As I sat down to watch this episode for the first time, I wasn't really expecting that much. I figured Kara would get back to Galactica and the whole "hey, remember that time you killed my brother?" thing would pretty much blow over.
In a nutshell, that's what happens, but summarizing the episode just like that is like saying Star Wars is all about a couple of walking tropes rescuing a princess from a guy in a silly helmet. It's true, but it doesn't do the story any justice.
So at the end of the previous episode, Kara got herself shot down because taking on eight Cylon Raiders is a lot less of a daunting task than trying to look Adama in the eye once he's figured out you killed his son. She survives, but before she can do too much, her knee gets smashed up and she has to hobble around for the rest of the season. In fact, there's even some doubt later on about whether she'll ever be able to fly again.
It turns out the answer is "yes." Not only will she fly a Viper again, eventually, she'll actually fly something in this very episode. Wandering around on the planet's surface, she finds the Raider that she shot down. It's intact, aside from a bullet hole in its head, so Kara climbs inside, scoops its brain out, and hijacks its body. Yes, these things are organic. Try to imagine this from the Cylon perspective. (Actually, we're still a full season and a half away from the first Cylon POV episode, and at this point they're still either faceless baddies, sex bombs, or sleeper agents, so seeing things from their point of view isn't too high on anyone's list.)
Meanwhile, the Galactica crew has used up an insane amount of fuel trying to rescue Kara, and it's really insightful seeing just how little of the planet they've been able to scan. They have DRADIS, which is basically radar, but they don't have sensors or scanners or anything that can easily detect life on the planet. It's a minor point, but it's yet one more difference between this show and the various Trek incarnations.
Roslin's annoyed about how much fuel they're using, especially once Starbuck's forty-six hours of air run out. So with extreme reluctance, Adama and Lee eventually concede and abandon the search-and-rescue attempt. Adama, in the episode's best scene, tells Lee that if it had been him [Lee] on the planet's surface, they would never leave. Lee is so overwhelmed by what constitutes an emotional outburst from his father that he magically teleports down to the hangar deck in time to intercept a Cylon Raider that has come out of nowhere.
Lee and the Raider (which Starbuck has commandeered) play tag for a minute before Starbuck gets him to see that she's written her callsign on the underside of the Raider's wings. Now, the reveal is pretty fantastic, but the underside of the wing is just about the least visible place on the Raider's entire body. (Okay, Starbuck had a bum leg, maybe she wasn't up to crawling around on top of it, but really, it seems to have been done that way for a dramatic effect.)
So, having very narrowly avoided shooting her down, Lee escorts Starbuck into the hangar, with orders to shoot her if she does anything unexpected. Now, 1) this is Starbuck we're talking about, so Adama should know better, and 2) this isn't the last time this exact scenario is going to play out. It's just that next time, she's going to be in a Viper instead of a Raider. Talk about all this happening before, and all of this happening again. Still, the reveal is handled pretty differently both times (though the music is undeniably cooler the second time).
Everyone celebrates the capture of Kara's new toy. Also, they celebrate her return, and, as predicted, Adama pretty much shrugs of the whole "You got Zak killed" thing.
Even though the ending was kind of predictable, this was still a great episode. As someone once said, it's not the destination but the journey that matters.
Friday, July 22, 2011
Thursday, July 21, 2011
BSG: "Water"
This is another case where I should point out that there's not a Battlestar Galactica episode I actually hate. That said, if I had to rank all the Season 1 episodes, this one would be pretty much at the bottom. I'd say "it has its share of flaws," but that would imply that the others do as well, and frankly, some of them don't.
The episode begins with an extended scene of Boomer, dripping wet and apparently unsure of where she is or how she got there. As she goes to change out of her flight suit, she discovers that there's a bomb in her bag. When she tries to put it back in the small arms locker, she discovers that six other bombs are missing. Shortly thereafter, five explosions go off in Galactica's water tank, thus precipitating the crisis that requires all that slave labor in "Bastille Day."
We the audience know that Boomer's a Cylon, but she doesn't know it yet, and neither do the others. This includes Chief Tyrol, who's been frakking her for a while (so he never noticed her glowing spine; that kind of limits the positions they used, doesn't it? Then again, that's not the only glowing spine the Chief failed to notice) and tries to cover for her. Unfortunately, Tyrol is no Gaius Baltar, so Boomer flips her lid when she finds out what he considers to be "help."
