Review

Razor is a romp of the best kind; quite literally straight out the show's greatest times so far: the season 2 Pegasus arc. Even complete with a verbatim, authentic season 2 opening theme. As such, I will review this episode as if it were aired during the second season. It makes little sense to do otherwise. As Razor does not possess any real spoilers for chronology subsequent episodes, it should be viewed directly after The Captain's Hand and just prior to Downloaded.

First and foremost, what a ridiculous teaser! The teaser is nothing more than an overly verbose, vague, and at times retconned recap. (I so especially love it when they insert new or deleted material in recaps...) The climax of absurdity here is intercutting Kendra Shaw's symbolic Razor dialog with the recaps, as if the clip show is supposed to actually be part of the dramatic narrative.

That said, this episode leaves us with some interesting partial exposition. Sharon reveals to everyone that the Cylons created hybrids as an evolutionary step between the centurions and the humanoid Cylons. Many were created, but the experiments were considered a failure. Some hybrids remained in service to control the basestars, but one went into isolation, guarded by old style Cylons known as "guardians." Adama witnessed these experiments briefly during the final mission of the first war. This information raises a series of interesting questions. For example, did the Cylons prototype their human models off of real humans?

I like seeing some of the repercussions of, as Shaw puts it, Adama "throwing his son the keys to a battlestar." Moreover, we learn precisely why Cain had what seemed to be such an unusually incredible disdain for Gina, and humanoid Cylons in general. Certainly Gina being responsible for the deaths of hundreds of her crew was enough, but it was always fascinating to wonder just what set Cain over the moral edge that would allow her to see the justice in rape and torture of a prisoner. The exposition of her having had an intimate, sexual relationship with Gina prior to knowing what she was was just the aesthetic touch this plot thread needed.

Not only does it ironically parallel Baltar's plight marvelously, but it adds a whole new layer to Cain's viciousness. And what viciousness! There can be no doubt or debate now, Tigh was right! Fisk was telling the truth! She really did kill her XO and long time friend for cowardice in the face of the enemy, and what's scary is there are plenty of reasons to agree with what she did and why she did it, despite its heinousness.

Near the end of Razor's first part, we're treated to fascinating glimpse into the first Cylon war from Adama's perspective which, aside from being an amazingly fun ride, resolves a few continuity problems by making canonical a series of common fan rationalizations. Many fans had always wondered how both Adama and Tigh could be veterans of the same war, with Adama being so much younger. It is established here that he only fought in one battle, just as the war was ending. Also, the war lasted twelve years!

Moreover, this episode establishes once and for all that original Cylon centurions, baseships, and raiders from the original Battlestar series were not making a simple cameo appearance in the miniseries museum. That's actually how they looked during the first Cylon war and I am incredibly impressed that they've managed to make it all look so cool. The battle with the destruction of the Columbia and the ensuing firefight between Adama and an old style Centurion couldn't have looked better. There was a lot of room for cringeworthy nostalgia here, but I thought they walked the line quite well.

Overall, save a nitpick or two here and there, Razor has many merits which easily secure its status as among the best episodes of BSG ever done. The story of Kendra Shaw is indeed compelling and using this new and overlooked character to tie together all these events and time periods we'd have loved to have seen more of variously was incredibly clever.

By telling this story, we get to see all sorts of amazing things that previously were only talked about. Not only do all the events depicted in this episode precisely match their descriptions in prior episodes, but watching them occur despite knowing the outcome is no less compelling. In fact, I believe that the fact that the audience of this episode is already privy to the outcomes of large quantities of plot covered forced the writers to raise the dramatic bar for the storytelling. The narrative focus is not on plot in this episode, but on the emotional impact.

You need look nowhere else but the episode's musical score for evidence. Like Shaw's character, the music floats seamlessly from time period to time period, weaving a tapestry of emotional impressions using strong plots as its thread rather than expecting the plots to stand on their own.

If you recall watching the first season of BSG, is there any doubt in your mind how it would end? Boomer was destined to betray the Galactica. And she did. The outcome was obvious and not at all a surprise, but still incredibly shocking and moving. When you watch the events of Pegasus' past in this episode, it elicits the same feelings. You know what's going to happen, but the story is so compelling and the details are so fascinating, the climax hits you just as hard no matter how many times you see it. This is why HBO's Rome was so critically acclaimed, for everybody knows the story of Julius Caesar. But it's not what you say, it's how you say it. Rome retold that age old story exceptionally well and I'm proud to say BSG channels that style here once again.

Review

The second half of Razor lives up to its first half and then some in terms of action, however there are some deficiencies. Aside from the fact that the cameo scene featuring the old style Cylon centurions talking to each other was somewhat painfully authentic, I found the prophesies imparted by the Cylon hybrid/god/whatever to be murky at best. Few if any answers are dispensed here and like Flesh and Bone it is as difficult to evaluate the legitimacy of the statements made by the hybrid as it was to evaluate the statements made by Leoben. Will the prophesies dispensed here come more or less true like they did with season one's prophesies? If so, how did the hybrid know these things?

In particular, it's somewhat aggravating that only half-baked impressions are getting revealed to the audience. At the end of the pilot miniseries, a similar revelation about a main character being potentially harmful to the rest of the main cast was imparted as well, but was done so in a much clearer way. Boomer was revealed to be a Cylon. Simple.

But At the end of Razor, Starbuck is revealed to be "the herald of the apocalypse. The harbinger of death." (That is, if you believe the Cylon hybrid.) As I said before, this is murky at best, and leaves us with significant questions. How does the Cylon hybrid know these things? For that matter how does he know about Kendra Shaw's hunger for redemption? Is he the Cylon god and therefore some kind of supernatural entity? Did he create the other humanoid Cylons?

Aside from that, this thrilling action story still manages to be a profound commentary on the kind of person Cain and consequently Shaw turned out to be. Adama and Apollo being unable to truly judge them also says something interesting about their characters. I like how the story used the controversy between Apollo and Adama of whether or not to nuke the whole base and sacrifice the whole team to complete the mission as a way to counterpoint the similar controversial decisions made by Cain. As Adama said, nobody was wrong from a tactical perspective.

I also like how Shaw's willingness to sacrifice herself at the end of the story quite nicely resembles Cain's unwillingness to go forward with her assassination attempt on Adama. Just like at the end of Resurrection Ship, Part 2, we learn that like Cain, Shaw really was a good person at heart. Just psychologically twisted and messed up by circumstances outside her control.

Indeed, we see Cain get more and more vicious in the second part just as clearly as we do in the first. The progression is steady and unrelenting how they transition from the authorization of raiding civilians, to prison rape, to the murder of civilian families. Then to sit and watch Cain justify it all to Shaw's face and promote her for carrying it all out is just an astonishing piece of drama.

Other notable details, the jet pack scene reminded me of Firefly. The scoring even seemed to channel Firefly in that moment. Overall, the science fiction and space battle stuff in both parts of the episode are beyond gorgeous as usual. Even watching the old style Centurions conduct guerrilla warfare was pretty awesome. They certainly didn't look as clunky and useless as they did in 1978.

It is interesting to compare my review of Razor to my review of the pilot miniseries. I recall subtracting a point from the pilot miniseries for not showing us any of the major Cylon engagements against the Colonial Fleet. We got to see some of that here, however I must now subtract a point from this similar production as well for the opposite reason. We got quite the light show in Razor and plenty of action, but the ending was seriously lacking in profundity.

It was never satisfactorily explained why Starbuck decided to act as Lee's CAG after explicitly stating in The Captain's Hand that she was going to stay on Galactica and be Galactica's CAG. She then reverses her decision to be Lee's CAG at the end of Razor as arbitrarily and as inexplicably as she reversed her original decision to stay on Galactica at the beginning of Razor. Then throwing in the joking about Leoben's assertions from Flesh and Bone that Starbuck has a destiny didn't help either.

Razor actually would have been a superior story had it not had anything whatsoever to do with prophesying things about Starbuck's mystical destiny. However, this little gaffe aside, the two part special was an incredibly satisfying piece.

Review

This is an episode that should have gotten a perfect score, but due to inheriting some (though not all) of the aesthetic issues of the third season finale was unable to quite reach that goal. The best way to illustrate this point is to compare the two primary plot threads: Baltar's story and the story of the final five Cylons and Starbuck.

I was endlessly entertained with Baltar's story. His newfound fandom made me groan in Crossroads, but the execution in this episode is spot on; flawless. The way Baltar is sort of accidentally indoctrinating his followers into believing in the Cylon god is hilarious, creepy, and fascinating all in one. While this Baltar cult seems to come out of nowhere and its motives and goals are unknown, it's far less annoying than the other unanswered questions of the episode. Which brings us to the story of the final five Cylons and Starbuck.

Where to begin? It's quite obvious now that the writers have committed to Tigh, Tyrol, Tory, and Anders actually being Cylons, rather than using it as a cheap dramatic misdirection. In some ways, I'm relieved by that. I wrote in my review of Crossroads that this isn't beyond my ability to suspend disbelief, but numerous questions must be answered before I'll stop being annoyed by it. Not only have none of the previous critical questions been answered, but this episode only raises more. Especially concerning Starbuck.

So, here we go. How did the Cylons find the fleet? Why did they wait this long to engage the fleet? What are the Cylons' motives for attacking the fleet? Exactly what is the connection between Anders and his eye contact encounter with the Cylon raider, if any? Why exactly did the Cylons back out of the fight? If the raider recognizing Anders was the cause, why didn't the Cylons recognize one the final five in one of their many previous encounters with them? Since we lacked in this episode what is obviously an incredibly critical scene from the Cylons' perspective, none of these questions are answered.

Moreover, we're still left wondering why the entire fleet lost power in Crossroads. And what was the significance of the music in Crossroads? Where did it come from? Why did these characters suddenly discover they were Cylons? What purpose did it serve in the overall Cylon plan?

Regarding Starbuck, how did she survive? How did she travel from the gas giant, to Earth, then to the nebula? In a viper? With no FTL? Was the gas giant's maelstrom some sort of wormhole? Was her death an illusion? Why is she missing memories? Why is her viper pristine? How did it get that way? Why does her viper have no computer memory but retain its gun camera footage? Is Starbuck the last Cylon? Is she a half Cylon? Is one of her parents the final Cylon? Incidentally, that would explain Leoben's obsession with her and it would render Casey a delightful metaphor for Starbuck. It would also explain the hybrid's familiarity with her in Razor. But it's hard to speculate with so little to work with.

Regardless of Starbuck's true nature, what is the motive behind that nature? What is the nature of Roslin's vision? As I said in Crossroads, the vision seems to be a manifestation of Cylon projection, but why is Roslin affected? Is it because she has some of Hera's blood in her? What is the meaning behind the vision? Why wasn't more time in this episode spent on exploring the ramifications of this? I made an identical complaint in Crossroads.

Then there's Earth. Starbuck says when she arrived at Earth "its yellow moon and star" matched the descriptions in the book of Pythia. This line was poorly written, as it is far, far too vague. Earth's moon is not yellow. However, she also said that the star patterns matched what was seen at the Tomb of Athena, which would imply she went to the real Earth. (Our Earth.) As would the photos shown on screen, which look like an actual photo of Earth taken from the Moon's perspective. Starbuck also remembers a gas giant with rings which is probably Saturn. As for her references to a flashing triple star and a comet, I haven't the slightest idea. All in all, clear as mud. But just enough for the audience to infer she probably went to the real Earth.

Perhaps the only thing worse than Roslin's and Starbuck's feud over whose poorly reasoned path to Earth is correct is Adama's poor reasoning behind why not to trust Starbuck. In the episode, he said that listening to Starbuck is exactly what the Cylons are counting on. What? Why would the Cylons count on that? Clearly the Cylons could have destroyed the fleet during that battle if they really wanted to, but made a conscious decision not to for reasons unknown. How can Adama not see that? Especially after Tigh pointed it out?

Aside from all that, the way the show handled the new Cylon characters struck me as aesthetically wrong, e.g. Tigh's waking dream, complete with an unwelcome mini-reprisal of that painfully inappropriate song from Crossroads, busting up the rhythm and pacing of what is otherwise an incredibly fast paced and powerful scene along with the new Cylon characters constantly making little in-jokes referencing their Cylon nature. This aesthetic clashes with prior incidences of the audience knowing the identities of certain Cylons characters in advance of the protagonists.

But at the end of the day, I still awarded this episode a rating of seven. It effectively lost three points due to all the stuff above, which I admit, after writing all that, seems quite generous. So what was good about the episode? Aside from my usual round of praising the phenomenal acting and directing, special mention should go once again to the scoring. Bear McCreary has restored my faith in BSG's incredible music, resetting the score back to its powerful and diverse instrumentals, properly setting the tone back to what it should be.

