Who Review: "Closing Time"

Ugh. So this episode is going to hinge on whether you liked "The Lodger" or thought it was pointless, boring filler because they couldn't get Neil Gaiman's episode up in time.

Going back to my review of "The Lodger," I find that I didn't even give it a score out of ten. Maybe that was because I didn't really think it was a Doctor Who episode so much as an episode of a suspiciously similar television show, wherein Matt Smith plays a benevolent alien bent on saving mankind, only here he has no understanding whatsoever of Earth customs.

Once again, the Doctor teams up with his comedic fat bloke friend, Craig, to save the day, and once again his social IQ gets cut in half for the sake of comedy. The Cybermats appear for the first time in the new series. (Remember those? They were the embarassing robot caterpillars from Tomb of the Cybermen that did frak-all.) The Doctor makes a fart joke and talks to babies.

The Cybermen are back, they try to take over, they're foiled. This time they're foiled because Craig loves his son so much that he resists Cyber-conversion and punches the hell out of a bunch of machines.

So basically everybody in Moffat's version of Who is superpowered. Amy can undo time-paradoxes. Rory can die a gazillion times and still keep coming back. Craig can resist Cyber-conversion just cuz.

Like "The Lodger," I'm not going to score this one. It's probably better than I'm willing to give it credit for, but I just don't like it when the show tries to be too comedic.

And then at the end of the episode, we find that River has been researching the Doctor and that the diary he'd left her has been written in. Then Eyepatch-lady shows up with the Silence and sticks River in the spacesuit so she can hide out at the bottom of Lake Silencio and kill the Doctor. There are so many things wrong with this scene that I want to spend the bulk of the review on it.

1) River has been studying the Doctor. Presumably now she knows his entire history, seeing as she's still in the future. That would mean that she knows about him defeating the Silence in 1969. That would mean that she probably saw a clip of the moon landing. That would mean that she's been brainwashed to kill the Silence on sight. But she does not.

2) The diary. I'd assumed it was brand-new when the Doctor left it on her bedside back in "Let's Kill Hitler," and that she'd been using it to chronicle his life in reverse. Now it kind of looks like he'd already written everything in it...? If not, who wrote the appointment at Lake Silencio in there?

3) Isn't River's compulsion to kill the Doctor magically gone as of "Let's Kill Hitler?" If not, why did she save his life in that episode?

4) Is older-River aware of what she'd done? She's in prison because she killed a good man, and it's strongly implied that she knows who it was. So when she shoots at the Astronaut in "The Impossible Astronaut," I would assume that she's aware that she's shooting at her younger self, and that she'll do massive epic damage to the timeline if she actually scores a hit.

All of these questions had better be answered next week.

One last thing: the nursery rhyme keeps trying to use "rock" and variations thereof to rhyme with "Doctor." The only one that's been acceptable so far is the absolutely epic double entendre "he cradled her and he rocked her."

Who Review: "The God Complex"

It is a myth that Steven Moffat has staked his career on whether or not you like River Song. Yes, she's arguably more important than any other recurring character/not-quite-companion on the show, ever (so that category would also include, um, the Brig and... uh... Rose's mum).

It is far more accurate to say that Moffat has stakes his career on an epic deconstruction of the Doctor's god complex, hence the title of this episode. And, given the previous run of episodes, if you ever thought "The God Complex" referred to anything else, then shame on you. (On a side note, I'd be willing to bet money - not a lot, mind you - that there's an image of the Silence under Eyepatch Lady's eyepatch, so that she's always looking at them. Yeah, light doesn't work that way, but hard science has never exactly been a deal-breaker on this show.)

So there's a maze that's contained to hold a Minotaur-like thing. This thing eats people's faith. It's been thrown in a prison, presumably by other members of its own race. Regardless, the justice system that sentenced this thing decided that a) the death penalty was not an option (because the show is made in Britain but also because if they did execute it, there wouldn't be a plot), and b) a bunch of innocent passer-by could be harvested to keep this thing alive. The entire prison is designed to torment innocent people by showing them what they fear most, or something. That is how the justice system works. Now if a justice system that cruel and unusual could sentence the Minotaur... how heinous must its crimes have been?

My point is that once again the Doctor is called to sympathize with a rampaging murderer, although at least this time he puts the thing down. He does it by doing one of the most memorable things the Seventh Doctor did - he breaks his companion's faith in him. Wait. Didn't Moffat say he despised the Seventh Doctor's run? I'm so confused.

The prison is apparently near Planet France, which gets invaded more than any planet in the Universe, but it also picks up three earth-men. Um, okay. Interestingly, none of them believe in Santa. One's a Muslim, one's a conspiracy nut, and one's a gambler who believes in luck. Frankly, I'd be offended if the show equated belief in conspiracies or belief in luck with belief in my God. Not burning-cars offended, mind you, but still offended.

Okay, so why was this episode made? Because Moffat wanted to deconstruct the Doctor's God Complex, got it. But why was it set in a hotel? Because Moffat thinks that hotels are creepy. Well then you actually have to make the hotel creepy, and not just rely on the whole we're-trapped-in-here-with-a-monster premise. How about some dark corridors?

Now, what Moffat excells at is killing people I don't like (his Season 4 two-parter being the exception - except there Frakwit McRichbugger was important to the plot). So gambler-nut and conspiracy-toolbag are the first to go. And then we spend a lot of time with the chick and grooming her to be the next companion, so you know she's gonna get offed. Because apparently anyone who finds "their room" suddenly loses the will to live - as evidently happens to the Doctor by the end, if anything in "Closing Time" is anything to go by.

Which begs the question of why people go looking for their rooms in the first place.

So what did I like? Well, the monster costume was all right. I liked the Doctor finally coming to his senses and kicking Amy and Rory out before they died. I liked the cheese-eating surrender-planet. I liked the guy from the cheese-eating surrender-planet calling the Doctor out on his inability to save everyone.

It's an average episode, ultimately. It gets a plus one point because, well, because there's not a kid in it.
6 out of 10.

Funny stuff my parents have said while watching "Battlestar Galactica"

I first showed my parents the Miniseries when I was only an episode or two into Season 4. Fortunately, by the time they actually got to the show proper, I had pretty much finished. So whenever they watched it and said anything that was absolutely hilarious in hindsight, I had to do my best not to completely crack up on the spot. Most of these, naturally, had to do with the identities of the Final Five.

Here are some of my favorites. Spoilers for all you very-late-to-the-party people:

Miniseries
After the explosion on Ragnar, Adama and Leoben are trapped in a corridor. Adama turns to Leoben and says "is there another way out of here?" And which point, I am not making this up, my mother says "there must be some kinda way outta here..." (surprisingly, she missed the first three quotes in "Crossroads, Part II").

Miniseries et seq
My mother has accused pretty much every named character in the show of being a Cylon... except Chief Tyrol. This got especially funny when he wanders around on the Algae Planet in "The Eye of Jupiter." And then survives decompression a lot better than Cally in "A Day in the Life."

"Valley of Darkness"
Col. Tigh: "Thank the gods I didn't have kids." Mom: "Uh-oh, are we gonna find out he had kids?"

"The Captain's Hand" et seq
Calling Tory Foster a Cylon pretty much every time she shows up. I'm convinced that one of the main reasons that they made her a Cylon was because she was such an obvious candidate that it would make the other three easier to sell.

"Downloaded"
After Anders blows up the cafe on Cylon-occuped Caprica, D'anna and Boomer haul him out of the rubble. Mother: "Uh-oh, they don't recognize that model." I came this close to completely losing it.

"Crossroads, Part I"
Just when I thought we had reached the end of opportunities for unintentionally hilarious statements, upon hearing the first strains of "All Along the Watchtower," Dad says: "It's Starbuck's favorite song! She's sending them a signal!" So close, and yet so far. (Yeah, none of them bought her death in "Maelstrom.")

Okay... What the Frak?

Ever since Doctor Who came back, I've been... well, miffed about the fact that there are only 14 episodes a season. This is the sort of crap that HBO and whatnot can pull, but only because they have to pay their actors so much to get nekkid. (At least, I assume that's the reason.)

Star Trek ran 26 episodes a season, almost every season, for pretty much all of its incarnations. Buffy? 22. Battlestar Galactica ran concurrently with the first three-ish seasons of Who and had 20 a year (sort of).

During its first six seasons, Doctor Who was churning out something like 40 half-hour episodes a year. 40. When they switched to color, that number came down to hover around 26 until the mid-1980s. (26 half-hour episodes = 13 hour-long episodes, but that only matters to DVD owners. I'm talking about the number of days we get new material, not the total number of hours. Not that I want to watch one episode in five-minute installments.)

In 1984, they pulled a stupid stunt and did a season of 13 hour-long episodes. It was such a disaster that the show was put on hiatus for 18 months... and then it came back with 14 half-hour episodes. So yeah, the new show is an improvement over that...

But...

A Christmas special, plus 13 regular episodes. And during the Tennant years, somebody screwed up his contract so badly that he didn't have to be in one of those 13?

And now there's this. Now, I'm not saying that stuff can't be worth the wait (again, BSG's last half-season certainly was). But come on. You're not doing 20, or 22, or 26 episodes. You're doing 13, plus a Christmas special. Are there really that few writers left in Britain that you have to write them all and start so late?

Now, I'd be more forgiving if Doctor Who were of the same caliber as, say, Battlestar Galactica. But this last season has been mostly disappointing, with three or four exceptions. I don't want to wait seven months for another "Night Terrors."

I'm really hesitant about saying this, because the last time an American got his mitts on Doctor Who we got the Movie... but at least we know how to get our shows out on time.

BSG: Rapture

In two of the best scenes of the season, Athena has Helo kill her (because suicide is a sin, and the only Cylon who ever kills themself but nobody else simultaneously is Cavil - twice), and then Helo bitches out Roslin about kidnapping his daughter. Since at the end of the day Roslin is a power-hungry lunatic who would just as soon send everyone who disagrees with her out the airlock, I don't really mind seeing some righteous fury on Helo's part.

And yes, I do mean that Roslin is a power-hungry lunatic. She's arguably the best representation ever of a true benevolent dictator; she really does only want more power as a means of safeguarding the fleet, but it's not clear she even ever wants an election in the first place, she tries to steal that election, she lets a former terrorist be VP because it's the easiest way to get her power back, she hedges forever on the notion of giving Baltar a trial, and once he's acquitted she mocks the notion of a trial and tries to give herself more power so she can just outright execute the next traitor who comes along.

(When all is said and done, though, she's legally the president, and if Zarek wants to complain about that, maybe he shouldn't have given up the Presidency so easily. I mean, he was willing to make a big issue out of it in Season 4; why didn't he grow a spine a season earlier?)

All right, with that political side-track over with, back to the episode. The Cylons turn five of their Raiders back, but one presses on, over the will of the group.