Meanwhile, Boomer and her new ECO, Crashdown, get sent off to go check out a planetary system for water. They find it, but there's a bomb under Boomer's seat, and her Cylon programming won't let her notice the water, or it will let her notice the water but is trying to get her to blow up her ship, or something... But then she does notice the water, and her ship doesn't blow up. I'll be honest, the reason I've been dragging my heels on this review has everything to do with this scene, because it's the one time in the first three seasons of the show where I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on. (According to the Battlestar Wiki, she's trying to report that she's found water while keeping her sleeper programming from blowing herself up. Yeah, that was really clear.)
They come back, and Tyrol again applies his special brand of "help" by giving the last bomb to the master-at-arms. Sharon again flips out, and then she storms out in a way that suggests that her sleeper personality has been activated and she's going off to do some other sabotage.
Ha ha, no, the next episode has nothing to do with her.
Frankly, the weak points of the show generally have to do with conveying the thought processes of the Cylon sleeper agents. "Crossroads, Part II" does it significantly better, but still not perfectly. Of course, "Crossroads" has so much else going for it, including a six-minute speech by Lee, and of course the music. "Water," not so much.
So between my condemnation of this episode and an offhand comment in the miniseries review, it might sound like I'm ragging on Grace Park. That's not really what I'm trying to do, and she does get better things to do later on (though as "Athena," not so much as "Boomer"). Is she capable of carrying an entire episode? Well, given that this was (at least through the end of Season 3) her one chance to do so, I'd say the jury's still out. The closest she gets after this are her pivotal scenes in "Home, Part II" and "Rapture," both of which are considerably better than this.
The episode begins with an extended scene of Boomer, dripping wet and apparently unsure of where she is or how she got there. As she goes to change out of her flight suit, she discovers that there's a bomb in her bag. When she tries to put it back in the small arms locker, she discovers that six other bombs are missing. Shortly thereafter, five explosions go off in Galactica's water tank, thus precipitating the crisis that requires all that slave labor in "Bastille Day."
We the audience know that Boomer's a Cylon, but she doesn't know it yet, and neither do the others. This includes Chief Tyrol, who's been frakking her for a while (so he never noticed her glowing spine; that kind of limits the positions they used, doesn't it? Then again, that's not the only glowing spine the Chief failed to notice) and tries to cover for her. Unfortunately, Tyrol is no Gaius Baltar, so Boomer flips her lid when she finds out what he considers to be "help."
Meanwhile, Boomer and her new ECO, Crashdown, get sent off to go check out a planetary system for water. They find it, but there's a bomb under Boomer's seat, and her Cylon programming won't let her notice the water, or it will let her notice the water but is trying to get her to blow up her ship, or something... But then she does notice the water, and her ship doesn't blow up. I'll be honest, the reason I've been dragging my heels on this review has everything to do with this scene, because it's the one time in the first three seasons of the show where I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on. (According to the Battlestar Wiki, she's trying to report that she's found water while keeping her sleeper programming from blowing herself up. Yeah, that was really clear.)
They come back, and Tyrol again applies his special brand of "help" by giving the last bomb to the master-at-arms. Sharon again flips out, and then she storms out in a way that suggests that her sleeper personality has been activated and she's going off to do some other sabotage.
Ha ha, no, the next episode has nothing to do with her.
Frankly, the weak points of the show generally have to do with conveying the thought processes of the Cylon sleeper agents. "Crossroads, Part II" does it significantly better, but still not perfectly. Of course, "Crossroads" has so much else going for it, including a six-minute speech by Lee, and of course the music. "Water," not so much.
So between my condemnation of this episode and an offhand comment in the miniseries review, it might sound like I'm ragging on Grace Park. That's not really what I'm trying to do, and she does get better things to do later on (though as "Athena," not so much as "Boomer"). Is she capable of carrying an entire episode? Well, given that this was (at least through the end of Season 3) her one chance to do so, I'd say the jury's still out. The closest she gets after this are her pivotal scenes in "Home, Part II" and "Rapture," both of which are considerably better than this.
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
BSG: Dirty Hands
Season 3, Episode 16
So apparently somebody from the production office time-traveled from 2006 to 2011, read my blog, realized that I was threatening to write an essay entitled "Is Battlestar Galactica Really a Liberal Show?" and decided to create some evidence for the defense.
Now, we had a bit of that earlier in Season 3, what with the suicide bombings done by our heroes, but then episode five went out of its way to show us that Tigh et al had gone a bit bonkers as far as extreme measures go (though that episode did also kill off my least favorite character, so at least there was that). So the jury's still out on that part. Then, much later in the season, along comes this episode.
