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.
Tuesday, June 28, 2011
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.
Thursday, June 23, 2011
DS9: Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges
"I'll spare you the Ends Justify the Means speech if you spare me the We Must Do the Right Thing speech."
-Sloane
(I did a longer version of this, and then Blogger kindly lost it. Sorry.)
Section 31 is an organization that exists in Starfleet without any oversight. They recruited Bashir last year, sort of, and now they're back to actually send him on a mission. With the war apparently winding down (this is the last standalone episode before the 10-part arc that wraps up the series), Section 31 is interested in making sure that the Romulans, the only other power that will be a threat to the Federation after the war, have a Federation mole in their upper echelons. Bashir is "recruited" to help make this happen, as is Starfleet's Admiral Ross, Sisko's immediate superior and basically his stand-in for this episode, since the tirade Bashir launches against Ross could just have easily been launched against Sisko for what he did back in "In the Pale Moonlight."
Bashir is duped into thinking that Koval, the guy in charge of Romulan Intelligence, is Section 31's target. Ross gets him to think that Sloane has a Romulan accomplice, causing Bashir to get Cretak (DS9's Romulan attache) to try to steal some files from Romulan Intelligence so they can see if anyone's suspected of being a Starfleet agent. Unfortunately, she gets caught and kicked out of the Senate. Bashir realizes that Ross had a role in everything, and confronts him. Off the record, Ross admits that the plan was to discredit Cretak, who will do whatever is in Romulus's best interest, including side with the Dominion, and promote Koval, who is actually a Federation mole. Ross says that he doesn't like the deal, but he likes sending young men and women to their deaths even less. Bashir responds by saying that Ross has betrayed the very principles those men and women have died to protect - see what I mean when I say this could have been a Bashir/Sisko confrontation instead of a Bashir/Ross one? Bashir's always been the wide-eyed idealist, and Sisko's been pretty Machiavellian; they really should have gotten one good confrontation in this season, and this is the best candidate.
Sloane appears again and says that it's his job to protect idealists like Bashir from the big bad Universe that doesn't share his opinion of right and wrong. Clearly this concept - the dichotomy between the "we must do the right thing" or "we must deserve to survive" crowd and the "the ends justify the means" or "throw that thing out the airlock" crowed - fascinated the episode's author, Ronald D. Moore; after all, he later spent four years on the same subject.
Near the end of the episode, Bashir gets hauled before a trial that turns out to be for Cretak. This could - and should - have been the episode's framing device; we would learn how events got to this point along with the Romulans being duped by Koval and Sloane. Other than the fact that Sisko should have had Ross's role, this is my only real suggestion for improvement with this episode.
9 out of 10.
-Sloane
(I did a longer version of this, and then Blogger kindly lost it. Sorry.)
Section 31 is an organization that exists in Starfleet without any oversight. They recruited Bashir last year, sort of, and now they're back to actually send him on a mission. With the war apparently winding down (this is the last standalone episode before the 10-part arc that wraps up the series), Section 31 is interested in making sure that the Romulans, the only other power that will be a threat to the Federation after the war, have a Federation mole in their upper echelons. Bashir is "recruited" to help make this happen, as is Starfleet's Admiral Ross, Sisko's immediate superior and basically his stand-in for this episode, since the tirade Bashir launches against Ross could just have easily been launched against Sisko for what he did back in "In the Pale Moonlight."
Bashir is duped into thinking that Koval, the guy in charge of Romulan Intelligence, is Section 31's target. Ross gets him to think that Sloane has a Romulan accomplice, causing Bashir to get Cretak (DS9's Romulan attache) to try to steal some files from Romulan Intelligence so they can see if anyone's suspected of being a Starfleet agent. Unfortunately, she gets caught and kicked out of the Senate. Bashir realizes that Ross had a role in everything, and confronts him. Off the record, Ross admits that the plan was to discredit Cretak, who will do whatever is in Romulus's best interest, including side with the Dominion, and promote Koval, who is actually a Federation mole. Ross says that he doesn't like the deal, but he likes sending young men and women to their deaths even less. Bashir responds by saying that Ross has betrayed the very principles those men and women have died to protect - see what I mean when I say this could have been a Bashir/Sisko confrontation instead of a Bashir/Ross one? Bashir's always been the wide-eyed idealist, and Sisko's been pretty Machiavellian; they really should have gotten one good confrontation in this season, and this is the best candidate.
Sloane appears again and says that it's his job to protect idealists like Bashir from the big bad Universe that doesn't share his opinion of right and wrong. Clearly this concept - the dichotomy between the "we must do the right thing" or "we must deserve to survive" crowd and the "the ends justify the means" or "throw that thing out the airlock" crowed - fascinated the episode's author, Ronald D. Moore; after all, he later spent four years on the same subject.
Near the end of the episode, Bashir gets hauled before a trial that turns out to be for Cretak. This could - and should - have been the episode's framing device; we would learn how events got to this point along with the Romulans being duped by Koval and Sloane. Other than the fact that Sisko should have had Ross's role, this is my only real suggestion for improvement with this episode.
9 out of 10.
Tuesday, June 21, 2011
BSG: Pegasus
It's been a while, and I apologize. And no, I'm obviously not doing the BSG episodes in order.
"Pegasus" was the first BSG episode to get a "mature content" warning. No way to get around it: this is the darkest episode of BSG I've seen so far. I can't really discuss the episode without discussing one particular scene, so consider yourself warned...
So way back in the 90s, Ron Moore wrote a TNG episode about a ship called the Pegasus and the insane Admiral commanding it. Just saying. (Yes, there was a Pegasus in the original BSG. I'm not ignorant of that.)
Anyway, it turns out that another ship, the eponymous Pegasus, survived the Cylon attack. Because its commander, Admiral Cain, outranks Commander Adama, she gets command of everything. Ultimately Adama realizes that she's absolutely frakkin' nuts, and goes head-to-head against her. And then the show goes on hiatus for a few months.
See, BSG knows how to make a mid-season cliffhanger. Steven Moffat should have taken note, because even in spite of the two problems I have with this episode, this is a billion times better than "A Good Man Goes to War."
So maybe I'm just a paranoid wingnut, but I can't help but notice that all the Pegasus crewmembers carry pistols with them at all times, whereas the Galactica crew does not. Okay, it's a really simple way to tell the crews apart from a distance, and I'd be willing to bet that the average viewer didn't notice it, but I can't help but think that the show is trying to send the message "guns=bad." (Then again, by this point we've already given President Airlock her nickname in "Flesh and Bone," so it's not exactly like the show has a terrible ideological bent one way or the other.)
The other problem I have with this episode from a purely artistic standpoint is the fact that after a season and a half of not-at-all traditional music, this episode gives us a psychedelic electric guitar at the beginning and some very traditional Trek-esque stuff at the end. If they'd limited it to just the Pegasus, I could see the reason for it.
Now then, on to the episode's very controversial scene. It's not just enough to have the Pegasus XO relate horror stories about the Admiral, and it's not enough to see an obviously-abused Number Six (props to the network for letting that many cuts and bruises air), we have to see a Pegasus officer sexually assault Sharon.
If you're disturbed by that scene, congratulations, you're human.
(Note, in this and future reviews I'll refer to the Number Eight copy that shot Adama as "Boomer" and the one carrying Helo's child as "Sharon.")
It's weird: Boomer getting shot in "Resistance" was simple, straightforward, and clean. More to the point, it's over very quickly; Boomer's terrible ordeal has finally come to an end, and she's probably at peace. Six's cuts and bruises are clear evidence of months of abuse (and on that note, anyone who thinks Tricia Helfer's just on the show to show some skin needs to check out her acting here, both as BSOD abuse-victim Six and as clearly-distrought hallucination-Six). And the show has alluded to sexual assault before, in both "Bastille Day" (and even more so before the scrip was re-written to let Cally bite her attacker's ear off) and "The Farm." But it was still shocking and disturbing to see it happen on-screen.
(And in the back of your head, you know that Tyrol and Helo are going to get there in time. In the Extended version, they don't.)
So the obvious question is, did we need to see this? Well, the midseason cliffhanger is the last two Human warships in the Universe turning their guns on each other, so we need a good reason to get to that point. Adama's whole perspective is that his crew is his family, so if Cain tries to have one or two of them killed, he'll absolutely turn on her. Both Tyrol and Helo have feelings for Sharon and will kill to protect her. And, having already established that the Galactica crew will treat their Cylon prisoner with some level of decency, it makes it easy to show the Pegasus crew are a bunch of sociopaths by not having them act the same way. In order to justify the last two Human military forces left anywhere going to each others' throats, we need to see one of them (obviously, the ones we haven't been following for a year and a half) do something morally despicable. And as TvTropes will tell you, rape is a special kind of evil.
So yeah, dark. Really, really dark. Also it raises the question of why Adama didn't have a guard on the cell or anything. (Oh right, because as both "Litmus" and "Resistance" have shown, Galactica's marines will obey the most powerful person in the room, regardless of outstanding orders.)
Still, the most intriguing thing about this episode is that Cain and the Pegasus crew could very well be exactly what Adama and the Galactica crew would have become if not for Roslin. Think I'm kidding? Look at Starbuck's treatment of her prisoner in "Flesh and Bone." Check out Lee's line in a deleted scene from "Resurrection Ship, Part 1" about how Galactica's crew isn't raping anyone yet. The only two people on Galactica who definitely think of Sharon as a human being with rights are Helo and Tyrol. Even more obviously, Cain's attitude towards Roslin is exactly the same as Adama's was in the miniseries. Roslin's grasp on power, as Zarek pointed out in "Bastille Day," is very tenuous, and it's only going to get even more so as her cancer gets worse. (Speaking of Zarek, in the very next episode Roslin tells Adama that Cain has to die. She seems just as much afraid of Zarek taking over as she is of Cain, but she doesn't order a hit on her political opponent...)
It's a simple fact that we'll empathize with anything that has a human face, and you can tell that the writers decided to capitalize on that with this episode. Let's not forget that the Six in the Pegasus brig killed 800 people - but even so, what happened to her is wrong, and I hope every viewer, of every political stripe, got that. What happened to Sharon, who's actually the closest thing to a Cylon who is totally on our side (that is, aware that she's a Cylon and aware of all her programming, and still on our side), is terrible.
So where does that leave us? An undeniably dark, but also undeniably very good episode.
(Much lighter sidebar: according to the commentary, Cain was originally supposed to have a rhythm stuck in her head and be constantly drumming it on tables and the like, but Michelle Forbes had no sense of rhythm, so that idea was dropped. Did RTD ever listen to that commentary track prior to 2007?)
The next review I intend to do is for DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," but that'll have to wait until I can dig up my Season 7 box set, as I have no idea where it currently is. I also want to do "Homefront/Paradise Lost" soon (are we sensing a pattern here?) but I also don't know where my Season 4 box set is. If I don't find either of them, I'll do another BSG tomorrow.
"Pegasus" was the first BSG episode to get a "mature content" warning. No way to get around it: this is the darkest episode of BSG I've seen so far. I can't really discuss the episode without discussing one particular scene, so consider yourself warned...
So way back in the 90s, Ron Moore wrote a TNG episode about a ship called the Pegasus and the insane Admiral commanding it. Just saying. (Yes, there was a Pegasus in the original BSG. I'm not ignorant of that.)
Anyway, it turns out that another ship, the eponymous Pegasus, survived the Cylon attack. Because its commander, Admiral Cain, outranks Commander Adama, she gets command of everything. Ultimately Adama realizes that she's absolutely frakkin' nuts, and goes head-to-head against her. And then the show goes on hiatus for a few months.
See, BSG knows how to make a mid-season cliffhanger. Steven Moffat should have taken note, because even in spite of the two problems I have with this episode, this is a billion times better than "A Good Man Goes to War."
So maybe I'm just a paranoid wingnut, but I can't help but notice that all the Pegasus crewmembers carry pistols with them at all times, whereas the Galactica crew does not. Okay, it's a really simple way to tell the crews apart from a distance, and I'd be willing to bet that the average viewer didn't notice it, but I can't help but think that the show is trying to send the message "guns=bad." (Then again, by this point we've already given President Airlock her nickname in "Flesh and Bone," so it's not exactly like the show has a terrible ideological bent one way or the other.)
The other problem I have with this episode from a purely artistic standpoint is the fact that after a season and a half of not-at-all traditional music, this episode gives us a psychedelic electric guitar at the beginning and some very traditional Trek-esque stuff at the end. If they'd limited it to just the Pegasus, I could see the reason for it.
Now then, on to the episode's very controversial scene. It's not just enough to have the Pegasus XO relate horror stories about the Admiral, and it's not enough to see an obviously-abused Number Six (props to the network for letting that many cuts and bruises air), we have to see a Pegasus officer sexually assault Sharon.
If you're disturbed by that scene, congratulations, you're human.
(Note, in this and future reviews I'll refer to the Number Eight copy that shot Adama as "Boomer" and the one carrying Helo's child as "Sharon.")
It's weird: Boomer getting shot in "Resistance" was simple, straightforward, and clean. More to the point, it's over very quickly; Boomer's terrible ordeal has finally come to an end, and she's probably at peace. Six's cuts and bruises are clear evidence of months of abuse (and on that note, anyone who thinks Tricia Helfer's just on the show to show some skin needs to check out her acting here, both as BSOD abuse-victim Six and as clearly-distrought hallucination-Six). And the show has alluded to sexual assault before, in both "Bastille Day" (and even more so before the scrip was re-written to let Cally bite her attacker's ear off) and "The Farm." But it was still shocking and disturbing to see it happen on-screen.
(And in the back of your head, you know that Tyrol and Helo are going to get there in time. In the Extended version, they don't.)
So the obvious question is, did we need to see this? Well, the midseason cliffhanger is the last two Human warships in the Universe turning their guns on each other, so we need a good reason to get to that point. Adama's whole perspective is that his crew is his family, so if Cain tries to have one or two of them killed, he'll absolutely turn on her. Both Tyrol and Helo have feelings for Sharon and will kill to protect her. And, having already established that the Galactica crew will treat their Cylon prisoner with some level of decency, it makes it easy to show the Pegasus crew are a bunch of sociopaths by not having them act the same way. In order to justify the last two Human military forces left anywhere going to each others' throats, we need to see one of them (obviously, the ones we haven't been following for a year and a half) do something morally despicable. And as TvTropes will tell you, rape is a special kind of evil.
