BSG: Final Cut

"Would you get out of my face?"
-Tigh

Hey, remember that time the alcoholic second-in-command declared martial law and got four people killed? So do the producers, so now that the rest of the Kobol arc is done, it's time to address that.

D'Anna Biers, professional smear journalist, is invited aboard Galactica in order to clear the air between the military and the civilians. It's a clever move on Roslin's part, because finding the sleaziest reporter out there and getting her to paint the crew in a positive light would be a massive propaganda coup.

My entire opinion of D'Anna was tainted from her very first scene, when she talks about editing "stock footage of rampaging marines" into the tape of marines shooting civilians aboard the Gideon. Having never seen Xena, my reaction was less "hey kids, it's Lucy Lawless!" and more "wow, I've known this character for three seconds and I already hope she turns out to be a Cylon."

What follows are a number of increasingly implausible scenes as D'Anna and her cameraman get shots of literally anything and everything that could possibly go wrong during a routine day aboard Galactica, capped off by the cheapest dogfight scene ever in the (modern) show's history. And this is where it kind of falls down.

Too many things are going on: Tigh is getting death threats because of his role in the Gideon massacre, Kat is turning into a stim-junkie, and Sharon nearly has a miscarriage. Biers and her camera witness each of them in turn, because somebody thought it would be great to give her unlimited access to the crew. There really doesn't seem to be an A-story, and it's all undermined by the fact that nobody bothers to try to have private conversations away from D'Anna's camera. Starbuck and Apollo talk about Kat going nuts, fully aware that D'Anna is taping every word. Adama and Tigh don't bother discussing the fallout from the Gideon incident in his quarters, they do it in CIC, where D'Anna can stand right there and tape everything.

The focal point of the story, according to the summary on the DVD casing, is D'Anna's discovery that there's a pregnant copy of Sharon aboard Galactica. And that would make for a compelling story, because preggers-Sharon is a big secret and a security threat. But would it really, as D'Anna says, blow everything wide open and turn the civilians against the Galactica crew? Bear in mind that there are no other friendly warships left in the Universe.* It's not exactly like the civvies can take care of themselves if the Cylons come calling.

*Nobody knows about the Pegasus yet, and given what happened to its civilian fleet, it doesn't qualify as a "friendly" ship.

This feels like one of the "new five" of Season 2. That's the first time I've used this term, so here it is in a nutshell: as far as I know, the writers assumed Season 2 would be 13 episodes long, and broke the season accordingly. When the order got bumped from 13 to 20, they got a three-month hiatus between episodes 10 and 11 in order to come up with more story ideas as part of the deal. So that's seven new episodes to make, but then "Scattered" became "Scattered" and "Valley of Darkness," and "Home" became "Home, Part 1" and "Home, Part 2." So then there were only five new episodes to do. And if I had to guess, those five are "Final Cut," "Flight of the Phoenix," "Black Market," "Sacrifice," and "Downloaded." I make those guesses not because of the relative quality of those episodes ("Downloaded" was nominated for a Hugo, for crying out loud), but because they generally have far less to do with the season's arc than the other 15 episodes, which either deal with Kobol, the Pegasus, Roslin's cancer, or Starbuck's quest to save Anders and the other Caprica resistance fighters.

And ultimately I'm not sure what the point of this episode was. It could have been a confrontation between D'Anna and Adama over freedom of the press. It could have been about Tigh dealing with his responsibility for the Gideon incident. It could have been about Kat and her stims, or it could have been about Dee's backstory. But when they tried to jam all those ideas into one episode, it comes off as a bit of a mess.

That said, the episode is a tour de force for the editor. Intercutting Kat's interview with her botched landing was a masterstroke, as was intercuttng Dee's interview with her panicked looks during the battle. But the best part comes near the end, as they're all watching the completed documentary and the theme from the original series plays in all its glory as we learn that not one Galactica crewmember has asked to resign (cf. 4.1 "He That Believeth in Me").