Now I should point out right off the bat that I don't hate this episode. I have yet to see a BSG episode I actually hate. I didn't like the ending of "Epiphanies," and while I had my problems with "Black Market," I didn't think it was the awful schlock the fandom seems to think it is. Same with "The Woman King," but that's another story for a different day. The point is, this episode was enjoyable, and, like the Doctor Who serials written by Malcolm Hulke, didn't offend my political sensibilities to the point where I couldn't enjoy it. That said, I am going to pick it apart, just because I can and because there's some stuff in it that deserves to be picked apart.
It's a story where the working class is exploited by the elite. You know, the fighter pilots who put their lives on the line every day (or at least every week if the FX budget is up to it) to keep the Cylons from destroying or enslaving the last remnants of humanity. These tired men and women, some of whom didn't even get to muster out during the New Caprica year, have finally had enough...
Oh, wait. It's not the pilots. It's a bunch of guys we've never seen before, slaving away to create fuel for the aforementioned pilots. Because, you know, even after we have ships capable of making FTL jumps, we'll still use manual labor.
(Now, somebody's going to jump on me for the "manual labor" comment, and say something like "well, you know what happened when they got machines to do their jobs for them? The Cylons happened. That didn't end too well." To which I say we've got machines on assembly lines in the country's remaining production plants, and they aren't about to nuke us all. There's a huge difference between "build me a machine that can process fuel for me" and "build me an A.I. that can beat me at chess, lie about the functional capacity of my ship, read my lips, and remote-pilot a pod so it crashes into me." In the miniseries, Roslin was talking about putting a computerized network on Galactica, so it's not like everyone's a Luddite like Adama.)
(Or you might complain about machines putting people out of work, which is fair enough if you're willing to ignore what Zarek said back in 1.11, "Colonial Day," about how people are still doing their jobs even if money doesn't mean anything anymore. Suddenly we're back on the subject of compensation, and yeah, a lot has happened since then, but you'd think if there was a genuine economy all of a sudden, it would have been brought up before now.)
So anyway, the refinery ship starts sabotaging its own output because they want better working conditions and so on. Which, let's face it, is a kind of stupid game to play when you're facing off against the only thing standing between you and the Cylons (or dehydration; see 1.2, "Water"). And it gets the captain arrested for his trouble, but more because he started quoting Baltar's book at Roslin, which was another stupid thing to do.
Oh, Baltar. He's stuck in prison because he collaborated with the Cylons, and he's either writing Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. His lawyer is helpfully smuggling it out for him, because "stumps don't have freedom of expression" (1.3, "Bastille Day," so apparently someone who watched Season 1 did a small amount of editing on this episode).
But before I rag on the workers of the fleet too much, I'll pause and aim some venom in the other direction. There's a subplot in this episode about a background mechanic named Ceelix, who applied to be a pilot. Now, nobody in the fleet ever read Atlas Shrugged, so Adama doesn't know what a bad idea it is to chain somebody to their desk. So Ceelix is told her current job is too important for her to leave. I'm no expert on politics, but I'd think that if you're suddenly down to 41,400 people, you draft every man, woman and child capable of using a tool and find something for them to work on, and award promotions or transfers based on merit. (Now you might be thinking that's what Cain did, but not really. She just took the best and brightest, and left everyone else to rot.) So if Ceelix has what it takes to be a pilot, you find somebody else to take over her mechanic job. Like Farmboy.
Back to the main plot. Cheif Tyrol is told to get the refinery ship back in line, but the workers demand to be put on a rotation cycle. So Tyrol drafts every civilian with farming experience (because farming=working with machines), including Farmboy. Farmboy is a kid who spent a few months on a farm in order to pay for college, and he's none too happy about getting shut up in the refinery ship. This is what I like to call "denial." See, even though the Cylons nuked his home planet and that college he wanted to go to, he somehow thinks that his getting assigned to actual work is a "mistake."
Sure enough, something goes wrong on the refinery ship and Farmboy gets hurt for it. What exactly goes wrong and how badly Farmboy gets hurt is something you'll have to watch the episode to figure out, but it looks to me like somebody decided it'd be a fun idea if they couldn't just turn off the conveyor belt without first having to push the "stab my arm" button. (And this is right after Tyrol and Cally almost died because they couldn't override an airlock in the previous episode. Honestly, how has the fleet lasted this long?)
Anyway, this is the last straw for Tyrol, and he goes on strike. Then Adama threatens to shoot Cally, and he goes off strike. Then he gets to talk to Roslin, and turns the Colonial One passengers into janitors and laundry-folders. This is the part of the episode I really like; see, part of the reason Tyrol goes on strike is because he's afraid what happened to Farmboy could one day happen to his son, and he doesn't want that. But he also doesn't want his kid to grow up without a mother, so when Adama threatens to shoot Cally, he's put in a really uncomfortable position. This is what good drama is about: you put your character in a position where, no matter what choice they make, they lose something (see also "Exodus, Part II" and "Crossroads, Part I" for other fantastic examples this season, invovling Tigh and and Lee, respectively). Unfortunately, in this case it's undermined because once Tyrol caves, he gets to negotiate with Roslin anyway and basically gets what he wants.