So yeah, dark. Really, really dark. Also it raises the question of why Adama didn't have a guard on the cell or anything. (Oh right, because as both "Litmus" and "Resistance" have shown, Galactica's marines will obey the most powerful person in the room, regardless of outstanding orders.)
Still, the most intriguing thing about this episode is that Cain and the Pegasus crew could very well be exactly what Adama and the Galactica crew would have become if not for Roslin. Think I'm kidding? Look at Starbuck's treatment of her prisoner in "Flesh and Bone." Check out Lee's line in a deleted scene from "Resurrection Ship, Part 1" about how Galactica's crew isn't raping anyone yet. The only two people on Galactica who definitely think of Sharon as a human being with rights are Helo and Tyrol. Even more obviously, Cain's attitude towards Roslin is exactly the same as Adama's was in the miniseries. Roslin's grasp on power, as Zarek pointed out in "Bastille Day," is very tenuous, and it's only going to get even more so as her cancer gets worse. (Speaking of Zarek, in the very next episode Roslin tells Adama that Cain has to die. She seems just as much afraid of Zarek taking over as she is of Cain, but she doesn't order a hit on her political opponent...)
It's a simple fact that we'll empathize with anything that has a human face, and you can tell that the writers decided to capitalize on that with this episode. Let's not forget that the Six in the Pegasus brig killed 800 people - but even so, what happened to her is wrong, and I hope every viewer, of every political stripe, got that. What happened to Sharon, who's actually the closest thing to a Cylon who is totally on our side (that is, aware that she's a Cylon and aware of all her programming, and still on our side), is terrible.
So where does that leave us? An undeniably dark, but also undeniably very good episode.
(Much lighter sidebar: according to the commentary, Cain was originally supposed to have a rhythm stuck in her head and be constantly drumming it on tables and the like, but Michelle Forbes had no sense of rhythm, so that idea was dropped. Did RTD ever listen to that commentary track prior to 2007?)
The next review I intend to do is for DS9's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges," but that'll have to wait until I can dig up my Season 7 box set, as I have no idea where it currently is. I also want to do "Homefront/Paradise Lost" soon (are we sensing a pattern here?) but I also don't know where my Season 4 box set is. If I don't find either of them, I'll do another BSG tomorrow.
Sunday, June 12, 2011
Who Review: "A Good Man Goes to War"
Anyone who hasn't seen the episode and doesn't somehow already know River Song's identity and doesn't want that spoiled, go away now.
Right then, if Steven Moffat ever gets access to a real TARDIS, I have a few suggestions for him. If, for example, he's ever going to build an entire episode around one massive revelation, Empire Strikes Back-style, he shouldn't blatantly give it away in all the promotional materials.
At a bare minimum, what you know going into this episode is that a) Amy's giving birth, and b) we'll find out who River is. It doesn't take any fantastic leap of the imagination to put two and two together. And any pretense of uncertainty gets thrown out the window a minute in when we learn that Amy's daughter's name is Melody Pond, thus spoiling the ending for anyone with either a thesaurus or a working knowledge of the English language.
What I'm saying is that the so-called "revelation" at the end of the episode is nothing of the sort, but rather the confirmation of the suspicions of every Who fan with a brain.
We've had this problem before. Back in "Time of Angels," the Doctor was remarkably thick about the fact that the Aplans had two heads but the statues had one. It's never a good thing when the viewers get ahead of the Doctor, and for us to get that far ahead of the companions suggests that they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
(Side note: if Rory technically didn't exist during the events of "The Pandorica Opens," how did his daughter?)
(Other side note: so Melody's all special because she was concieved inside the TARDIS. Wait, is Moffat honestly saying that, for example, Ian and Barbara, whose relationship is practically canon, never got it on? Or is he saying that Rory and Amy are just really, really bad at practicing contraception? Remember, Rory's fantasy in "Amy's Choice" was her getting pregnant, at home, five years after they left the Doctor. Look, this isn't the sort of show where details would be all that appropriate, but... seriously?)
(Other other side note: where the hell were the Cybermen?)
You'll notice I haven't said that much about the plot. That's because it's a bit insane. The Doctor gathers a bunch of allies we've never seen before (or more accurately, he gathers an army of Silurians, led by someone we've never seen before, a Sontaran we've never seen before, and a fat blue guy we have seen before, but never with the Doctor) and goes on the warpath, bloodlessly winning a victory only to find out that he's been fooled twice by the same trick, which is the only real plot twist in the episode.
A friend of mine recently described Harry Potter 7A as a massive tease, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly what this episode was. The problem was we all knew the truth from very early on, and the "proper revelation" of it was something of a letdown. It'd be like dropping a massive, obvious hint at the start of The Empire Strikes Back as to Darth Vader's real identity, except worse, because Empire still has other plot twists (the midget is Yoda, Lando is a traitor) and watchable moments ("I know"). It is not one massive enticement to watch Return of the Jedi.
Now is it fair to compare this episode, which is the first of a two-parter, to a film? No, but this is the mid-season break. Even Star Trek Voyager never went as low as to make a season finale that basically did nothing more than say "hey, come back next fall."
There is, simply put, no meat in this episode.
Right then, if Steven Moffat ever gets access to a real TARDIS, I have a few suggestions for him. If, for example, he's ever going to build an entire episode around one massive revelation, Empire Strikes Back-style, he shouldn't blatantly give it away in all the promotional materials.
At a bare minimum, what you know going into this episode is that a) Amy's giving birth, and b) we'll find out who River is. It doesn't take any fantastic leap of the imagination to put two and two together. And any pretense of uncertainty gets thrown out the window a minute in when we learn that Amy's daughter's name is Melody Pond, thus spoiling the ending for anyone with either a thesaurus or a working knowledge of the English language.
What I'm saying is that the so-called "revelation" at the end of the episode is nothing of the sort, but rather the confirmation of the suspicions of every Who fan with a brain.
We've had this problem before. Back in "Time of Angels," the Doctor was remarkably thick about the fact that the Aplans had two heads but the statues had one. It's never a good thing when the viewers get ahead of the Doctor, and for us to get that far ahead of the companions suggests that they're not the sharpest knives in the drawer.
(Side note: if Rory technically didn't exist during the events of "The Pandorica Opens," how did his daughter?)
(Other side note: so Melody's all special because she was concieved inside the TARDIS. Wait, is Moffat honestly saying that, for example, Ian and Barbara, whose relationship is practically canon, never got it on? Or is he saying that Rory and Amy are just really, really bad at practicing contraception? Remember, Rory's fantasy in "Amy's Choice" was her getting pregnant, at home, five years after they left the Doctor. Look, this isn't the sort of show where details would be all that appropriate, but... seriously?)
(Other other side note: where the hell were the Cybermen?)
You'll notice I haven't said that much about the plot. That's because it's a bit insane. The Doctor gathers a bunch of allies we've never seen before (or more accurately, he gathers an army of Silurians, led by someone we've never seen before, a Sontaran we've never seen before, and a fat blue guy we have seen before, but never with the Doctor) and goes on the warpath, bloodlessly winning a victory only to find out that he's been fooled twice by the same trick, which is the only real plot twist in the episode.
A friend of mine recently described Harry Potter 7A as a massive tease, and I can't help but feel that that's exactly what this episode was. The problem was we all knew the truth from very early on, and the "proper revelation" of it was something of a letdown. It'd be like dropping a massive, obvious hint at the start of The Empire Strikes Back as to Darth Vader's real identity, except worse, because Empire still has other plot twists (the midget is Yoda, Lando is a traitor) and watchable moments ("I know"). It is not one massive enticement to watch Return of the Jedi.
Now is it fair to compare this episode, which is the first of a two-parter, to a film? No, but this is the mid-season break. Even Star Trek Voyager never went as low as to make a season finale that basically did nothing more than say "hey, come back next fall."
There is, simply put, no meat in this episode.
Saturday, June 11, 2011
BSG: "Bastille Day"
Going out of order here just because I'm not nearly as crazy about "Water" as I am about "Bastille Day," and I have to make headway somewhere.
Okay, relevant stuff from "Water" that needs to be mentioned: Adama put on a big formal greeting for Roslin, thinking she'd like it. She hated it, dreading the notion of having to do this sort of thing all the time. Lee told her it was a peace offering from Adama, so she made him (Lee) her military advisor.
In this episode, we find out that Adama doesn't like that, and says Lee has to choose a side.
So, in this episode, the following things happen:
Lee chooses a side.
Lee becomes my favorite character.
Jamie Bamber's accent slips for one word (no, you find it).
Richard Hatch (the original Apollo from the 1978 series) shows up.
Yeah, it's an Apollo-centric episode.
Other stuff from "Water" that was important: someone (Sharon the Cylon) blew up the water tank on the Galactica, forcing everyone to go look for water. Eventually, they found a planet with a bunch of ice on it, which is close enough. Unfortunately, the ice needs to be broken up into chunks, which is going to be hard labor. Fortunately, we've got a ship full of prisoners! Unfortunately, our bleeding-heart Education-Secretary-turned-President isn't big on slave labor. Or to put it another way, our practically-retired, shortsighted Commander thinks slave labor is a-ok.
(Unfortunately, a lot of the Adama-Roslin tension kind of vanishes after this episode, or at least takes a massive backseat to the other plots, and for it to come crashing back at the end of the season is kind of jarring.)
Lee gets sent over to round up some volunteers, having proposed a system whereby prisoners could earn points towards gaining their freedom. Roslin's aide, Billy, goes with, and Billy picks Dualla to represent the Galactica staff. To round out the team, they send over Cally, a cute technician.
Turns out one of the prisoners is Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch's character), a terrorist from Dualla's home planet. Billy and Lee respect him; Dualla does not. Cally's only there to be threatened by inmates, so she's not afforded an opinion. (Okay, that was a joke, but seriously, Cally has a very similar quality to Willow in early Buffy seasons, in that you just know the monsters are going to go for her.)
In the middle of a philosophical discussion between Lee and Zarek, the prisoners break out and take over the ship. Zarek demands Roslin's resignation, as she was never duly elected. In America, at least in theory, the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed. This doesn't explain the Presidencies of people who lose the popular vote, and it certainly doesn't explain President Ford.
So, while it pains me to say it, and while I certainly have issues with some of his views in "Colonial Day," the terrorist has a point. Nobody elected Laura Roslin. She did a fantastic job rallying the fleet together, but she did so on, let's face it, some very tenuous authority. (Pop quiz: who's America's Secretary of Education right now? No, you can't Google it.)
Well it turns out that Zarek is planning on martyrdom; he knows Roslin and Adama won't negotiate with him and will instead send in the troops, and he wants his glorious last stand. One of his fellow former inmates just wants... well, it's never outright stated, but it's strongly implied that he has fairly ungentlemanly intentions towards Cally. Cally freakin' bites his ear off and gets a bullet in the gut for it. (People getting shot in the gut will be a recurring theme on this show.)
A standoff ensues; Lee gets someone's gun and shoots the would-be rapist (thus establishing another recurring theme), and then delivers an ultimatum to Zarek at gunpoint: his men are going to mine the ice for them, and then they'll have their elections. Nobody else has to die, but if Lee reneges on the deal, Zarek can still have his last stand.
Roslin and Adama chew Lee out for negotiating without authorization, but Lee points out that Roslin is just serving out the remainder of the previous President's term, and that term is up in 7 months. According to the law, there's an election then. Lee's picked his side; rather than be loyal specifically to one person, he's going to be loyal to whatever the Colonies have in lieu of a Constitution.
Which, on the one hand, feels like a cop-out ending, if only because we had no idea prior to this episode that the President's term was almost up. On the other hand, compared to the way "Act of Contrition/You Can't Go Home Again" wraps up (that is to say, entirely predictably), this is nice. Lee figured out which side he's on, and if you throw out all the rules, he just won't play.
Despite the "oh, by the way, your term's almost up" ending, this is probably my favorite single episode of the season. The line has been drawn; even though there are less than 50,000 people left, the law will still be obeyed (at least until Lee himself says otherwise at the end of Season 3). Other episodes may draw on more personal conflicts ("Act of Contrition"), have more humor ("Tigh Me Up, Tight Me Down"), feature more action ("Hand of God"), or touch on other political subjects that, with the benefit of hindsight, seem strangely lacking in other space operas ("Colonial Day"). But this is a nice, tense little number that shows Lee thinking on his feet and finding his own moral footing. Can you blame me for suddenly liking the character so much?
Okay, relevant stuff from "Water" that needs to be mentioned: Adama put on a big formal greeting for Roslin, thinking she'd like it. She hated it, dreading the notion of having to do this sort of thing all the time. Lee told her it was a peace offering from Adama, so she made him (Lee) her military advisor.
In this episode, we find out that Adama doesn't like that, and says Lee has to choose a side.
So, in this episode, the following things happen:
Lee chooses a side.
Lee becomes my favorite character.
Jamie Bamber's accent slips for one word (no, you find it).
Richard Hatch (the original Apollo from the 1978 series) shows up.
Yeah, it's an Apollo-centric episode.
Other stuff from "Water" that was important: someone (Sharon the Cylon) blew up the water tank on the Galactica, forcing everyone to go look for water. Eventually, they found a planet with a bunch of ice on it, which is close enough. Unfortunately, the ice needs to be broken up into chunks, which is going to be hard labor. Fortunately, we've got a ship full of prisoners! Unfortunately, our bleeding-heart Education-Secretary-turned-President isn't big on slave labor. Or to put it another way, our practically-retired, shortsighted Commander thinks slave labor is a-ok.
(Unfortunately, a lot of the Adama-Roslin tension kind of vanishes after this episode, or at least takes a massive backseat to the other plots, and for it to come crashing back at the end of the season is kind of jarring.)
Lee gets sent over to round up some volunteers, having proposed a system whereby prisoners could earn points towards gaining their freedom. Roslin's aide, Billy, goes with, and Billy picks Dualla to represent the Galactica staff. To round out the team, they send over Cally, a cute technician.