The incredible space battle at the beginning of the episode needs little praise from me, as it was downright flawless. Watching Adama go toe to toe with a vastly superior force for several minutes completely competently was just stunning to watch and seeing a civilian ship destroyed was just gut-wrenching.

The episode also bears some interesting recurring themes. One is the question of how any given character would feel if a close friend or a loved one were revealed to be a Cylon. Lee posits "would that really change how we feel about them?" implying his belief that it wouldn't. Starbuck takes an ironically contrary position concerning Anders. The episode also has some interesting recurring symbolism concerning the right eye. Tigh's right eye is missing, Tigh dreams of shooting Adama in the right eye, and the camera focuses on Anders' right eye when he makes contact with the Cylon raider. Despite my annoyance with both scenes, I enjoyed the parallelism.

There are a couple small details that are nice too. I like the reintroduction of Charlie Connor's character along with the reintroduction of his pain surrounding his son's death, which hearkens back to Collaborators. Additionally, I liked seeing Seelix and Anders, two rook pilots, get a chance to shine in the cockpit.

Overall though, the narrative is distinctly failing to get to the point. It's dangling more and more mysteries in front of us as if that's good storytelling, but it isn't. Allow me to reiterate a point I made in response to a comment posted on my review of Crossroads.

Said I: Consider this amusing scene from HBO's Rome. Deep in season two, in one scene, Antony is trying subtly to bully Cicero into granting political favors, a common theme on the show. The pattern is that Antony threatens Cicero's life, then Cicero caves and does whatever Antony wants. But this time, the dialog was somewhat different. Just as Cicero refused to cooperate, Antony says: "Well you leave me only one option then." Cicero replies: "It always comes to this." Antony agrees: "I know. I'm sorry. Such times we live in." Cicero then says: "Please, go on. Make your threats. I don't like to submit to mere implication."

Like Cicero, I will not submit to mere implication. I'm as devoted a fan to BSG as Cicero was a devoted coward. But I will not gush all over the show over the mere implication of good stories to come.

Review

So we now know why the Cylons backed out of the fight. The raiders made an independent decision to break off the fight! What a scary thing for the Cylons to have to deal with and easily the Cylon story steals the show here. Unfortunately though, just as before, this episode doesn't quite go far enough.

We still don't know how the Cylons found the fleet, we still don't know why they waited this long to attack the fleet, we still don't know what their original motives for attacking the fleet were, we still don't know why the fleet lost power just prior to the battle, nor why it was mysteriously restored, the significance of the music in Crossroads is still unclear, Roslin's shared vision with Caprica Six is still totally unexplained, what really happened to Starbuck is still totally unexplained, etc, etc, etc, I've gone on about it at length already in previous reviews. Enough already.

Suffice it to say, as usual, this episode lost points for not covering any of that. But to top it all off, while a smattering of critical questions were indeed answered in this episode, we get to add at least one new one to the list too. Why is Baltar seeing a copy of himself in his head now, just like Caprica Six? Is it due to her physical proximity to him as a prisoner aboard the Galactica? Why hasn't he seen this projection already since he lived with her for several months prior? Keep in mind, the original Head Six was never explained either. Over three seasons later.

Moving on, much like the Precipice to season three's Occupation, this episode provides crucial clarity to the motives of many of the current major players and grounds the audience much better than the prior episode. The degree to which Adama is torn between Roslin and Starbuck is presented far more eloquently here and Adama's decision to cut Starbuck loose in an attempt to have it both ways adds a fascinating facet to his character. My only complaint is all of that plot in this episode should have been compressed into the last episode, rather than dragging out the conflict unnecessarily.

Among the more audaciously titillating moments of the show is Roslin's attempt to murder Starbuck, followed by her cool-headed declaration that she'd surely attempt it again if given another opportunity. Roslin's zeal is matched only by her hatred of Cylons; even suspected Cylons. I find it interesting to note that her brutality in this episode seems unmatched since her behavior in Epiphanies, an episode in which she ordered the termination of Athena's pregnancy in a single, cold move. It's as if her illness motivates her to try to find a way to be more hardcore, manifesting itself as almost raw cruelty.

That said there's a clear method to her madness. She knows what she's doing and it seems just about every character aside from Starbuck considers Roslin to be quite credible. And when she attributes Adama's conflict of interest regarding her and Kara to not being able to handle taking anymore loss, it hits home hard. Equally, Adama's lines to Roslin attributing her mistrust of Kara to fear of not truly being the dying leader spelled out in the Pythian prophecy thereby reducing her terminal illness to mere meaninglessness strike a powerful chord as well. In the end, there's too much vagueness and faith required on both sides to form an objective conclusion, which is the aesthetic that should have been presented from the start. After all, we're measuring the veracity of religious prophecy against a dissenter's gut feeling. Something tells me everyone involved could use a bit more objectivity.

Baltar's story continues to be amusing, despite my slight groan when Head Baltar was introduced. I like the way he's suddenly becoming unknowingly entangled in the final five mess once again. Moreover, I wonder if he just impregnated Tory? A scary thought indeed. Then Baltar really would be the literal father of one of the next generation of god's children. Equally creepy is how Tigh put Tory up to the little prostitution scheme. Ultimately, merging these two plot threads services both quite well.

Nearly all of Lee's scenes seemed gratuitous and unnecessary to me, with the exception of his visiting Starbuck, which seemed necessary to clear the air and finally resolve the ongoing love quadrangle. While it doesn't actually serve as any kind of resolution whatsoever, I think there's a conscious acknowledgment implied in that scene that it may never be resolved. That sometimes things like this just can't be resolved because love is an irrational thing. Aside from this, nearly every scene Lee was in was nostalgic wankery. And not the cool kind, like Razor.

As I said though, the real meat of this episode lies with the Cylons as there's quite obviously the beginning of a civil war here. The motives, for once, actually seem quite clear and in character. The Cavils, Dorals, Simons and one Sharon (Boomer) believe that what the raiders did was out of line and want to lobotomize them. They also believe that seeking out the final five not only violates their programming but presents a tangible danger to their very survival. The origin of this belief is yet another annoying question to be answered some day, but the effect is an interesting conservative position.

The Sixes, Leobens, the rest of the Sharons, and presumably the D'Annas (if they were to be unboxed) make up an opposing liberal position. Their motives are to discover the lost origins of the Cylons, to understand their place in the universe. This implies they know next to nothing about their creator(s) or their purpose, which makes sense seeing as how they've developed a religion surrounding that.

Other interesting exposition in this episode revealed all the model numbers of the significant seven Cylon models. We can at this point rule out the numbers being sorted by apparent human age of the Cylon character. An interesting discrepancy is that model number seven is actually a member of the final five, while Sharon is model number eight. Could this be because the final five were originally supposed to be the final six? Six sleeper agents and six non-sleeper agents?

In particular I wonder that because one thing the eights share with the final five is one of her model is the only other sleeper agent ever shown on the show. All the other Cylons of the significant seven were confirmed to not be sleeper agents and all other members of the final five (well, except the fifth so far anyway) have been shown to be sleeper agents. Was the "flaw" in Sharon's model Six has alluded to previously the fact that she was an imperfect sleeper agent while the final five were in fact perfect sleeper agents?

The only lingering aesthetic issue is the actions performed by what I've deemed the liberal Cylons in this episode seem wholly reckless. Doesn't it seem obvious that restoring the centurions' free will will simply bite them in the ass later? What a can of worms Six unleashed.

Moreover, how could Six of all Cylons possibly make an argument about model unity? Hers was the first to become unable to reach an internal consensus thanks to the differing views Caprica Six brought to the table between Downloaded and the New Caprica arc. Between that inane dialog and Cavil's inane assertion that the final five couldn't possibly be in the fleet when it's difficult to imagine where else they could possibly be, the Cylons sure aren't being very consistent.

Though while annoying, the Cylons lacking consistency or entirely rational motives isn't at all a problem. It only underscores the reason for their civil war. The Cylons have issues that need resolving and it's bubbled up into this. Methinks things are about to get quite interesting.

Review

Battlestar Dramatica! Oh, I missed this feeling, this feeling of being completely satisfied by every character, every plot thread, the pacing, the action, the intrigue, all of it. This episode earned its ten across the board. BSG's dramatic appeal just reached its resurrection ship and came back with a fury.

The most remarkable quality of this episode is how it does so much with so little. Most episodes I've awarded tens to have had big, epic space battles, major plot events and gritty drama all at the same time. This episode has all of this, but the major plot events, while significant, are relatively minor and while the space battle in this episode is awesome, we see very little of it. Instead, Cally single handedly steals the show.

It's pretty much a cliche by now that once a character gets an unusual amount of screen time they're sure to die. However, this episode doesn't leave you feeling like "why are we all of a sudden focusing on Cally?" Every moment was perfectly natural, every emotional hoop she jumped through was real, and at the end of the story you feel for her. She was truly a victim of circumstances.

Which brings us to Tory. She's the vessel from which the gritty drama of this episode flows. The character that's always in the background, who remained relatively in the background even after being revealed as a Cylon, suddenly came into blinding focus. What she did was just astonishing. Tory, in the moment of Cally's most profound anguish gained Cally's trust in a matter of minutes then viciously abused that trust, striking her down, taking the baby and brutally murdering her in front of her infant child. Wow. I mean, just wow. This is the kind of dark drama I watch this show for.

As such, the overarching weaknesses of the show just fell into the background for me here. This episode was so good I didn't care about the vague thematic mysticism, the lack of answers surrounding numerous critical plots, or the aesthetic issues other episodes faced. During this episode, everything was perfect, and I'm incredibly thankful for that.

And I don't just mean the incredibly compelling story and the masterful acting. Even the little details are spot on here. Such as the fast cuts, rapidly taking you from one compositionally fascinating scene to the next and back again in every character context. Everything from Starbuck's haphazard command to Cally's spinning out of control amidst her spinning night light was television as an art form at its best.

Additionally, the side plot with the Cylons was easily strong enough to be the episode's main plot. Between plans to unbox D'Anna, the Centurions getting crankier, and Cylon basestars blowing each other up, the Cylons are getting more and more interesting by the minute. One lingering nitpick is we never found out if the D'Annas really got unboxed or if Six' armada was completely destroyed.

Another ambiguity is where all this Lee business is going. While all of Lee's scenes this time around were worthwhile and downright fascinating, I am left wondering just what everyone's agenda really is. Zarek has a point when he says Roslin seems to be becoming more tyrannical, but I've got to wonder whether or not she's actually a victim of circumstance as well. Was the executive order Lee bashed in the meeting really just innocently flawed? Or would Roslin have let that one slip by if no one called her on it? My only guess is that Lee's trying to be as ethical as possible, loyalties be damned. If someone close to him fraks up, he'll call them on it.

Among other nice touches in the episode were two interesting scenes between Roslin and Adama. Early on in the episode Adama sits down next to Roslin's hospital bed and begins reading a mystery novel to her. It's a cute, sad little scene. If you recall back in season one, she mentioned having a "weakness for mysteries." I also like the scene where Roslin and Adama speak about the Demetrius candidly. It implied heavily that Adama authorized the mission without Roslin's approval and informed her afterward. This is entirely in character for Adama and an interesting counterpoint to Roslin's behavior when she hid the Cylon child without notifying Adama.

Overall, simply put, this episode is an outstanding piece of drama. I felt that Cally's character really reached her full potential in this episode and her death was among the most touching, gut wrenching, and shocking moments of the show so far. It's up there with Adama getting shot, and that's saying a lot. Bravo!

Review

Verbose is the keyword when describing this episode, as it spends too much time on too few plot threads. I feel rather boxed in as aside from the raptor crash, the short quorum debate, and the rather useless Demetrius cameo, we see nonstop frontloaded Galactica scenes. This is especially jarring considering the myriad of plot threads the previous episode presented us with. It's as if we've suddenly gone from epic and dramatic to small scale and silly.

And indeed this episode is silly. At the beginning of the season I was quite entertained by Baltar's cult and his overall story in general. It worked quite well as an ongoing subplot, and it all seemed like a natural continuation of his character to me. It indeed still does. In fact, I'm quite glad to see him slowly manipulating his way back into public life and I was delighted to see Roslin's reaction to his ever regrowing fame and critical acclaim. However, this episode could have accomplished all of that with half or even a quarter of its scenes devoted to that plot thread. If we've learned one thing here, it's that Baltar's plot, at least for now, works much better as a subplot than a main plot.