As for Adama's actions, on paper I don't for one moment suspect that he's actually going to shoot Cally. Objectively, it's totally against the most basic component of his character, that he's a father to his men. In the episode itself, Edward James Olmos sells it, because he's really good at his job. But what Adama's trying to do there is to get Tyrol to stand down; he knows Roslin will negotiate with Galactica's chief mechanic, but not with anyone who has any sort of power over her (see the very next episode to hear Roslin flat-out say she won't negotiate with terrorists).
So that's "Dirty Hands." Nice try, I loved the "I'm gonna have them shoot Cally" scene between Tyrol and Adama, and I like the resolution, that yes, everyone has to pitch in. Too bad the refinery ship looks more like a Gilded Age factory than a space-age fuel processor.
As a side note, as a Firefly fan, I approve of the music. (This season gives us Jane Espenson and Mark Sheppard as well! It's like somebody finally noticed the similar visual styles and decided to just run with it; Firefly even gets a mention in RDM's podcast for "The Son Also Rises.")
All right, I'm going to be back on schedule through at least Saturday; I don't know if I'll have a reliable internet connection after that. So here are the BSG episodes I'm going to try to get through by then: "Water," "You Can't Go Home Again," "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," "Colonial Day," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Because I just covered BSG's strike episode, I'd also like to work in DS9's "Bar Association," but I make no promises. I'll also put together a BSG page, listing all my reviews so far, like I have for Doctor Who. And speaking of Doctor Who, I'm going to get the extant Season 12 serials ("Robot" and "The Sontaran Experiment") covered before the end of August, as well as "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Caves of Androzani."
So apparently somebody from the production office time-traveled from 2006 to 2011, read my blog, realized that I was threatening to write an essay entitled "Is Battlestar Galactica Really a Liberal Show?" and decided to create some evidence for the defense.
Now, we had a bit of that earlier in Season 3, what with the suicide bombings done by our heroes, but then episode five went out of its way to show us that Tigh et al had gone a bit bonkers as far as extreme measures go (though that episode did also kill off my least favorite character, so at least there was that). So the jury's still out on that part. Then, much later in the season, along comes this episode.
Now I should point out right off the bat that I don't hate this episode. I have yet to see a BSG episode I actually hate. I didn't like the ending of "Epiphanies," and while I had my problems with "Black Market," I didn't think it was the awful schlock the fandom seems to think it is. Same with "The Woman King," but that's another story for a different day. The point is, this episode was enjoyable, and, like the Doctor Who serials written by Malcolm Hulke, didn't offend my political sensibilities to the point where I couldn't enjoy it. That said, I am going to pick it apart, just because I can and because there's some stuff in it that deserves to be picked apart.
It's a story where the working class is exploited by the elite. You know, the fighter pilots who put their lives on the line every day (or at least every week if the FX budget is up to it) to keep the Cylons from destroying or enslaving the last remnants of humanity. These tired men and women, some of whom didn't even get to muster out during the New Caprica year, have finally had enough...
Oh, wait. It's not the pilots. It's a bunch of guys we've never seen before, slaving away to create fuel for the aforementioned pilots. Because, you know, even after we have ships capable of making FTL jumps, we'll still use manual labor.
(Now, somebody's going to jump on me for the "manual labor" comment, and say something like "well, you know what happened when they got machines to do their jobs for them? The Cylons happened. That didn't end too well." To which I say we've got machines on assembly lines in the country's remaining production plants, and they aren't about to nuke us all. There's a huge difference between "build me a machine that can process fuel for me" and "build me an A.I. that can beat me at chess, lie about the functional capacity of my ship, read my lips, and remote-pilot a pod so it crashes into me." In the miniseries, Roslin was talking about putting a computerized network on Galactica, so it's not like everyone's a Luddite like Adama.)
(Or you might complain about machines putting people out of work, which is fair enough if you're willing to ignore what Zarek said back in 1.11, "Colonial Day," about how people are still doing their jobs even if money doesn't mean anything anymore. Suddenly we're back on the subject of compensation, and yeah, a lot has happened since then, but you'd think if there was a genuine economy all of a sudden, it would have been brought up before now.)