Turns out one of the prisoners is Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch's character), a terrorist from Dualla's home planet. Billy and Lee respect him; Dualla does not. Cally's only there to be threatened by inmates, so she's not afforded an opinion. (Okay, that was a joke, but seriously, Cally has a very similar quality to Willow in early Buffy seasons, in that you just know the monsters are going to go for her.)
In the middle of a philosophical discussion between Lee and Zarek, the prisoners break out and take over the ship. Zarek demands Roslin's resignation, as she was never duly elected. In America, at least in theory, the government derives its powers from the consent of the governed. This doesn't explain the Presidencies of people who lose the popular vote, and it certainly doesn't explain President Ford.
So, while it pains me to say it, and while I certainly have issues with some of his views in "Colonial Day," the terrorist has a point. Nobody elected Laura Roslin. She did a fantastic job rallying the fleet together, but she did so on, let's face it, some very tenuous authority. (Pop quiz: who's America's Secretary of Education right now? No, you can't Google it.)
Well it turns out that Zarek is planning on martyrdom; he knows Roslin and Adama won't negotiate with him and will instead send in the troops, and he wants his glorious last stand. One of his fellow former inmates just wants... well, it's never outright stated, but it's strongly implied that he has fairly ungentlemanly intentions towards Cally. Cally freakin' bites his ear off and gets a bullet in the gut for it. (People getting shot in the gut will be a recurring theme on this show.)
A standoff ensues; Lee gets someone's gun and shoots the would-be rapist (thus establishing another recurring theme), and then delivers an ultimatum to Zarek at gunpoint: his men are going to mine the ice for them, and then they'll have their elections. Nobody else has to die, but if Lee reneges on the deal, Zarek can still have his last stand.
Roslin and Adama chew Lee out for negotiating without authorization, but Lee points out that Roslin is just serving out the remainder of the previous President's term, and that term is up in 7 months. According to the law, there's an election then. Lee's picked his side; rather than be loyal specifically to one person, he's going to be loyal to whatever the Colonies have in lieu of a Constitution.
Which, on the one hand, feels like a cop-out ending, if only because we had no idea prior to this episode that the President's term was almost up. On the other hand, compared to the way "Act of Contrition/You Can't Go Home Again" wraps up (that is to say, entirely predictably), this is nice. Lee figured out which side he's on, and if you throw out all the rules, he just won't play.
Despite the "oh, by the way, your term's almost up" ending, this is probably my favorite single episode of the season. The line has been drawn; even though there are less than 50,000 people left, the law will still be obeyed (at least until Lee himself says otherwise at the end of Season 3). Other episodes may draw on more personal conflicts ("Act of Contrition"), have more humor ("Tigh Me Up, Tight Me Down"), feature more action ("Hand of God"), or touch on other political subjects that, with the benefit of hindsight, seem strangely lacking in other space operas ("Colonial Day"). But this is a nice, tense little number that shows Lee thinking on his feet and finding his own moral footing. Can you blame me for suddenly liking the character so much?
Falling Behind, promises to catch up
but first:
This would seem to indicate that Steven Moffat had that one idea about the Doctor's name (no, not his real one, we still don't know that one) stuck in his head for 16 years!
This would seem to indicate that Steven Moffat had that one idea about the Doctor's name (no, not his real one, we still don't know that one) stuck in his head for 16 years!
Wednesday, June 8, 2011
BtVS: "Fool for Love"
It sounds sacreligious, but once upon a time I actually did compare Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Star Trek Voyager.
Once you've winched your jaw back up / launched your missiles at me / excommunicated me, let me explain. See, in Voyager's fourth season, a member of the stock villan race (in this case, the Borg) unwillingly joined the good guys. Seven of Nine immediately got the closest equivalent to character exploration Voyager ever accomplished; her backstory was fleshed out, and blah blah blah. All this happened about half a season in, blah blah.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer's fourth season, a member of the stock villain race (in this case, vampires) unwillingly joined the good guys. Spike had to wait an entire season before we got his backstory. The delay is intriguing, but understandable; the way Buffy treats Spike is considerably different from the way Janeway treats Seven (outside of fanfiction). For the entirety of Season 4, she didn't trust him, didn't like him, had no reason to want to hear his backstory. And so we had to wait.
There are two other things I should mention about this episode before I actually dive into it. First, as most people know, it's the first part of an unofficial two-parter with Angel's "Darla," which aired immediately afterward. In both episodes, we see flashbacks to London, 1880 and China, 1900, but from Spike's perspective in the first episode and Darla's in the second.
Second, this was the first Buffy episode I saw, the first Whedon episode I saw, the only Whedon episode I actually saw on television (as opposed to DVD) until Dollhouse, and one of only three Whedon episodes (the other two being Angel's "In the Dark" and Firefly's "Our Mrs. Reynolds") that I saw out of chronological order. So it's a fairly important episode to me.
The episode opens with Buffy on routine patrol, doing what she always does, fighting a vampire and making quips, but this time it goes wrong and she gets stabbed. The vampire gets away. I like that it was just a normal vampire (in the sense that the vamp is a one-shot who dies later in the episode) rather than a recurring villain. They're making a point; by Season Five, vampires had become the equivalent of the Stormtroopers in Star Wars; the only way they were ever going to win a fight was through sheer numbers. And yet Buffy slips up in a one-on-one fight and barely escapes with her life. There was nothing special about this particular vampire (except that he was a Heavy Metal fan - more on that in just a moment); Buffy just slipped up and got a chilling reminder of her own mortality.
I think that's what the writers were going for, and the commentary seems to back it up. But they undercut it just a little bit by making the vampire a metalhead. There's a Season Three Angel episode where a pop band gets infected by a demon virus and goes all metal, so it's not just a one-time occurence; someone on the Mutant Enemy staff just went ahead and automatically equated metal with evil. That kind of annoys me, but I digress. They convey "metalhead" by giving the vamp a leather jacket and long hair. Both of these also say "badass," which does kind of undercut the notion that this was just an ordinary vamp that nearly killed Buffy.
Anyway, she decides she wants to know how some of her predecessors died, so she won't make the same mistakes she did. Unfortunately, Giles doesn't have that much for her, so she goes to the only person she knows who has actually killed a Slayer. Exactly one season ago, Spike was captured by Buffy's equivalent of Torchwood and implanted with a microchip that prevents him from harming humans (how exactly that chip works is a bit of a mystery, as at one point he uses it to test whether another character actually is human. Man, if only they had that sort of thing on BSG...) Still able to fight demons, he began a reluctant transition to Buffy's side, and I do mean that it more ways than one. This episode comes near the beginning of the "Spike loves Buffy" arc, which may have been created to help explain why he's actually willing to fight on the side of good by the end of the season.
Anyways, back in his bad old days, Spike killed not one but two Slayers; one during the Boxer rebellion and one in New York in the 70s. Buffy asks him to recount these fights and see if she can glean any information from his story.
But Spike's not content to just do two scenes; instead, he starts his story on the evening of his transformation from bloody awful poet to badass creature of the night. Once upon a time, (specifically in 1880) he was a poet named William who inexplicably thought he could come up with a rhyme for "effulgent." (Watch the episode to find out what he went with.) Mercilessly mocked by some people, he storms out into the night, bumps into someone (who we find out in "Darla" was, um, Darla), and then encounters Dru, who turns him.
As a new vampire, Spike doesn't quite understand the whole "stealth" thing. He goes on a rampage that very nearly gets the entire Fang Gang (Angelus, Darla, Dru, and him) killed. Angelus warns him that he'll attract the attention of a Slayer, but this only piques his interest.
Fast forward to 1900. It's the Boxer Rebellion. Spike is losing a fight against the Chinese Slayer until an explosion knocks her off-balance. Spike capitalizes on the situation and kills her. Then it turns out that Slayer blood is an aphrodisiac to vampires (as if That One Scene at the end of Season Three wasn't suggestive enough), so Spike and Dru start to get it on. They then re-unite with Angel and Darla, who both look uncomfortable for reasons that "Darla" will reveal, but the astute Buffy fan will have already figured out (hint: 1900 is after 1898). Spike boasts about killing a Slayer.
Buffy interrupts, understandably not really wanting to hear about Spike getting his jollies. (Give it a year, Summers...) Spike correctly deduces that Buffy's interested in his story because she got hurt, and thinks he can give her some sort of insight. They go outside and, with the aid of a pool cue, re-enact the second fight.
It takes place on a subway carriage, and once again, Spike is losing until the lights go out, at which point he promptly gains the upper hand. He reveals every Slayer has a death wish, and that all it takes is luck, or as he puts it, "one good day." Buffy didn't lose that fight because the metalhead vamp was faster or stronger; she lost it because she slipped up. Her friends help tie her to this world, but there's part of her that just doesn't want to play the game anymore.
Of course, that's not all Spike says. "I'll slip in. Have myself a real good day." Doesn't take a genius to figure out what he's talking about. Buffy storms away, affronted.
Privately, Spike remembers what happened in South America in after the events of "Belonging." Dru leaves him for a Chaos demon, insisting that he stinks of the Slayer.
The titular fool for love is Spike. He loved Dru, but she left him. Now he has feelings for Buffy, but she treats him like dirt. He loads up a shotgun, intending to kill her, but he finds her sitting on her back porch, upset about something, and his resolve shatters. Buffy just found out that her mother might have brain cancer. Spike sits on the porch with Buffy. Roll credits.
This is really the first time that Buffy lets Spike in. Okay, that sounded wrong. This is the first time she opens up... no, that's not any better. That doesn't happen until Season Six. But it's worth pointing out that, just as Spike will be the first one in Season Six to learn that Buffy was in Heaven, here Spike is the first one to find out that something is very, very wrong in Buffy's personal life. The balance of power is just beginning to shift.
The notion that any old vampire could have offed Buffy was an interesting one. Of course, it wasn't actually going to happen, and when Buffy does die at the end of the season, it's during the season finale and the entire Universe is at stake. The "death wish" concept is introduced here to help set that up. But clearly the notion of "just a normal, pointless death" stuck with the writing team...
9 out of 10.
(Yes, I slipped up in my schedule. "Darla" will still be up this evening.)
Thursday: BSG: "Water"
Friday: BSG: "Bastille Day"
Saturday: DS9: "In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "A Good Man Goes to War" and a River Song retrospective
Once you've winched your jaw back up / launched your missiles at me / excommunicated me, let me explain. See, in Voyager's fourth season, a member of the stock villan race (in this case, the Borg) unwillingly joined the good guys. Seven of Nine immediately got the closest equivalent to character exploration Voyager ever accomplished; her backstory was fleshed out, and blah blah blah. All this happened about half a season in, blah blah.
In Buffy the Vampire Slayer's fourth season, a member of the stock villain race (in this case, vampires) unwillingly joined the good guys. Spike had to wait an entire season before we got his backstory. The delay is intriguing, but understandable; the way Buffy treats Spike is considerably different from the way Janeway treats Seven (outside of fanfiction). For the entirety of Season 4, she didn't trust him, didn't like him, had no reason to want to hear his backstory. And so we had to wait.
There are two other things I should mention about this episode before I actually dive into it. First, as most people know, it's the first part of an unofficial two-parter with Angel's "Darla," which aired immediately afterward. In both episodes, we see flashbacks to London, 1880 and China, 1900, but from Spike's perspective in the first episode and Darla's in the second.
Second, this was the first Buffy episode I saw, the first Whedon episode I saw, the only Whedon episode I actually saw on television (as opposed to DVD) until Dollhouse, and one of only three Whedon episodes (the other two being Angel's "In the Dark" and Firefly's "Our Mrs. Reynolds") that I saw out of chronological order. So it's a fairly important episode to me.
The episode opens with Buffy on routine patrol, doing what she always does, fighting a vampire and making quips, but this time it goes wrong and she gets stabbed. The vampire gets away. I like that it was just a normal vampire (in the sense that the vamp is a one-shot who dies later in the episode) rather than a recurring villain. They're making a point; by Season Five, vampires had become the equivalent of the Stormtroopers in Star Wars; the only way they were ever going to win a fight was through sheer numbers. And yet Buffy slips up in a one-on-one fight and barely escapes with her life. There was nothing special about this particular vampire (except that he was a Heavy Metal fan - more on that in just a moment); Buffy just slipped up and got a chilling reminder of her own mortality.
I think that's what the writers were going for, and the commentary seems to back it up. But they undercut it just a little bit by making the vampire a metalhead. There's a Season Three Angel episode where a pop band gets infected by a demon virus and goes all metal, so it's not just a one-time occurence; someone on the Mutant Enemy staff just went ahead and automatically equated metal with evil. That kind of annoys me, but I digress. They convey "metalhead" by giving the vamp a leather jacket and long hair. Both of these also say "badass," which does kind of undercut the notion that this was just an ordinary vamp that nearly killed Buffy.
Anyway, she decides she wants to know how some of her predecessors died, so she won't make the same mistakes she did. Unfortunately, Giles doesn't have that much for her, so she goes to the only person she knows who has actually killed a Slayer. Exactly one season ago, Spike was captured by Buffy's equivalent of Torchwood and implanted with a microchip that prevents him from harming humans (how exactly that chip works is a bit of a mystery, as at one point he uses it to test whether another character actually is human. Man, if only they had that sort of thing on BSG...) Still able to fight demons, he began a reluctant transition to Buffy's side, and I do mean that it more ways than one. This episode comes near the beginning of the "Spike loves Buffy" arc, which may have been created to help explain why he's actually willing to fight on the side of good by the end of the season.
Anyways, back in his bad old days, Spike killed not one but two Slayers; one during the Boxer rebellion and one in New York in the 70s. Buffy asks him to recount these fights and see if she can glean any information from his story.
But Spike's not content to just do two scenes; instead, he starts his story on the evening of his transformation from bloody awful poet to badass creature of the night. Once upon a time, (specifically in 1880) he was a poet named William who inexplicably thought he could come up with a rhyme for "effulgent." (Watch the episode to find out what he went with.) Mercilessly mocked by some people, he storms out into the night, bumps into someone (who we find out in "Darla" was, um, Darla), and then encounters Dru, who turns him.