This episode just oozes superfluous Baltar scenes and even Tigh's creepy little visits with Six were a bit on the verbose side. More aesthetically wrong in my opinion though was the dramatic angle chosen for Tigh's scenes with Six. Bringing back Ellen and dressing her up as Six was just too much. We didn't need to be force fed the symbolism; this could all have been done subtextually or, if the director was feeling particularly lazy, with just a single flashback to Ellen during the scene when Tigh is smiling over the sleeping Six. That said, a good share of this episode's points goes to Tigh and Six. Their scenes were endlessly fascinating if a bit pointless at times. A better episode would have shown us more of where that was going rather than dwelling on idle conversation, no matter how amusing it was.

One area where this episode was spot on was with Tyrol. His explosion at Adama was extremely well done and his mistake with the raptor was as chilling as its aftermath was fun to watch. As a side note, I find it a bit hard to believe that Racetrack and her copilot survived what appeared to be such a horrendous crash. The whole front side of the raptor was torn off, then the raptor slammed face first into the side of the hangar deck! And there's not a scratch on them. It's not entirely unrealistic, especially seeing as how they were fully suited up with helmets and all. I just think aside from adding a bit more realism, it would have added a bit of gritty drama to the episode. Something which it sorely lacked. Moreover, I'm getting a bit tired of Racetrack having random issues with her raptor. It's almost a cliche by now.

Another character I liked this episode was Roslin. Her behavior regarding Baltar in the quorum meeting was spot on and her new wig adds a chilling dimension to her character. It's been pointed out quite correctly by others that her new hairstyle bears a striking resemblance to Admiral Cain; some nice symbolism underscoring her newfound ruthlessness. Her scene with Baltar in jail illustrates this quite well. Finally, Adama's continued closeness with Roslin remains sweet.

Tory's story is a bit muddled this time around. While it's obvious that her "we're perfect the way we are" campaign is a way to help her feel okay with being a Cylon, it seems useless for her to use that to manipulate Baltar. For that matter, why is she still hanging out with him? Also, while I was intrigued regarding the various references to Tory having discovered a new physical prowess thanks to being a Cylon (slapping Cally halfway across the airlock, overpowering Baltar, inferring this newfound strength in a meeting with Tigh and Tyrol), the episode did not go into any depth exploring this beyond the most casual of references.

Instead, we're treated to Baltar generally acting like a jackass, then making a nonsensical religious speech at the end of the show, heavily motivated by Tory's "we're perfect" dialog with him just prior to the Baltar cult being assaulted. Baltar's and Tory's motivations in this episode make little sense and the episode's attempt to intercut Tigh, Tyrol, and even worse Anders after having shown absolutely none of the Demetrius the whole episode to add some significance to Baltar's speech seemed wholly manufactured.

At the end, the episode comes off as something of a flop. The two most relevant plot threads get no screen time and what we do see here is so overdone and mishandled that it's tough to choke down.

Review

The same sin as last episode with the opposite focus is committed here: too much focus on one plot thread, neglecting the others, to the detriment of all plot threads. What we see here on the Demetrius doesn't drag quite as badly as the previous episode's overly claustrophobic plots, but it almost does.

There is little to say about the Baltar/Tyrol/Tory plot other than to note the well earned warm and fuzzy moment between Baltar and Tyrol at the end. I like how Tyrol seems to symbolize a microcosm of what both human and Cylon characters alike are all starting to go through. A slow, but progressing internal and external forgiveness of themselves and everyone around them.

Baltar seems wise enough, or at least lucky enough to smell that forgiveness is the popular sentiment in the air at the moment. So in order for his redemption, as he calls it, to occur, he must be at the center of the forgiveness movement, even if it's a process that's started independently already. Leave it to Baltar to take the credit. As for Tyrol, I find it touching how he seems to go from angry and hardcore to readily accepting the caring companionship (or at least the appearance of such) of a man he had previously hated in such a short period of time.

It's easy to appreciate any episode which features a lot of the Kara-Leoben dynamic, and indeed, that's where most of the points awarded for this episode go. In particular I was quite amused by the chat Anders and Leoben shared, where Leoben seemed to imply that he knew Anders was a Cylon, or at least that Anders was more than he seemed to be. Easily just about every line Leoben utters is well crafted and pointed, which is more than I can say for most of the Demetrius crew who have seemed to play the same broken record since The Ties That Bind. Nothing but whining about Starbuck's craziness.

Starbuck's certainly not helping her credibility by doing things like broadcasting eerily suspicious lines to the rest of her crew like "I know you're out there" while in her viper, but didn't her crew know what the hell they were getting themselves into? It's as if they were expecting a leader who just mysteriously resurrected without explanation to be a perfectly rational and coherent commander when she herself doesn't even seem to consciously know just what the hell is going on with her.

I was profoundly amused by Helo's continuing unflinching defense of Starbuck since the beginning, culminating of course to the point where he pistol whips a fellow crewman, in a single moment of badassery once again reminding us that Helo is a pretty big guy; not someone to mess with! Unfortunately, instead of being an amusing overtone in this episode it becomes a full blown and blown out of proportion plot.

Most perplexing is Athena, of all people, leading the mutinous charge against Starbuck. I don't think I have to do much explaining to demonstrate why that would be profoundly out of character. Obviously it's not an impossible pill to swallow. She'll do anything to prove her loyalty to the humans. But even go so far as to consistently oppose Helo? To reject an alliance proposal from her own people? From a Cylon model the rest of her line (well, aside from Boomer, but Athena and Boomer rarely see eye to eye) concurs with? It just seems out of character.

In the end, the episode loses most of its steam when Helo finally succumbs to the irrational will of those under his command and throws his weight behind their mutiny. Of all the times Helo's irrepressible moral defiance should suddenly vanish, this had to have been the worst time. It seems to give the impression that Helo isn't, in fact, the moral compass of the fleet, but merely constantly confrontational without a good reason. While I think the episode did a fairly good job of illustrating Helo's struggle to remain loyal to Starbuck, the fact that he mutinied was an extreme disservice to his character.

A better episode would have continued the trend of the unflinching Helo, culminating with the same scene in the mock-CIC of the Demetrius with Helo and Anders both standing by Starbuck's orders, if reluctantly, in the face of what is easily an absurdly risky move. It's easy for the audience to conclude that this damaged baseship is going to find its way into an alliance with the fleet somehow. Delaying that happenstance with a silly manufactured mutiny cliffhanger is weak. A better cliffhanger would have simply been maybe a few looks of horror from Starbuck's crew, the jump, a pan over the Cylon baseship, and cut to be continued.

Overall, this episode is another weak offering. It manages to work slightly better than the prior episode due to the plot thread dominating the episode bearing far more relevance this time around, but the poor execution results in something of a flop.

Review

Faith is (obviously) the episode's theme, featuring multiple characters having their faiths tested. Kara's faith in Leoben, Helo's faith in Kara, Adama's faith in Kara, etc. Roslin, thanks to Emily, is starting to see some validity in Baltar's newfound faith, or at least less invalidity in it. Ultimately this episode's strength is not in its theme, but in the developing Cylon plot.

The lame cliffhanger of the previous episode is overcome quickly with the Demetrius CIC rapidly becoming a contentious and violent battleground resulting in Gaeta's leg a casualty. The compromise reached to send a raptor to the Cylon ship is imaginative and clever; definitely something that seems an unlikely proposition until the attempted mutiny. Why would it cross Starbuck's mind until she had to start thinking of a backup plan?

The arrival at the basestar has mixed issues. On one hand, the stroll through the debris field is fun and the connection to Kara's vision and painting is well done. On the other hand, the whole plot surrounding Barolay's death along with the death of her murderer seemed unnecessary. The leader of the Sixes well establishes from her earliest lines that any sort of trust between the two peoples must be earned. Permanently offing one character on each side through what is basically an accident seems narratively superfluous. There are better ways to demonstrate an earned trust.

An interesting side note regarding that digression is it allowed Athena to utter a rather interesting line to Kara. She said to Kara, regarding the Six killing Barolay: "she kills one of us and you're willing to just let it go?" Athena's statement implies that she in all contexts considers herself one of the colonials, something that is certainly consistent with her behavior recently. But still, an interesting thing for her to say in front of a bunch of Cylons.

The plot thickens most regarding the Cylon hybrid's dialog with Kara, in which Kara finally gets to hear the statements that the first hybrid divulged to Kendra Shaw. That, along with Leoben's constant assurances to Kara that she's special and different from the others (such as his line claiming that she's "one of the few"), along with her seemingly supernatural return from death at the beginning of the season all point to there being much more to Kara than anyone really knows. We know all this already, of course, but what's interesting is Kara seems to know everything we do now as well which spells an interesting twist in the character's journey.

As previously stated, I was less impressed with the title theme of the episode. While the consistent overtones of faith across all plot threads imbues the episode with a certain attractive symmetry, Roslin's story simply flopped. As a Star Trek fan, I welcomed Nana Visitor's cameo, but Emily's character didn't resonate well with me at all. It appears as though she served little more than as a plot device to get Roslin to pay more attention to Baltar's ramblings.

I find it hard to believe Roslin would see something supernatural in having a dream which she, herself, admitted was common among cancer patients, especially after having had that dream described to her in great detail just prior to Emily's severe attack and lapsing into unconsciousness. It's obvious the entire experience was a powerful one for Roslin, so it's completely reasonable she would reenact the dream described to her. Instead, the first thing Roslin assumes is that it's all, somehow, related to there possibly being truth to Baltar's theological message, which, by her own admission is a message in support of the Cylon god; a concept she utterly despises, as she utterly despises the Cylons.

On the other hand, Roslin made a big point about religion being metaphorical to Emily, which seems inconsistent with her stated belief as of latter season 1 that she believes the Kobolian scriptures to be all real. Maybe Roslin doesn't know what to believe. Given her nature as a dying cancer patient whose purpose in life as the dying leader has recently been called into question by Adama, it's reasonable to cut her a certain slack when dealing with her ever flip flopping position on faith.

Aside from all that, one wonders why there's still no mention of blood transfusions from Hera. It's possible to rationalize Roslin's condition away as "maybe it only works once" or "maybe she just doesn't want it this time because she's supposed to be the dying leader" or whatever. But Emily? Why would she refuse such a treatment? I'm sure there's a rational explanation for why Hera isn't being used as the wonder-drug-kid across the whole fleet, but some sort of exposition regarding this would be appreciated.

Instead, we're treated to what was largely an entirely unnecessary plot thread surrounding Roslin in this episode, climaxing in the wholly unnecessary final scene in the episode in which Adama declares that Roslin made him believe in Earth. Yeah, no kidding? I think we knew that since Home, Part 2. In the end though, the story of Starbuck and her crew beginning to forge an alliance with the Cylons was sufficiently well executed to raise the quality bar of the episode above average.

Review

This is a surprisingly riveting episode, densely packed with plot, liberally infused with style, and endlessly fascinating in its implications.

Much like The Ties That Bind, this episode's strengths lie with its intoxicating elegance and powerful, ambiguous ending. As expected, the rebel Cylons are able to offer a sufficiently tempting collaboration proposal to Roslin and Adama and it's no small package: the revelation to the fleet that the final five Cylons are among them, the revelation to the fleet that they likely know the way to Earth, and the total elimination of the Cylons' ability to resurrect.

Armed with those prospects and a spiffy new Cylon basestar as a gift (okay, maybe not so spiffy and new), even Roslin's jubilant about the possibility of a collaborative mission. Executing this premise alone makes for a stellar episode, but for this episode, that's just the beginning.

What ensues among the endlessly fascinating preparations for this joint strike mission isn't what anyone could have ever expected. Motivated by this torturous communal vision, Athena murders the rebel leader Six and Roslin gets herself, Baltar, much of the Galactica crew, along with half their remaining vipers captured by the Cylon hybrid.

Among the widespread implications of the events of this episode will include the ascension of Zarek to the presidency. This has happened before, but perhaps this time it will be more legitimate and less easily quashed by Adama. Given Zarek's increasingly critical opinion of Roslin's behavior while in power, it'll be interesting to see how his own behavior counterpoints or perhaps ironically mirrors her own.

Also, Athena's murder of the rebel leader Six is not likely to go down well; she may have just sacrificed much of that trust Adama has placed in her over the years. All over an unexplained vision which she'll now likely have to come forward about.

The most remarkable thing about this episode though is that the dizzying string of events covered here plays out amidst an incredibly powerful score, underscored by Gaeta's operatic laments in sickbay. Gaeta's tortured performance reflects the mood of the episode quite nicely and its interspersion throughout the episode starts off as sad and confused and slowly evolves into something profound as truly epic events occur all around him while he sings obliviously.

In addition to the major events which occur here, the artistic approach to this episode's storytelling, particularly in the episode's climax is what really makes it so great. There is little else to say than bravo!

Review

Normally I would complain about not being able to see the battle which destroyed the Cylon resurrection hub, but this episode manages to milk the bottle show effect to its fullest potential as a result of that.