Watch these episodes back-to-back and wonder what precisely made Cavil change his mind. In "Jupiter," he was all "it doesn't matter how long it takes to find Earth" (which fits, given that he alone of the Seven knows what's down there). Suddenly, he says there's too much of a risk. Cavil should still be in covering-his-tracks mode, as he is at the end of the episode when he boxes D'anna. He should relish the idea that he can get Adama to nuke his last best chance to find Earth. (Maybe he's just maneuvering to try to box D'anna already. I don't know. I don't know if the writers knew at this point. I'd really like to know when the writers knew who the Final Five were, and what Cavil's role was.)

Down on the surface, Dee finds Starbuck and gets her doped up on drugs. Starbuck confesses that Lee won't cheat, but Dee's having none of that. They manage to take off, eventually, after Dee manages to slap Starbuck a good one under the guise of keeping her lucid.

Anders and Lee manage to stop the Cylon advance, except that D'anna and Baltar conveniently sneak in the back door after Chief leaves. They unplug all the bombs - and again, note that Chief can't bring himself to detonate the temple. Then it's vision time, and D'anna gets to see the faces of the Final Five, prompting an aneurysm or something. Then it's Baltar's turn. Funnily enough, he does get to see one of the Five's faces, not that he'd know it. Then he gets pistol-whipped and brought back in a body bag.

The star goes nova, and with the episode's running time almost out, everything gets nicely wrapped up by the editor.

Oh, and while that tense battle was going down on the planet, Athena managed to download to a Resurrection Ship (which Caprica-Six just happened to be on), shuttle over to the Basestar where Hera was, rescue her, and then somehow convince Caprica to come back with her. Why, I'm really not sure.

...and Another Thing About Caprica

Generally speaking, the science-fiction genre has been a way to tell all sorts of fairy tales with the sort of subtext you couldn't use anywhere else. H.G. Wells did this with the Eloi and the Morlocks, using them to tell a story of a working-class rebellion. It wasn't the main point of The Time Machine, but it was in there.

This approach works because the audience is watching the adventures of people a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away (or just a long time ago. Or in the future. Or whatever). They don't expect those people to be us. Captain Kirk can proselytize about a better tomorrow without getting painfully preachy.

Then came Battlestar Galactica, which turned that equation on its head. In his manifesto, Moore notes that the crew of the Galactica "are you and me." But the audience still doesn't mind because they're in spaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaace. You think I would watch "Dirty Hands" if it weren't an episode of a science-fiction show? And that's just the most obvious polemic in the series; you don't have to be a partisan hack to notice that they're putting all sorts of references to the War on Terror, torture, Iraq, justice, religion, and so on into the show.

Now some of this subtext is probably just a way of making the unfamiliar familiar. For example, Roslin gets sworn in aboard a futuristic jetliner, much like LBJ was sworn in on Air Force One. I don't think they intend to compare the series as an allegory to Vietnam, and I don't think anything Roslin does particularly mirrors the Great Society, but just about everyone who watched the Miniseries could pick up on the post-Dallas mood. Cally gets to play Jack Ruby in one episode, even though Boomer wasn't a sniper and her target lived. There's a reference to the "Daisy Girl" ad, and the girl isn't even playing with daisies. Hell, there's even a point where the show digs up something familiar to the audience as a way of unsettling the audience; by the time "All Along the Watchtower" makes its appearance, you've accepted the Colonial culture as a sister culture. You don't expect them to start quoting Star Wars or listening to the Beatles. They're "us" and "not-us" at the same time, which is what makes the fact that "Watchtower" exists in their universe a big slice of wham in an episode that's already nearly reached a critical mass of wham.

But in Caprica, they're already in a familiar setting. Caprica depicts a society that is maybe 10-20 years ahead of our own (ignoring the interplanetary travel). So when this society gets hit by a terrorist attack, and a barely-competent investigator starts barging in on private property just to get some good press, it hits a tad too close to home.

Suddenly, the show has abandoned one of the central tenants of political science fiction; that this all happens to people who are not us. Caprica continues the BSG theme that these people are us, but we're looking for escapism here, not a subtext so heavy that it's become plain old text.

Impressions of Caprica

So I'm now three episodes into Caprica, for which there may or may not be individual reviews, because even moreso than BSG this show is really adhering to the concept of being one long film.

But that's not to say that I can't make some observations about things I like (and things I don't), and some guesses about why the show ultimately failed.

#1: The Pedigree

I have some issues with the finale of Battlestar Galactica, but one thing I'm incredibly happy it did was virtually kill off any chance of a sequel. No, the reason I'm happy about this is not because I don't want to see more of the Galactica 'verse, but because a sequel simply couldn't hold up to the very impressive level of quality that BSG pulled off. It prevented subsequent geniuses from coming in and wrecking the Galactica legacy with a bunch of subpar spinoffs.

To demonstrate what I mean, just look at the Star Trek franchise. Let's ignore DS9 for a moment because I know that opinion is highly divided on that one, and just look at the other three incarnations since 1987: first you had TNG, which struggled for a little while to find its footing. Then it had a good run starting in the third or fourth season, but by the end the writers were obviously struggling to come up with good ideas. As soon as TNG got promoted from television to film, they created Voyager, which was basically as far away from DS9 as they could get; DS9 would have ongoing story and character arcs and stay in one place, while Voyager would thump the reset button every week and never stay in the same place. You can't really say that DS9 is just TNG on a space station, because there was a lot more going on there. But I think it would be accurate to say that Voyager is just TNG trying to get back to Earth (assuming you ignore the divergent qualities of each).

And after Voyager, there was Enterprise, which was basically TNG in the past. See, Deep Space Nine brought something new to the table, and it was better for it. I would argue that DS9 was better than TNG, but I also recognize that that's just personal opinon talking. However, Voyager and Enterprise showed an obvious decline in quality. So of the more recent Star Trek incarnations, we've only really had one that was even arguably better than its predecessors.

I could use other examples, but with Moore, Thompson, Weddle and Taylor all DS9 stalwarts, Star Trek seemed like the right one to go with. My point is that just like novels and films, sequels to television shows tend to suck.

#2: Prequelitis

Another problem that Caprica has is one that it shares with the Star Wars prequels. And no, I'm not talking about poorly-written characters, lousy dialogue, bad acting, or an over-reliance on CGI in place of storytelling. Caprica's not really guilty of any of that (although any show that needs to start each episode by telling you precisely what the main characters are thinking probably isn't doing everything right).

Rather, you know how it all is going to end up. The biggest twist that the Star Wars prequels could have delivered would have been to reveal that Darth Vader was actually not Anakin Skywalker (somebody on the Caprica staff knew this. Two words: Willie Adama). But that didn't happen. All we prequels really told us was that Vader was seduced by the dark side of the Force. Gee, Obi-wan Kenobi used those exact words about 30 minutes into Star Wars. Likewise, all Caprica is going to tell us is that the Cylons were created by man, which is something that all but three episodes of the first three BSG seasons told us at the beginning of each episode.

But there's another problem here, one that Caprica doesn't share with Star Wars. In the prequels, we knew what Palpatine's plan was the entire time. He was going to create the Galactic Empire. We'd already seen that. So we knew there was an end goal in mind. In contrast, the Cylons never really had a "plan" beyond "nuke everything until it's dead" over in BSG (until its final season), and Sister Polygamy's plan in Caprica is a) vague as all hell, and b) not really clearly tied in to the events of 58 years later. (Palpatine manipulating things behind the scenes -> Empire. Monotheistic terrorists -> ...um, Cylons, somehow.) And then there's the stuff about Tauron languages and other stuff that never came up in Galactica. And don't tell me it's because the Colonies aren't unified yet, because there's apparently a unified court system, and even just before Galactica (per "Taking a Break from All Your Worries"), people from one colony needed a visa to work on another one.

So between these two issues, I'm a bit curious as to why this was a spinoff of Galactica and not its own stand-alone thing. And don't say it's because Galactica had brand recognition. That's a stupid argument for so many reasons.

1) In 2003, the words "Battlestar Galactica" meant "that campy Star Wars ripoff from the 70s." Five years later, it meant "the best science-fiction show ever made." Moore and Eick took the name of the show and completely re-branded it.

2) Galactica fans were turned off by the finale. Look at the viewing figures for "Daybreak" versus the figures for Caprica's pilot.

3) At times it tries too hard to be a Galactica clone (pyramid, the Colonial Anthem), while at other times it has to pointlessly distance itself from its parent show.

Okay, so that's a broad run-down of some of the problems with the show. Here are some of the things I like about it so far:

Daniel Graystone

He's not a corrupt industrialist who's only in it for the money. He seems at least somewhat distrubed by some of the ways his technology has been used, and more importantly, he's trying to chase down the virtual ghost of his daughter. Yeah, his wife's a loony who can't let go of the Idiot Ball for two damn seconds (seriously, she makes Ellen Tigh and Kara Thrace look like beacons of stability), but that's hardly his fault. Faced with some of his unintended consequences, he swore to give his holoband profits to charity. We'll see if that plays out, but it's a nice gesture anyway.

Sam Adama

Yes, the paranoid wingnut's second-favorite character is the gay gangster. (I'll probably have to say this again and again, but I don't mind political subtext so long as you neither rub my face in it nor overemphasize it at the expense of the story.) I just wish they'd stop peppering his dialogue with random Tauron words (seriously, even Worf wasn't that bad by DS9).

Zoe

Thank you, Dawson Casting. It makes me feel less guilty for saying this: Zoe is hot. It's just... what's going on with her, exactly? This geeky nerd has been making Robo-Zoe dance (and there's a scene where he does... something to the robot's crotch area). Is Robo-Zoe programmed to follow the Second Law of Robotics, or is she just willfully ignoring the creep factor in order to keep up her disguise?

BSG: Maelstrom

Spoilers. Like you didn't know.

If you were a BSG fan back when this episode was initially broadcast, you probably already knew the big thing that happened in it. The production team didn't exactly try to keep Katee Sackhoff's departure a secret, other than getting her to sign a confidentiality agreement.

I didn't watch BSG on its initial run, for the relatively simple reason that a show with a title as ludicrous as Battlestar Galactica couldn't actually be any good. (Now, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, that's a world-class title right there.) Anyway, I knew that this had to be coming up. I was just really surprised that this was the way that they went about doing it.

So Starbuck's been having creepy dreams about Leoben, and that mandala she painted back in her Old Caprica apartment. Now I'll be the first to point out that Starbuck's head was never screwed on all that tight, but between Leoben mind-frakking her on New Caprica (and then mind-frakking her in the other sense in her dreams) and her discovery that she painted a design that was almost identical to one painted 2,000/3,600/4,000 years ago (delete according to whichever source says what), she's pretty much gone off the deep end.