So anyway, the refinery ship starts sabotaging its own output because they want better working conditions and so on. Which, let's face it, is a kind of stupid game to play when you're facing off against the only thing standing between you and the Cylons (or dehydration; see 1.2, "Water"). And it gets the captain arrested for his trouble, but more because he started quoting Baltar's book at Roslin, which was another stupid thing to do.
Oh, Baltar. He's stuck in prison because he collaborated with the Cylons, and he's either writing Mein Kampf or The Communist Manifesto. His lawyer is helpfully smuggling it out for him, because "stumps don't have freedom of expression" (1.3, "Bastille Day," so apparently someone who watched Season 1 did a small amount of editing on this episode).
But before I rag on the workers of the fleet too much, I'll pause and aim some venom in the other direction. There's a subplot in this episode about a background mechanic named Ceelix, who applied to be a pilot. Now, nobody in the fleet ever read Atlas Shrugged, so Adama doesn't know what a bad idea it is to chain somebody to their desk. So Ceelix is told her current job is too important for her to leave. I'm no expert on politics, but I'd think that if you're suddenly down to 41,400 people, you draft every man, woman and child capable of using a tool and find something for them to work on, and award promotions or transfers based on merit. (Now you might be thinking that's what Cain did, but not really. She just took the best and brightest, and left everyone else to rot.) So if Ceelix has what it takes to be a pilot, you find somebody else to take over her mechanic job. Like Farmboy.
Back to the main plot. Cheif Tyrol is told to get the refinery ship back in line, but the workers demand to be put on a rotation cycle. So Tyrol drafts every civilian with farming experience (because farming=working with machines), including Farmboy. Farmboy is a kid who spent a few months on a farm in order to pay for college, and he's none too happy about getting shut up in the refinery ship. This is what I like to call "denial." See, even though the Cylons nuked his home planet and that college he wanted to go to, he somehow thinks that his getting assigned to actual work is a "mistake."
Sure enough, something goes wrong on the refinery ship and Farmboy gets hurt for it. What exactly goes wrong and how badly Farmboy gets hurt is something you'll have to watch the episode to figure out, but it looks to me like somebody decided it'd be a fun idea if they couldn't just turn off the conveyor belt without first having to push the "stab my arm" button. (And this is right after Tyrol and Cally almost died because they couldn't override an airlock in the previous episode. Honestly, how has the fleet lasted this long?)
Anyway, this is the last straw for Tyrol, and he goes on strike. Then Adama threatens to shoot Cally, and he goes off strike. Then he gets to talk to Roslin, and turns the Colonial One passengers into janitors and laundry-folders. This is the part of the episode I really like; see, part of the reason Tyrol goes on strike is because he's afraid what happened to Farmboy could one day happen to his son, and he doesn't want that. But he also doesn't want his kid to grow up without a mother, so when Adama threatens to shoot Cally, he's put in a really uncomfortable position. This is what good drama is about: you put your character in a position where, no matter what choice they make, they lose something (see also "Exodus, Part II" and "Crossroads, Part I" for other fantastic examples this season, invovling Tigh and and Lee, respectively). Unfortunately, in this case it's undermined because once Tyrol caves, he gets to negotiate with Roslin anyway and basically gets what he wants.
As for Adama's actions, on paper I don't for one moment suspect that he's actually going to shoot Cally. Objectively, it's totally against the most basic component of his character, that he's a father to his men. In the episode itself, Edward James Olmos sells it, because he's really good at his job. But what Adama's trying to do there is to get Tyrol to stand down; he knows Roslin will negotiate with Galactica's chief mechanic, but not with anyone who has any sort of power over her (see the very next episode to hear Roslin flat-out say she won't negotiate with terrorists).
So that's "Dirty Hands." Nice try, I loved the "I'm gonna have them shoot Cally" scene between Tyrol and Adama, and I like the resolution, that yes, everyone has to pitch in. Too bad the refinery ship looks more like a Gilded Age factory than a space-age fuel processor.
As a side note, as a Firefly fan, I approve of the music. (This season gives us Jane Espenson and Mark Sheppard as well! It's like somebody finally noticed the similar visual styles and decided to just run with it; Firefly even gets a mention in RDM's podcast for "The Son Also Rises.")
All right, I'm going to be back on schedule through at least Saturday; I don't know if I'll have a reliable internet connection after that. So here are the BSG episodes I'm going to try to get through by then: "Water," "You Can't Go Home Again," "Tigh Me Up Tigh Me Down," "Colonial Day," and "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Because I just covered BSG's strike episode, I'd also like to work in DS9's "Bar Association," but I make no promises. I'll also put together a BSG page, listing all my reviews so far, like I have for Doctor Who. And speaking of Doctor Who, I'm going to get the extant Season 12 serials ("Robot" and "The Sontaran Experiment") covered before the end of August, as well as "The Talons of Weng-Chiang" and "The Caves of Androzani."