The mysterious disappearance of a large swath of our characters in the prior episode isn't explained at all here which allows us to really feel the effect of the mystery and the panic it creates within the fleet. This episode focuses solely on the various different reactions to this sudden event within the fleet, fully exploring the implications of a number of different radical, sudden changes.

The first, and most interesting is the ascension of Zarek to the presidency. As is expected, Adama was unfond of that notion and effectively blocked it from happening. What's most interesting though is how that happened. Instead of focusing the entire episode on Adama playing politics with Zarek, he simply stopped caring about the civilian government at all, much like in the events of Kobol's Last Gleaming. But instead of staging a coup, Adama proceeded to be governed by simple apathy, best exemplified by when he jumped Galactica away from the fleet without warning. A powerful scene.

The full effect of Adama's disapproval of Zarek is observed, but moreover we get to see Adama obsess over finding a way to retrieve Roslin and his missing pilots; a set of behaviors not unprecedented at all. Motivated solely by his anger and rapidly losing his objectivity, he lashes out at everyone around him, including Tigh, as he did in You Can't Go Home Again. Though I think Tigh probably deserved some browbeating for his actions. More on that later.

Adama's story culminates in a beautiful moment of clarity motivated by Romo Lampkin of all people convincing Adama to back off from his irrational quest for the sake of the fleet's safety. This forces Adama to realize that while he cannot let go of his obsession, he can at least obsess without endangering the fleet. In one of the most touching endings for an episode so far, "Husker" climbs in a raptor to wait for his lost love to return to him, all alone in the night.

There is much else to praise as well. Lee's ascension to the presidency was not without its predictability, but was simply the inevitable strongest choice for the show's overarching narrative. Pairing that with Zarek's reckless behavior spreading fear, uncertainty, and doubt among the quorum; having them "inhaling fear and exhaling anger" as Lee put it was a great way to turn Lee against Zarek for the first time in a long while. I loved Zarek's line pointing out his resentment of the fact that he was actually elected to office whereas Roslin wasn't.

Perhaps an even better line was Adama telling Athena that she "murdered an innocent woman" when he was referring to the leader Six. It's fascinating how Adama seems to simply casually consider the Cylons to be people now, not inhuman things without rights. Finally, using Lampkin to force Lee to realize that he's the perfect choice for president was quite apt as well. I especially liked the whole repressed ambition analysis. Quite right.

The biggest problem with the episode stems from how Lampkin's character behaved. His apathy and eventual nervous breakdown simply weren't very compelling and frankly, to me, did a disservice to his character. Certainly it added some humanity to him, but it also removed so much of his gravitas. I liked the fact that Lee saw he was depressed and recruited him into the interim president search for that reason, but the way Romo's depression and Romo's eventual conclusion that Lee was the best choice for interim president were mashed together seemed something of a mismatch to me.

Specifically, the entire nervous breakdown scene mashed together Romo's personal apathy with his apathy regarding hope for humanity seemingly triggered by the death of his cat at the hands of those who hated him for defending Baltar. His lashing out at Lee is motivated by his belief that Lee's the best hope for humanity, but since he's concluded that hope is pointless then there's no reason to prolong humanity's demise. In Romo's mind, killing Lee symbolically forces humanity to accept its hopelessness.

This all makes sense, but it plays in the episode like it's trying to be some grand revelation as it is at this time (explicitly anyway) the audience is clued into the fact that Romo's cat has been dead for weeks, as if anyone really cares. Moreover, Romo goes off on a guilt rant, expressing his disgust with himself over saving himself at the expense of friends and family, forcing Lee to give an entirely unnecessary speech pointing out the fact that everyone alive in the fleet had to do the same thing. As a result of all this, the scene comes off as some sort of half-assed attempt at manufactured danger rather than a touching character moment for Romo, or some sort of pointed philosophical statement.

Other missteps the episode makes are of course the reprisal of the Ellen-as-Six aesthetic, but more importantly the idea that Tigh has impregnated Caprica Six. There is an obvious technical problem associated with this, as it is established in The Farm that Cylons cannot procreate with each other. I'm sure this can and will be explained later. It can easily be written off now as "the final five are different." Still, it comes off as rather weak. The same confrontation between Tigh and Adama could have been achieved by simply having Adama discover that they've been having sex. The pregnancy was unnecessary. That said, let's hope she has the baby. That would certainly be interesting. ;)

All in all, a very well done episode. Normally, the bottle show isolation aesthetic alone would make this episode lose significant points, but here it works quite to this episode's advantage. I rather preferred not seeing the Cylons in this episode and I quite enjoyed watching the Galactica investigate the battle only in its aftermath, always seeming to be one step behind the Cylons.

Review

Action, story depth, raw and powerful emotions, major character revelations, and so much more, this episode has it all. As if sacrificing itself to strengthen this episode's story, the previous episode managed to be all setup for this unexpected and completely astonishing payoff without suffering from setup syndrome at all.

The Hub takes the unusual step of going back to the moment of the beginning of the previous episode and retelling events from the perspective of the Cylon basestar. Doing it in this order allows us to be entrenched in the revolutionary events occurring within Cylon culture completely while still allowing us to totally milk the effects it has on the fleet. We don't need to cut back to the fleet and deal with what are easily comparatively less interesting events at all. We simply ride the epic wave nonstop until its conclusion and the backdrop of events of the previous episode serve only to enhance this episode's ride.

Along the way, in fact, this is Roslin's story. As stunning as the resurrection hub battle was, and as exciting as it is to have D'Anna back, and as interesting as all the repercussions are, the most remarkable parts of this story have to do with the things Roslin experiences along the way. She boarded that basestar to get answers from the Cylon hybrid about her visions. Instead, she's forced to act as sole commander in chief in the largest military operation on the show so far, she's forced to confront the true nature of Baltar's crimes, and she's forced to confront her love for Adama.

The most interesting aspect to this major milestone in the life of Roslin's character has to do with the degree to which Roslin's eventual forgiveness of Baltar is related to the final acceptance of her love for Adama. Throughout the story, her subconscious, portrayed by Elosha, was determined to force her to realize how cold she had become. As she finally faced Baltar's explicit confession, she was forced to fight back her basic instincts telling her to project all her anger about her circumstances onto Baltar and destroy them both.

In doing so, she overcame the mental barrier preventing her from fundamentally forgiving Baltar for what he did. Because after all, she did know he had some part in the fall of the 12 Colonies as established as far back as Taking a Break from All Your Worries when he stated that "conspiracy requires intent." She took that statement simply as to confirm her suspicions, but never let the other aspect of it truly hit home. He never intended. Moreover, the larger issue of whether or not he deserved to die regardless of the severity of his crime motivated Roslin to save him. She was forced to live up to her "all is forgiven" idealism and practice what she preached.

The centerpiece of the episode comes into play at the end when her journey to break down the barriers necessary to forgive Baltar also turns out to be what enables her to profess her love for Adama. There is little more to say regarding that other than this beautiful moment is well earned. Overall, this is an outstanding episode. One of the best of the series.

Review

The almighty Earth episode doesn't disappoint. Even better, it wasn't even expected. What started as a tense standoff between two people bitterly distrusting of one another, yet ever entwined ends brilliantly on a truly revolutionary act of trust between them which pays off with nothing short of finding Earth together! Truly epic. But of course on Battlestar Galactica, the grass is never greener on the other side.

I knew in the early days of the show that the best way the show could depict Earth, if ever, would be to portray it as a devastated wasteland. It was obvious that the writers originally chose to consider the place a fantasy to add as much darkness to the drama as possible. What better drama than dangling a fictitious carrot in front of all but two of the characters? But eventually the writers decided that having it really exist could be more useful as a plot device for the kind of dark drama that BSG is.

Having Earth really exist opened up even more potential for dark storytelling because instead of milking the idea that the carrot is fictitious, which was done quite well in the first season, the story gave even the show's two doubters (Adama and Roslin) cause for hope. Armed with that, the second, third, and fourth seasons marched on only to finally do the one thing darker and more disturbing than revealing to tens of thousands of refugees that their promised land doesn't exist: it's revealed to tens of thousands of refugees that their promised land is just as devastated as the homes they fled.

Indeed, the brilliance of this episode lies with its thematic consistency and powerful message. As stated before, on Battlestar Galactica, thematically the grass is never greener on the other side. What this leaves our characters with is the harsh reality that they will have to solve their own problems, work out their own differences, and make their own promised land. No hidden treasures await, no glorious saviors, and no larger than life external solutions. And what could be better?

Anything else would simply be deus ex machina, regardless of how well earned that contrivance may have been. To earn it and then deny it for the sake of good storytelling is simply outstanding writing. And to top it all off, this incredible event, something that easily could have served as the series finale, was done in the middle of the season leaving plenty more episodes for some much needed epilogue and closure to tie up the numerous loose ends and finally put our characters on the road to solving their problems, rather than running from them.

Bravo!

Review

(Note: I do not recommend watching these webisodes until after you watch the next episode Sometimes a Great Notion, as these webisodes take place canonically and chronologically after that episode.)

After what was such an incredibly satisfying pair of episodes, the steam effectively runs out here. Some of you might be wondering, "hey, wait a minute, did I miss an episode? This 'Face of the Enemy' thing wasn't aired on TV, was it?" No, it wasn't. This is the second installment of webisodes to grace the show; they were shown exclusively on Sci Fi's website.

The webisodes are considered optional episodes. I discussed why this is a bad idea in my review season three's webisodes (The Resistance), but I suppose it's time to elaborate further. Like the last installment, this episode requires the distinction of the new term "webisode" because the content and the method of delivering the content differs to much so from that of a regular episode. In short, both the quality of the storytelling and the video quality of the webisodes are far, far below average.

What's worse is when combined with those facts, branding episodes like this with the term webisode seems to imply that the web simply cannot be used to deliver high quality content, which is as patently false as it is offensive. In addition to these low quality webisodes, Sci Fi has offered the ability to watch full regular episodes on their website as well, though unfortunately at the same terrible video quality. But the important thing is Sci Fi's implied assumption that the web cannot be used to deliver quality storytelling seems be contradicted by their own actions of offering good episodes in this format too. Why aren't those episodes called "webisodes" too? I'll tell you. Because they don't suck.

As for the video quality, if Sci Fi embraced Bit Torrent, they could easily distribute much higher quality video without exacerbating their bandwidth costs. Moreover, Apple already distributes 1080p movie trailers on their website and they don't even use Bit Torrent to offset bandwidth costs. Sci Fi needs to get their web act together and stop putting out these half-assed webisodes. I would rather there be no webisodes at all than have them presented at this level of storytelling and video quality. For that matter, let's do away with the whole concept of webisodes entirely. Just make regular episodes and distribute them on the web in 1080p already! This YouTube quality material is unprofessional.

That said, onto the plot. Like The Resistance before it, this webisode picks up on the previous episode's cliffhanger in an incredibly lackluster way. Though this time, the offense is perhaps more grievous. Instead of showing us the fallout of discovering Earth a devastated wasteland, we arbitrarily skip ahead nine days for no apparent reason where we subtly learn what essentially amounts to a number of spoilers in an incredibly anticlimactic way. This is an unfortunate consequence of airing these webisodes earlier than the next episode, Sometimes a Great Notion, which should have aired first.

Thanks to this webisode, we now know that the fleet leaves Earth within nine days of its discovery for some reason, Tigh is still the XO, the alliance with the rebel Cylons continues, the rebel basestar is still traveling with the fleet, the rest of the Cylons are still hostile; tracking the fleet down and attacking it, and the rebel Cylons are sharing their technology with the fleet ostensibly to keep it flying.

As for Gaeta, his story just wasn't compelling enough to justify all these tangential plot reveals. I mean really, why are we skipping ahead of the good stuff and incurring all these negative side effects just to see a Raptor murder mystery? One with an unusual amount of gratuitous gore and a weak justification for why they jumped to nowhere in the first place? (A high energy discharge of subatomic particles corrupted the hard drive data? Yikes! Where's a flux capacitor when you need one?)

Moreover, how do the events of this story realistically lead Gaeta to thinking the whole alliance with the Cylons is a bad idea? Just because one Sharon has a thing for being duplicitous and going on murderous rampages doesn't mean the whole deal should be called off. How short-sighted is that?

Worse yet, the hoops we must jump through just to watch this material is as painful as sitting through all that gratuitous gore. On top of seeing way too many recycled clips from previous episodes and hearing far too much recycled scoring, there are whole scenes actually repeated as a consequence of splitting up the webisode into 10 parts. And for anyone lucky enough to have watched this when it "aired" on SciFi.com, I think I speak for everyone when I say if I have to see that Underworld Rise of the Lycans ad one more time, I might have to strangle somebody.

All in all, this plot is irrelevant and out of place. This could quite possibly be Battlestar's worst offering. Very disappointing.