Not helping matters is this invisible Heavy Raider that only she can see. (Gee, a Cylon only you are aware of? Dr. Baltar might be able to help with that, and he's not even a psychiatrist!) So after developing Starbuck's gun camera footage, everyone sees that there was no Heavy Raider. (Damn that gun camera footage, Starbuck, it's always proving you're nuts. "I saw a Heavy Raider." Yeah, right. "I found Earth." Yeah, ri... oh.)

Adama passes the buck to Apollo about whether or not to ground her, and both men will live long enough to regret Lee's decision. In this scene, Lee mentions that "In peacetime, [Cottle] would ground us all." It's an indirect nod to the fact that reinforcements simply aren't coming. You have to play the cards you're dealt. And you don't ground your top gun just because she's got a little case of PTSD. (Come to think of it, these guys are really, really bad at not grounding people. Kat was clearly dying of radiation poisoning, Starbuck is clearly going off the deep end... but then, expecting Lee Adama to ever approach the subject of Kara Thrace rationally and objectively is a bit like asking Cavil and Zarek to be best friends. It's just not going to happen.)

So Lee volunteers to be Kara's wing, and they go off on one last CAP together. She sees the Heavy Raider again and engages, chasing it right down the eye of a storm (the titular Maelstrom) until it shoots her. Maybe.

See, I'm not clear on this. The first time she ran across the Heavy Raider, it winged her, but there wasn't a scratch on her Viper afterwards. (Also, all throughout this episode, the Heavy Raider shoots the same ammunition and with the same frequency as a normal Raider; contrast this to the behavior of the HR in "Scattered.") Now it manages to shoot a hole in her canopy, causing her Viper to go into an uncontrolled tumble. Starbuck falls unconscious.

So far, so good. You could still have it either way at this point, so long as you avoid having Starbuck fully regain consciousness before the big firework. Either the Raider exists or it doesn't; either way, Starbuck thinks it does, and she's had an accident chasing it down. Either way, it's still effective as far as writing her out goes.

So then we cut to Starbuck's apartment on Caprica. Leoben turns off her alarm clock and wakes her up. They ramble on about destiny for a while before Leoben shows Starbuck her mother's death and lets her comfort her dying mother, something Starbuck never actually got to do. Having thus come to terms with death, Starbuck regains consciousness. There's a shot that heavily implies that Lee sees the Heavy Raider (thus making it real), and then Starbuck's Viper explodes. Kablooey!

...and if I hadn't left a few things out, that would have been a satisfying episode and a believable death scene.

The problem is that Head-Leoben invites Kara to "explore the space between life and death." Then, after she regains consciousness, Kara tells Lee not to worry, and that she'll see him on the other side. We see her reach for the ejection lever, and then decide against it. Yeah, it's making it clearer that she's accepting her imminent death, but the way it plays out also suggests that there's nothing other than her own crazy death wish (and the urge to explore "the space between life and death") that's keeping her from pulling out in time.

The point is, this episode planted some clear seeds, and then relied on the rumor machine (Katee left! She's expressed vocal disappointment with the show, and promises never to return!) to do its work for it. The story was originally going to be a lot simpler; Starbuck and Apollo would be stuck in a dogfight, and Starbuck would sacrifice herself so Apollo could get away. Would that have been better? Doubtful. Katee Sackhoff asked to be given another encounter with Leoben, and I certainly think that that was the right decision. You couldn't possibly kill her off, having established that she has a destiny, without her most vocal prophet/stalker telling her yup, this is where you get off. And it does redefine the relationship between them, which is important. But those final seconds just play out for too long.

And furthermore, I like the ambiguity about whether or not the Raider exists. But having a shot that implies Lee sees it, and then telling us in the commentary or interviews or whatever that he didn't is just, well, wrong. I can understand the need to put out a statement shutting down insane rumors like Daniel and Starbuck were related (seriously, where the frak did that come from?), but if your intention is that the Raider never existed, don't put a misleading visual effects shot in there.

None of this, however, is really meant to damn the episode. I know what happens later, but I'm still moved to (manly) tears watching Starbuck's final moments. So it drops a few hints for us; for Lee, and for all the other characters, she's gone forever. Her ship's in pieces.

You might say "ratings stunt," but the next episode plays her death incredibly straight. A grieving Lee Adama ends up getting sucked into Romo Lampkin's emotional manipulation, which leads to him resigning from the service and becoming the Caprican Delegate to the Quorum of Twelve, which in turn causes him to spend some time as Zarek's stooge and some time as the Acting President of the Colonies. And that's just the most obvious plot threat launched from this episode.

My main point is that by this point, they're pandering to the DVD audience rather than the initial-broadcast audience. Given all the clues in this episode, and without immediate access to press coverage of Sackhoff's departure, nobody watching this on DVD could really think she was gone for good.

Who Review: The Girl Who Waited

Tom McRae hasn't, to the best of my knowledge, worked on the show since Season 2. And since Season 2 was the bad season, I was a little bit skeptical...

Silly me.

Okay, so they go to a planet, and once again the Doctor doesn't bother to check the news or anything because they land in the middle of a plague. A quarantine facility shifts time in order to save people. The Doctor and Rory get stuck in one time-stream, while Amy gets stuck in another.

There are two fantastic concepts here. First, the whole idea of splitting time-streams so that some people move faster than others is utterly brilliant, and I hope the idea is revisited. Then there's the notion that the plague could kill the Doctor (but not Rory or Amy, who are immune), so he has to stay in the TARDIS and be Mission Control for the entire episode. I would not mind seeing more episodes like this. Not because Matt Smith is annoying; far from it, but it was nice to actually go all the way with what's been a common theme since 2005 and actually force the Doctor to act entirely through other people.

Amy gets chased around not-Aperture-Science-honest by faceless medic-droids that want to give her medicine that will kill her (Moffat Cliche Number 3: Literal-Minded Medical Robots Gone Amok). Way back in "Gridlock," when those two clowns drugged Martha, I first wondered about the way future medicine would affect our heroes, and it's nice to see that someone is finally taking this issue seriously. Which is another great plus in this episode's favor.

Rory gets equipped with a pair of glasses that let him hear the Doctor, while the Doctor can see whatever the glasses see. Then he goes in search of wifey. Small problem: it's been 36 years for Amy, and those 36 years have not been kind to Amy, Amy's psyche, and the makeup and wardrobe departments.

Which brings us to utterly stupid thing number one: Old-Amy's costume looks like the sort of thing I could bash together without any budget whatsoever. Maybe that's the point, but I can't help but think of Old-Amy as a sort of Joan of Arc with Nerf armor. So for the rest of this review, I'm going to call her Joan of Nerf.

Anyway, Joan of Nerf isn't big on the whole "rescue Amy before she becomes me" thing, since she is Amy (since she has all her memories) and she doesn't want to die. But other-Amy is still out there, somehow, and they eventually strike a bargain to rescue both versions after loads and loads of heartstring-tugging.

But then the Doctor reneges on the deal and only saves the younger, hotter, less angsty version, justifying himself because "I said I'd save her, and I did." Except Joan of Nerf has all of Amy's memories, and per YOUR VERY ARGUMENT in "The Almost People," that makes her just as much a person as Amy.

That's less a Stupid Thing than it is a Continuity Problem, but Moffat can duck around that by claiming that Big Bang 2 yargle arb fargle.

Stupid Thing Number Two is the fight scene at the end, which demonstrates the clear advantage of having a trained ballerina in your cast. What, did you think a stunt double wouldn't work? Joan of Nerf is already wearing (awful) make-up.

And now I have to do the thing I hate doing, which is critique acting. I'm not an actor, I don't know subpar acting when I see it, so I really only ever do this when there's a noticeable problem, and there is one here. See, Joan of Nerf is supposed to hate the Doctor. She's been spending the last 36 years doing two things; hiding from medic-droids that will kill her, and nursing a festering hatred of the Doctor. But Joan of Nerf also still loves Rory, and because of that, and the fact that she's Amy, who is apparently Time Santa as far as sorting out paradoxes goes, so she's got to end up being a hero. While there's no doubt that Karen Gillan can act off of herself, she doesn't really pull off the emotional weight that Joan of Nerf is supposed to be carrying. Again, that's less a Stupid Thing and more an inconvenience. She's delivered really great performances on other occasions (two words: "save him" in "Amy's Choice"), but it just felt a tad flat here.

I guess I have to mention how, just as in "The Almost People," we knew the extra person wasn't going to come back, but it was nice to see everyone acknowledge that. I would have liked a little bit more from the Doctor about how necessary it is to leave her behind - and frankly, I'm surprised Joan of Nerf got totally offed, unlike Jenny in "The Doctor's Daughter" or even River in "Forest of the Dead." (Moffat is going out of his way to tie up loose ends. I don't know whether that's a good thing or not.) I'm also surprised she didn't go down fighting, but, as you'll see when I get around to reviewing BSG's "Maelstrom," I tend to misjudge how characters are going to die. (Agh! I came this close to finishing a Who Review without mentioning Galactica.)

So now all we have to do is age the Doctor, and clone Rory, and we'll have gone full circle on everything.

7 out of 10. A number of great ideas. Better follow-through would have been nice.

BSG: The Eye of Jupiter

Between the occupation of New Caprica and Baltar's subsequent Basestar vacation, the writers needed to come up with a frakking good idea why the audience wouldn't get to see all 12 Cylon models running around.

And the idea the writers came up with was good enough to breathe another season and a half of life into a show that was beginning to lose its traction. (Is that really a fair assessment? Try to picture the way the bulk of Season 4 would have gone if the Final Five were just models 7 and 9-12, as opposed to being fundamentally different from the others.) Enter the Final Five, the five not-yet-revealed Cylon models who aren't in contact with the other seven.

Baltar mentioned them first in "Torn," and then everyone started using the term, presumably because they were programmed not to think about the Final Five, and that extended to calling the Final Five the Final Five.

Then in "Hero," the Cylons engaged in an absolutely insane plot to get a former prisoner to kill Adama, which told me all I needed to know about the Final Five; namely, that the other seven weren't in contact with the Five, and that the likelihood of any of the Five having sleeper programming was practically nil.

So now we come to the Algae Planet, or as I like to call it, Overexposed Planet Number Four. Caprica was overexposed with a gold filter, Kobol was overexposed with a green filter, New Caprica was overexposed with a blue filter and tons of fog (except in "Unfinished Business" for some reason), the Algae planet was overexposed with a blue filter, and Earth will just be plain overexposed.

Anyway, on this planet is the Temple of Five, which was built by the Thirteenth Tribe but apparently contains some sort of clue about not only the location of Earth, but also the identities of the Final Five. Talk about convenient.