As a new vampire, Spike doesn't quite understand the whole "stealth" thing. He goes on a rampage that very nearly gets the entire Fang Gang (Angelus, Darla, Dru, and him) killed. Angelus warns him that he'll attract the attention of a Slayer, but this only piques his interest.
Fast forward to 1900. It's the Boxer Rebellion. Spike is losing a fight against the Chinese Slayer until an explosion knocks her off-balance. Spike capitalizes on the situation and kills her. Then it turns out that Slayer blood is an aphrodisiac to vampires (as if That One Scene at the end of Season Three wasn't suggestive enough), so Spike and Dru start to get it on. They then re-unite with Angel and Darla, who both look uncomfortable for reasons that "Darla" will reveal, but the astute Buffy fan will have already figured out (hint: 1900 is after 1898). Spike boasts about killing a Slayer.
Buffy interrupts, understandably not really wanting to hear about Spike getting his jollies. (Give it a year, Summers...) Spike correctly deduces that Buffy's interested in his story because she got hurt, and thinks he can give her some sort of insight. They go outside and, with the aid of a pool cue, re-enact the second fight.
It takes place on a subway carriage, and once again, Spike is losing until the lights go out, at which point he promptly gains the upper hand. He reveals every Slayer has a death wish, and that all it takes is luck, or as he puts it, "one good day." Buffy didn't lose that fight because the metalhead vamp was faster or stronger; she lost it because she slipped up. Her friends help tie her to this world, but there's part of her that just doesn't want to play the game anymore.
Of course, that's not all Spike says. "I'll slip in. Have myself a real good day." Doesn't take a genius to figure out what he's talking about. Buffy storms away, affronted.
Privately, Spike remembers what happened in South America in after the events of "Belonging." Dru leaves him for a Chaos demon, insisting that he stinks of the Slayer.
The titular fool for love is Spike. He loved Dru, but she left him. Now he has feelings for Buffy, but she treats him like dirt. He loads up a shotgun, intending to kill her, but he finds her sitting on her back porch, upset about something, and his resolve shatters. Buffy just found out that her mother might have brain cancer. Spike sits on the porch with Buffy. Roll credits.
This is really the first time that Buffy lets Spike in. Okay, that sounded wrong. This is the first time she opens up... no, that's not any better. That doesn't happen until Season Six. But it's worth pointing out that, just as Spike will be the first one in Season Six to learn that Buffy was in Heaven, here Spike is the first one to find out that something is very, very wrong in Buffy's personal life. The balance of power is just beginning to shift.
The notion that any old vampire could have offed Buffy was an interesting one. Of course, it wasn't actually going to happen, and when Buffy does die at the end of the season, it's during the season finale and the entire Universe is at stake. The "death wish" concept is introduced here to help set that up. But clearly the notion of "just a normal, pointless death" stuck with the writing team...
9 out of 10.
(Yes, I slipped up in my schedule. "Darla" will still be up this evening.)
Thursday: BSG: "Water"
Friday: BSG: "Bastille Day"
Saturday: DS9: "In Purgatory's Shadow/By Inferno's Light"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "A Good Man Goes to War" and a River Song retrospective
Monday, June 6, 2011
BSG: 33
Yes, we're tired. Yes, there is no relief. Yes, the Cylons keep coming after us time after time after time. And yes, we are still expected to do our jobs!
-Colonel Tigh
The first episode of BSG proper is a dark tour-de-force, aptly demonstrating exactly where the show is going to go, and how the show is going to work for at least the first season.
For all intents and purposes, there are three major stories unfolding: Helo and a Boomer clone on Caprica (which I'll ignore for now and instead cover all in one go once the story comes to some sort of conclusion). Baltar continues to have conversations with Six, which chronicle his slow conversion into either an instrument of God's will, a helpless pawn in Six's game, or some sort of self-actualization. And of course, Galactica must deal with Cylon threats pretty much every week.
This time, the threat comes every 33 minutes, hence the title of the episode. The crew is worn out after five days of constant attacks. The Cylons show up, the fleet jumps, 33 minutes pass, repeat. Until one time it doesn't. They left behind one ship, the Olympic Carrier, by accident. This time, 33 minutes come and go and nothing happens. Then the Carrier shows up, 33 minutes pass incredibly quickly, and the Cylons show up. Just to drive the point home, it's suddenly revealed that there are nukes on the Carrier, and so Starbuck and Apollo, jacked up on stimulants, are ordered to destroy it, despite the fact that there are almost certainly civilians aboard.
Let me just get the two minor quibbles I have with this episode out of the way first. One, as I already mentioned, the 33 minutes between the Carrier's reappearance and the Cylons' arrival seem to elapse much too quickly. Two, very little is made of the fact that the pilots are, as Starbuck says, "on drugs." Given the confrontation between Lee and Kara, you'd kind of think that that was going somewhere.
Now let me move on to the things I like. One, the confrontation between Lee and Kara. Of all the things in this episode, that scene is probably my favorite. She doesn't want to take the stimulants because they'll mess her up. Lee's a by-the-book officer who knows better than to disobey an order, and his orders are to get Kara to take her drugs. (It kind of comes back later, in that Kara pauses significantly before firing on the Carrier. Lee's no happier about that order, but he does as he's told with less hesitation.)
Oh, second, the destruction of the Carrier. There are less than 50,000 Humans left in the Universe. Every single remaining life is extra-precious. But Roslin and Adama know that they can't risk the entire fleet for the sake of the 1,300 on the Carrier. They don't know for certain, but the evidence strongly suggests that the Cylons are tracking that ship, or someone on it. And then suddenly it's got nukes. So that ship has to be destroyed, along with everyone aboard. The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise. But it's not sugarcoated; both Apollo and Adama argue that the burden of responsibility is on them, and the Carrier's destruction gets mentioned again in the following episode.
Third, sometimes the Baltar/Six stuff doesn't seem to tie in quite so nicely to the main plot, but it works really well here. Someone aboard the Carrier seems to have knowledge that could expose Baltar's (accidental) role in the destruction of Caprica; when the Carrier goes missing, Six claims that Baltar has been saved by God. Baltar doesn't believe her; the Carrier reappears. Baltar repents; Roslin gives the order to destroy the Carrier.
There are a lot of wonderful little character touches as well, like Tigh giving up his ten minutes of rest because Adama's too tired to remember whose turn it is. Or Chief Tyrol, who's given so little to work with, but does a fantastic job showing just how tired and frustrated he is. Or Dualla, trying to track down any surviving members of her family. The extended cast size is just about manageable, so these tiny little scenes help the audience remember who these people are and help flesh out their characters.
Frankly, if you count "33" as the proper start to Season 1, then it's the strongest single-episode introduction to a television show I've ever seen. If you don't, then it's still the strongest "episode right after the season opener" I've ever seen. Can't say much more than that.
-Colonel Tigh
The first episode of BSG proper is a dark tour-de-force, aptly demonstrating exactly where the show is going to go, and how the show is going to work for at least the first season.
For all intents and purposes, there are three major stories unfolding: Helo and a Boomer clone on Caprica (which I'll ignore for now and instead cover all in one go once the story comes to some sort of conclusion). Baltar continues to have conversations with Six, which chronicle his slow conversion into either an instrument of God's will, a helpless pawn in Six's game, or some sort of self-actualization. And of course, Galactica must deal with Cylon threats pretty much every week.
This time, the threat comes every 33 minutes, hence the title of the episode. The crew is worn out after five days of constant attacks. The Cylons show up, the fleet jumps, 33 minutes pass, repeat. Until one time it doesn't. They left behind one ship, the Olympic Carrier, by accident. This time, 33 minutes come and go and nothing happens. Then the Carrier shows up, 33 minutes pass incredibly quickly, and the Cylons show up. Just to drive the point home, it's suddenly revealed that there are nukes on the Carrier, and so Starbuck and Apollo, jacked up on stimulants, are ordered to destroy it, despite the fact that there are almost certainly civilians aboard.
Let me just get the two minor quibbles I have with this episode out of the way first. One, as I already mentioned, the 33 minutes between the Carrier's reappearance and the Cylons' arrival seem to elapse much too quickly. Two, very little is made of the fact that the pilots are, as Starbuck says, "on drugs." Given the confrontation between Lee and Kara, you'd kind of think that that was going somewhere.
Now let me move on to the things I like. One, the confrontation between Lee and Kara. Of all the things in this episode, that scene is probably my favorite. She doesn't want to take the stimulants because they'll mess her up. Lee's a by-the-book officer who knows better than to disobey an order, and his orders are to get Kara to take her drugs. (It kind of comes back later, in that Kara pauses significantly before firing on the Carrier. Lee's no happier about that order, but he does as he's told with less hesitation.)
Oh, second, the destruction of the Carrier. There are less than 50,000 Humans left in the Universe. Every single remaining life is extra-precious. But Roslin and Adama know that they can't risk the entire fleet for the sake of the 1,300 on the Carrier. They don't know for certain, but the evidence strongly suggests that the Cylons are tracking that ship, or someone on it. And then suddenly it's got nukes. So that ship has to be destroyed, along with everyone aboard. The stakes are simply too high to do otherwise. But it's not sugarcoated; both Apollo and Adama argue that the burden of responsibility is on them, and the Carrier's destruction gets mentioned again in the following episode.
Third, sometimes the Baltar/Six stuff doesn't seem to tie in quite so nicely to the main plot, but it works really well here. Someone aboard the Carrier seems to have knowledge that could expose Baltar's (accidental) role in the destruction of Caprica; when the Carrier goes missing, Six claims that Baltar has been saved by God. Baltar doesn't believe her; the Carrier reappears. Baltar repents; Roslin gives the order to destroy the Carrier.
There are a lot of wonderful little character touches as well, like Tigh giving up his ten minutes of rest because Adama's too tired to remember whose turn it is. Or Chief Tyrol, who's given so little to work with, but does a fantastic job showing just how tired and frustrated he is. Or Dualla, trying to track down any surviving members of her family. The extended cast size is just about manageable, so these tiny little scenes help the audience remember who these people are and help flesh out their characters.
Frankly, if you count "33" as the proper start to Season 1, then it's the strongest single-episode introduction to a television show I've ever seen. If you don't, then it's still the strongest "episode right after the season opener" I've ever seen. Can't say much more than that.
Sunday, June 5, 2011
Who Review: "The Rebel Flesh"/"The Almost People"
...alias the knockoff of Avatar, Blade Runner, and every other duplicate/AI plotline out there.
"The Rebel Flesh" is pretty terrible for all the reasons I detailed here and have no wish to repeat.
"The Almost People" is actually really cool, from the moment Matt Smith starts imitating his predecessors to the utter wham of an ending.
For a start, all the gangers except three spend the entire episode in acid suits, so it's really easy to tell them apart. As for the other three, one is the Doctor, one stays wearing what her human double is wearing in order to confuse Rory (and us), and the other... well, I'll get to that. The point is, we're either supposed to be confused, or not aware that we're looking at a ganger. That is to say the confusion is intentional here whereas it was just annoying in the first part.
Rory is still off with Jessica, while the others bundle together. The Doctor quickly acclimatizes to his ganger and the two of them go into a fantastic double-act. They can only be told apart by their shoes. Sabotage ensues and the Doctors try to keep everyone safe, but they're not particularly good at it because people still die.
What I like most about the Doctor's attitude towards the Doctorganger is that it's really a continuation of the line Peter Davison once uttered in The Five Doctors: "A man is the sum of his memory." Because the Doctorganger has all the Doctor's memories, he is the Doctor.
Amy confronts the "fake" Doctor and mentions his upcoming death. He flips out - understandably. (It turns out later that they switched places, so that's the original she's just told... oops.)
Eventually the "real" Doctor sends the "fake" Doctor off to save Rory. He gives him his sonic screwdriver. The "fake" Doctor gets knocked out and appears to join the Gangers, who lock all the "real" people in a room with an acid pump. Here, the "real" Doctor tries to escape by using the sonic screwdriver. ...what? At the end, the "fake" Doctor, having revealed himself to be the original Doctor all along, gives the Doctorganger back his screwdriver, which the Doctorganger uses to kill himself, another Ganger, and Jessica, who is now patently evil. Then the original Doctor pulls out another screwdriver, points it at Amy, and...
Amy's body disintegrates, and her consciousness is instantly transferred somewhere else. She's a Cylon! Wait, wrong show. Again.
Okay, so the screwdriver evidently got cloned, but if you watched carefully, it looks like there were somehow three of them floating around instead of two.
As a side note, how does the Doctor know it's been nine months for Amy?
As another side note, when will the show stop hiring bad child actors?
The twist ending was legitimately awesome. Everything Matt Smith did in this episode, from imitating his predecessors to talking to himself to saying "call me Smith" (ho ho ho) was excellent.
"Rebel Flesh" gets 2 out of 10. You had to have seen that coming. "Almost People" gets a 7, saved primarily because of Smith's performance and the ending. (I have never split the ratings on a two-parter by that much, which should really tell you how little I think of the setup, but how awesome Smith's performance is.)
"The Rebel Flesh" is pretty terrible for all the reasons I detailed here and have no wish to repeat.
"The Almost People" is actually really cool, from the moment Matt Smith starts imitating his predecessors to the utter wham of an ending.
For a start, all the gangers except three spend the entire episode in acid suits, so it's really easy to tell them apart. As for the other three, one is the Doctor, one stays wearing what her human double is wearing in order to confuse Rory (and us), and the other... well, I'll get to that. The point is, we're either supposed to be confused, or not aware that we're looking at a ganger. That is to say the confusion is intentional here whereas it was just annoying in the first part.
Rory is still off with Jessica, while the others bundle together. The Doctor quickly acclimatizes to his ganger and the two of them go into a fantastic double-act. They can only be told apart by their shoes. Sabotage ensues and the Doctors try to keep everyone safe, but they're not particularly good at it because people still die.
What I like most about the Doctor's attitude towards the Doctorganger is that it's really a continuation of the line Peter Davison once uttered in The Five Doctors: "A man is the sum of his memory." Because the Doctorganger has all the Doctor's memories, he is the Doctor.