Sunday, July 10, 2011
BSG: Scar
There's a reason this review has been in the tubes for a while. Actually there are two. One, I'm lazy as all hell, and two, I wanted to get far enough ahead so I wouldn't be caught flat-footed by a repeat of something that happened in my "Black Market" review.
(Just for the record, there is a method to this madness. I'm alternating back and forth between going in almost-order from the beginning of the show, and going in almost-order from the mid-season 2 cliffhanger.)
See, in my "Black Market" review, I said something to the effect of "Starbuck needing to be rescued would be detrimental to her character." I was complaining about the fact that the damsel-in-distress role for the episode was taken by a character we'd never met before and who, as it turns out, dies offscreen at the end of the season (presumably). I did that benefit-of-hindsight thing and said if Starbuck somehow got in over her head with the mob, and Lee had to bail her out, there might be more emotional depth to the show. Then I said what I said about Starbuck not needing rescuing. What I meant was that Starbuck should obviously never be relegated to the damsel-in-distress role in an episode where another character (in this case Lee) has the spotlight. But since I wrote the "Black Market" review the same day I saw it, I had no idea that Starbuck was going to need rescuing in the very next episode, which kind of forced me to eat my words.
So, having gotten all the way up to Season 3's "The Passage" (gee... what was that about putting a familiar face in over her head with the mob?), I'm pretty sure I won't wind up in the same situation with this review.
This is another one of those flashback-to-the-recent-past episodes, which works, I guess. It's getting a tad old and I'm glad to see it pretty much gone after this (see, "pretty much" being the operative term). Anyway, Starbuck and Kat are chasing down a Cylon Raider named Scar, who's the enemy ace. He's killed a lot of people who we meet in the various flashbacks. Their deaths really get to Kat, who pins a picture of one of the pilots' girlfriends on the memorial wall (again, call forward to "The Passage"). She also starts blaming Starbuck, mostly because Starbuck starts doing questionable things like getting blind drunk and nearly frakking Lee.
(Okay, legitimate question: why do I call Kara by her callsign when I call Lee by his first name? Partly because it seems to me like more people call her Starbuck and him Lee. Also, at this point in the series, he's barely in a cockpit anymore; he got to crash an important ship back in "Resurrection Ship," and he won't get back in a Viper until he destroys another important ship in "Exodus, Part II." I guess you can chalk it up to emotional distress and a bullet wound after "Sacrifice." So calling him by his callsign doesn't seem that appropriate.)
Until "Unfinished Business" came along and kind of ruined it (but in the best possible way), this was the best episode for teasing the Kara/Lee relationship, mostly because of their almost-sex-scene. Here, it gets broken off when Lee realizes he's just a substitute for Anders (or at least the audience realizes that; Lee's judgment when it comes to Kara is questionable at best).
But, surprisingly, the real tension is the conflict between Starbuck and Kat. Starbuck's a drunk who let a nugget die in her place because she was too hung-over to fly; Kat's a stim-junkie who put a gazillion divots in the landing deck because she didn't pull herself from the flight roster. Naturally, it's this crack team that gets paired together for the ultimate confrontation with Scar. Kara very nearly engages in a suicide run against Scar, because she's convinced Anders is dead and doesn't see the point in living anymore. But at the last second, she remembers her promise to come back for him, so she breaks away and sets Scar up so Kat can get the kill. Of course, Kat gloats about this and rubs it in Starbuck's face once they get back to Galactica, because, hey, if your superior officer was as frakked-up as Starbuck is, you would act like Kat too.
That said, if I actually had to go through and rank all the Galactica crew in the order I like them from most to least, Kat would probably end up near the bottom (she'd be ahead of Jammer, the only character whose death I actively cheered, but I don't know who else. Oh, Sgt "Don't You Know What an Independent Tribunal Means" Hadrian, and Crashdown, who went all Private Hudson on us the moment his last mission got frakked up). Once the writers found things for Starbuck to do (in other words, from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" on), I really started liking her more, whereas Kat was just a background pilot and a stim-junkie. That was how I felt about her at the time; it's worth pointing out that "Unfinished Business" was a huge blow to Starbuck's standing, and "The Passage" did a fair amount to rehabilitate Kat. But in this episode she seems like an usurper. We don't really expect Starbuck to be killed here, so it's her humiliation - she loses her status as Galactica's top gun to the woman who's been in her face for a while, and to whom she incidentally now owes her life - that creates the payoff for the story.