Actually, no, please do not talk about convenient. There are two different conversations in this episode where characters go out of their way to say how totally random it is that both the Colonial and Cylon fleets converged on this planet at once, and that it must be the will of God, the gods, or Ronald D. Moore. This is what we call "lampshade hanging," and we don't need none of that!

Baltar, because he actually is a genius, managed to decipher a riddle spoken by the Basestar's hybrid, and that led them to the Algae planet. Meanwhile, the humans only found the planet because they were looking for food to eat. Which group is supposed to be the ones interpreting religious scrolls looking for Earth again? Anyway, Roslin gets right down to business interpreting religious scrolls as soon as Tyrol reports back that he's found a temple that looks surprisingly like the main part of Ragnar Anchorage... I mean, a temple that was built by the Thirteenth Tribe.

(Now, with the benefit of hindsight, you might be tempted to think that there's something significant to the fact that Tyrol found the temple. I submit as counter-evidence the fact that Anders didn't.)

Anyway, once another 20 episodes elapse and we get around to "Sometimes a Great Notion," the gaps start to get filled in as to how this can be both a Thirteenth Tribe temple and a Final Five identifier. But for the time being, we're all "huh," and "what?"

Anyway, the temple supposedly contains the Eye of Jupiter, which points the way to Earth. The Eye of Jupiter is denoted as this red, yellow and blue mandala thingy. Tyrol is tasked with finding the Eye while Apollo and Anders try to hold off a Cylon ground force. Anders is well aware that his "two-timing bitch of a wife" (her words) is cheating on him with Apollo. Naturally, there's an incredible amount of tension... and also ridiculously oiled biceps. (There's a similar scene between Starbuck and Dee in the next episode, but with out the subtext. That's probably because we just had "The Passage," where Starbuck and Kat got so close that every male audience member was yelling "Kiss her!")

Starbuck won't divorce Anders, and Lee makes up his mind not to cheat on Dee, which puts them both pretty much in hell for the next couple of episodes. But not to worry, becuase Starbuck gets shot down, Anders flips and tries to go rescue her, but Lee won't let him because he's too important. Apparently nobody else is capable of leading a bunch of civilians.

Incidentally, this is a repeated problem in the show: the plot contrives to send a character somewhere or keep a character somewhere because that character is too important. Starbuck is the best sniper, even though she's a pilot (and a card shark, tactical genius, Pyramid pro, painter, pianist, and clairvoyant). Boomer is the best Raptor wrangler, even though Racetrack steps in as soon as she's out of the picture. Anders is the only capable resistance leader. Apollo is the only person qualified to be Acting President.

Meanwhile, the Cylons show up. Lucy Lawless is still tricking you into thinking she's the show's Big Bad, but it's starting to become clear that she's on a mission of her own and the others are about to rebel. Just to hammer that point home, Dean Stockwell shows up for the first time since New Caprica to hurl massive amounts of snark at pretty much everyone (it's what he does, and he's so good at it that they went and made an entire movie of him doing almost nothing but). In this instance, he offers the Colonials Baltar in exchange for the Eye of Jupiter. Naturally, they don't take the offer. Baltar and D'anna jump in a Heavy Raider and head towards the planet, but Adama threatens to nuke the temple (and the surrounding area, including Apollo and Starbuck) so the Cylons can't find the Eye.

And, oh yeah, the sun's about to go supernova.

This was sort-of, kind-of the Season 3 midseason finale, because they went on a quick break afterwards. No, it's not as good as the Season 2 equivalent. That's because this episode has to service so much more than just its own cliffhanger. Since the Final Five are so much more important to the overall mythology of the series than the Pegasus ever was, we have to focus on that aspect of the story a lot. But since there's a rather simple explanation for the Temple of Five being both of the things that it is, and since that explanation gives the entire game away, a massive sleight-of-hand which basically amounts to "don't think about it too hard" is employed.

So what did I like about this episode? Ironically, the same thing I didn't like that much about "Water." Grace Park is better here than she was there. Her characters are more interesting. The scene between Boomer and Athena is great, and the scene where Athena finds out her daughter is still alive is even better.

The scene where Roslin confesses that she kidnapped Hera is great. I normally wish they would go back and stick the deleted scenes back into the episodes more often (as in "Pegasus" and "Unfinished Business"), but I'm glad they didn't in this case, because the snippet of that scene that made it into the episode is so much better than the full-length version that can be found elsewhere on the DVD. (Roslin second-guessing herself and asking Adama what she should do? We don't need to see that. I like Roslin the most when she's absolutely sure that the choice she made was the lesser of two evils.)

I guess I liked the scene between Anders and Lee, even though I thought the plot was trying a bit too hard to force these two to cooperate, when really Anders could just have gone off and rescued Starbuck. (Lee's a character I get about 99% of the time, so whenever he does something that doesn't make any sense to me, it tends to throw me. Anders isn't that important; he just told all the civilians to make bombs and whatnot.)

And Dean Stockwell makes a welcome reappearance. But still, when you compare this to "Pegasus" and especially "Revelations," the other two midseason cliffhangers, this one comes up so short. (Obligatory swipe at Doctor Who: yes, it's better than "A Good Man Goes to War." That goes without saying.)

My 10 favorite pieces of BSG soundtrack music

Bear McCreary is my new hero, and pretty much the only thing keeping me from saying that he's the best composer alive is that as far as I know, the following people aren't dead: John "Star Wars" Williams, James "Star Trek II" Horner, Ennio "The Good, the Bad and the Ugly" Morricone, and Hans "Pirates of the Carribean" Zimmer.

But unlike all those guys, Bear is still primarily a television composer. Which means he's not as famous. Still, over four seasons of BSG, he's given us some of the coolest musical themes and stings I've heard in a long, long time.

Honorable mention #1: the Colonial Anthem, better known as the original series theme, composed by Stu Phillips.

Honorable mention #2: the Miniseries theme, composed by Richard Gibbs. Bear McCreary is awesome and I wouldn't want to live in a world where the following tunes don't exist, but at the same time, I kind of miss the Miniseries theme and wonder what it would have been like if Richard Gibbs had stayed on to do the show.

Honorable mention #3: "All Along the Watchtower." Someone got the bright idea to do a cover of the only song in the world that has already recieved a definitive cover. I did include another Final Five track in the actual list.

10) "Black Market." Say what you will about the episode, but the title track is awesome. Shame we get to hear about three seconds of it unless we buy the soundtrack. (Um, "Black Market.")

9) "Farewell Apollo." This is the last time the Adama theme gets a big old showcase, now with military drums. With themes like these, I tend to like the later arrangements better just because they're more fully evolved. ("Six of One.")

8) "Storming New Caprica." Hell yes. This and the Adama theme are what make bagpipes bearable. ("Exodus, Part II.)

7) "Apocalypse." Downtuned guitars crunching away underneath the main title theme? If I didn't know better, I'd say Bear wrote both pieces simultaneously. (The Plan)

6) "Kat's Sacrifice." The fact that this theme only appears in one episode is downright criminal. But I guess that's what you get when you compose a theme for a character who promptly gets killed off. ("The Passage")

5) "Diaspora Oratio." What? They found Earth? But we're only halfway through Season 4! How are the next 10 episodes going to play out? This music is probably the main reason we don't ask that question. ("Revelations")

4) "An Easterly View." This was the music with which to end the show, playing over the scene that should have ended it: about two minutes before "Daybreak, Part III" actually ends, Adama sits next to Laura's grave, as the fantastic "Violence and Variations" theme plays one final time with incredible gusto.

3) "Something Dark is Coming." Move over, "Pegasus," this is the best psychedelic-tinged guitar track in the series. It plays at the beginning of "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part I."

2) "Kara's Coordinates." It all comes together in "Daybreak, Part II." Starbuck's destiny, Hera's notes, the Final Five... well, kinda sorta, anyway, as far as the storytelling goes. Once again, the music sells it.

1) "Prelude to War." Perfection.

BSG: The Passage

This is the first Battlestar Galactica episode written by Jane Espenson (primarily of Buffy fame, but at this point it'd be easier to list the sci-fi/fantasy shows that she hasn't written for in the last 15 years).

...and, frankly, I was expecting more. Now, to her credit, she does get the funniest joke of the season ("paper shortage"), but it's not quite as funny as Adama and Tigh seem to think it is.

Anyway, this episode is a pretty good case study as to why the standalone episodes of the show don't really measure up. And for the record, I'd be willing to bet that she was given most of the plot and told to work it into something useable while the regular staff focused on the developing love quadrangle.

So first of all, I'd better explain what a standalone episode is (or at least, what I consider a standalone episode to be). It's exactly that: an episode that stands alone, has a self-contained story with a beginning, middle and end. The closest we got to that in Season 1 were "Act of Contrition" and "Colonial Day." "Act of Contrition" starts with an explosion and focuses on Starbuck training new pilots, but the episode is really about her guilt over the death of Zak Adama, and that was introduced back in the Miniseries. "Colonial Day" is a bit more clear-cut of an example, because the Qurorum of Twelve, the Vice-Presidency, and Wallace Gray are all introduced in that episode. But, most of those plot threads reappear later on. Making Baltar your Vice-President doesn't come without consequences. Furthermore, "Colonial Day" is open-ended on the assassin issue, even if that never got resolved (it went to the Ship of Abandoned Plotlines, along with Boxey, Novacek, Lee's flab, Demand Peace, etc).

Then Season 2 has a massive culprit in the form of "Black Market," but as I argued when I reviewed it, I felt that "Black Market" was flawed because it was a standalone episode, since it dropped eight zillion new things in our lap with absolutely no prior notice. Lee being in a relationship with a hooker isn't so much out-of-character as it is a revelation of a dark side that has only been hinted at once before (at the end of "Resurrection Ship, Part II").

Then there was "Hero," which contorted the entire continuity of the show in order to give Adama reason to believe that he'd started the war. Said feelings of guilt had never been hinted at before - unless you count that moment in the Miniseries when Leoben tells him that he can't hide from the things he's done (but I could write an entire blog post on the discrepancies between the Miniseries and the series proper).

Now, is "The Passage" as bad as either of those two episodes? No, of course not. I vehemently disagree with the notion that "Black Market," "Hero" and "The Woman King" are the worst three episodes of the show, but that's only because for whatever reason "Epiphanies" isn't on that list. (And as an aside, I am much more forgiving of a standalone like "Black Market," whose various players are never mentioned again, than I am of "Epiphanies," which garbles its technobabble so badly that you're left wondering why Laura doesn't stick a needle in Hera once her cancer returns. "Black Market" wrecked one episode. "Epiphanies" wrecked an entire plotline.)