Review

Loneliness, isolation, devastation, despair, and suicide are the themes of this episode; a difficult burden to bear and dramatize well. Sometimes a Great Notion masterfully delivers on the exploration of how discovering a devastated Earth would truly impact these already emotionally precarious people while simultaneously managing to deliver yet more major revelations about the ongoing plot of the show.

Of course among the most powerful and memorable events of the episode is the suicide of Dee. The ever persistent cliche of a character who gets an inordinate amount of attention in the plot is most likely to die wiggles its way into this episode in full force, but the time spent on Dee mostly didn't tend feel to cliched or out of place.

Admittedly, there was some unnecessary foreshadowing at the beginning of the episode where we are inexplicably focusing on Dee digging up some children's toys in the beach ruins along with her half-breakdown while copiloting the raptor with Helo, but every scene afterward involving Dee was relevant and her presence justified due to its impact on a more important character.

The best piece of foreshadowing in fact occurred during her heart to heart with Lee in the pilots briefing room where Lee says to her, "I couldn't have done it without you, Dee" with regards to keeping humanity going while commanding the Pegasus. She responds, "you will this time too." This is the moment where the audience should have picked up on her plan to commit suicide while still allowing for Lee to be oblivious to it. The scene does a marvelous job of accomplishing both goals at the same time.

Yet, when she popped herself it was still a completely shocking moment. Not as gut-wrenching as how Cally met her end, but definitely among the most powerful assets of the episode. After events like these, there are bound to be a number of suicides in the fleet. Making one of them a character we've been living with for much of the show allows the effect to resonate far more clearly with the audience. As for why Dee, I think she was a solid choice to pay that dramatic toll. Examining her character's history, she lost a father whom she regrets never having made amends with, she lost Billy, she lost Lee, then she lost Earth. That was it for her. Her story is a microcosm for what was no doubt a flurry of similarly motivated suicides fleet-wide.

The most brilliant detail of the suicide of Dee is how just before she does it, she begins humming a piece of music, which then, after her death, is integrated into the musical score as Adama and Lee mourn her death. The composer Bear McCreary describes it thusly: "At this moment, you are hearing actress Kandyse McClure herself actually humming the Dualla Theme ... Dualla was humming her tune right before she killed herself, and I wanted to create the feeling that, somehow, her voice and that melody were imprinted on the universe like a bloodstain."

While Dee's suicide is powerful, what this episode is really about is how the fleet's four strongest current leaders manage to, or not to, rise to the occasion and press on despite such a devastating discovery. Laura Roslin loses her will to live and abandons her faith, Lee Adama and Colonel Tigh hang onto hope but lack direction, and Admiral Adama walks the full spectrum; going from total devastation, to infuriated anger, to suicidal tendencies, to finally getting it together and putting forth a solid, realistic plan to answer the episode's pressingly pertinent question: "What do we do now?"

The question of what must be done is the question Adama struggles with all throughout the episode but only is able to answer after some clear and obvious soul searching. Only after accepting Tigh for who and what he is and accepting Earth for what it was and what it became could Adama get it together, rise to the occasion, and lead his people once more.

So what do we do now? Where does Adama lead us? What is the answer to the episode's pressingly pertinent question? Adama decides to set out looking for a brand new star system with a habitable planet to settle on. What else could he do? The twelve colonies are all but uninhabitable, as is Earth, and the only two planets which are habitable that they know of (Kobol and New Caprica) are locations which Cavil's faction of the Cylons are no doubt patrolling. So they did the only thing left to do. Pack up and get back on the road in search of a new home.

Interestingly enough though, Adama invited his new Cylon rebel allies to join him on this journey. This seems to imply that Adama has finally learned the lesson of the show, a lesson it probably took confronting Colonel Tigh's Cylon nature to teach him. The lesson I described in my review of Revelations. These people are going to have to solve their own problems, work out their own differences, and make their own promised land.

But there is another component to this episode I've not discussed yet, which is the flurry of major long term plot revelations revealed here. Specifically, that Ellen Tigh is the last Cylon, there are two Starbucks and two of her viper, and that the 13th tribe of Earth was a tribe of Cylons. Unfortunately, there is little to say about any of this. These reveals are tantalizing enough to be interesting, but also vague enough to be annoying.

Simply stated, these reveals are consistent with the overarching thematic vagueness aesthetic the show has been abusing since the mid-third season. Just like too many episodes before this one, it raises more questions than answers. Among the most important is why was Earth destroyed? Why are there two Starbucks and two of her viper? How and why did the final five survive nuclear holocaust on Earth only to be obliviously reborn in the twelve colonies 2000 years later? Why were they "switched on" by Bob Dylan's, er, I mean Anders' song in the first place? What is their connection to Starbuck's viper? Why are the final five the only apparent survivors of the 13th tribe? Or were they?

Setting that aside for a moment, it's certainly worth noting that these revelations open up a lot of fascinating possibilities about the history of the Cylons. Tigh said that the 13th tribe were all Cylons, came to that planet, and called it Earth. This seems to imply that the 13th tribe were all Cylons before they came to Earth, but this seems implausible. If that were the case, then the Colonials would have knowledge of ancient Cylons in their recorded history.

A more plausible explanation is perhaps the Cylons were never invented by the twelve colonies in the first place. Maybe whoever supposedly invented them discovered Earth, excavated various Cylon technologies and slowly began trying to privatize them for various monetary and political purposes. Perhaps also that is how the final five ended up being reborn. Maybe their consciousnesses were stored on a recovered computer and their bodies recreated using the resurrection technology.

This is all speculation of course, but as I said, even with what little new exposition there all is in this episode, it opens up all sorts of fascinating possibilities.

While I found most of the exposition to be annoyingly lacking in detail and I felt that parts of the plot dragged on too slowly at the expense of more detailed exposition (Anders singing part of All Along the Watchtower was a particular groan-inducing moment), this style did in fact provide at least one stylized gem of incredible directing. When Roslin was burning her copy of the book of Pythia, the last lines of her scene are "burn... burn." The scene then transitions into Starbuck burning the body of her counterpart. This brooding aesthetic only served to enhance Starbuck's eerie deed. It's as if to say there is a shared loneliness and mortal fear of the unknown between these two characters.

Overall, this episode hits just shy of another perfect or near-perfect score. A bit less time focused on Dee and a bit more time focused on giving us clearer exposition on the history of the Cylons and just what the hell is going on with Starbuck would have made for a much more satisfying episode. Regardless though, this was an above average, outstanding piece.

Review

Aside from the The Face of the Enemy, this episode is perhaps the first true filler of the season. Granted, there are some important events here as there are with most episodes of BSG, including the filler, but what we get here is a mix of some irrelevant plots, some poorly executed plots, some downright annoying plots, with a few interesting and worthwhile things here and there.

First, let's talk about what was good in this episode. There are two stand out plots that make the episode worth watching. One is the Roslin and Adama story. Little needs to be said about the Roslin and Adama story as it measures up quite nicely to its usual charm. The other great plot thread is the exposition about the rebel Cylons wanting to gain citizenship in the colonial fleet, including a seat on the quorum of twelve. Ostensibly it would then become a quorum of thirteen. ;) The thirteen tribes back together again!

In exchange, the Cylons would offer to share their technology with the fleet. This is a plot which was hinted at, or rather spoiled depending on how you look at it, in the Face of the Enemy in which Tigh mentions to Gaeta that Cylon technology is going to keep the fleet running.

Other less significant nice details of the episode include the visual theme of Adama picking up crumpled up papers on the Galactica variously along with a focus on his daily routine, signifying that he's picking up the pieces of the fleet and his life in an attempt to return to normalcy. Likewise much of the episode had fascinatingly organic scene transitions, as if the camera was simply wandering the ship observing various concurrent events. It contrasts the previous episode nicely in which we could see mass depression and apathy throughout the ship in the background as well as the foreground. Now in this episode the organic feel of the directing creates a sense of life returning to the ship.

Another highly insignificant but amusing tidbit is the line "the president is resting comfortably aboard Galactica." I like the use of that line because it's precisely what they told the press when Roslin was jailed when she sent Starbuck on a mission against orders. Now of course the same line takes on an entirely different meaning. Another nice piece of trivial continuity is Zarek's line to Lee about Lee having held so many different jobs in the fleet. Amusing since Lee has in fact been everything from an ordinary pilot, to the CAG, to military adviser to President Roslin, to the XO of the Pegasus, to the commander of the Pegasus, to a lawyer, to a member of the quorum of twelve, to finally serving as acting president briefly. That's a lot of hats to wear in just a few years.

Unfortunately though these nuggets of gold are buried by the story being dominated by bad plots. The most important of these is the growing dissent about the pending permanence of the alliance with the rebel Cylons. We knew of Gaeta's objections in The Face of the Enemy, but of course the motivations behind his objections were not well understood. It's easier to understand his position after seeing this episode, but unfortunately his motives are still somewhat lacking in the usual complexity BSG affords antagonists.

I say antagonist in this case because it is obvious to the audience that the proposed alliance is entirely a good thing. Moreover, the dissenters are few and far between. Basically the only people who oppose the alliance are Gaeta, Zarek, and a bunch of extras. Granted some important name dropping goes on. All of the quorum seems at least somewhat opposed to the alliance, and a fair amount of ships in the fleet refused to allow Cylons to board their ships. However, with only two characters we know well backing the dissent, their motives lacking sufficient complexity, and their being relatively unimportant characters in the first place leaves the entire issue heavily lopsided, making it difficult for the audience to sympathize with the dissenters. The entire issue seems to lack that certain shade of gray that BSG strives for.

Indeed, Zarek too struck me as somewhat two dimensional in his motives in this episode. Once again, Zarek is using a controversial issue to make a power grab by attempting to undermine the popularity of the decisions made by the current administration. Adama even proves the man's susceptibility to corruption in an incredibly well executed bluff near the end of the episode. While this was a nice moment for Adama, it seems to imply that Zarek's political positions and sensationalism are wholly manufactured simply to facilitate the aforementioned power grab(s). This, I think, is a disservice to his character. I'd like to think he's more complex than this.

It's worth noting, however, the singular goal of attempting a power grab isn't by itself a sign of a two dimensional character. This very episode featured a classy scene in which Baltar similarly manipulates a crowd of his followers into rejecting the Cylon god with a sensationalist speech. The implication is that by continuing to deliver these rousing speeches, he's gaining an ever more numerous and loyal following. Unlike Zarek, Baltar's manipulations are subtle, complex, and layered.

What's worse about Gaeta's and Zarek's mutual objections to the alliance is that they seem to stem from nothing more than simple bigotry. While I suppose this is understandable among some of the fleet's population, both Gaeta and Zarek have a history of seeming like characters who wouldn't be stupid enough to let their bigotries blind them to progress. Especially Gaeta, given his prior willingness to collaborate with the Cylons.

Still worse, the entire tylium ship plot was completely unnecessary. It seemed like little more than manufactured danger to get Adama a good reason to confront, threaten, and attempt to blackmail Zarek. But on top of the tylium ship plot's irrelevance, it doesn't make a whole lot sense either. Why would jumping away from the fleet be useful for them? And even if they did for some fantastical reason believe staying away from the fleet would be a good idea, why not jump again when Athena located them? Did they just get scared of being all alone and decide it's time to go home?

But the worst sin of the episode is the Cally retcon. It's irrelevant like the tylium ship, poorly executed like Gaeta's and Zarek's motivations, and on top of that highly annoying all in one. The revelation that Tyrol is not Nicky's father is of absolutely no consequence in this episode. The only possible purpose for it is to render Hera the only hybrid Cylon child once again; the significance of which may or may not be used for some other interesting plot thread later.

I don't necessarily have a problem with Hera being the only hybrid, but the degree of plot fudging necessary to swallow this retcon is beyond what I consider acceptable. None of the prior Cally material can't be rationalized, but it significantly tramples on the aesthetic of previous episodes. For example, instead of believing Cally devoted herself to Tyrol after their rather unusual but sweet pairing in Lay Down Your Burdens, we must now accept the idea that she was sleeping around with other men while they were dating just prior to getting married presumably several months after her beat down, as evidenced by the fact that she was still pregnant one year later.

Also, when Cally decided to kill herself and Nicky in The Ties That Bind, it was heavily implied that she wanted to destroy her Cylon hybrid son. Instead, given the retcon, the scene now plays simply as her not wanting her fully human son to be raised by a Cylon who thinks he's the father. This all works in the context of the narrative, but strongly diminishes Cally's character. However, regardless of how well you feel this retcon can be rationalized, the very fact that it was even necessary to begin with is incredibly poor writing. An unfortunate product of BSG's "make it up as you go along" writing style, which usually doesn't create major problems, but here it reeks heavily of bad writing.

