The Great 2022 Rewatch of Battlestar Galactica has begun. In this, my primary goal is to review all the episodes I didn't review on my first pass, and to re-do a few reviews where I have since changed my mind.
And what better place to start than with "Water." In my original review, I ranked it at the bottom of the Season 1 episodes for me, and that's just not true. ("Six Degrees of Separation" is unquestionably the worst S1 episode, followed by the unimpressive conclusion to "Litmus" and the tonal misfire that is "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.")
Anyway, the main reason why I want to re-do this review is because in the original I was downright mean to Grace Park, who has the unenviable task of trying to grapple with what is, frankly, a weak scene in the script. I reprint the pivotal paragraph of the previous review as the prime example of what I mean:
Meanwhile, Boomer and her new ECO, Crashdown, get sent off to go check out a planetary system for water. They find it, but there's a bomb under Boomer's seat, and her Cylon programming won't let her notice the water, or it will let her notice the water but is trying to get her to blow up her ship, or something... But then she does notice the water, and her ship doesn't blow up. I'll be honest, the reason I've been dragging my heels on this review has everything to do with this scene, because it's the one time in the first three seasons of the show where I couldn't tell you exactly what's going on. (According to the Battlestar Wiki, she's trying to report that she's found water while keeping her sleeper programming from blowing herself up. Yeah, that was really clear.)
I think, fairly or no, the breakdown in the script right here is the defining part of the episode for me. This episode stuck in my head as "the one where Park makes faces at her computer and plays with a bomb for a minute."
Thing is, everything up to that point (and most of what follows) is good. I'll address what I mean in parentheses first. Boomer is the only Cylon sleeper agent on the show, by which I mean she's the only one who a) doesn't know she's a Cylon and b) has been programmed to carry out acts of sabotage (contra the Final Five, which are just along for the ride). We know that she has a "cover" personality (the one we see most of the time in Seasons 1 and 2), and a "sleeper" personality (which we I don't think ever see active except for the very end of this episode and the very end of 1.13 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 2"). (From Season 3 on, she's made peace with what she is and there's no indication that her new body has a sleeper personality.)
But we never see the two sides warring with each other, except in this episode. In the problematic scene. We know she was in "sleeper" mode right before the episode began when she went on her spelunking trip. I assume, based on inferences fairly drawn from the script, that her "cover" personality is completely unaware of what she was doing at that time.
What is unclear to me, and never satisfactorily resolved, is what her "cover" personality thought was happening during the scene where her "sleeper" personality was trying to blow them up. I would have preferred that this event have been moved to later in the season (thereby precipitating her suicide attempt in 1.12 "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1").
Ah well. It's a weakness of the sort I should expect from this show, because nothing was really planned out. Since I can't credit Park for doing a good job in an impossible scene, let me instead credit her for the freakout she does when she tries to explain to Tyrol about the missing detonators at the beginning of the episode.
I get that they needed to establish that Boomer was a sleeper agent, programmed to think she was human, because they planned to pull that trick again. And it was necessary to do an episode about that early on. But by the same token, I think the last act of the episode came way too early in the season.
You can find the full list of my BSG reviews in episode order here.
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