So there's suddenly a crisis without any warning. Last time this happened ("Water"), a Cylon was responsible. But there are no sleeper agents left in the fleet. How do I know this? Because the Cylons would never have resorted to a scheme as insane as the one in "Hero" if they had an infiltrator or a sleeper agent they could just contact. Besides, any known Cylons would have gotten off at New Caprica. (Yes, yes, I know about the Final Five, but it becomes clear later on that they have no sleeper programming, only blocked and altered memories.) But, hey, after three years in space, it's only natural that stuff might start to fail (gee, this just might become a major frakking plotline in Season 4.5... why they didn't have everything break down, instead of doing the Luddite thing, remains a mystery to me).

The food has all been contaminated, and there's a scene where the pilots have to eat crumbs. It's a nice and effective scene, provided that you like Kat.

And that's another problem with this episode. I know she's Starbuck's own personal Starbuck (and yeah, I mean that in every way possible; look at how close their faces are during their confrontations in both this and "Scar"). It's just that we know Starbuck is a hyperpowered Viper jock, because we've seen it. Kat just seems like someone who's made it their personal mission to antagonize Starbuck as much as humanly possible. Not that I disapprove of antagonizing Starbuck (anyone who calls herself a "two-timing bitch of a wife" needs a good kick in the ass from time to time - and frankly, the "make Starbuck's life hell" episodes are some of the best in the show), but that seems to be Kat's sole reason for existing. We don't really get to see her in combat all that much. We find out more about her personal life in this episode, but we also find out that she's running from her personal life.

So I'm just going to come out and say it: until this episode, I didn't like Kat very much, and even afterwards, my feelings were somewhat mixed. But I'll get into that later.

First of all, let me talk about what I do like in this episode. Number one, the music. If you're reading this but don't have the Season 3 soundtrack, order it right now. Bear McCreary composed an awesome little theme for Kat that only ever gets heard in this episode. It's called "Kat's Sacrifice," and it could have easily been the title theme for another show.

Number two, I like the message the story tries to tell. See, as they make these dangerous trips through a radiation-filled star cluster (because the plot demands it), Kat's personal life begins to catch up to her. We learn that she was a smuggler named Sasha who stole the name of a dead girl to get through the background checks and end up as a Viper pilot. But the message of the story is that it doesn't matter who you were or what you did before; what matters is what you're doing now, and Kat's fighting the good fight. Good for her.

Number three was just something that amused me. Raptors can be flown from either the right or the left seat in the cockpit. If you watch the Raptor scenes closely enough, you'll notice that the only person driving from the left is Apollo, the only pilot played by a British actor. That just struck me as funny.

Okay, so now back to griping. Aside from the fact that this is a standalone, which means all the exposition needs to come fast and furious in order to get to the actual meat of the story, the main problem comes in the ending. Starbuck finds out about Kat's past. Kat begs Starbuck to let her, Kat, tell the Admiral herself. Starbuck, no stranger to having to confess awful secrets to Adama, agrees. Then Kat goes on a mission she knows she won't come back from because she's already recieved too much radiation poisoning. To me, that's less of a heroic sacrifice and more a glorified suicide. (But if I'm going to gripe too much about suicide, I'd be a hypocrite if I turned around and showered praise on "Sometimes a Great Notion," and since that's precisely what I'm going to do when I finally get there, I'll stop complaining.)

Anyway, "Flawed, but Watchable" (also known as "Average") is my verdict on "The Passage." I'm not going to do to Jane Espenson what I did to Robert Holmes in my Doctor Who reviews, and hold her to a higher standard than the other writers. This isn't as good as, say, Firefly's "Shindig," but it's better than any other standalone episode this season. As far as where it ranks in the season, it's competing for the #10 slot along with "The Eye of Jupiter" and "Rapture," because the first four, last four, and "Unfinished Business" have the other top nine pretty much locked up.

Caprica: Pilot

Our story opens in the V-club, which you can tell is a place up to no good because it's full of teenagers having sex, fighting each other, killing each other, engaging in human sacrifice, and listening to techno music. Zoe Graystone talks to two of her friends as they watch her virtual copy. The copy is, sadly, more believable than her friend Ben, who frankly sounds like he just read his lines for the first time that morning.

Anyway, the copy of Zoe de-rezzes (see, Battlestar took its slang from Blade Runner, so Caprica's going to have to steal its slang from some other 80s thing: Tron). Real-Zoe gets in trouble, but promises to perform "tweakage" on the virtual copy. Did the writers get all their knowledge of kids from Buffy and their technology ideas from cult 80s films?

So we meet her parents - Daddy's a major player in this show. Daniel Graystone is played by Eric Stoltz, which makes me wish I'd seen him in more stuff than just Pulp Fiction.

Zoe and her avatar talk - the avatar is pretty much exactly like her only a tad more judgemental. (Here's the first thing that makes no frakking sense to me: the avatar supposedly is Zoe, but Zoe knows why Zoe-A is so important, and Zoe-A apparently doesn't.)

So the kids run away, but then Ben blows himself up rather than admit he only read the first page of the script. Unfortunately, he kills Zoe, as well as Tamara Adams and her mother. Tamara's daddy is Civil Liberties Lawyer... I mean, defense attorney for the mob Joseph Adama, idol and enemy of Romo Lampkin, father of Bill, and owner of one very special lighter.

So in this scene there's some stuff that doesn't make sense to me. Zoe uses a piece of magic paper to send a message to her mother, and it says "message sent." By "message sent," I assume they meant the message was sent, but later we find out it didn't get there, somehow. Why is she using a piece of magic paper? Is magic paper really going to replace the iPhone and not the other way around? Check out how long it takes her to type the first four words of her message; we've got faster stuff today.

Then there's Ben, who's willing to up and murder his best friend. Why? Was she mocking his acting ability? It doesn't make any sense, and by the time the pilot movie ends we still only have the vague idea that Polly Walker might be behind it in some way.

Now contrast this with the way Battlestar Galactica opened. We know about the Cylon War, about the 40-year silence. Six walks in, kisses the guy, nukes the station. War is on. Six is in the market, killing the baby, a model with no acting experience doing a better job than Ben Stark (yeah, I'm picking on him because he's flat and his character makes no sense). Six has sex with Baltar, tells him she used him to get into the defense mainframe. We know what's going on here.

There's an obvious 9/11 subtext. "As of this moment, we are at war." People grieve, but they get ready for what looks like it's just going to be a black-and-white struggle (which the show then gleefully subverts every chance it gets). Roslin pulls an LBJ and gets sworn in on a passenger jet. The miniseries uses historical references to put us in a familiar world.

Nothing of the sort is really attempted in Caprica. Yeah, there's a terrorist attack, but what's the point? Who are the Soldiers of the One? "As you know," they worship the one true God, but what do they really want? What could cause Ben Stark to murder his girlfriend and a bunch of other civilians? The Cylons want to nuke the Colonies until all the humans are dead; later on, we learn that Cavil wants to prove to five specific people that mankind isn't worth saving, but we don't even need to know anything about that plotline to get the BSG miniseries. Meanwhile, a terrorist blows up a train, and the only noticeable change is that now an anti-terrorism officer is harassing a grieving mother.

Adama and Graystone sit in a coffee shop and smoke for a couple of hours. Look at us! Smoking! Yeah, we're subversive, aren't we? It's not like Mad Men does this day in and day out.

So after that, Graystone invites Adama to a C-Bucs game. And he gives this guy he just met his private number. This is before he knows that he can exploit Adama's grief to his advantage, using Adama's mob connections to steal the MCP (Master Control Program? STOP USING TERMS FROM TRON!!!!)

Next, Lacy goes to see Zoe-A in what's totally not the Matrix, honest, and when she finds Zoe-A covered in blood, she screams. Now, later we'll see that both Lacy and Adama unconsciously say what they say in V-world out in the real world too, so why doesn't that scream alert the Graystone household that something's wrong? Why does Lacy have to be in the Graystone household to find Zoe-A's magic room? They weren't at the beginning.

So they do the "you're just a thing" thing, and we talk about how Zoe-A has memories even though she's been compiled from data about Zoe's birth control perscriptions (and about eighty gazillion other sources).

Fortunately, as happens whenever I start griping about things not following their own frakking rules, a character I like shows up. Graystone shows up, but Lacy runs away.

Now, Adama's a lawyer, so I guess we have to show him in a court of law. Turns out Adama and his underworld buddies have bribed the judge (so... in the entire BSG/Caprica verse, the fairest trial we've ever seen is... Gaeta nearly being executed by the Circle).

Graystone has his own problems; he's about to lose his contract to build robots for the military because his robot can't shoot a mobile bowling pin with a painball gun. How hard can it be? The computer can always manage to shoot me whenever I play Half-Life 2, and Gordon Freeman can't move half as fast as the bowling pin. Per "Rebirth," it's because the robot isn't intuitive or some such, but 1) how smart is Serge, the Graystones' robot butler, and 2) how "intuitive" are the NPCs in any modern video game?

Then we have the scene where the kid asks the uncomfortable questions about death, but this scene is quickly interrupted because Daniel Graystone is too busy making important discoveries. Now as much as I'll complain about Season 3 of BSG chasing its own tail for the sake of character pieces, this show has pretty much the opposite problem. I want to see Adama realize that his wife and daughter were on that train. I want to see Adama talk to his son about it.

See, among the many, many other things Buffy the Vampire Slayer did to make it one of the greatest television shows ever, it always stuck with the characters in the middle of really awkward, uncomfortable, emotional scenes. There was no relief for the audience (say, by cutting to a different scene) because there was no relief for the characters. Nobody ever talked through their problems off-screen. There's a scene in "Innocence" where, just to prove to the audience how Angel is truly gone, Angelus spends a good three minutes completely shattering Buffy's heart.

At least Daniel Graystone's story is interesting enough to make up for the character bits I miss from Adama's story. Graystone gets Zoe's friend, Lacy, to show him Zoe-A. Then Graystone steals Zoe-A and puts it in a Cylon body. (Hey, this guy's supposed to be some sort of genius, right? If there's a risk of something going wrong, how about you copy Zoe-A's program? You yourself aren't really sure whether she's your daughter or just a tool to help keep your contract from being stolen by a competitor.)

(Further note to self: be sure to mock Baltar's supposed genius credentials on the next BSG review, too.)

Graystone shows Adama a copy of his daughter, Tamara, but Adama's not quite as quick a convert to the Church of the Robot Soul (established 1982). Still, he's perfectly willing to help Graystone steal the MCP from his competitor.

So Adama agrees to give the defense minister a message in exchange for his mob buddies getting the MCP. The defense minister has Tyrell's glasses from Blade Runner, because hey, why not? Either you get the reference, or you don't, and if you don't, why are you watching this? Then Graystone has sex with his wife while Adama's brother kills the minister.

So basically Graystone is this amoral businessman who's willing to steal from his competitor and corrupt his daughter's work in order to keep his contract... except then he was sad he couldn't suceed in putting his daughter in the robot. This makes him a complex, nuanced character. But because they kept cutting away from the Adama storyline, and because they left a bunch of material invovling Mrs. Graystone and Sister Clarence Willow on the cutting room floor, I don't really have that much of a feel for their characters yet.