The final and perhaps most annoying sin of this episode is that once again this bottle show sheds no light on any of the outstanding overarching long term unanswered plot questions raised by prior episodes. I need not list the litany of these outstanding questions once again; suffice it to say that the longer they remain ignored, the more annoying these questions get and the more they risk becoming simple plot holes.

Overall, this episode commits a multitude of sins for which I cannot grant much of a score.

Review

The Oath is a fast paced, riveting action show in the tradition of Valley of Darkness but unique in its own right because it's hard to know who the enemy is at any given moment. Long time friends become foes as it is slowly revealed scene by scene who among the cast's long list of characters still with us have been swayed by Gaeta's cause.

Indeed, especially satisfying among this episode's many merits is the plethora of continuity and loose character threads which come together here in a somewhat twisted way. Among those in Gaeta's formidable army are characters we already love to hate, such as Charlie Connor and I-like-to-rape-Cylons Specialist Gage, as well as long time friends now turned foe like Seelix and Racetrack. And seeing Laird meet such an unceremonious end was both unfortunate but also strangely appropriate for his endlessly tragic character.

A notable exception was Hoshi, who seemed to have a notable presence in this episode, but his close relationship with Gaeta wasn't touched on even in the slightest. Official statements by Ronald D. Moore indicate that this is a dramatic oversight caused by retroactively pairing them in the webisodes, which were shot after the series wrapped. Like the previous episode's gaffe with Cally and Nicky, this is an unfortunate (though less severe) consequence of BSG's over reliance on make-it-up-as-you-go-along storytelling.

Roslin and Adama go through perhaps the most interesting journeys in this episode. Roslin's leadership qualities seem to get a jolt of energy; it seems appropriate that it would take a crisis of this magnitude to jump start herself back into leadership. Juxtaposing this transition with some of her most cavalier and uncaring regard for her position so far along with a nascent desire to start offering Adama backseat driver political advice while still maintaining a desire not to get involved was a fantastic aesthetic.

Roslin also had some rather powerful lines in her speech to the fleet about the conflict between Colonials and the Cylons' generational nature. (Lines which should perhaps give us pause regarding the current situation between the Israelis and the Palestinians.) The ancientness of this conflict is perhaps even more striking given the discovery of ancient Cylons. As for Adama, nearly every line that comes out of his mouth after Gaeta stages his coup is both chilling and profound. It will be quite a thing of darkness to see if Adama actually acts on his threat of no amnesty and no forgiveness for the traitors. His line declaring that there will be a "reckoning" is also a nice touch, paralleling Gaeta's nearly identical line in the previous episode.

To my pleasant surprise, Gaeta and Zarek work very well in this episode as complex antagonists. Gaeta's scheming in this episode is absolutely an incredible amount of fun to watch and Alessandro Juliani delivers an outstanding performance leading the coup. The texture about Gaeta's underlying motive for staging the coup being about personal redemption rings true to me. It seems plausible that after all he had been through but more importantly all the mistakes (or at least perceived mistakes) he had made, he would feel compelled to use his unique position of power and influence to take extraordinary action to right what he considered to be the extraordinary wrongs of his past actions and the present actions taken by those above him.

Likewise, the lengths Zarek will go to secure a power grab have some interesting new darkness to it with his personally murdering Laird. We know Zarek is no stranger to personal acts of criminal violence, but we've not actually seen anything this explicit out of him on camera ever. He tends to prefer others doing the dirty work for him. But perhaps the most interesting item of depth in Zarek's actions in this episode is his lecturing Gaeta, from experience, about how revolutions can be lost with the slightest hesitation. Zarek's wisdom is lost on Gaeta though because in the end, Gaeta hesitates on numerous occasions, such as hesitating to kill Adama and hesitating to shoot down the raptor bound for the Cylon baseship. This will surely be his undoing.

Regardless though of this added depth, Zarek and Gaeta both still come off as somewhat two dimensional. Lee Adama, in a single scene, managed to demonstrate a more thoughtfully reasoned out argument sympathetic to Gaeta's and Zarek's position when he lashed out at Tigh. However, unlike the last episode where Gaeta and Zarek came off as vaguely annoying, and despite the continued two dimensional nature of their motives, their missteps in this episode are merely fascinating in a pitiful kind of way.

It is realistic that complex people might paradoxically take oversimplified political positions. I dare say it happens far too frequently in the real world. In that sense, and in the sense that Gaeta's and Zarek's oversimplified political positions seem somewhat at odds, I am enjoying watching the slightly conflicted dynamic between them. Again, it'll be their undoing. Another particular annoyance is the scene where a viper pilot lashed out at Starbuck with the line "nobody even knows what you are anymore," as if to tauntingly remind the audience that the ongoing unanswered questions about the overarching plot are being deliberately ignored.

However, the vast majority of this episode is exciting enough and the drama powerful enough to largely forgive that yet repeated sin. At the beginning of this review I compared The Oath favorably to Valley of Darkness. I should emphasize that this is no small complement, as few episodes are as marvelously memorable.

Review

Nothing too terribly unexpected happens in this conclusion to Gaeta's rebellion. As expected, ideological divisions between Zarek and Gaeta are their undoing; Gaeta's too idealistic and merciful to do what needs to be done to accomplish his goals. Throughout the episode he struggles with the morality of his actions until he finds a line he simply will not cross.

Along the way, the ride is nearly as good as the previous episode, with some minor blemishes on top of those prior. Some nice textures are the focus on Kelly's divided loyalties, Adama's refusal to take his mock trial seriously, Roslin ordering the Cylon rebels around, Romo Lampkin getting caught up in the rebellion, Baltar starting to feel guilty about his perpetual flight rather than fight response to crisis, and seeing the engine room.

Some curious dramatic focus was spent near the end with Tyrol examining the crack in the wall in the engine room without the implications beyond a look of worry in Tyrol's face made all that obvious to the audience. Did Tyrol cause that crack by throwing a wrench into the engine or was it there all along? Is the old piece of crap, not to mention war torn Galactica well on its way to falling into irreparable disrepair?

The most significant blemishes on this episode which detract from the level of excitement the previous one enjoyed are the rather abrupt ending and Adama's distinct lack of ruthlessness. Overall, this episode could have been a much more incredible payoff if Adama had gone on a Starbuck style murderous rampage, killing more people than just Gaeta and Zarek. Strictly speaking, his actions in this episode seem to conflict with his stated intent of offering no forgiveness and no amnesty to the traitors. Though, again, the ending was abrupt. For all we know this is just the first round of executions.

Regarding how Gaeta and Zarek met their end, I feel in death the two characters finally earn some of that depth I felt they both needed and deserved in order to become sympathetic characters. Gaeta's motivational breakdown, minor obsession with his itching nub, and his glee when it stopped itching just prior to his death were nice touches, but perhaps even more interesting was Zarek's little smile just before he met his end. It's as if he's glad he's finally getting his wish to be martyred for (what he considers to be) a righteous cause.

Overall, there is little to say about this episode. It rides the wave of the previous one quite well. The distinct missed opportunity of a space battle between the Galactica and the Cylon base ship is unfortunate; how much more badass would Adama retaking the CIC have been if Roslin was firing on the Galactica from the Cylon ship when he did it? But what's missing in this episode and what aesthetically didn't work isn't enough to drag this well above average episode down too far.

Review

Exposition is projectile vomited at the audience in this episode at an unprecedented rate; a rapid fire sequence of answers we've waited for far too long delivered one after the other, which is strangely both too much at once and paradoxically also not enough to fully answer all the piled up annoying unanswered questions about the overarching story.

Most importantly, this episode paints a much clearer picture of the Cylon backstory. The oldest known account of the creation of Cylons occurred on Kobol, thousands of years ago. The twelve tribes created the thirteenth, a tribe of Cylons, which spawned a war between the humans and Cylons on Kobol. They then went their separate ways. The twelve tribes founded the twelve colonies and the thirteenth tribe of Cylons colonized Earth.

The thirteenth tribe was destroyed by some sort of civil war, so five members of the thirteenth tribe (the final five Cylons), the only (apparent) survivors, set a course for the twelve colonies ostensibly to rejoin their long lost brethren and warn them of the dangers of reinventing artificial life in an attempt to end what they perceived to be an inevitable cycle of violence. They traveled in an ancient FTL incapable ship, armed with resurrection technology.

The final five were the only (apparent) survivors because they all were working in secret to reinvent the resurrection technology, as their people had since abandoned it long ago when they learned to procreate biologically. They were somehow warned of the impending destruction of their society and programmed themselves so that when they died in the holocaust, their consciousnesses would be transferred to new bodies on the ship, which they had placed in orbit.

Their plan was successful and they were reborn aboard the ship. Because their ship lacked FTL, but traveled at very fast sublight speeds, time slowed down within the ship, but outside the ship thousands of years had passed by the time they reached their destination. (See theory of relativity for a long, boring, but scientifically accurate explanation.) When they finally arrived, the twelve colonies had already reinvented the artificial life (Cylon centurions) as the final five predicted they would. But the final five were too late, because the humans had already gone to war with the centurions they created.

The final five, intrigued by the reinvented centurions' novel notion of a one, true, loving god judged them capable of love and mercy and convinced them to end the war with the humans in exchange for giving them Cylon biotechnology and resurrection. Together they created Cavil and seven other humanoid Cylons. But Cavil turned on them, destroyed the entire seventh model (Daniel), boxed the final five, implanted them with false memories, and set them loose within the twelve colonies so they could experience humanity "up close and personal," as Cavil put it.

Cavil's motives are multifaceted and somewhat murky in places, but they seem to stem primarily from a combination of believing the humanoid models are fundamentally flawed creations compared to the centurions and his resultant bitterness and contempt for his creators for what he perceives to be their arrogance and naivete. He also resents their desire to end the cycle of violence, believing that the humans should be exterminated for enslaving the centurions. Clearly, Cavil's beliefs had sway, which is why he was able to convince the whole of the (rest of the) Cylons to subsequently massacre the twelve colonies.

Getting into the actual events of the story, there are a number of fascinating details worth noting about Ellen's year and a half with Cavil aside from the revelations about the overarching story. For example, Ellen made and named Cavil in her father's image. This means in a sense, Cavil is both her son and her father. This adds a whole new level of creepiness to Cavil's willful sexual exploitation of Ellen at the beginning of the third season.

Unfortunately, reprising its thematic vagueness, the one plot thread that seemed to make the least amount of sense was the series of revelations or perhaps lack thereof regarding the Temple of Five. Ellen says the temple was originally called the Temple of Hopes, built by the thirteenth tribe 3000 years ago when they left Kobol. They stopped and prayed for guidance on their exodus and then god showed them the way to Earth. Cavil calls it instead a monument to Ellen's vanity. He seemed to imply that the supernova which occurred in Rapture was somehow Ellen's doing and that she somehow orchestrated the events which revealed the faces of the final five to D'Anna.

Strangely, despite lacking in detail, Cavil's explanation seems to make the most sense because Ellen, however, claims she didn't plant any "carnival tricks" at the temple at all, but instead claims the one true god must have orchestrated these events. She does however admit having been to the Temple of Hopes on her way to the twelve colonies. And by this time in the story it is clear that Boomer's loyalties were wavering. Not to mention the fact that Ellen had been on the baseship for months now. It's possible she could have somehow done exactly as Cavil believes she did. Though if true, I would then question her motives for lying to him. Especially about the one true god. So I'm not really sure what's going on there.

Another curious line is Cavil's reference to the humans not knowing about "the colony" which supposedly has all of Ellen's equipment which she and her cohorts ostensibly used to build resurrection capabilities for the new Cylons. He believes the hub could be rebuilt with that equipment. What is "the colony?" The Cylon homeworld that they colonized after the first Cylon war? Or something else?

Also of curious note is that Anders appears to drop a possible hint about the head people. When the final five lived on Earth, the warning signs they got about the coming destruction were supposedly just like the Six in Baltar's head. Anders saw a woman, Tory saw a man, and no one else could see these people. How this is related (if at all) to Baltar's head people and Caprica Six' head Baltar remains to be seen.

Still yet, there are other pesky lingering questions. The show once again claims Kobol being the "birthplace" of all mankind, something which doesn't really make sense given the undeniable history of humanity having evolved on Earth. Is that a lost history? Also, why did Ellen and Cavil idly debate with each other for a whole year and a half before Ellen finally chose to leave? Obviously the hub incident and Cavil's resultant increased brutality was the true catalyst for Ellen's motive to escape, but even then another four months passed between Cavil announcing his intent to crack open Ellen's head and his decision to finally do it. Why? Because he needed to develop the technique first with the Simons?

