without any warning or hint of this in a previous episode? (Answer: the dead girl from Caprica was originally going to be seen back during the spacewalk in "Resurrection Ship," but apparently someone on the BSG staff thinks viewers are stupid and would lose the plot thread before it came up again here, which only begs the question of why this episode didn't immediately follow "Resurrection Ship." It's not like Lee had anything to do in "Epiphanies," and it's not like Roslin, Helo or Sharon have anything to do here. In fact, swapping the two episodes around would a) draw out Roslin's cancer story, and b) give Sharon more time to develop a baby bump. As broadcast, it just looks like she swallowed a watermelon between "Ressurection Ship" and "Epiphanies.")
Two more things I want to discuss: One, Starbuck isn't in here at all. Obviously, she can't be the girl who gets in over her head with the mob, because it would be totally untrue to her character for her to have to be outright rescued by someone else. But her absence - and Lee's apparent rejection of Dualla's advances - only highlight how odd it is that he's gotten involved in this other relationship completely offscreen.
And finally, Tom Zarek. I love the multiple levels of his character and his interaction with Lee, but seriously, the "Old Apollo versus New Apollo" thing is starting to wear off. In both of his appearances thus far in Season 2, he's focused on Lee. In "Home," he contemplated killing him, but he ultimately backed off, and here he basically shows up to point Lee in the right direction. But back in "Home," he could rest secure in the knowledge that Roslin's cancer effectively made her a lame duck. To bring back Tom Zarek without acknowledging the fact that his goal of obtaining the Presidency just got a lot harder doesn't do his character any favors, and is another reason why this episode should have come before "Epiphanies."
Ultimately it's a problem that I've heard in a lot of commentaries: they just don't have enough time to tell all the stories they want to. Neither this nor "Epiphanies" could have been reasonably stretched into a two-parter, but among the many things the show excels at, one is cleverly inserting plot threads for subsequent episodes into earlier episodes. So basically, in a nutshell, the problem with "Black Market" is that it is too much of a stand-alone episode in a show that frankly thrives on story arcs.
Moore's commentary, even though it's drowned out by background noise, is certainly insightful and does touch on some of the episode's flaws, most notably the fact that it feels more like a police procedural than an episode of Battlestar Galactica. But if you want my opinion, and since you're reading this that's a fair assumption to make, my issue with this episode has to do with the fact that it tries to be too much of a stand-alone episode instead of part of a greater whole.
As I mentioned back in "Bastille Day," Lee "Apollo" Adama is my favorite character on the show, and since "Black Market" is the most Lee-centric episode since then, maybe that's why I'm more forgiving than Moore is. But still, in this episode we're introduced to two more women in Lee's life out of literally nowhere and expected to care about them.
Okay, before I go much further, I guess a synopsis is in order. After "Pegasus" came "Resurrection Ship," a two-parter in which Cain died and Fisk suceeded her as the commander of the Pegasus. Also in that episode, Lee had to punch out of his ship and got stranded in space. A deleted scene showed him turning to drink for the first time (I think) and generally harboring much darker thoughts than we'd previously seen. At the end of the episode, Lee confesses to Starbuck (and also to Dualla, who happens to be eavesdropping) that he's not happy to be alive.
(There's another deleted scene in this episode where Dualla tells Lee that she wishes she died back on Caprica. There's enough Lee/Dee interaction onscreen to be able to guess where all this is heading, but yeah, I can see what the fans mean when they complain about just how much of their relationship got left on the cutting room floor.)
So in this episode Fisk is killed by some thugs running a black market. Roslin demands that the entire operation be shut down, and Adama appoints Lee to the job. (Gotta say, Bill, you do a terrible job when it comes to picking stable pilots for critical missions. First you had Starbuck interrogate a guy, then you had a clearly-distraught Boomer blow up a Basestar, and now you think Lee's got his head screwed on straight enough for this sort of investigation. Hell, Tigh may be a drunk, but he's never openly defied you...)
Meanwhile, Lee's doing the whole "Heart of Darkness" thing (Moore says as much in the commentary). In addition to the fact that he wishes he hadn't been rescued, he's apparently been having a long-term relationship with a prostitute.