See, in the Battlestar Galactica pilot/miniseries, you got to know all these characters. Adama was this crusty old guy who had the respect of his underlings, Tigh was a functional drunk with an estranged wife, Starbuck was an ace pilot but also a world-class screwup partly because of the guilt she felt in getting her boyfriend killed, Apollo wasn't a chip off the old block at all, Roslin was either an obstructivist schoolteacher or a cancer-stricken heroine who rallied a civilian fleet, or both, and Baltar was a sleazebag with an imaginary girlfriend. Basically what I know about Joseph Adama at this point is that he's a defense attorney for the mob, and he doesn't know how to raise his son.

Epilogue: The Perils of Prequels

We're in a similar trap here to the one that the Star Wars prequels fell into. Now, that's not entirely fair, because Caprica doesn't have a cartoon rabbit, an awful love story, and an over-reliance on CGI instead of characters (although I'm not sure I like how much attention the Cylon prototype is getting, and I applaud the decision to have Zoe stand in for the robot a lot once we get to the series proper). We have much better characters, (let's face it, saturday morning cartoons have better characters than the Star Wars prequels) but the story's in a similar dilemma because we all know where it ends up. The very first thing on the screen is a title card that says "Caprica: 58 years before the Fall." We go into this thinking that we know how it's all going to end.

All we knew about the way Battlestar Galactica was going to end was that they were probably going to find Earth (they did), and that they were probably going to discover 12 Cylon models along the way (they did). We didn't know who those Cylons were, who would die along the way, what state we'd find Earth in, how well the Roslin-Adama alliance would last, whether Starbuck and Apollo would ever frak, whether Starbuck would ever confess to Adama about the real circumstances of Zak's death, or even when the entire show takes place.

Not nearly as many plotlines are set up here. We have the Soldiers of the One and whatever Polly Walker's up to, but it's harder to care because we all know they'll be dead in 58 years. Here we know that the Cylons will become self-aware, that Joseph Adama will live long enough to know his grandson Lee, that Zoe-A is somehow going to have to magically vanish, they're going to lose that magic paper technology and the holobands, and that it's all going to end in a nuclear holocaust. We think we know little Willie Adama's going to make it, but that's subverted far too late.

So, and especially given the way "Daybreak" divided the Galactica fanbase, I really think Caprica should have been an independent show instead of a prequel.

BSG: Colonial Day

In which we look at the political side of life on the run, meet Roslin's economic advisor (who has apparently been there from the start), say good-bye to Roslin's economic advisor, make some jabs at Star Trek, and elect a Vice-President. Also, Zarek brokers for power and may or may not have sent an assassin to do... something.

But don't expect the assassin to come up again. It's not like this show's at its best when it threads long-running plot elements together in a brilliant tapestry...

So, having broken the bank on "Bastille Day," our writers decide that they can now represent other ships in the fleet with... college campuses. Brillaint. Just put a couple lines of dialogue in about how it's a cruise ship and two visual effects shots showing the artificial horizon, and boom! Sold!

The Quorum of Twelve is meeting here, and Sagittaron has elected Tom Zarek, former terrorist, to that august body. Roslin is pissed, but decides to let him attend over Adama's objections. Now as a side note, the only crime Zarek is ever accused of is blowing up a government building (and, y'know, that whole hostage situation on the Astral Queen). By the time Zarek finally gets around to launching his mutiny, Roslin has...

-summarily executed at least three prisoners without a trial.
-deliberately withheld knowledge of her debilitating illness from the public.
-subverted the boundary between military and civilian government.
-ordered the assassination of the fleet's senior military officer.
-unilaterally curtailed at least one liberty via executive fiat.
-attempted to steal an election.
-consistently ignored the will of the people in pursuing an alliance with the Rebel Cylon faction.

And meanwhile Colonel Tigh has used suicide bombers to blow up Cylon facilities, and every single time anyone other than Roslin mentions President Adar, it's usually in negative terms. Adama says he was a moron, and Roslin herself confesses that he killed 13 civilians when he sent the marines into Aerilon City, and that he was willing to get into a shooting war with a teacher's union. Even in light of recent events in Wisconsin, that doesn't exactly put Adar in any sort of positive light. What I'm saying is that Zarek may have had some legitimate grievance. (Which is not to say that he had the right to blow up a building, or even that Adar was president when Zarek was imprisoned 20 years ago. But that's one of the things that's so great about the show; the many shades of gray.)

So Zarek gets on the Quroum, and at the meeting he mentions that Roslin has (almost certainly deliberately, judging by her conversation with Grey and Billy afterwards) neglected to include the election of a Vice-President in the agenda. Wow, Madame Airlock manipulating something for political reasons? Get out. And then everyone starts panicking that Zarek will have Roslin killed the moment he becomes Vice-President. As we see at virtually all of his appearances after this, but most notably when he gives Laura back the Presidency in 3.5, "Collaborators," Zarek is a realist. He knows how governments work, and what they need to make them work. (Hell, he even launches his mutiny from a fairly legitimate grievance that "the Roslin/Adama administration" is blatantly ignoring the will of the people.)

So Zarek says that money doesn't have any real meaning. Man, that sounds familiar. (I'd always interpreted this scene as a not-at-all subtle jab at the socialist/collectivist economics of Star Trek.) He also says that they should become a collective because there isn't any business. Uh, Tom, who made your suit if there isn't any production whatsoever? Did you have it with you on the Astral Queen? (Come to think of it, where did Apollo's blue and dress uniforms come from? I don't think there was any cargo space in the Viper, and I don't think he wore one of them under his flight suit...) Maybe he's just saying this to appeal to the mob, because Zarek is fantastic at manipulating mobs... and Lee Adama.

Except, for whatever reason, in this episode Lee isn't Lee Adama, college rebel who reads banned books. He's a jack-booted thug who roughs up a man for defending Zarek, has the barman turn off a wireless broadcast of Zarek's interview even though other people want to hear him and he has a right to be heard, more-or-less starts a barfight over said wireless broadcast, plays the "bad cop" in a "good-cop bad-cop" routine with Starbuck, and bullies Zarek in the middle of a frakking Quorum meeting. I hereby submit Lee's behavior in this episode for official consideration in The Case For Another Pilot.

Roslin realizes that Grey can't win the election for VP, so she throws him under a bus and gets Gaius Baltar to run instead. That's clearly going to end well. Gaius gets elected, Lee and Kara dance together, and everyone's on speaking terms. No, things aren't going to go to hell next week, why do you ask?

Meanwhile, on Cylon-occupied Caprica, Helo finally sees another Eight running around, and the game is over.

The problem with this episode is that, unlike "Water," which was ill-concieved from the start and only got worse because Grace Park had to learn how to play a sleeper agent on the spot, or "Six Degrees of Separation," which will live or die based on your opinion of the character Gaius Baltar and the writer Michael Angeli, "Colonial Day" is an episode that could have been great. Roslin throws a trusted and valuable adviser under a bus in order to survive a political crisis and an assassin's bullet, and she has to replace him with Gaius Baltar of all people. That's a great story!

...the problem is the execution. Grey should have been seen before this (and sadly, this won't be the last time the writers drop an important new character on us for one episode only, after which point said character is never seen or mentioned again). His loss should have been felt by the Roslin Administration. He could have wound up in the anti-Roslin faction, which would have made him a very awkward ally of Baltar and Zarek during the election.

Zarek is back, and it's sadly the last time he'll be a two-dimensional character for at least a year. Richard Hatch plays him as a congenial politician, which is exactly what the charater needs to be, but he completely lacks the menacing undertones that the plot requires. This is not a fault in Hatch's performance; the fault lies in the fact that the story demands two completely different things from the character of Tom Zarek in this episode in order to make both the fact that he's suddenly a politician and the danger that Vice-President Zarek implies credible.

My favorite scene, which I didn't get to talk about because it was part of another subplot that went nowhere, was the one between Ellen Tigh and Tom Zarek at the bar. I'm paraphrasing a bit because I don't have it in front of me, but the conversation starts something like this:

Tom: Can I get you a drink?
Ellen: Are you the bartender now?
Tom: No. But why should he tend bar? What's in it for him?
Ellen: A big tip.
Tom: But what would he spend it on?

These are two people who both very much look out for number one, but Ellen is just so much more open about that fact. Tom's much more interested in currying favor and racking up an impressive amount of good will and favors to call in later. There are three things I wish they'd done with the character of Tom Zarek: give him another scene with Ellen, put him in the New Caprican resistance (because having to actually work alongside a bona-fide former terrorist would have given Tigh conniptions), and give him a final interview (the last is actually Richard Hatch's idea, and it's great).

BSG: The Captain's Hand

In which the writers, in an attempt to avoid a contemporary euphamism for "abortion," put a massive lie in Roslin's mouth.

"I have fought for a woman's right to control her body my entire life."

Yeah, except for that one time you were all set to murder Sharon's baby against her will.

I'll try not to thump my Bible too much in this review, mostly because the writers did their best to edge around the subject matter with similar tact.

The B-plot of this episode...

Okay, that's not correct. This episode doesn't really have an A- and B-plot, it just has one plot that gets less screen time than the other. This episode sets out to do two things that need to be done before the end of the season:

1) prove that there are no competent officers left in the Pegasus chain of command, thus justifying Adama's decision to put his son in command, and

2) give Baltar a platform from which to launch his Presidential campaign.

And it does both of those reasonably well.

Way back in "The Farm" we got these really creepy overtones from Simon the Cylon about what life after the apocalypse would mean as far as reproductive rights goes. Honestly, if re-building your society is your first priority, and if the statement that finally convinces the Commander to give up the fight and run away is "we need to start making babies," then, well, you need to start making babies.

In the series bible, there was this idea about how in Season 1, Roslin was going to ban contraceptives for everyone except female Galactica crew, and I for one would like to have seen that plotline make it onto the screen. (Incidentally, in this version, said decision irks civil-liberties-minded (!) Adama, who declares martial law because of that, not because Roslin got Starbuck to commandeer the Raider.)

Hell, in the aftermath of a real disaster that takes your population down to 50,298 (which, I hasten to add, is smaller than that of my suburb), I'd imagine that two laws would very quickly be passed. 1) every single male between 20 and 40 would be immediately conscripted ("Dirty Hands" skirts this issue, but only in an oblique way). 2) every single female between 20 and 40 would be required to marry and begin having children. Basically, you'd have to divide your population up between soldiers and baby-makers (old folks would have to raise the kids, I guess). Then Baltar's rant at the end of the episode about curtailing freedoms and making us more like the Cylons would ring true.