Also, why did the twelve colonies take so many thousands of years to finally reinvent the Cylons if they had already invented them on Kobol? And who was fighting who on Earth? Why did their society destroy itself? Finally, what's the deal with Kara? Poor girl still gets no answers in this episode. Was I right to speculate in my review of He That Believeth in Me that one of Starbuck's parents was a Cylon? Thus is the destroyed seventh Cylon model Daniel Starbuck's father? Suffice it to say there are still many more questions to be answered.

Moving away from the exposition for a moment, the Galactica story had a number of interesting charms of its own. Is it possible that Lee will become the vice president now? Will he then assume the presidency if/when Roslin dies? Also, will the poor Galactica fall apart? It was just chilling to watch Tyrol and Adama examine all the cracks and breaks in the ship's hull. More chilling was Tyrol's warning not to jump the ship. That could prove problematic if Cavil chases Ellen when she arrives at the fleet! As could Ellen discovering Tigh's relationship with Caprica Six. I doubt anyone in the fleet will be all that thrilled to see Boomer either.

Overall, No Exit is an outstanding episode. There were minor blemishes, such as Anders' blurting out exposition faster than can be reasonably kept up with at times, some more vagueness (particularly with the Temple of Five), and even after all that some remaining very important lingering mysteries that weren't even addressed. But overall, this was an incredibly satisfying and necessary episode. If some of these answers had been deflated out of this story and had been sprinkled a little more slowly across previous episodes in order to focus more on the Cavil / Ellen dynamic in this story, No Exit might have even been worth a perfect score.

Review

"Petty" is exactly the right word to describe much of Deadlock's plot which focuses way too much on Ellen still being the same old Ellen. I suppose it's easy to appreciate on some level she'd be the same person she's always been, but I find it hard to suspend disbelief on the matter of her being willing to put everyone in jeopardy over an irrational and fleeting feeling of Saul's betrayal, especially if she can say to Saul, "so who'd you frak?" and then "it's okay, you thought I was dead," then get all pissed off when she discovers Tigh had been seeing Caprica Six and had in fact impregnated her.

As previously noted, much of the episode hinges on this irrational myopia, but the annoyances don't end there. Hearkening back to The Farm's sins, much of this episode's storytelling seems to heavily imply that love, or lack thereof is the principal cause of the death of Caprica Six' baby. Obviously the plot leaves room for any number of perfectly rational causes rooted in science rather than mysticism, but this recurring overtone is irritating.

Then of course, there's the plot hole regarding how Ellen and Boomer could even locate the fleet in the first place not being satisfactorily explained. (Well, not explained at all, really.) Did they get that information because Cavil knew where the fleet was all along? If so, why hasn't Cavil attacked the fleet already? Speaking of plot holes, did anyone else feel like eliminating Caprica Six' baby was another less-than-subtle slight of hand by the writers to make Hera more important, like the Cally retcon? (Though perhaps less annoying.)

However, the other half of the story concerning Baltar was a refreshing and interesting change of pace. It seems while Baltar was away, his cult made a deal with the Sons of Ares. They work to earn a food surplus, then give some or most of it to the Sons of Ares in exchange for being left alone. Baltar, unaware of this, tries to regain control of his cult from Paula by doing the noble deed of feeding the underprivileged on the lower decks and is quickly made aware of the new arrangement shortly thereafter.

The most interesting part though is how Baltar responds to this. Instead of letting his survival instinct kick in to protect him as usual, he sees the bigger picture; he sees the writing on the wall. His appeal to Adama seems to be rooted in preventing another uprising, one which he sees as more dangerous than Gaeta's mutiny. Somehow, he manages to convince Adama of this offscreen and is given a cache of weapons.

While it's also a bit irritating that the next (perhaps final?) plot arc aboard the Galactica looks to be the fermenting of yet another uprising as this is starting to feel somewhat redundant by now, I enjoyed the theme of the episode closing on the note of Adama being surprised to realize that the societal integration of the humans and Cylons has already happened on some level as evidenced by the final scene showing us a physical representation of that mutual blending on the memorial wall. With the ship too being infused with Cylon blood both literally and figuratively, Adama's final challenge will be to finish the work he's already begun mending the fences between these two peoples.

Overall, this episode isn't anything spectacular, though not necessarily a stinker either. The petty plot concerning the final five drags the episode down below average, but if it had focused less on this pettiness and more on Baltar, the ship's condition, and even the yet-another-uprising plot threads more, it might have been above average.

Review

Boomer did it again! The master betrayer strikes again, but this time in a more sinister way. It's interesting to see Boomer's now recurrent history of betrayal. She betrayed Adama at the end of season one, she betrayed her own people by refusing to assimilate afterward and (with Caprica Six) sowing the seeds of civil war among her people, she betrayed her Cylon model by siding with Cavil instead of the rest of the Eights, she (seemingly) betrayed Cavil by helping Ellen to escape, and now, just when we think we've seen the end of it, she betrays Tyrol to do Cavil's bidding.

What strikes me about her arc on the show is how shocking her two major betrayals have been. When she shot Adama, there was no doubt leading up to it she was going to end up doing something bad. But when the moment happened, it was still shocking because the dramatic focus had been on Boomer trying to understand what she was and, of course, Adama confronting the betrayal of his son. With the dramatic focus on those issues, the episode seemed ready to wrap up, then bam!

This time though, as I said before, Boomer's big betrayal feels more sinister. This time, she wasn't just a programmed machine, but entirely complicit in her twisted actions. She used her perhaps genuine love for Tyrol to make herself more sympathetic so she could gain her freedom, kidnap Hera, and defile Athena's relationship with Helo by pretending to be her during sex in order to exact revenge on her for taking over her old life aboard the Galactica. This is both emotionally complex as well as ironic as Athena originally seduced Helo on Caprica in the first place by pretending to be Boomer.

On top of all that, I can only imagine how much worse Boomer's reckless close-range raptor jump has made Galactica's ever worsening state of disrepair. Equally as tantalizing is the question of what will become of Tyrol if/when his complicity in Boomer's escape is discovered and what exactly Roslin's condition is. If her collapse at the end of this episode wasn't her death, she's definitely mighty close to dying.

On the other side of the fence we have Starbuck, whose story is decidedly less satisfying. In the tradition of Valley of Darkness, it once again brings fantastic piano music to the table; Kara's nightmare was a particularly impressive scene. Another nice nugget of good continuity was Starbuck's line about the mutiny thinning the ranks of the crew. This seems to imply Adama made good on his word to not forgive the mutineers. But her story also brought us the groan-inducing moment when Kara and her imaginary father played All Along the Watchtower together. More importantly, the story dragged somewhat and left us no answers; only reinforcing the existing mysteries.

Apparently, Starbuck, her father, the final five, and Hera are all connected somehow through that song. How they all came to learn it (with the exception of it having been taught to Starbuck by her father) is still a mystery, as is its overall significance. We know of course that Anders wrote it on Earth 2000 years ago, but beyond that the whole thing is still full of holes. Even Ellen appears to have no additional knowledge of it.

Another deficiency is in the degree of subtlety with which the piano player is revealed to be a hallucination of Starbuck's father. Throughout the episode, the dramatic focus is on he being possibly a new romantic interest, particularly because Anders may not survive and she has a history of cheating anyway. The man's similarities to her father play as just that, similarities; something which catches her eye enough to make the man noticeable and interesting, but not enough to connote a hallucination.

These sorts of things are always a balancing act, of course. If Starbuck was to be unaware she was hallucinating, it's difficult to clue the audience in without cluing her in as well. However, there was not one scene in the episode in which a single person took notice that Starbuck was talking to thin air, as is the case constantly with Baltar.

Moreover, in the scene where it is revealed that Starbuck hallucinated him, it is done so implicitly. He's in the cut, then he's not. But the dramatic focus is entirely on the final five being surprised that Starbuck could know that song, rather than on Starbuck's hallucination, as is so often the case with Baltar. In fact, there are only a few seconds of screen time where it can even be discerned that the man was a hallucination at all, on top of the dramatic focus not being on him in the first place. You have to really be paying attention or you'll miss it.

Another question to add to the pile is whether or not Starbuck's hallucination is technically connected to Baltar's in any way, and, of course, whether or not Baltar's hallucinations are somehow connected to Cylon projection. Finally, not including a Baltar thread of the plot at all is a big misstep given the amount of emphasis on him in the last episode. Especially seeing as how his story ended somewhat vaguely last episode as well.

Overall, this episode manages to fare slightly better than the last, but is still lacking in some pretty important ways. Had Starbuck's plot been more substantive and a Baltar thread been integrated, the episode could have been worth more points. Still a great episode though, thanks in large part to Boomer's ruthlessness.

Review

The penultimate episode to the three part finale continues the trend of an unsatisfyingly slow plot progression. The most significant events are Baltar revealing Starbuck's secret to everyone and Adama's formal decision to abandon the Galactica as a lost cause. Unfortunately, while both plot threads are interesting and move things forward adequately, neither plot thread is executed as well as it could have been.

Adama's story first centered around his outright refusal to even consider giving up on the Galactica followed by his slow, reluctant acceptance that the ship is a lost cause. The problem is, while Adama may be convinced, I am not. It's obvious that the plot wanted to use the damage done to the ship by Boomer as a catalyst to have the ship declared permanently unsalvageable. However, nothing that happens in this episode is evidence that the ship cannot be repaired. Granted, the repairs aren't going well. But there's no evidence that they are a hopeless cause.

All we do get attempting to substantiate that plot is a lot of sensationalism about the ship's ever worsening state of dilapidation and the circling vultures of the other ship captains. Even Tigh chastises the deck guy who seemed to most conspicuously replace Tyrol today for no coherent reason for claiming that there's a 90% chance another jump would destroy the ship. As Tigh said, I think a decision as critical as abandoning the Galactica should be made only with 100% certainty of the ship's expired viability.

Then there's the line about "sending her off in style." What the hell does that mean? Scrapping the ship and feeding it to the vultures is "sending her off in style?" I think Lee Adama sent the Pegasus off with a lot more style than that. Regardless of all that, I think the plot thread is not without merit. The Galactica was an old piece of crap from the very first episode and now it's a repeated battle torn old piece of crap. It's amazing it's lasted this long. I just wish the specifics of the plot made it clear beyond a shadow of the doubt that the ship cannot be saved. Because that's what it would take in my opinion for Adama to give up on the damn thing.

Even more muddled was Baltar spilling the beans on Starbuck's secret. His angels speech was vaguely incoherent and didn't seem to get him anywhere, but it was at least interesting that the first thing this man of science did after meticulously studying the dogtag was to try to further enlarge his flock by disseminating that information in a sensationalist motivational speech. What's bothersome though is Starbuck's confession to Baltar didn't result in any advancement of the plot or answer any significant questions about Starbuck at all. Frankly, Starbuck's resurrection was fairly common knowledge anyway. Proof of the existence of a duplicate body is insignificant compared to the fact that she literally reappeared to them all from nowhere.

What's worse though is that the narrative paints a very clear aesthetic of Baltar truly believing in all this religious nonsense he's spouting. His candid bathroom conversation with Starbuck leans heavily in that direction. It's obvious that Baltar's the same old Baltar, trying to win political power and stay in the celebrity spotlight. But if this man of science is really willing to finally buy head Six' claims to being an angel of god, then I'm going to be a bit disappointed. Like Adama accepting the Galactica's inevitable demise, I can accept that Baltar might make that leap of faith, but I don't think the show has earned that yet. I think Baltar would want to eliminate all rational explanations before just saying "yep, angels are everywhere!"

The episode has other annoyances as well. For one, aside from the episode's general slow pace, Cavil's motives for wanting Hera remain unclear. Exactly how is Hera supposed to be the key to Cylon reproduction? I doubt she knows anything about resurrection and as for biological reproduction, their gene pool isn't big enough. This doesn't make any sense. As for our heroes rescuing Hera, in some ways I liked the fact that they couldn't immediately locate where she had been taken to and that their prospects of deducing it were slim to none, but the episode acts as if the crew has simply given up on even trying to locate her. If I were Helo, I'd steal that damn raptor and go. Clearly Adama doesn't give a rat's ass. And just to make sure we're all paying attention, what's a season 4 episode without yet another groan inducing reference to All Along the Watchtower? (The dying Sharon uttered "too much confusion" just before she died...)

To top it off, in addition to all the outstanding questions such as once again having no explanation for Starbuck, once again having no explanation for the head people, and only a vague impression of Cavil's motives, we once again get zero follow up on the status of and purpose for Baltar arming his followers, even though the episode has a significant Baltar plot thread this time! The finale sure is going to have a lot of loose ends to tie up. Sure, No Exit did a lot of the footwork, but the finale will have to be packed to the brim with exposition just to be an adequate finale, much less manage to be a dramatically compelling end to the story along the way.