Amy confronts the "fake" Doctor and mentions his upcoming death. He flips out - understandably. (It turns out later that they switched places, so that's the original she's just told... oops.)
Eventually the "real" Doctor sends the "fake" Doctor off to save Rory. He gives him his sonic screwdriver. The "fake" Doctor gets knocked out and appears to join the Gangers, who lock all the "real" people in a room with an acid pump. Here, the "real" Doctor tries to escape by using the sonic screwdriver. ...what? At the end, the "fake" Doctor, having revealed himself to be the original Doctor all along, gives the Doctorganger back his screwdriver, which the Doctorganger uses to kill himself, another Ganger, and Jessica, who is now patently evil. Then the original Doctor pulls out another screwdriver, points it at Amy, and...
Amy's body disintegrates, and her consciousness is instantly transferred somewhere else. She's a Cylon! Wait, wrong show. Again.
Okay, so the screwdriver evidently got cloned, but if you watched carefully, it looks like there were somehow three of them floating around instead of two.
As a side note, how does the Doctor know it's been nine months for Amy?
As another side note, when will the show stop hiring bad child actors?
The twist ending was legitimately awesome. Everything Matt Smith did in this episode, from imitating his predecessors to talking to himself to saying "call me Smith" (ho ho ho) was excellent.
"Rebel Flesh" gets 2 out of 10. You had to have seen that coming. "Almost People" gets a 7, saved primarily because of Smith's performance and the ending. (I have never split the ratings on a two-parter by that much, which should really tell you how little I think of the setup, but how awesome Smith's performance is.)
Saturday, June 4, 2011
BtVS: "Becoming" (parts 1 and 2)
"Becoming" is the two-part finale to Buffy's second season, bringing the Angelus arc to a close and demonstrating better than any episode other than "The Gift" just how much Buffy is willing to sacrifice in order to save the world.
Loads and loads of background information is necessary, so I'll get it out of the way quickly; in Season 1, Buffy, the Slayer, fell in love with Angel, the only good vampire in the universe (because he was the only one who had a soul). In the middle of Season 2, they had sex, causing Angel to experience a moment of perfect happiness and lose his soul. He became evil once again, harassing Buffy's friends for the remainder of the season and murdering one of her teachers.
Also earlier in Season 2, Buffy met Kendra, the other Slayer. See, Buffy "died" at the end of Season 1, and whenever one Slayer dies the next is "called" (gets their powers). Buffy's subsequent resuscitation didn't cancel Kendra's activation, and so for a brief time there were two Slayers, who for the most part stayed out of each other's way.
Also earlier in Season 2, the aforementioned teacher Angelus killed researched a way to restore his soul, and saved that information to a floppy disk that just happened to go AWOL after her death.
Also earlier in Season 2, we met a pair of vampires named Spike and Drusilla, who used to pal around with Angelus in the bad old days. Dru was injured before the season began, but she was restored by a ritual arranged by Spike. During that same ritual, Spike got tossed into a pipe organ and got stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of the season (they were actually planning to kill him at that point, as he'd served his purpose as one of the season's fake Big Bads, but fan reaction was positive enough to convice the writers to keep him around). When Angel turned evil, he started flirting with Dru and mocking Spike's injury, making Spike incredibly jealous.
...okay, I think that's everything (this is what I get for reviewing an arc-driven show in non-chronological order). Let's dive into the episodes.
Part 1 starts with even more background information. It shows the moment Angelus was sired by Darla in 1753 (which contradicts information we're given in "Halloween," but that's another story), as well as his persecution of Drusilla in 1860, his re-ensoulment in 1898, his rescue from rock-bottom in 1996 and his decision to help Buffy that same year.
The plot revolves around a demon named Acathla, who is currently stuck in stone form. (Quick! Everyone stare at it and don't blin... sorry, wrong series.) Only one who is worthy can remove the sword from Acathla, which will re-awaken it, and then Acathla will consume the world. Angelus thinks this is an awesome idea, and sets about trying to make himself worthy. To that end, he has his minions kidnap resident demonologist Giles in a raid that also puts Buffy's friend Willow in the hospital and kills Kendra. Buffy finds Kendra's body and is nearly arrested for murder. She escapes, but gets expelled from school.
Then she runs into Spike, who it turns out has been faking the extent of his injuries for the last few episodes. He can walk again, and he's not that big on the whole world-ending thing, so he agrees to help Buffy save Giles from a torture-happy ("they didn't even have chainsaws in my day") Angelus. In the process of all this, Buffy's mother finds out that she's the Slayer. Joyce is, understandably, less than thrilled.
Meanwhile, Willow has found the information she needs to restore Angel's soul, and never mind that she spent the first half of the second episode unconscious in a hospital, she's going to do it. (Whedon runs into this same suspension-of-disbelief problem again next year when he puts Buffy in the hospital right before her showdown with the Mayor.)
Angelus figures out how to do the ritual, and promptly does it. Buffy shows up and Spike does his part, but then he knocks out Dru and runs away with her, because she's all he really wanted. Buffy and Angelus have a sword fight while Acathla slowly wakes up. Buffy wins, because this is her show, but right before she can skewer Angelus (whose blood is needed in order to reverse the ritual), Willow restores his soul. Of course, Buffy's still got to kill him, because if she doesn't Acathla will swallow the world. So she does. Angel disappears into hell for one hundred years, or one summer, depending on your perspective.
Her personal life now in utter ruins - she's expelled from school and wanted for murder, she had to kill her boyfriend as soon as he got his soul back, and she's not on speaking terms with her mother - Buffy skips town. Roll credits.
By this point, Whedon knew he was bringing Angel back to spin him off into his own show. The return itself still basically amounts to "a wizard did it," but that doesn't really cheapen the emotional impact of this episode. Once Angel does return, his relationship with Buffy is forever altered and ultimately doomed.
This is one of the great season finales of the show (the other being "The Gift," if you had to ask). Note that it's not enough to just have Buffy kill the demon that's been walking around in her boyfriend's body for the last few months; he had to get his soul restored so she'd have to kill Angel, not Angelus. Yes, it seems strange that Willow can suddenly do high-level magic after getting knocked on the head, yes, the murder charges will be randomly dropped between seasons, and yes, absolutely no effort is made to mask the stunt doubles' faces during the sword-fight. But really, these are quibbles. Seeing Dru kill Kendra is a nice touch; throughout the entire season we've been hearing people say just how dangerous she is, and it's only here at the end where she shows us just what she can do. And Buffy has to let her go as part of her bargain with Spike. It's a shame it would take two and a half years for them to meet again, and even then it was only really as part of the Buffy/Spike story. But the main story, the conclusion of the Angelus arc and the final confrontation between him and Buffy, delivers on all levels.
10 out of 10.
Loads and loads of background information is necessary, so I'll get it out of the way quickly; in Season 1, Buffy, the Slayer, fell in love with Angel, the only good vampire in the universe (because he was the only one who had a soul). In the middle of Season 2, they had sex, causing Angel to experience a moment of perfect happiness and lose his soul. He became evil once again, harassing Buffy's friends for the remainder of the season and murdering one of her teachers.
Also earlier in Season 2, Buffy met Kendra, the other Slayer. See, Buffy "died" at the end of Season 1, and whenever one Slayer dies the next is "called" (gets their powers). Buffy's subsequent resuscitation didn't cancel Kendra's activation, and so for a brief time there were two Slayers, who for the most part stayed out of each other's way.
Also earlier in Season 2, the aforementioned teacher Angelus killed researched a way to restore his soul, and saved that information to a floppy disk that just happened to go AWOL after her death.
Also earlier in Season 2, we met a pair of vampires named Spike and Drusilla, who used to pal around with Angelus in the bad old days. Dru was injured before the season began, but she was restored by a ritual arranged by Spike. During that same ritual, Spike got tossed into a pipe organ and got stuck in a wheelchair for the rest of the season (they were actually planning to kill him at that point, as he'd served his purpose as one of the season's fake Big Bads, but fan reaction was positive enough to convice the writers to keep him around). When Angel turned evil, he started flirting with Dru and mocking Spike's injury, making Spike incredibly jealous.
...okay, I think that's everything (this is what I get for reviewing an arc-driven show in non-chronological order). Let's dive into the episodes.
Part 1 starts with even more background information. It shows the moment Angelus was sired by Darla in 1753 (which contradicts information we're given in "Halloween," but that's another story), as well as his persecution of Drusilla in 1860, his re-ensoulment in 1898, his rescue from rock-bottom in 1996 and his decision to help Buffy that same year.
The plot revolves around a demon named Acathla, who is currently stuck in stone form. (Quick! Everyone stare at it and don't blin... sorry, wrong series.) Only one who is worthy can remove the sword from Acathla, which will re-awaken it, and then Acathla will consume the world. Angelus thinks this is an awesome idea, and sets about trying to make himself worthy. To that end, he has his minions kidnap resident demonologist Giles in a raid that also puts Buffy's friend Willow in the hospital and kills Kendra. Buffy finds Kendra's body and is nearly arrested for murder. She escapes, but gets expelled from school.
Then she runs into Spike, who it turns out has been faking the extent of his injuries for the last few episodes. He can walk again, and he's not that big on the whole world-ending thing, so he agrees to help Buffy save Giles from a torture-happy ("they didn't even have chainsaws in my day") Angelus. In the process of all this, Buffy's mother finds out that she's the Slayer. Joyce is, understandably, less than thrilled.
Meanwhile, Willow has found the information she needs to restore Angel's soul, and never mind that she spent the first half of the second episode unconscious in a hospital, she's going to do it. (Whedon runs into this same suspension-of-disbelief problem again next year when he puts Buffy in the hospital right before her showdown with the Mayor.)
Angelus figures out how to do the ritual, and promptly does it. Buffy shows up and Spike does his part, but then he knocks out Dru and runs away with her, because she's all he really wanted. Buffy and Angelus have a sword fight while Acathla slowly wakes up. Buffy wins, because this is her show, but right before she can skewer Angelus (whose blood is needed in order to reverse the ritual), Willow restores his soul. Of course, Buffy's still got to kill him, because if she doesn't Acathla will swallow the world. So she does. Angel disappears into hell for one hundred years, or one summer, depending on your perspective.
Her personal life now in utter ruins - she's expelled from school and wanted for murder, she had to kill her boyfriend as soon as he got his soul back, and she's not on speaking terms with her mother - Buffy skips town. Roll credits.
By this point, Whedon knew he was bringing Angel back to spin him off into his own show. The return itself still basically amounts to "a wizard did it," but that doesn't really cheapen the emotional impact of this episode. Once Angel does return, his relationship with Buffy is forever altered and ultimately doomed.
This is one of the great season finales of the show (the other being "The Gift," if you had to ask). Note that it's not enough to just have Buffy kill the demon that's been walking around in her boyfriend's body for the last few months; he had to get his soul restored so she'd have to kill Angel, not Angelus. Yes, it seems strange that Willow can suddenly do high-level magic after getting knocked on the head, yes, the murder charges will be randomly dropped between seasons, and yes, absolutely no effort is made to mask the stunt doubles' faces during the sword-fight. But really, these are quibbles. Seeing Dru kill Kendra is a nice touch; throughout the entire season we've been hearing people say just how dangerous she is, and it's only here at the end where she shows us just what she can do. And Buffy has to let her go as part of her bargain with Spike. It's a shame it would take two and a half years for them to meet again, and even then it was only really as part of the Buffy/Spike story. But the main story, the conclusion of the Angelus arc and the final confrontation between him and Buffy, delivers on all levels.
10 out of 10.
Friday, June 3, 2011
DS9: In the Pale Moonlight
"Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?"
-the Joker, Batman
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one."
-Spock, Star Trek II
So Deep Space Nine is probably the most controversial Star Trek show, at least among Trekkies, and "In the Pale Moonlight" is probably the most controversial Trek episode ever. Which is understandable, because it is so far away from Gene Rodenberry's utopian vision that it might as well have been an episode in a different show. To most people - we'll call them the traditional Trekkies - Star Trek is about idealism and principles. Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, shows the Federation on a war footing and tests many of those principles to the breaking point. "In the Pale Moonlight" is just the greatest example.
Setting: the Dominion War. The Dominion and the Cardassians are pouding the Klingons and the Federation, while the Romulans are sitting on the sidelines. Long story short, Sisko (DS9's commander and apparently the only guy involved in the war efforts who has brains, competence and initiative) decides that the only way they're going to win the war is by recruiting the Romulans. It doesn't take him long to realize that the Romulans won't commit to an alliance without definitive proof that the Dominion is plotting against them. So he asks the station's resident spy and magnificent bastard, Garak, to procure said proof. Garak eventually decides that such proof doesn't actually exist, but he's not the sort of person to let that stop him. This is the same guy who tortured Odo that one time, continued sputtering lies about his past even when the truth could have saved him considerable pain, and, if the spin-off book penned by his actor is to be believed, killed Gul Dukat's father. In other words, he's exactly the sort of person you should never in a million years let convince you to let him forge some evidence. Not because he won't be able to, you understand, but rather because he'll do it so creepily effectively.
And yet that's exactly what Sisko does, because the stakes are so damn high. In order to get the right type of recording unit, Sisko has to give an unknown contact enough magic goo ("biomemetic gel") to make a biological weapon. To get the right forger for the job, he first has to get said forger a pardon (as the forger is rotting in a Klingon prison, about to be executed), and later has to bribe Quark not to press charges after the forger attacks him. Quark is the station's resident capitalist pig, a greedy SOB who's only ever in it for himself, or so he'd like you to think. When Quark tells you that he's just proven that yes, you do have a price, you need to take a step back and re-examine what you're doing. But Sisko can't. Because the stakes are too high. If he can't bring the Romulans into the war, the Federation will be wiped out.
Eventually the recording is completed, and a Romulan senator arrives to review it. Unfortunately, he finds out that IT'S A FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE! However, it turns out that this was Garak's plan all along; Garak has planted a bomb in the senator's ship. The senator dies, but the recording is found in the wreckage. Garak assures Sisko that any signs of forgery will now appear to be imperfections caused by the explosion. "And with a dead senator in one hand and a seemingly genuine [recording] in the other, what conclusion would you draw?" The Romulans are drawn into the war, and all it costs is the life of a senator, the life of a forger (Sisko mentions his death, which presumably happened offscreen and was cut from the finished episode), and Sisko's principles.