And even though that didn't happen, I'm still quite happy with the episode we got (besides, what I'm proposing would probably be too dark even for that show). Adama discovers that Dr. Cottle has been providing abortions on his ship for 5/8 months (delete whichever is appropriate; I'm not really going to discuss the Season Two Timeline Discontinuity here. Follow that link to an article written by people with even more time on their hands). Now, per the series bible and an early Season 1 commentary, Adama is supposed to be the main "Republican" on the show. (For what it's worth, I think this is the last time he's to the right of Roslin on an issue; they've certainly traded places by "A Measure of Salvation.") I think he'd be royally pissed that Cottle's been doing this sort of thing, but they have a brief glaring contest and then appear to get over it.

Roslin doesn't really have that option. The latest girl is from Gemenon, the planet of the devout wingnuts who believe that children (or at least female children) are the property of their parents until they turn 18. The Gemenese representative, basically a stand-in for Elosha (who died earlier in the season), pressures Roslin to force the girl to return to her parents.

(The writers mention, back in the commentary for "Home, Part 1," that they were deciding whether to kill Billy or Elosha in that episode, and that killing Elosha meant that they were sacrificing a plotline later on in the season where the priests would lean on Roslin for some sort of action. I would be willing to bet that they simply revived that plotline after Paul Campbell left, with the Gemenese rep standing in for Elosha.)

Roslin points out that abortion was legal in the 12 colonies and so it is still legal today. (Ah, but unless the Colonies had their own equivalent of Roe v. Wade, I kind of doubt that abortion was legal on Gemenon. Oh well.) So the Gemenese delegate storms away in a huff, and if she hadn't appeared earlier in the show, I would have assumed she'd been cast simply on her ability to do that, because she has to do it twice in this episode and then we never see her again (maybe she got nuked on Cloud Nine along with Lee's hooker-girlfriend).

Adama and Roslin have a chat where she lies in the manner discussed at the top of the page, and Adama points out that Roslin's first commandment was "make babies." She consults with Baltar, who by this point is already planning to "betray Roslin and run for President" (as Gina-Six conveniently tells us in the re-cap of the far superior versions of "Epiphanies" and "Black Market" that somehow never made it to air). Baltar tells her that the human race will be extinct in less than 20 years.

So Roslin gives a speech. Now, Roslin isn't my favorite character on the show; throughout the Miniseries and Seasons 1 and 2.0, she spends a lot of time being obstructive, liberal, holier-than-thou, and dying. (This in contrast to Baltar, who spends most of his time being deceptive, crazy, holier-than-thou, and living.) But credit where credit's due; the character is very well-written and almost flawlessly acted, and for my money this is one of Mary McDonnell's best scenes in the show (others including her confession scene in "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2," her absolutely heartbreaking "Captain Apollo" moment in "Crossroads, Part 1," and her "every bomb, every bullet" oath against Zarek and the subsequent "he is alive" appeal to the Cylons in "Blood on the Scales"). You can tell this is one of those hard decisions that she's going to regret, like the destruction of the Olympic Carrier.

In a way, this is the closest the show ever comes to "In the Pale Moonlight," that (in)famous Deep Space Nine episode where a Starfleet officer sells out his principles to keep the Federation alive. You get the sense that something similar is going on here... but you wonder if, in Roslin's personal log, she would have admitted that she'd do it all over again.

Baltar takes this opportunity to stab her in the back, the slimeball, and announce his candidacy for President. He's already been told to run by Zarek and, in the aforementioned flashback-to-something-that-never-actually-happened, Six. Head-Six shows up and applauds his decision, agreeing with her physical counterpart and continuing to blur the distinction between them even though by this point, especially with the introduction of Head-Baltar just around the corner, the writers have to know what she really is. I'm not complaining, but it's not like they're doing the slower members of the audience any favors (three of the four people I've watched "Downloaded" with were utterly confused by Head-Baltar).

Here's the thing about the abortion issue: nobody brings up the rights of the unborn or the right to privacy or anything like that (nor do they shy away from using the a-word). This is about Roslin being forced to make a hard decision that goes against her own political stance for the good of humanity. Which is probably the only way they could do this sort of an episode without completely showing their political colors and alienating part of their (decreasing) audience, but is still, all things considered, probably the best way for a drama like this to do it.

The other plot, the one that a lot of people mistake for the A-plot, is a lot more straightforward. Lee gets sent over to Pegasus to be the de facto XO to Barry Garner (John Heard, clearly having a ball and making this one-shot character more interesting than Fisk ever was), who disobeys orders, falls into a trap, and has to re-enact Star Trek II without any of the literary references or age-induced gravitas that made that film the masterpiece it is. Lee and Kara also argue, due in no small part to the fact that she frakking shot him in the previous episode, but it turns out that his real beef with her is that she can always get away with everything while he can't. (Was he already writing his "Crossroads, Part 2" speech in his head?)

Anyway, Garner pulls a Spock and Pegasus is able to jump away. Lee gives Garner a glowing report, even though the whole fiasco was Garner's fault in the first place, and then Adama puts Lee in command of Pegasus. Lee tells Dee he's leaving Galactica, not her, but that scene gets left on the cutting room floor and then put into the re-cap of several subsequent episodes. (I adore the full version of that scene, where Dee comes in on Lee and Kara embracing and doesn't get jealous, and then Kara tells Lee she'll leave the boots outside so he and Dee can get some privacy, and then Lee tells Dee Kara never jokes about that sort of thing. Maybe the reason I don't mind the Lee/Dee scenes being gutted is the fact that they're still in the deleted scenes on the DVD.)

From here through "Exodus, Part 2," it's full speed ahead, all guns blazing, with very little to complain about. Arguably the start of the longest run of great episodes the show had.

Who Review: Night Terrors

If Doctor Who never, ever, ever employs another child actor, it will still be too soon. This is what you get when you take the same damn plot from "Fear Her" and arfle bargh fargle.

Right. That's out of my system. I'll keep these paragraphs as short as I can to avoid ranting.

The Talons of Weng-Chiang is generally considered to be a classic, as is The Caves of Androzani, as is, for some unfathomable reason, Genesis of the Daleks. You know what all of these have in common? No, it's not that Bob Holmes either wrote or re-wrote them, although that's also true; it's that these have NO KIDS in them WHATSOEVER.

(Now, The Mind Robber, which I adore, had kids in it, but these kids were deliberately written to be creepy little pukes and not actually characters in their own right. They also got approximately one line and ten seconds of screen time each. None of them were asked to carry any serious weight, and, inasmuch as any kid can actually act, these ones did a decent job.)

In fact, the first time we had an obnoxious kid, the writers eventually killed him off. Then there weren't any kids for a while, and then they came back with a vengeance in the last two seasons (Remembrance of the Daleks, Survival). And then the show was CANCELLED.

Now am I saying that bad child actors got the show killed? No, a glorified accountant who would rather sell toys than produce good stories got the show killed, aided by a fat script editor who loathed him but loved Bob Holmes and violence, and later by another script editor who had a teeny bit of a bone to pick with Margaret Thatcher. But mostly it was the glorified accountant. But the kids didn't show up until the show's audience was five guys and a dog; at that point, you're desperate enough to try anything to keep the show on the air.

So there's a kid. A kid who prays to Santa* to "save me from the monsters." And despite the fact that the end of the episode manifestly proves that the Doctor is not the intended recipient, the Doctor gets the message anyway. (Moffat Cliche Number 12: the psychic paper is an e-mail inbox as well as just a fake ID.)

*No, not really, but since Doctor Who is pretty atheistic and Amelia Pond prayed to Santa at the beginning of "The Eleventh Hour," I'm going to use Santa as the go-to deity of choice for every denizen of the Whoniverse from here on out.

So the Doctor gets this message and comes a-running, because that's what he does, and it's not like they can keep paying the Nation estate all those royalties, so he can't go after the Daleks, and it's not the end of the season yet, so he can't go after the Silence.

Amy and Rory go around interviewing all the wrong people (and it's telling that the guy I sympathize the most with is the "evil" landlord). A little old lady who's definitely not as short as the camera keeps trying to make her gets eaten by a trash heap. The Doctor sees George the Fantastic Child Actor peeping through a window, so naturally he sends Amy and Rory down a floor so he can cause trouble by himself. They take the elevator.

Okay, credit where credit's due: the show does a good job of misleading you and making you think that the apartment block in general, or maybe the lift, or maybe the cupboard is what's haunted. Or maybe it's just George the Fantastic Child Actor doing such a phenomenal job that you don't want to think about him at all.

Okay, blame where blame is due: Amy and Rory take the ELEVATOR to go down ONE FLOOR. Bargle argh farl.

They get what they deserve when the elevator crashes and pukes them out in a wooden house with wooden pans and wooden food and a glass eyeball and a gigantic fake lantern. By the time Amy and Rory left that room, anybody in the audience who hadn't figured out that they were in a freaking dollhouse lost their right to vote.

Because, as I've said before and will certainly have to say again, Moffat Cliche Number One is: the audience gets ahead of the characters. Always.

So the Doctor meets George after scamming his way into George's father's confidence.

See, maybe the episode is supposed to be about parenting fears. Moffat says as much in the "behind the scenes" thingy. But what's the more realistic fear, that your son's an alien or that an absolute lunatic with a penchant for getting innocent people killed, a man who has turned a blind eye to the suffering of literally trillions of intelligent beings because the Daleks might one day do one good thing can scam his way into your life and turn it upside-down?

Is this unfair? Bringing up an episode from before the current star was born? No, not really. Not given the number of times in the previous season that we saw William Hartnell's face. Not given the fact that the initial BBC America broadcast of this episode also included a commercial for Law and Order: UK, citing the inclusion of "Fifth Doctor Peter Davison" in the cast as an incentive to watch. (What is it with that show scooping up British sci-fi veterans?)

So they quickly discover that all of George's demons are locked in his closet (subtlety was never Moffat's strong point). The Doctor argues that they can't just open the closet, because then the episode would be over. Then after about ten minutes of boggling, the Doctor decides that, yup, the closet needs to be opened. He does, and then George freaks and starts screaming "SAVE ME FROM THE MONSTERS! SAVE ME FROM THE MONSTERS!" and the Doctor and Daddy get sucked into the closet.

Now for one horrifying moment I thought the Doctor was going to be sucked in but Daddy wasn't, and that we'd then have to sit through a gender-flipped re-enactment of the end of "Fear Her," but at least Mark Gatiss is marginally smarter than that. (Was Gatiss the one with all the daddy issues back in Season 2? I don't remember and have no wish to look.)

And then the episode marks some time, in contrast to the previous half-hour of marking time. Amy gets changed into a wooden doll, because hey, why not? (And to be fair, charging the army of dolls was a frakking stupid idea and she deserved what she got.)