But then it's at this point that you end up wishing - in a complete 180 turn from Season One and "The Case for Another Pilot" - that there were fewer characters and plotlines now. Starbuck never really has to deal with losing her top gun status, and I'm pretty sure she and Kat only ever fly one more mission together ("The Passage" again). What we do get out of it is Starbuck's regained determination to rescue Anders, which she manages to accomplish before the end of the season.
And also some nifty dogfights. Let's face it, the Cylons are doing an absolutely awful job mopping up the last 49,593 humans in the Universe; we get three-and-a-half battles in Season 2.5 (the "half" basically consists of Galactica and Pegasus running away from New Caprica), and of those three, one ("Resurrection Ship") was instigated by the humans. Blah blah budgetary reasons, it's nice to get an episode with a dogfight that has no stock footage whatsoever. Yay.
(Just for the record, there is a method to this madness. I'm alternating back and forth between going in almost-order from the beginning of the show, and going in almost-order from the mid-season 2 cliffhanger.)
See, in my "Black Market" review, I said something to the effect of "Starbuck needing to be rescued would be detrimental to her character." I was complaining about the fact that the damsel-in-distress role for the episode was taken by a character we'd never met before and who, as it turns out, dies offscreen at the end of the season (presumably). I did that benefit-of-hindsight thing and said if Starbuck somehow got in over her head with the mob, and Lee had to bail her out, there might be more emotional depth to the show. Then I said what I said about Starbuck not needing rescuing. What I meant was that Starbuck should obviously never be relegated to the damsel-in-distress role in an episode where another character (in this case Lee) has the spotlight. But since I wrote the "Black Market" review the same day I saw it, I had no idea that Starbuck was going to need rescuing in the very next episode, which kind of forced me to eat my words.
So, having gotten all the way up to Season 3's "The Passage" (gee... what was that about putting a familiar face in over her head with the mob?), I'm pretty sure I won't wind up in the same situation with this review.
This is another one of those flashback-to-the-recent-past episodes, which works, I guess. It's getting a tad old and I'm glad to see it pretty much gone after this (see, "pretty much" being the operative term). Anyway, Starbuck and Kat are chasing down a Cylon Raider named Scar, who's the enemy ace. He's killed a lot of people who we meet in the various flashbacks. Their deaths really get to Kat, who pins a picture of one of the pilots' girlfriends on the memorial wall (again, call forward to "The Passage"). She also starts blaming Starbuck, mostly because Starbuck starts doing questionable things like getting blind drunk and nearly frakking Lee.
(Okay, legitimate question: why do I call Kara by her callsign when I call Lee by his first name? Partly because it seems to me like more people call her Starbuck and him Lee. Also, at this point in the series, he's barely in a cockpit anymore; he got to crash an important ship back in "Resurrection Ship," and he won't get back in a Viper until he destroys another important ship in "Exodus, Part II." I guess you can chalk it up to emotional distress and a bullet wound after "Sacrifice." So calling him by his callsign doesn't seem that appropriate.)
Until "Unfinished Business" came along and kind of ruined it (but in the best possible way), this was the best episode for teasing the Kara/Lee relationship, mostly because of their almost-sex-scene. Here, it gets broken off when Lee realizes he's just a substitute for Anders (or at least the audience realizes that; Lee's judgment when it comes to Kara is questionable at best).
But, surprisingly, the real tension is the conflict between Starbuck and Kat. Starbuck's a drunk who let a nugget die in her place because she was too hung-over to fly; Kat's a stim-junkie who put a gazillion divots in the landing deck because she didn't pull herself from the flight roster. Naturally, it's this crack team that gets paired together for the ultimate confrontation with Scar. Kara very nearly engages in a suicide run against Scar, because she's convinced Anders is dead and doesn't see the point in living anymore. But at the last second, she remembers her promise to come back for him, so she breaks away and sets Scar up so Kat can get the kill. Of course, Kat gloats about this and rubs it in Starbuck's face once they get back to Galactica, because, hey, if your superior officer was as frakked-up as Starbuck is, you would act like Kat too.
That said, if I actually had to go through and rank all the Galactica crew in the order I like them from most to least, Kat would probably end up near the bottom (she'd be ahead of Jammer, the only character whose death I actively cheered, but I don't know who else. Oh, Sgt "Don't You Know What an Independent Tribunal Means" Hadrian, and Crashdown, who went all Private Hudson on us the moment his last mission got frakked up). Once the writers found things for Starbuck to do (in other words, from "Kobol's Last Gleaming" on), I really started liking her more, whereas Kat was just a background pilot and a stim-junkie. That was how I felt about her at the time; it's worth pointing out that "Unfinished Business" was a huge blow to Starbuck's standing, and "The Passage" did a fair amount to rehabilitate Kat. But in this episode she seems like an usurper. We don't really expect Starbuck to be killed here, so it's her humiliation - she loses her status as Galactica's top gun to the woman who's been in her face for a while, and to whom she incidentally now owes her life - that creates the payoff for the story.