It's easy to understand why some people don't like this episode, and indeed DS9 as a whole. A Starfleet officer abandoning his principles to drag other people into a war for the Federation's benefit is about as far away from peacefully seeking out new life and new civilizations as you can get. I think the following season's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" (In Time of War, the Law Falls Silent) was written to address fan concerns; here, someone else goes no further, really, than Sisko went, but in that episode, all of our heroes are appalled. (The main protagonist of that episode is Dr. Bashir, who is the closest DS9 has to a bleeding-heart liberal. In contrast, Sisko has already shown that he easily loses his cool, and has on one notorious occasion basically gassed a planet to capture a criminal.)
Bear in mind that this episode aired in 1998. Then, nobody had ever heard of Guantanamo Bay. We weren't at war. There was no reason to think, so the traditional Trekkies claimed, that we'd have to resort to underhanded methods to win a war.
Well, that was then. In 1998, the concept of a full-scale war like that was an interesting thought experiment, to see if Roddenberry's utopian ideals could withstand such an extreme threat. The traditional Trekkies don't like the answer.
The episode is framed by Sisko narrating his personal log and trying to come to terms with what he's done. Perhaps the most damning thing is the fact that the episode ends with the realization that, even though with the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious even to him that he was treading down the road to hell, he can live with what he's done. He sacrificed his principles to save as many lives as he could. (Of course, he could have sacrificed even more principles and saved even more lives by arguing for a surrender, but nobody on either side of the debate seems to be too keen to point that out...)
It doesn't treat its subject matter lightly, and Avery Brooks' serious performance here helps tremendously. I'll call him out for overacting in various other reviews, but here I think he hits every note perfectly. The writing is perfect too. This episode forced Trekkies to confront serious wartime issues in a way that clearly made many of them uncomfortable.
At the beginning of the review I quoted two things that were not this episode. The first, from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film, is the line that named this episode. Dancing with the devil is precisely what Sisko does here. The second, the famous line that foreshadows and explains Spock's self-sacrifice in Star Trek II, is really only a minor variation on the old Communist line: "From each according to ability, to each according to need." There's no denying that this is perfectly in line with Star Trek's generally leftist ideology. And yet, really, that is no different than what Sisko does here. The need is too great not to sacrifice his principles.
Frankly, until I saw Battlestar Galactica's "33," I thought this was the best dramatic plotline American science-fiction television had ever produced, and for exactly the same reason I love "33" so much. It doesn't shy away from the fact that in dire emergency, principles are the first thing to go. There is no such thing as a perfect solution. Star Trek generally likes to pretend that we're all going to be perfect in the future. The Deep Space Nine writers knew better, and they proved it here.
10 out of 10.
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
Monday: BSG: "33"
Tuesday: Buffy: "Fool for Love"
Wednesday: Angel: "Darla"
Thursday: BSG: "Water"
-the Joker, Batman
"The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few... or the one."
-Spock, Star Trek II
So Deep Space Nine is probably the most controversial Star Trek show, at least among Trekkies, and "In the Pale Moonlight" is probably the most controversial Trek episode ever. Which is understandable, because it is so far away from Gene Rodenberry's utopian vision that it might as well have been an episode in a different show. To most people - we'll call them the traditional Trekkies - Star Trek is about idealism and principles. Deep Space Nine, on the other hand, shows the Federation on a war footing and tests many of those principles to the breaking point. "In the Pale Moonlight" is just the greatest example.
Setting: the Dominion War. The Dominion and the Cardassians are pouding the Klingons and the Federation, while the Romulans are sitting on the sidelines. Long story short, Sisko (DS9's commander and apparently the only guy involved in the war efforts who has brains, competence and initiative) decides that the only way they're going to win the war is by recruiting the Romulans. It doesn't take him long to realize that the Romulans won't commit to an alliance without definitive proof that the Dominion is plotting against them. So he asks the station's resident spy and magnificent bastard, Garak, to procure said proof. Garak eventually decides that such proof doesn't actually exist, but he's not the sort of person to let that stop him. This is the same guy who tortured Odo that one time, continued sputtering lies about his past even when the truth could have saved him considerable pain, and, if the spin-off book penned by his actor is to be believed, killed Gul Dukat's father. In other words, he's exactly the sort of person you should never in a million years let convince you to let him forge some evidence. Not because he won't be able to, you understand, but rather because he'll do it so creepily effectively.
And yet that's exactly what Sisko does, because the stakes are so damn high. In order to get the right type of recording unit, Sisko has to give an unknown contact enough magic goo ("biomemetic gel") to make a biological weapon. To get the right forger for the job, he first has to get said forger a pardon (as the forger is rotting in a Klingon prison, about to be executed), and later has to bribe Quark not to press charges after the forger attacks him. Quark is the station's resident capitalist pig, a greedy SOB who's only ever in it for himself, or so he'd like you to think. When Quark tells you that he's just proven that yes, you do have a price, you need to take a step back and re-examine what you're doing. But Sisko can't. Because the stakes are too high. If he can't bring the Romulans into the war, the Federation will be wiped out.
Eventually the recording is completed, and a Romulan senator arrives to review it. Unfortunately, he finds out that IT'S A FAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE! However, it turns out that this was Garak's plan all along; Garak has planted a bomb in the senator's ship. The senator dies, but the recording is found in the wreckage. Garak assures Sisko that any signs of forgery will now appear to be imperfections caused by the explosion. "And with a dead senator in one hand and a seemingly genuine [recording] in the other, what conclusion would you draw?" The Romulans are drawn into the war, and all it costs is the life of a senator, the life of a forger (Sisko mentions his death, which presumably happened offscreen and was cut from the finished episode), and Sisko's principles.
It's easy to understand why some people don't like this episode, and indeed DS9 as a whole. A Starfleet officer abandoning his principles to drag other people into a war for the Federation's benefit is about as far away from peacefully seeking out new life and new civilizations as you can get. I think the following season's "Inter Arma Enim Silent Leges" (In Time of War, the Law Falls Silent) was written to address fan concerns; here, someone else goes no further, really, than Sisko went, but in that episode, all of our heroes are appalled. (The main protagonist of that episode is Dr. Bashir, who is the closest DS9 has to a bleeding-heart liberal. In contrast, Sisko has already shown that he easily loses his cool, and has on one notorious occasion basically gassed a planet to capture a criminal.)
Bear in mind that this episode aired in 1998. Then, nobody had ever heard of Guantanamo Bay. We weren't at war. There was no reason to think, so the traditional Trekkies claimed, that we'd have to resort to underhanded methods to win a war.
Well, that was then. In 1998, the concept of a full-scale war like that was an interesting thought experiment, to see if Roddenberry's utopian ideals could withstand such an extreme threat. The traditional Trekkies don't like the answer.
The episode is framed by Sisko narrating his personal log and trying to come to terms with what he's done. Perhaps the most damning thing is the fact that the episode ends with the realization that, even though with the benefit of hindsight, it's obvious even to him that he was treading down the road to hell, he can live with what he's done. He sacrificed his principles to save as many lives as he could. (Of course, he could have sacrificed even more principles and saved even more lives by arguing for a surrender, but nobody on either side of the debate seems to be too keen to point that out...)
It doesn't treat its subject matter lightly, and Avery Brooks' serious performance here helps tremendously. I'll call him out for overacting in various other reviews, but here I think he hits every note perfectly. The writing is perfect too. This episode forced Trekkies to confront serious wartime issues in a way that clearly made many of them uncomfortable.
At the beginning of the review I quoted two things that were not this episode. The first, from Tim Burton's 1989 Batman film, is the line that named this episode. Dancing with the devil is precisely what Sisko does here. The second, the famous line that foreshadows and explains Spock's self-sacrifice in Star Trek II, is really only a minor variation on the old Communist line: "From each according to ability, to each according to need." There's no denying that this is perfectly in line with Star Trek's generally leftist ideology. And yet, really, that is no different than what Sisko does here. The need is too great not to sacrifice his principles.
Frankly, until I saw Battlestar Galactica's "33," I thought this was the best dramatic plotline American science-fiction television had ever produced, and for exactly the same reason I love "33" so much. It doesn't shy away from the fact that in dire emergency, principles are the first thing to go. There is no such thing as a perfect solution. Star Trek generally likes to pretend that we're all going to be perfect in the future. The Deep Space Nine writers knew better, and they proved it here.
10 out of 10.
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
Monday: BSG: "33"
Tuesday: Buffy: "Fool for Love"
Wednesday: Angel: "Darla"
Thursday: BSG: "Water"
Thursday, June 2, 2011
BSG: Miniseries part 2
Lee saves himself, the President, and the civilian fleet by doing some technobabble. According to the commentary, this is a sly wink at the Star Trek thing of doing technobabble week in and week out to get out of every single stinking bind.
Roslin continues to gather civilian ships. She goes aboard one and meets a little girl who, well, hasn't quite grasped the fact that her parents are dead yet. That in itself is a pretty heartbreaking scene, but what's to come is even better/worse...
A Cylon scout finds the civilian fleet, and they decide they have to jump immediately. The ships that aren't FTL-capable will simply have to be left behind, and that includes the one the little girl is on. The sequence that follows is the sequence that told me I'd absolutely love this show. The slowest countdown ever commences, and the camera keeps cutting back to Roslin or the little girl, as if telling us "okay, any second now, she's going to change her mind and put the other ships at risk to save the girl." Nope! (Also: Barry Goldwater will kill us all.) The fleet jumps, and Cylons appear and blow the remaining ships to itty bitty bits. This is a series that clearly won't shy away from showing us the consequences of hard decisions, and I love it for that.
(Sidebar: Genesis of the Daleks would be 100% better if, instead of the Doctor spouting off some nonsense about the Daleks ultimately doing some good, it ended with a flash-forward into the future and showed us every single extermination thus far in the show; deaths that are now, in a very real sense, on the Doctor's hands.)
Galactica jumps to Ragnar Station, which is hidden inside a nebula of some sort, which does a good job of playing hell with sensors and communication. There's an incredibly lengthy sequence that follows, wherein they meet a guy who's been hiding there. He's acting an awful lot like he's seen Blade Runner, because he acts a lot like the replicants in that film. Unfortunately for him, Adama's played by a guy who was in that film, so Adama cottons on and bashes his head in with a flashlight. While Adama's still separated from the rest of the crew (and seriously, this sequence lasts forever), the civilian fleet arrives. Adama gets back, and he and Lee have a... restrained reunion. Adama, Tigh and Baltar discuss what it means that the Cylons look like us now. Baltar's tasked with coming up with a way to identify the Cylons, because apparently the Voight-Kampff test doesn't exist in this universe (seriously, though, Six is clearly sociopathic at the very least. She'd register as a replicant).
Starbuck is tasked with scouting outside the nebula to see what the Cylon position is. Before she leaves, she confesses to Lee that Zak (remember him? He's Lee's dead brother and the whole reason there's a wedge between Lee and Adama - apparently, although the final episode suggests that their estrangement goes back even further than that) actually flunked Basic Flight, and was only in that Viper he died in because Starbuck fudged his grades. Whoops. You'll have to wait for episode 4 of the series proper for that issue to actually be tackled, though.
Starbuck finds a Cylon force. Adama and Roslin argue about whether or not they can actually fight, and Adama eventually agrees to just run. Before they do so, Baltar frames a man as a Cylon agent (pretty much because Six told him to), and that man gets left behind on Ragnar. Not to worry, though, because he actually is a Cylon. (Because if he wasn't, Baltar would be utterly reprehensible, I guess.)
There's a fairly epic battle while Galactica screens the civilian fleet from a Cylon attack, Starbuck saves Apollo's life, and then there's the denoument. Adama claims that they're going to set course for Earth, but Roslin privately calls him on it. Now she holds all the cards; it's not enough that Adama's already said he has no intention of staging a military coup, now Roslin can just hold the "you lied about knowing where Earth is" thing over his head. At the very end, the Cylons arrive on Ragnar and spout some cryptic gibberish. One of them is identical to Boomer, meaning, dun dun dunnnnnnn, Boomer's a Cylon.
As you can tell, there's not nearly as much stuff going on in Part 2. The Ragnar Station stuff drags on for longer than is really healthy (and with the benefit of hindsight, the "mechanic drops an explosive thingy and causes a nasty accident" event is going to get recycled in the series proper). It's nice to see Baltar start worming his way into Adama's confidence once the latter gets back, and it's good to see the various "I thought you were dead" reactions Lee gets when he comes back. There's a nice battle at the end, but really, having introduced everything in Part 1, all Part 2 really seems to do is get all the chips in place for the actual show.
BSG: Miniseries, part 1
"When the captain's son gets vaporized, you just know that you're not getting the whole story... The audience knows that no kid is ever going to die on Doctor Who."
-Me, reviewing Curse of the Black Spot
When I wrote those words, I had no idea that the very next piece of science-fiction I watched would not only kill a child, but would also feature a character committing infanticide.
Battlestar Galactica was originated back in 1978 as the very first Star Wars ripoff, and the very first television show to cost a million dollars an episode. Guess which one got it cancelled. After 25 years and at least one aborted attempt, it was brought back by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Unlike Doctor Who, the revived BSG was a complete reimagining, re-casting every role and re-telling the entire story, with significant changes. An extremely long miniseries - basically a made-for-TV movie split into two parts - acted as a pilot for an actual show, which quickly followed.
The story begins with some background information that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Terminator or The Matrix, and visual effects that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Firefly. The Cylons were created by man, then they fought them, then there was a peace. An armistice station was built, but the Cylons never bother to show up. Until one day they do, in the form of two glorified toasters and one incarnation of sex. And then they blow up the station.
Cut to the eponymous Galactica, which is about to be decomissioned. In the course of one four-minute-long shot, we rove a bunch of corridors and are introduced to ace-pilot-with-an-additude-problem Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, and a bunch of bridge officers. Sorry, "CIC Officers." Galactica doesn't have a Star Trek- style bridge, but rather an aircraft-carrier-style Combat Information Center that functions as the ship's nerve center. There's no Captain's Chair, no viewscreen, and no ship's computer voiced by the creator's wife.