Yeah this came out of literally nowhere, and while it wouldn't be surprising for him to do a onetime thing after his near death experience, it's implied that this has been going on for a bit longer than that. Or perhaps in the BSGverse, working girls regularly let their clients talk to their daughters. (Hell, when you get right down to it, the prostitute's daughter is the lynchpin of the problem. See, the Black Marketeers needed to do something so evil that warrants Lee shooting their leader at the end - as if killing a Colonial Officer wasn't enough* - so they kidnap the daughter for some nefarious purpose that, thankfully, isn't explicitly spelled out.
*Yeah, Fisk was a snake. But saying that diminishes his murder undermines what the writers were going for. More on that in a second.
Anyway, Lee's been seeing this prostitute because apparently he needs a stand-in for a girl whose heart he broke back on Caprica. And speaking of breaking hearts, he pretty much shoots Dee down in this episode (no, not in the dogfighting sense). We can see that he's clearly not the same person he was back in "Bastille Day." He's no longer so confident about the moral and ethical ground that he's standing on. This is called "Character Development," and Lee got more of it in a season and a half than certain DS9 characters got in seven years.
But this is still a tremendous amount of stuff to drop on us in the span of one episode, which is the main problem. See, the whole idea is to get Lee to the point where he basically kills a (bad) man in cold blood. Now if you're a longtime reader, chances are you know I'm pretty much cool with that. If you don't feel like reading that whole rant, the gist of it is that there's a huge difference between killing an innocent and killing a killer. (This is why it doesn't matter that Fisk was a snake, incidentally; if we're supposed to feel that Lee has crossed some horrible line in killing the black marketeer, then we should probably also care about Fisk.)
But Lee, who had a chance to do something similar in "Bastille Day" and didn't take it, apparently needs an extra push. Never mind the fact that he respects/respected Zarek, but clearly feels nothing for the black marketeer here. Never mind the fact that his sense of right and wrong has been crumbling ever since his father ordered him to help Starbuck put a bullet in Cain's head (at the very most recent).
So... why did the writers feel the need to introduce two more women in the life of Lee Adama, both of whom clearly mean something to him, without any warning or hint of this in a previous episode? (Answer: the dead girl from Caprica was originally going to be seen back during the spacewalk in "Resurrection Ship," but apparently someone on the BSG staff thinks viewers are stupid and would lose the plot thread before it came up again here, which only begs the question of why this episode didn't immediately follow "Resurrection Ship." It's not like Lee had anything to do in "Epiphanies," and it's not like Roslin, Helo or Sharon have anything to do here. In fact, swapping the two episodes around would a) draw out Roslin's cancer story, and b) give Sharon more time to develop a baby bump. As broadcast, it just looks like she swallowed a watermelon between "Ressurection Ship" and "Epiphanies.")
Two more things I want to discuss: One, Starbuck isn't in here at all. Obviously, she can't be the girl who gets in over her head with the mob, because it would be totally untrue to her character for her to have to be outright rescued by someone else. But her absence - and Lee's apparent rejection of Dualla's advances - only highlight how odd it is that he's gotten involved in this other relationship completely offscreen.
And finally, Tom Zarek. I love the multiple levels of his character and his interaction with Lee, but seriously, the "Old Apollo versus New Apollo" thing is starting to wear off. In both of his appearances thus far in Season 2, he's focused on Lee. In "Home," he contemplated killing him, but he ultimately backed off, and here he basically shows up to point Lee in the right direction. But back in "Home," he could rest secure in the knowledge that Roslin's cancer effectively made her a lame duck. To bring back Tom Zarek without acknowledging the fact that his goal of obtaining the Presidency just got a lot harder doesn't do his character any favors, and is another reason why this episode should have come before "Epiphanies."
Ultimately it's a problem that I've heard in a lot of commentaries: they just don't have enough time to tell all the stories they want to. Neither this nor "Epiphanies" could have been reasonably stretched into a two-parter, but among the many things the show excels at, one is cleverly inserting plot threads for subsequent episodes into earlier episodes. So basically, in a nutshell, the problem with "Black Market" is that it is too much of a stand-alone episode in a show that frankly thrives on story arcs.
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Post-Craig review: Goldfinger
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