But then it's at this point that you end up wishing - in a complete 180 turn from Season One and "The Case for Another Pilot" - that there were fewer characters and plotlines now. Starbuck never really has to deal with losing her top gun status, and I'm pretty sure she and Kat only ever fly one more mission together ("The Passage" again). What we do get out of it is Starbuck's regained determination to rescue Anders, which she manages to accomplish before the end of the season.
And also some nifty dogfights. Let's face it, the Cylons are doing an absolutely awful job mopping up the last 49,593 humans in the Universe; we get three-and-a-half battles in Season 2.5 (the "half" basically consists of Galactica and Pegasus running away from New Caprica), and of those three, one ("Resurrection Ship") was instigated by the humans. Blah blah budgetary reasons, it's nice to get an episode with a dogfight that has no stock footage whatsoever. Yay.
Friday, July 1, 2011
Star Trek Galactica
I've probably already done a post about the Star Trek reboot, but that was then and this is now, as a famous Slayer once said.
See, the first time I saw it (and numerous subsequent times, because though it is a fairly brainless action-fest, it is a very good fairly brainless action fest), there was always one shot in the movie that really annoyed me. It was during the space-jump sequence, when the camera does a shaky zoom-in and takes a second to correctly frame the divers. At the time, I thought it was a kind of heartless tribute to Firefly, which was full of shots like that, whereas Star Trek was not.
In actual fact, it was one of several little homages to Battlestar Galactica. Let's count the others.
2) The corridors on the Kelvin. You only see the Kelvin's corridors for a few brief seconds as the Captain is talking to George Kirk, but they do look... familiar. They're slanted the way Galactica's are, and they've got the same kind of lights on them. Granted they're on a much smaller scale (because in a world where mass is your enemy, why on Caprica would you have ceilings as high as the ones on Galactica), but still, they look pretty similar.
3) The DRADIS console in the Kobayashi Maru simulator. It's not an actual BSG prop (read on), but there is this round thing full of computer screens attached to the center of the ceiling.
4) The small, free-standing stack of computer screens. This is a BSG prop. It appears in the Starfleet hangar bay.
5) The Federation Seal. For the first time in the franchise's history, it's done in gold and black, and it dominates the back wall of the Starfleet hangar bay. The color scheme and placement reminds me of the Seal of the Colonies in BSG, and given the other things I've mentioned, I don't think this is a coincidence. But even if it was...
6) The communications officer is a tall thin (the original Uhura was neither of these) black chick who got shoved awkwardly into a relationship with one of the more important characters.
Yup. That pretty much does it.
See, the first time I saw it (and numerous subsequent times, because though it is a fairly brainless action-fest, it is a very good fairly brainless action fest), there was always one shot in the movie that really annoyed me. It was during the space-jump sequence, when the camera does a shaky zoom-in and takes a second to correctly frame the divers. At the time, I thought it was a kind of heartless tribute to Firefly, which was full of shots like that, whereas Star Trek was not.
In actual fact, it was one of several little homages to Battlestar Galactica. Let's count the others.
2) The corridors on the Kelvin. You only see the Kelvin's corridors for a few brief seconds as the Captain is talking to George Kirk, but they do look... familiar. They're slanted the way Galactica's are, and they've got the same kind of lights on them. Granted they're on a much smaller scale (because in a world where mass is your enemy, why on Caprica would you have ceilings as high as the ones on Galactica), but still, they look pretty similar.
3) The DRADIS console in the Kobayashi Maru simulator. It's not an actual BSG prop (read on), but there is this round thing full of computer screens attached to the center of the ceiling.
4) The small, free-standing stack of computer screens. This is a BSG prop. It appears in the Starfleet hangar bay.
5) The Federation Seal. For the first time in the franchise's history, it's done in gold and black, and it dominates the back wall of the Starfleet hangar bay. The color scheme and placement reminds me of the Seal of the Colonies in BSG, and given the other things I've mentioned, I don't think this is a coincidence. But even if it was...
6) The communications officer is a tall thin (the original Uhura was neither of these) black chick who got shoved awkwardly into a relationship with one of the more important characters.
Yup. That pretty much does it.
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