Now at this point it's pretty clear that the things in George's closet aren't the monsters; everything else, including the Doctor, is. This would be clever if... let's see... "The Pandorica Opens" and "A Good Man Goes to War" hadn't already done that (Moffat Cliche Number Two: The Doctor is a Monster). So the Doctor gives some technobabble about George being an alien that needs to be loved, and then yells at George from inside the cupboard, and then George comes in to stop the doll-zombies because, whoops, our intrepid writers have written themselves into a corner again, and then Daddy saves George from the doll-zombies, and then everyone who was zombified comes back to life and everyone's a happy family again and just when the sweetness of it all was getting absolutely sickening and you realized that you had no frakking idea what the hell just happened or how the problem even started in the first place...

...that creepy song the wooden dolls have been singing throughout the episode tells you that, yup, time is running out for the Doctor.

See, the TV audience is too jaded at this point. Doctor Who is a cash cow, and there's no way the BBC is just going to outright cancel it (although given the quality of this season, I don't know how much I'd complain if they did decide to put it down). It is no longer enough to just do an in-Universe "OMG Doctor's gonna die" thing; you have to actually pretend it's real in the real world too (as usual, Battlestar Galactica did this better).

So here are my thoughts overall; the theme is, probably, acceptance. Okay, fine. The kid's an alien but he'll be fine, sure, whatever, the Doctor isn't exactly known for picking up all the pieces after an adventure. The twist, to the extent that it's comprehensible, is halfway decent. But George's powers are explained in about five seconds while a bunch of other stuff is going on, and I couldn't possibly tell you what made him so afraid in the first place.

George the Fantastic Child Actor actually has very little to do except at the end, and by no means is he the worst child actor the show has ever had.

For once, the big "thing the Doctor missed" sailed over my head, probably because we saw the photo album for all of about five seconds. It wasn't like they were harping on it with every other line, like they were the two-headed Aplans back in "The Time of Angels." But Amy and Rory have suffered. It pains me to say it, because Amy hasn't done anything quite as obnoxious as Rose, but there's a clear parallel; suddenly, near the end of her voyage with the Doctor, the companion becomes really thick and unable to take care of herself.

And why is the dollhouse bigger on the inside? Once upon a time (as recently as "Doomsday"), that was a Time Lord thing. The Silence have a TARDIS-like perception filter, maybe they have a bigger-on-the-inside thingy as well.

And here's the thing: Moffat was great when he wrote self-contained, stand-alone stories. In RTD's show, he never got to do running arcs. And in that show, he delivered "The Empty Child"/"The Doctor Dances," which rightfully stole the Hugo from BSG's "Pegasus," and "Blink," which likewise won over Razor. (He also did "Girl in the Fireplace," which robbed "Downloaded," but I'm trying to just list his accomplishments here.) Since taking over, he also gave us "A Christmas Carol," which I frankly think is the best episode, regular or otherwise, that New Who has ever had. But he's also gotten wrapped up in (hell, has staked his entire tenure as a showrunner on) this massive Kudzu plot that is highly unlikely to have a satisfying conclusion.

Anyway, "Night Terrors" isn't actually any better than "The Rebel Flesh," but I'm giving it a bonus point for not stealing its plot from Blade Runner, BSG and Avatar.

3 out of 10. The twist is clever, but it's also the only thing the episode has going for it.

BSG: Sacrifice

(In which Billy gets shot down by Dee, and then gets shot down in a more literal sense.)

"With respect, sir, I am the best shot in or out of the cockpit."
-Starbuck, "Bastille Day"

"I think it was friendly fire. I think I hit him."
-Starbuck, "Sacrifice"

"We've all been trained in capture simulations."
-Dee, "Bastille Day"

Is it unfair to compare this episode to "Bastille Day?" I don't think so. Apollo, Dee and Billy all get captured by elements of a violent mob, while the "I-never-wanted-to-go-into-politics" President yammers on about not negotiating with terrorism. (And we haven't even seen all the repercussions of the last time Lee negotiated with a terrorist...) Also, the leader of the mob gets special billing, and despite their protestations to the contrary, it really is all about them.

Our episode opens with Dana Delaney's character, Sesha Abinell, writing a manifesto while remembering how her hubby died in a Cylon attack. On the wall is a picture of Sharon, her face obscured by shadow. Because if there's one thing that Season 2.5 likes to do, it's reference Apocalypse Now.

Meanwhile, Dee shoots Billy down. Then she goes over to Cloud Nine and talks to Lee about it, saying she doesn't really know where their relationship is going. I'd assumed it was going nowhere, seeing as she'd gone back to Billy at the end of "Epiphanies" and Lee had gone off to frak that single-mom hooker in the episode no-one wants to talk about. But apparently there is a thing. Now I said the Lee/Dee thing didn't bother me as much as it bothers the other fans, and that's true. It's been set up since at least "Resistance" that Dee's carrying a torch. And I guess Lee has a thing for her because she's Mission Control?

So they flirt in the hallway, then they both go up against Tigh, then they flirt in the gym, then Dee asks him if he's serious, then there's a great deleted scene from "Resurrection Ship" where they talk about things going to hell, and then there's a less-great deleted scene in "Black Market" where Dee admits that she doesn't really care to be alive either. Yeah, it's not a great romantic story, but it's not Attack of the Clones either. (Although, when Dee leaves him in "Crossroads" and talks about how the system doesn't work, I did have an uncomfortable flashback to AotC. As Plinkett would say, "supports fascism.") Nobody even brings up the whole officer-enlisted thing, and when it becomes clear that the relationship is serious, Adama bumps Dee up to Lieutenant to get around that issue. There aren't any real obstacles to their relationship, other than the various other things Lee cares about (Starbuck, due process of law).

Because that's how relationships work (or don't) on Battlestar; rarely are they undermined by external forces. It's not that Lee goes out of his way to screw up Starbuck/Anders; they just do that to themselves. Cally was set to kill herself before Tory showed up. Athena and Helo do end up happily married, but only after they both spend 50 days in a nuclear wasteland, then she nearly gets raped and he ends up starring in "The Woman King." Saul loves Ellen even though she's a terrible influence. My point is that there are no matches made in heaven here. Lee and Dee have at least a physical attraction to each other, and it's probably deeper than that, but their conflicting personalities and values ultimately get in the way. Dee's the complete opposite of Starbuck, and Lee is somewhere in the middle. Ultimately, nobody's going to walk away happy.

So hooker-mom left you because she didn't want to be your dead-pregnant-ex surrogate, and then you frakked things up with Starbuck because you didn't want to be her Anders surrogate, and now here you are with Dee. That kind of sucks for her. And then Billy shows up at the bar and complains that Dee "let [him] propose to [her]" when she knew she was going to meet Apollo at the bar anyway. And then Lee hauls Ellen Frakking Tigh off into the bathroom! I wonder what, precisely, Dee was thinking right then.

Then Sesha and her cronies take over the bar and take hostages. Now, I get Lee's decision to save Ellen over Dee: the XO's wife is a more valuable hostage than Petty Officer Dualla. It just would have been nice for him to have made that point to Ellen, because within minutes, she goes swanning out to tell them that she's the XO's wife. And then she tells them that they've made the biggest mistake of their lives.

Lee does the Aliens trick (he sets off a false alarm) so that they can send someone in. That someone is Kara Thrace, who was also getting some R&R over there, proving once again that she cleans up good. She gets inside the bar, but cover is blown. A firefight ensues, and Kara, the best shot in or out of the cockpit, shoots Lee. So, Starbuck, you frakked Zak; you killed Zak; you almost frakked Apollo; you almost killed Apollo. Are we sensing a pattern here?

Dee (understandably) panicks and asks Billy to get something to stop the bleeding. I don't have to think too hard to guess what Billy was thinking right then. But when one of the thugs threatens him, Billy points out that if the Admiral's son dies, no-one here gets out alive. How is it, Dee, that a civilian is cooler under fire than someone who was trained for this sort of thing? It's a complete 180 from "Bastille Day." (Okay, okay, Dee cares a lot more about Apollo than Billy does. Still, I don't really think that this episode does her any favors, which is sad because I do like Dee. Hell, throughout the entirety of "Unfinished Business," I was thinking no, Lee, no, Kara is nothing but trouble. Which is not to say that I didn't enjoy "Unfinished Business," but that's a story for another day.)

Abinell wants the copy of Sharon who's down in Galactica's brig, and with time running out before Lee bleeds to death, Adama appears to cave. A suspiciously-not-pregnant body is wheeled into the bar. Sesha puts two bullets in Boomer's head (bullets that seem to to virtually no damage) before realizing that it's Boomer, not Sharon.

On re-watching this episode, I noticed that the re-cap did not, for once, include a shot of Cally pulling a Jack Ruby on Boomer. This might be the only time in the history of the show where a really important plot element from a previous episode doesn't crop up in the re-cap. (Don't quote me on that; I previously said that "The Farm" was the only episode where the A-story takes place on Cylon-occupied Caprica, completely forgetting about "Downloaded.")

So then Sesha tells her goon to "kill the girlfriend." (She knows that Dee and Apollo are "together.") Billy gets a gun from one goon and manages to kill another one, before he too goes down. The marines come in (and also storm the Astral Queen for good measure, since some of the shots are re-used from "Bastille Day") and shoot the rest of Sesha's mob to hell. Sesha's corpse ends up draped over Boomer's. Poetry.

Then Dee, who's spent the last ten minutes kneeling over Apollo, scrambles over to Billy's body. Again, this is not her finest hour. But then, both men she cares about got shot within minutes of each other; this is just a bad time for her all around.

Roslin and Adama argue about whether or not Adama's plan was worth it, since Billy's dead and Apollo's in sickbay with a bullet in his chest (and as fate would have it, it's going to be more than a year before he gets in a Viper again). Dee sits by Lee's bed, holding his hand and telling him that she's not going to leave. Starbuck looks on, unnoticed in the background. Between this and the way "Resurrection Ship" ended, we have a love triangle on our hands.

And then the episode ends with a few shots of Sharon, while ominous music plays. Except that she is one of the good guys at this point, and both "bad" things she does from this point on (not out Cavil as a Cylon, and shoot Natalie) stem from her maternal instincts (grief and protection, respectively). So go figure.

This isn't exactly one of the stellar episodes, and though the ending is a lot cleverer than the one in "Bastille Day" (oh, did no-one mention that your term is up in 7 months? Silly me), it overall suffers comparatively.

One last thing I wanted to touch on: Adama has a conversation with Sharon about whether or not she would identify the (six) remaining Cylon models. She says "no" for no real reason (because the real reason is that if she could, and did, the show would be over). It's pretty obvious that the writers need to come up with a good reason why this is... and it's not surprising that the concept of the Final Five is introduced at around the same time that "Athena" gets accepted by the rest of the crew.