Down in the hangar bay, we meet two more really important characters, Tyrol and Boomer. Tyrol's Galactica's crew chief, and Boomer is a pilot. They're fraternizing. We also meet two slightly-less-major characters, Helo and Cally. Helo is Boomer's ECO, and Cally is another mechanic. Neither gets much to do now, but they'll both be important later on. The Miniseries has to introduce an imperial ton of characters, and for the most part it suceeds at getting their roles and personalities across in just a few lines of dialogue. Somewhere in the background we also meet a character named Prosna, but damn if I actually remembered who he was.
Cut to Planet Caprica. Sex incarnate wanders around a market and kills an infant by snapping its neck. Okay, that description doesn't quite do the scene justice. The last time we saw this woman, she was getting herself blown up on a space station, and now she's wandering around, apparently looking a bit confused. She mentions, somewhat amazed, that the infant's neck is capable of supporting its head. After the deed is done, she looks distressed. What was she doing? Examining human frailties? Experiencing death firsthand? She doesn't act like a serial baby-killer, and that's probably why I didn't have too much of a problem with that scene. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath.
Starbuck, Boomer, Helo, Tigh, and the Galactica's CAG play a card game. When Starbuck wins, Tigh knocks the table over and Starbuck punches him. This was one of two scenes in the miniseries that I didn't really get the first time; in retrospect, the scene's trying to tell us that Tigh's a drunk who is estranged from his wife, and Starbuck likes riling him up, even though she's on a hair trigger herself.
Back on Caprica, we meet Dr. Gaius Baltar, the Smartest Man Alive, played by an actor who looks uncannily like DS9's Dr. Julian Bashir (who just happened to be the Smartest Man Alive in that show). Sex incarnate walks in; they get it on and her spine starts to glow. As if we didn't know this woman was in no way normal. It eventually transpires that she is both a robot and a woman, a Cylon called Number Six (yes, they picked the number as a reference to that Number Six, and yes, I'll be calling her Number Sex from time to time). She's been using Baltar to gain access to Caprica's defense mainframe. She eventually tells him this, along with the fact that a Cylon attack is about to go down. But for some reason she seems rather interested in ensuring his survival. In the commentary, the producers mention that Tricia Helfer had virtually no acting experience prior to this, and it later transpires that they were writing the Cylon plan by the seat of their pants. I wonder which contributed more to Six's strange behavior. No, I'm not knocking her acting ability here; in fact I'm impressed that an inexperienced actress delivered such a good performance for a character whose motivation was apparently unknown even to her at the time.
Starbuck gets thrown in the brig for striking a superior officer. Adama's son, Lee, turns up for the Galactica's decomissioning ceremony. Unlike virtually everyone else, Lee (call sign: Apollo), doesn't have a lot of respect for the old man. At first I figured that this was just because he didn't like always being compared to Commander Adama, which brings us directly to the second scene in the miniseries that I'm ashamed to say I completely missed the point of. Lee visits Starbuck in the brig; it's been two years since "the funeral," and Starbuck and Adama still talk about it two or three times a year. We've already seen that Starbuck and Adama have a special relationship going on, and it's in this scene that we actually learn it, as well as why Lee has such a big stick up his ass when it comes to his father. Lee's brother Zak died two years ago; he and Starbuck were an item. After the accident, Adama treated Starbuck like a daughter. This isn't made explicit in this scene, but it's pretty obviously inferred. I was just being oblivious or something when I saw it the first time. Shame on me.
Lee visits the Commander and has an argument about how his brother wasn't cut out to be a pilot; he's upset because Adama pushed Zak too hard to do something he couldn't do, and that's what led to Zak's death. Lee is additionally saddled with having to fly his father's Viper during the decommissioning ceremony - as if he needs more baggage.
We meet Secretary of Education Laura Roslin, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It's not the Venusian Flu, it's cancer. This is just one example of the realism in this series compared to other sci-fi shows. (As an aside, you can see a Firefly-class ship at the very beginning of her first scene.) She travels to Galactica to try to get it set up to be a museum, but Adama won't abide networked computers. (Not going to be an issue, really, unless Adama's going to continue to command Galactica after it becomes a museum.)
The decomissioning ceremony goes smoothy, although Adama ad-libs his speech and winds up confessing his sadness about the loss of his son. Roslin's ship leaves to head back to Caprica.
And now that every single character has finally been introduced, everything goes to hell. The Cylons attack; Galactica's CAG is killed, along with most of the Viper pilots. Boomer and Helo make an emergency landing on Caprica, where they're accosted by refugees. Their ship is fixed, but Helo gives up his seat to Dr. Baltar.
Baltar will spend the rest of the miniseries hallucinating about Six and trying desperately to save his own ass; he's the one who (unwittingly) gave the Cylons everything they needed to wipe out humanity. He gets trapped in a web of his own lies and winds up getting an apparently innocent man marooned just to save his own hide. It's all very interesting to watch, and there are moments during his epic speed lying that he actually seems to channel the Doctor - but that could just be me, since this was just before Doctor Who came back, and none of the Original Seven were quite that manic.
Here's the thing; up to this point, we have two protagonists that it's hard to like; Apollo has a massive stick up his ass and Baltar's a cowardly liar. The main protagonist, Adama, hasn't really done that much to deserve all the praise the other characters heap on him. Yes, he's a father to his men and all that, but at this point he's also an emotionally scarred man who's apparently partly responsible for his son's death. Tigh's a drunk, and Starbuck has a serious attitude problem. Six is evil (and relegated to being a hallucination of the aforementioned cowardly liar for the rest of the miniseries and most of the first batch of episodes). Of the main characters, only Roslin would appear to be completely likeable on paper, and even she comes across as a meddling bureaucrat in her conversation with Adama (whereas he comes off as a Luddite). And yet it's hard not to keep watching. That's because, with the possible exception of Baltar, none of these characters are actually unlikeable; they're all flawed people. They're not perfect Starfleet folk. And despite their flaws, we care about them.
(Sidebar: I listed Tigh as a main character and didn't mention Boomer, even though Grace Park appears in the main credits and Michael Hogan is listed as a guest star once we get to the series proper. Boomer's role in this story is pretty much simply to get Baltar onto the Galactica. That's about it. She's having a relationship with the crew chief, but her character doesn't seem to be nearly as fleshed out as Tigh's. Again, that's nothing against the actress; there's just not that much to her character yet. The only reason I can think of why she gets star billing is the fact that she's revealed to be a Cylon at the end.)
Roslin gets word of the Cylon attack and commandeers the passenger ship she's on. She starts rescuing stranded civilians, but her "I'm in charge" attitude annoys a reporter, who tries to get Apollo (who was along to escort them) to put her in her place. The first scene between Apollo and Roslin is awesome; you think Apollo's going to shut this upstart bureaucrat down, but he very quickly realizes that "the lady's in charge." This is the scene where I started warming up to Apollo, and I think that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. They're setting up the Roslin-Adama conflict. Roslin brings out the good in Apollo; she's a leader he can look up to and respect, whereas all he can see when he looks at his father is the accident that cost him a brother.
A Cylon attack on Galactica gets Starbuck out of the brig and forces Tigh to vent part of the ship, killing 85 people on Tyrol's crew in order to save the ship. This is where Prosna dies, and Tyrol and Cally duly mourn him, but because he had so little screen time before this, I kind of forgot who he was. This is the first of two tough decisions in the miniseries, and, like the second one, it's nice to get to see some of the consequences of that decision. It also explains why Adama keeps Tigh around; from a purely storytelling standpoint, Adama can't be the father-to-his-men-type figure if he personally makes these kinds of decisions. Instead, he lets Tigh make the call and then stands by him on it.
With all 42 (!) people ahead of her in the line of sucession dead, Roslin becomes President of
what little is left. Meanwhile, everyone ahead of Adama in the military chain of command is also dead, so he takes command of the military. He orders everyone to rendezvous with him. Roslin then orders him to rendezvous with her. "Ask him how many hospital beds he has available and how soon he can join us." Again, we never saw this sort of military-civilian conflict even on Deep Space Nine.
Adama and Apollo bitch at each other over the radio (sorry, "wireless"). Adama refuses to accept Roslin's authority, insisting that she's just the Secretary of Education. Apollo refuses to rendezvous with Galactica. The whole thing is rendered moot when two Cylon raiders appear. Adama desperately yells for his son to get out of there, but the civilian ships are apparently destroyed.
What surprised me the most about Part 1 of the miniseries was how little of the Cylon attack we actually saw. We saw a couple of nukes go off on Caprica, and we saw one fighter squadron get wiped out. Most of the rest of it was relayed to Galactica's CIC, in much the same way that the first half of the Borg battle in Star Trek: First Contact is heard but not seen. I applaud this decision; not only did it save considerably on the budget, but it gave us more time for character... well, it's too early to say "development," so let's say "exploration" instead.
It's interesting to watch this unfold from Adama's perspective, even though what we get is more Roslin/Apollo (not that that's a bad thing). All Adama wants to do is get into the fight, but his ship is ill-equipped and there's a petty bureaucrat trying to undermine his authority, and who has his only surviving son on her side. Later on, in "You Can't Go Home Again," the producers will claim that this is the first time Adama's really been emotionally compromised. To which I ask: what is he here? Throughout part 2, Roslin's going to be telling him the war is already lost. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that it's a conflict between a military leader who feels and a political leader who thinks, as opposed to the other way around.
I can't cover four hours in one post. Part 2 will be up later today.
-Me, reviewing Curse of the Black Spot
When I wrote those words, I had no idea that the very next piece of science-fiction I watched would not only kill a child, but would also feature a character committing infanticide.
Battlestar Galactica was originated back in 1978 as the very first Star Wars ripoff, and the very first television show to cost a million dollars an episode. Guess which one got it cancelled. After 25 years and at least one aborted attempt, it was brought back by Ronald D. Moore and David Eick. Unlike Doctor Who, the revived BSG was a complete reimagining, re-casting every role and re-telling the entire story, with significant changes. An extremely long miniseries - basically a made-for-TV movie split into two parts - acted as a pilot for an actual show, which quickly followed.
The story begins with some background information that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Terminator or The Matrix, and visual effects that will be familiar to anyone who's seen Firefly. The Cylons were created by man, then they fought them, then there was a peace. An armistice station was built, but the Cylons never bother to show up. Until one day they do, in the form of two glorified toasters and one incarnation of sex. And then they blow up the station.
Cut to the eponymous Galactica, which is about to be decomissioned. In the course of one four-minute-long shot, we rove a bunch of corridors and are introduced to ace-pilot-with-an-additude-problem Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, Commander Adama, Colonel Tigh, and a bunch of bridge officers. Sorry, "CIC Officers." Galactica doesn't have a Star Trek- style bridge, but rather an aircraft-carrier-style Combat Information Center that functions as the ship's nerve center. There's no Captain's Chair, no viewscreen, and no ship's computer voiced by the creator's wife.
Down in the hangar bay, we meet two more really important characters, Tyrol and Boomer. Tyrol's Galactica's crew chief, and Boomer is a pilot. They're fraternizing. We also meet two slightly-less-major characters, Helo and Cally. Helo is Boomer's ECO, and Cally is another mechanic. Neither gets much to do now, but they'll both be important later on. The Miniseries has to introduce an imperial ton of characters, and for the most part it suceeds at getting their roles and personalities across in just a few lines of dialogue. Somewhere in the background we also meet a character named Prosna, but damn if I actually remembered who he was.
Cut to Planet Caprica. Sex incarnate wanders around a market and kills an infant by snapping its neck. Okay, that description doesn't quite do the scene justice. The last time we saw this woman, she was getting herself blown up on a space station, and now she's wandering around, apparently looking a bit confused. She mentions, somewhat amazed, that the infant's neck is capable of supporting its head. After the deed is done, she looks distressed. What was she doing? Examining human frailties? Experiencing death firsthand? She doesn't act like a serial baby-killer, and that's probably why I didn't have too much of a problem with that scene. Or maybe I'm just a sociopath.
Starbuck, Boomer, Helo, Tigh, and the Galactica's CAG play a card game. When Starbuck wins, Tigh knocks the table over and Starbuck punches him. This was one of two scenes in the miniseries that I didn't really get the first time; in retrospect, the scene's trying to tell us that Tigh's a drunk who is estranged from his wife, and Starbuck likes riling him up, even though she's on a hair trigger herself.
Back on Caprica, we meet Dr. Gaius Baltar, the Smartest Man Alive, played by an actor who looks uncannily like DS9's Dr. Julian Bashir (who just happened to be the Smartest Man Alive in that show). Sex incarnate walks in; they get it on and her spine starts to glow. As if we didn't know this woman was in no way normal. It eventually transpires that she is both a robot and a woman, a Cylon called Number Six (yes, they picked the number as a reference to that Number Six, and yes, I'll be calling her Number Sex from time to time). She's been using Baltar to gain access to Caprica's defense mainframe. She eventually tells him this, along with the fact that a Cylon attack is about to go down. But for some reason she seems rather interested in ensuring his survival. In the commentary, the producers mention that Tricia Helfer had virtually no acting experience prior to this, and it later transpires that they were writing the Cylon plan by the seat of their pants. I wonder which contributed more to Six's strange behavior. No, I'm not knocking her acting ability here; in fact I'm impressed that an inexperienced actress delivered such a good performance for a character whose motivation was apparently unknown even to her at the time.
Starbuck gets thrown in the brig for striking a superior officer. Adama's son, Lee, turns up for the Galactica's decomissioning ceremony. Unlike virtually everyone else, Lee (call sign: Apollo), doesn't have a lot of respect for the old man. At first I figured that this was just because he didn't like always being compared to Commander Adama, which brings us directly to the second scene in the miniseries that I'm ashamed to say I completely missed the point of. Lee visits Starbuck in the brig; it's been two years since "the funeral," and Starbuck and Adama still talk about it two or three times a year. We've already seen that Starbuck and Adama have a special relationship going on, and it's in this scene that we actually learn it, as well as why Lee has such a big stick up his ass when it comes to his father. Lee's brother Zak died two years ago; he and Starbuck were an item. After the accident, Adama treated Starbuck like a daughter. This isn't made explicit in this scene, but it's pretty obviously inferred. I was just being oblivious or something when I saw it the first time. Shame on me.
Lee visits the Commander and has an argument about how his brother wasn't cut out to be a pilot; he's upset because Adama pushed Zak too hard to do something he couldn't do, and that's what led to Zak's death. Lee is additionally saddled with having to fly his father's Viper during the decommissioning ceremony - as if he needs more baggage.
We meet Secretary of Education Laura Roslin, who has just been diagnosed with cancer. It's not the Venusian Flu, it's cancer. This is just one example of the realism in this series compared to other sci-fi shows. (As an aside, you can see a Firefly-class ship at the very beginning of her first scene.) She travels to Galactica to try to get it set up to be a museum, but Adama won't abide networked computers. (Not going to be an issue, really, unless Adama's going to continue to command Galactica after it becomes a museum.)
The decomissioning ceremony goes smoothy, although Adama ad-libs his speech and winds up confessing his sadness about the loss of his son. Roslin's ship leaves to head back to Caprica.
And now that every single character has finally been introduced, everything goes to hell. The Cylons attack; Galactica's CAG is killed, along with most of the Viper pilots. Boomer and Helo make an emergency landing on Caprica, where they're accosted by refugees. Their ship is fixed, but Helo gives up his seat to Dr. Baltar.
Baltar will spend the rest of the miniseries hallucinating about Six and trying desperately to save his own ass; he's the one who (unwittingly) gave the Cylons everything they needed to wipe out humanity. He gets trapped in a web of his own lies and winds up getting an apparently innocent man marooned just to save his own hide. It's all very interesting to watch, and there are moments during his epic speed lying that he actually seems to channel the Doctor - but that could just be me, since this was just before Doctor Who came back, and none of the Original Seven were quite that manic.
Here's the thing; up to this point, we have two protagonists that it's hard to like; Apollo has a massive stick up his ass and Baltar's a cowardly liar. The main protagonist, Adama, hasn't really done that much to deserve all the praise the other characters heap on him. Yes, he's a father to his men and all that, but at this point he's also an emotionally scarred man who's apparently partly responsible for his son's death. Tigh's a drunk, and Starbuck has a serious attitude problem. Six is evil (and relegated to being a hallucination of the aforementioned cowardly liar for the rest of the miniseries and most of the first batch of episodes). Of the main characters, only Roslin would appear to be completely likeable on paper, and even she comes across as a meddling bureaucrat in her conversation with Adama (whereas he comes off as a Luddite). And yet it's hard not to keep watching. That's because, with the possible exception of Baltar, none of these characters are actually unlikeable; they're all flawed people. They're not perfect Starfleet folk. And despite their flaws, we care about them.
(Sidebar: I listed Tigh as a main character and didn't mention Boomer, even though Grace Park appears in the main credits and Michael Hogan is listed as a guest star once we get to the series proper. Boomer's role in this story is pretty much simply to get Baltar onto the Galactica. That's about it. She's having a relationship with the crew chief, but her character doesn't seem to be nearly as fleshed out as Tigh's. Again, that's nothing against the actress; there's just not that much to her character yet. The only reason I can think of why she gets star billing is the fact that she's revealed to be a Cylon at the end.)
Roslin gets word of the Cylon attack and commandeers the passenger ship she's on. She starts rescuing stranded civilians, but her "I'm in charge" attitude annoys a reporter, who tries to get Apollo (who was along to escort them) to put her in her place. The first scene between Apollo and Roslin is awesome; you think Apollo's going to shut this upstart bureaucrat down, but he very quickly realizes that "the lady's in charge." This is the scene where I started warming up to Apollo, and I think that this was a deliberate choice on the part of the writers. They're setting up the Roslin-Adama conflict. Roslin brings out the good in Apollo; she's a leader he can look up to and respect, whereas all he can see when he looks at his father is the accident that cost him a brother.
A Cylon attack on Galactica gets Starbuck out of the brig and forces Tigh to vent part of the ship, killing 85 people on Tyrol's crew in order to save the ship. This is where Prosna dies, and Tyrol and Cally duly mourn him, but because he had so little screen time before this, I kind of forgot who he was. This is the first of two tough decisions in the miniseries, and, like the second one, it's nice to get to see some of the consequences of that decision. It also explains why Adama keeps Tigh around; from a purely storytelling standpoint, Adama can't be the father-to-his-men-type figure if he personally makes these kinds of decisions. Instead, he lets Tigh make the call and then stands by him on it.
With all 42 (!) people ahead of her in the line of sucession dead, Roslin becomes President of
what little is left. Meanwhile, everyone ahead of Adama in the military chain of command is also dead, so he takes command of the military. He orders everyone to rendezvous with him. Roslin then orders him to rendezvous with her. "Ask him how many hospital beds he has available and how soon he can join us." Again, we never saw this sort of military-civilian conflict even on Deep Space Nine.
Adama and Apollo bitch at each other over the radio (sorry, "wireless"). Adama refuses to accept Roslin's authority, insisting that she's just the Secretary of Education. Apollo refuses to rendezvous with Galactica. The whole thing is rendered moot when two Cylon raiders appear. Adama desperately yells for his son to get out of there, but the civilian ships are apparently destroyed.
What surprised me the most about Part 1 of the miniseries was how little of the Cylon attack we actually saw. We saw a couple of nukes go off on Caprica, and we saw one fighter squadron get wiped out. Most of the rest of it was relayed to Galactica's CIC, in much the same way that the first half of the Borg battle in Star Trek: First Contact is heard but not seen. I applaud this decision; not only did it save considerably on the budget, but it gave us more time for character... well, it's too early to say "development," so let's say "exploration" instead.
It's interesting to watch this unfold from Adama's perspective, even though what we get is more Roslin/Apollo (not that that's a bad thing). All Adama wants to do is get into the fight, but his ship is ill-equipped and there's a petty bureaucrat trying to undermine his authority, and who has his only surviving son on her side. Later on, in "You Can't Go Home Again," the producers will claim that this is the first time Adama's really been emotionally compromised. To which I ask: what is he here? Throughout part 2, Roslin's going to be telling him the war is already lost. Perhaps the most interesting thing about the show is that it's a conflict between a military leader who feels and a political leader who thinks, as opposed to the other way around.
I can't cover four hours in one post. Part 2 will be up later today.
Wednesday, June 1, 2011
BtVS: Gingerbread
First off, a bit of a foreword, because this marks the beginning of an extended foray into sci-fi/fantasy works that aren't Doctor Who. Whereas Doctor Who is largely episodic, with every serial being largely a self-contained story that you can watch without needing any background information, most of the other shows I'll be looking at aren't. Buffy can at least pretend to be, even though it does have overarching season-long arcs. Angel can't, or at least it has increasing difficulty doing so; it can in Season One, but it certainly can't by Season Four. Firefly can, but only because there are only a handful of threads that got established in its first and only thirteen episodes. The good Dollhouse episodes are arc-centric. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine is largely on the fence, especially as the majority of episodes I want to look at come from the last three seasons. Battlestar Galactica is arc-driven. For this reason, a lot of these reviews, simply as a matter of necessity, won't restrict themselves simply to the content covered in neat 45-minute chunks. In general, these reviews are going to be a lot more tangential than the Doctor Who reviews have been. Likewise, the scoring system is going to be largely scrapped; neither Firefly nor Dollhouse generated enough episodes to really establish a baseline, Angel gets too arc-driven, and I'll be reviewing BSG episodes before I even finish the first season (and it's heavily arc-driven anyway). Therefore, Buffy and DS9 will get numerical scores, Firefly, Dollhouse and BSG won't, and I haven't decided what to do about Angel yet. I'll probably score Seasons 1-3 and 5, and do something different for Season 4. I'll cop the SFDebris line and mention that all scores are relative to that series and that series alone; a Buffy episode that gets an 8 is not automatically better than a Doctor Who episode that got a 7, and vice-versa.
For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.
But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).
Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.
The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.
It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '
I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"
At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)
On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.
So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).
"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.
"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.
Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
For my first foray into Joss Whedon's most famous and influential show, I've picked an obscure episode from the middle of Season Three. I've chosen this episode because I think it's actually the darkest episode of the show, ever. That may be a high claim considering there was an episode in Season 1 with overtures of child abuse, a few episode of Season 2 that were all about sex, and the entirety of Season 6, which was largely about drugs, but also had gunplay, torture, grisly murder and the infamous attempted rape.
But for me, "Gingerbread" is the darkest Buffy episode for two main reasons. One, the plot is kicked off by the discovery of two dead children. When I reviewed Doctor Who's "Curse of the Black Spot" and complained about how obvious it was that the kid wasn't dead, this episode was one of the first things I thought of. Now, you might be wondering, since I've brought up the issue of dead children, what about the Anoited One? To which I respond, 1) the Anointed One was turned offscreen. 2) It was a very legitimate plot twist - the horrible ubervamp was not the religious nutball but instead the innocent little kid. 3) the Anointed One's death - his permanent one, near the beginning of Season 2 - is there both to establish Spike as the real threat and to dispose of a child actor who was aging when his vampiric character couldn't (strange that this was never a problem for David Boreanaz, who looks remarkably different even in Season Three than he did in Season One, never mind the weight he gained by the time Angel wrapped).
Now, yes, the notion of a demon walking around in a kid's body is creepy as all hell, but really, that explanation of vampirism pretty much left town in the middle of Season Two and never came back. Besides, the Anointed One was still mobile, and his body simply vanished when he was killed a second time. The whole "dead child" angle was not a plot point, not like it is here.
The second reason I think "Gingerbread" is Buffy's darkest episode is because by the end, Buffy's mother is pretty much perfectly willing to burn her own daughter at the stake. Top that.
Anyway, here's the plot in a nutshell: Buffy's mother (who, remember, only found out that her daughter was the Slayer at the end of the last season) watched Buffy fight some evil. They have an awkward conversation - because at this point, the show is still trying to make a point of balancing Buffy's normal life with her Slayer activities, something that either goes out the window or is just done wrong after a certain event midway through Season 5 - and then they discover two dead children with a mysterious mark on them.
It transpires that the mark is related to witchcraft, and so The Adults band together and form an anti-occult group. Problem is, Buffy's best friend Willow is a budding witch. '
I don't know how much of this was planned from the beginning, but here goes: Angel, the vampire with a soul and Buffy's love interest for the first three seasons, was originally created to be the main villain for Season Two. As the second half of Season Two - the "Angelus" arc - got underway, it became obvious to Joss Whedon that David Boreanaz deserved his own show. This much is known; I can only speculate as to whether Angel would have been killed for good at the end of Season Two if they weren't planning on spinning him off. It does seem to me like Willow's magical abilities come out of nowhere, and I'll go into more detail when I actually get to the "Becoming" episodes, but I'd be willing to guess that this episode is at least partially a means of payment for how that arc ended. "Okay, Willow restored Angel's soul and we're seeing the consequences of that for Buffy and Angel... what are the consequences for Willow?"
At any rate, this episode does look at those consequences. At this point in the show, magic is not a metaphor for lesbianism or drug abuse, and this episode would no doubt have been considerably different had it been made after Willow and Tara became an item. Here magic is a stigma all its own, and Sunnydale engages in a literal witch-hunt. And because Buffy has supernatural powers, she's dragged into it, too. That's it. On the supernatural end, there's not a lot of metaphor going on, which is rare for this show. (Well... maybe. The show occasionally reminds us that Willow is Jewish...)
On the adults' side, however... It seems to me like this is a satire of those parents' groups that want to outlaw violent video games and the like - or it could be an analogue to Mothers Against Drunk Driving, which would at least make it more serious. It turns out that the "dead children" are actually ancient demons who thrive on creating these sorts of witch-hunts (and originated in Germany...). Buffy and the gang stop them, "evil" witch Amy gets stuck as a rat for the next three seasons, and everything just kind of eases back to normal. If Buffy ever calls her mother on the whole "you tried to burn me alive thing" after this, I can't remember it.
So the kids aren't really dead, because ha ha, you can't actually kill kids on TV (stay tuned...) It's interesting to note how the show treats dead children as such serious business, and then nods and winks as it reveals that actually a couple of demons are just playing on people's fears. That the adults could be driven into such a frenzy that they're willing to burn three (admittedly troublemaking) teenagers alive does make for some really compelling drama. And to get there, it does need the "a demon made me do it" oomph. The anti-violent-game lot may be a bunch of riled harpies, but they're not going around demanding human sacrifice. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see that this is one of the last "Buffy vs Adults" stories - she's still got her confrontation with the Mayor at the end of the season, and a nebulous government organization after that, but from then on it's either personal crises ("The Body," almost all of Season 6) or direct supernatural threats (Glory, the First).
"Gingerbread" features a threat that I wouldn't have minded seeing more of; a corruptor, a threat that can turn the people you trust against you. I don't mean outright mind-control a la "Bad Eggs" or the entire Jasmine arc on Angel, but rather psychological manipulation, a la the Joker to Harvey Dent in The Dark Knight. I mentioned earlier that maybe "Gingerbread" was a payoff for Willow's sudden magical aptitude in "Becoming." Much more obviously, it's payoff for the Buffy-Joyce plot in "Becoming." Joyce felt betrayed by Buffy because Buffy kept her secret lifestyle from her; in this episode, Joyce betrays Buffy. It's an extra little bit of denoument, crammed in the middle of a season, yes, but it shows that the writers really were thinking about the consequences of every single thing that happened on the show.
"Gingerbread" gets a 6 out of 10. That doesn't mean that it's only 60% good; I like it a lot, but 1) there are many other episodes that are better, and 2) it doesn't have many special qualities. It's dark as all hell, and it's a payoff for stuff that happened earlier, but that's about it.
Thursday: BSG miniseries
Friday: DS9: "In the Pale Moonlight"
Saturday: Buffy: "Becoming"
Sunday: Doctor Who: "The Rebel Flesh/The Almost People"
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Image of the Week: Pearl Harbor and the Fog of War
I follow a lot of naval history accounts, so this "Japanese map showing their assessment of the damage done to the United States flee...