Review

Continuing in the tradition of Crossroads, Part 1 and Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 1, Daybreak, Part 1 is an annoyingly slow buildup to the season (and in this case series) finale. The core issue in this installment is the overly verbose, questionably relevant flashbacks which will probably make a coherent point by the end of the finale but serve as little more than mildly interesting trivia about the characters we've grown to love after all these years.

As a consequence of this, only half of the episode advances the plot and only does so at a crawling pace. We get an inkling closer to understanding Cavil's motive for kidnapping Hera in that we're told that Hera "holds the key" to the Cylons' continued existence somewhere in her genetic code, whatever that means. I'm still going with Cavil's motives not really making any sense. But hey, who cares? He's the bad guy and he's got the kid! And he's gonna do something bad to her! Who needs complex, nuanced motivations when you can have a stereotypically evil bad guy? (For anyone not paying attention, that was sarcasm.)

I was a great deal more pleased with how the fleet treated losing Hera in this episode. Adama's near indifference to the situation last episode was rectified quite well here. One nice touch is that Adama doesn't really seem to care whether or not Hera is some iconic representation of the future, but instead to him all that matters is a little girl was abducted from his ship and damn it, he's gonna get her back. Duty and honor.

The way he latches on to this is also likely in part due to his desire to see the Galactica go out "in style" for real, rather than the whimper of a way it was going out in last episode's closing and this episode's opening. I still have no idea what that line meant at the end of last episode, but it doesn't really matter now. There's that motivating Adama, and also something tells me that some part of him would rather go on a suicide mission than live on deck 74 of a Cylon baseship for the rest of his days.

Another highlight is despite how largely pointless the flashbacks seemed, Baltar's were an especially remarkably spectacular insight into his character. I think we learned more about Baltar in this one episode than we did in nearly all the others combined. I loved the actor that played his father and the creepy way Six gets to Baltar by providing for his father is just lovely.

All in all, this episode once again continues the unfortunate trend of minor plot advancement and no significant outstanding questions answered. For that matter, a new question is added to pile. How was Anders able to locate the colony? The last two thirds of the finale will have to be quite densely packed with exposition!

Review

The last great space battle of the series doesn't disappoint. Regardless of whatever happens to the Galactica in the third and final part of the series finale, we can now definitely say that the old girl has gone out in style. It has single handedly gone toe to toe with the Cylon homeworld! How delightful. And in doing so, has effectively ended the war with the Cylons in the process. At the end of part two the story is essentially over, however as I've repeated over and over again for the whole season there are still many questions to answer which will require a great deal more exposition.

The list of questions has been stated already ad nauseum, however one which I am afraid we will never get a satisfactory answer to at this point is how exactly Hera was supposed to be Cavil's key to his people's salvation. Frankly, the whole plot would have made much more sense if Cavil had abducted her with the explicit and stated motive as using her as a bargaining chip to get the final five to give him resurrection. For that matter Cavil could have just jumped on over to the fleet and asked for the final five's help. "Give me resurrection, and I'll stop chasing you!" But alas, that would be too rational and distinctly not dramatic, and we needed a plot device for a gorgeous space battle!

Speaking of irrational, Baltar's angels and god speech was among the most groan inducing monologues I've heard in a science fiction show since Sheridan's "get the hell out of our galaxy!" speech in Babylon 5. Baltar says events have been occurring which can't be explained rationally by any of the characters from their perspectives. Okay, that's fine, but why not at least provide rational explanations for the audience? Otherwise, it just feels awkwardly preachy and reeks of deus ex machina.

The list of poor aesthetic choices does not end there though. Once again, the flashbacks remain largely unable to make a coherent point. For example, Tigh, Adama, and Ellen at the strip club was a bit much and Boomer's flashback quite jarringly broke up what was an otherwise very nicely intense action sequence. I have mixed feelings on Boomer's flashback though because it seemed to be the only flashback to add something relevant to the episode. In fact, it was laced with irony. Boomer paid Adama back numerous times throughout the series with both betrayal and repentance. And ultimately, she paid him back with her life too, just as Adama had alluded to. Finally, ultimately, it did in fact really mean something.

Another rather mixed highlight was how the opera house premonitions ended up coming together. While it's most gratifying to see they were actually going somewhere with this beyond the confused but fun independent manifestations of these visions we've seen before, the visions still remain completely unexplained. They ended up being a fascinating and beautiful visual metaphor scored to a beautiful, almost overwrought piece of music, but it is implied that they have a much greater significance than what we are actually clued into in the sequence of the plot. Likewise, the revelation that Baltar and Caprica Six can see each others' head people is significant in a yet undefined way.

Overall, thanks to Cavil's never quite adequate motivations and the still unattended to pile of loose threads, the climax of BSG's finale is just short of being worth a perfect score. Now off we go! Let's go get some closure. Stay tuned.

Review

In interviews throughout the run of the series, executive producer Ron Moore repeatedly told us that this series was a character drama first and a science fiction series second. Indeed, in this reviewer's view that is an accurate assessment of the show's entire run and has faithfully been its greatest strength. Unfortunately, it is also its greatest weakness, leading to an ever worsening tendency over the years for the show's overarching thematic mysticism to get more and more veiled in mystery and vagueness. The climax of absurdity manifests itself in this ending as one of the most supremely beautiful, emotionally powerful, visually stunning, intensely action packed, and to my everlasting disappointment astonishingly sloppily written science fiction stories I've ever seen.

This ending delivers intense beauty, lovely drama, stunning visuals, and riveting action at the devastating expense of the plot. The gritty realism the show has been grounded in since day one was violated in order to deliver what feels like a powerful ending. The trouble is, despite the captivating drama and glitz, as Ron Moore said in his January 2000 Cinescape interview criticizing Star Trek Voyager's realism, "I think the audience intuitively knows when something is true and something is not true." Battlestar Galactica's ending isn't true. It's neither true to itself, nor to the underlying premise of the show. Everything from the continuity to the science to the narrative aesthetic is either sloppy, full of errors, or both.

The most glaringly significant piece of plot the finale delivers is the discovery of the real Earth, or our Earth, the one we're all living on right now. The implication is that the Earth discovered in Revelations was just some other planet like Kobol or Caprica. If you go back and rewatch Revelations, be sure to take notice that we never once see an external shot of the planet with recognizable land masses because they are all obscured by clouds. This was a nice sleight of hand. The trouble is though in order for us and for the characters to believe that the Earth found in Revelations was the real deal, the Tomb of Athena star patterns had to match from that planet's vantage point. With that in mind, there could be no doubt, that planet was the real Earth, our Earth, the one we're all living on right now.

That was all well and good, but then they throw this curve ball at us. The Earth in Revelations wasn't really Earth? The planet they discover at the end of this episode is really our Earth, Tanzania and all? In that case, the Tomb of Athena is the biggest, most gaping plot hole of the entire series. A real clunker. Because the simple fact of the matter is that it is technically impossible for the constellations to match in both places. Gaeta confirmed that they matched at Revelations Earth, and if you look up into the sky tonight you'll see that they match here too. This is completely irreconcilable. Unless of course you write off the impossible nature of this happenstance as god making it possible. That's this finale's answer to everything.

Because apparently the writers at some point got bored of the show's groundings in gritty realism and presenting seemingly larger than life events in ways that could be rationally explained away and decided that deus ex machina would be more fun. Regardless of how much fun it was to write, it definitely was much less work. What were the imaginary people Baltar and Six were seeing? Angels from god. How did Kara come back to life? She was an angel from god. How did Kara's charred body get from the gas giant in Maelstrom to the faux Earth? God put it there. What were the recurring opera house dreams? Visions from god. The list of plot holes both explicitly and implicitly attributed to god in this episode is extensive and certainly doesn't end there. To say that reducing the only viable explanation for the larger than life happenings of the plot to the supernatural is a cop out is a gross understatement.

But continuity and science errors and covering up plot holes with god aren't the only sins the ending commits. There's still the issue of the colonists suddenly, completely out of nowhere, deciding that they're all, unanimously, going to become technology hating luddites! This is so completely implausible on so many levels that it's downright absurd. Sure, this was obviously a necessary plot contrivance to resolve the issue of why the people of our Earth today don't have inter stellar spacecraft with FTL drives and why technologically advanced civilization is still such a relatively new thing, but all of this could have been built up to in a much more responsible and realistic way.

It is of course not out of the realm of the possibilities that these people who've been literally massacred and traumatized by their own technology would begin to develop an irrational hatred of technology in general, leading to an equally irrational desire to project all the bad things about themselves onto it and throw it all into the sun, but it is completely incomprehensible that it would come out of literally nowhere in the final moments of the finale with absolutely nothing leading up to it. As Ron Moore also said in his January 2000 Cinescape interview, "these people would not act like this." It only would have been believable if an anti-technology movement within the fleet had been building for most of the entire journey with a significant and growing following, even among the main cast. People aren't going to make a decision like this as casually and cavalierly as Lee Adama did totally out of nowhere.

What's worse is in reality a decision like this is fraught with insanely negative consequences that the plot glossed over in an entirely myopic way to the point of romanticization of the primitive. The reality of the situation is life on Pleistocene Earth was brutish and hard; not to mention cold, thanks to the ice age the plot conveniently ignores. Just before launching the attack on the colony, the admiral turns Cottle away from volunteering claiming that the fleet can't afford to lose a doctor. But apparently after they find Earth, that reasoning goes right out the window because they voluntarily get rid of a whole lot more than what a skilled doctor could do for them. They abandon modern medical care entirely, along with sanitation, plumbing, heat, air conditioning, electricity, and perhaps worst of all - liquor! How could all those alcoholics get by without liquor? ;)

The point is mortality rates as a consequence of that decision would be horrifying. Especially given all the scary prehistoric predators Pleistocene Earth had to offer. In fact, all our archaeological evidence suggests that the human race nearly went extinct not too long after our beloved colonists landed. The population may have even been reduced to a number as small as a few thousand. That means that along with the vast majority of the new primitive friends our delighted colonists made upon arrival, all the colonial survivors too were nearly wiped out not too long after they landed. Great job Lee! That luddite thing sure was a great idea!

Given this, Lee's line to Kara reassuring her that she won't be forgotten is like a kind of sad, unintentional comedy. The truth is their entire civilization and everything that they ever accomplished will be forgotten! Another gem of painfully unintentional comedy is Baltar and Caprica Six wondering if Hera will be all right, then being assured by their angels that she will be. I suppose the answer to that question depends on how you look at it. According to our archaeological evidence, Mitochondrial Eve died as a young woman. But I guess Hera surviving just long enough to bear children and thus become Mitochondrial Eve was good enough for god!

Indeed, even though the prophecies of harbinger-of-death Kara and instrument-of-god Baltar leading humanity to its end were supposed to be a reference to Hera's status as Mitochondrial Eve signaling the end of a pure human race as all her descendants were part Cylon and everyone living today is supposed to be a descendant of her, there is yet more unintentional comedy in the idea that given how in addition to the fact that everyone doubtless died horribly well before their otherwise natural lifespan, the entire population nearly died out after they landed. Civilization didn't really recover from this until many tens of thousands of years later. Those prophecies were truer than anyone realized! That's a lot of death.

As an amusing aside, given Lee's instrumental hand in deciding the fate of the colonists, one of the greatest ironies of my writing these reviews over the years is that in a twisted, cynically sarcastic way, I actually predicted that Lee would screw over the entire human race. Recall this passage from my review of Exodus, Part 2: "Lee Adama sure has a habit of breaking things. In the miniseries, two vipers. In Resurrection Ship, Part 2, the Blackbird. And here he destroys the Pegasus herself! Bad Lee Adama, I hate you! What next, he miscalculates a jump and sends the entire fleet into the center of a star thus ending the series?" Yep, that is pretty much exactly what was next.

A better ending would have pared down the unnecessarily verbose flashbacks. There's some interesting symmetry in the characters on daybreak of the first day of their new lives reflecting on the key moments of their past that led them to who and where they are now, but the point could have been made more eloquently without lacing the entire three part finale with flashbacks seemingly at random. Most of the material we saw in the flashbacks should have been given to us in earlier episodes anyway. A better ending would have given narrative focus to how idiotic the decision to chuck all their technology into the sun was, making a point about how in reality these people haven't really learned their lesson, rather than weakly trying to make some half assed anti-consumerism and anti-technology statement followed by a silly robots montage scored to the Jimmy Hendrex rendition of All Along the Watchtower.

In the miniseries, Commander Adama said "you cannot play god then wash your hands of the things that you've created. Sooner or later the day comes when you can't hide from the things that you've done anymore," but that's exactly what they decided to do in the end. They're hiding from the things they've done. They're giving the Centurions the basestar and sending them on their merry way. By refusing to coexist with their technology and by deliberately forgetting their history, they're quite possibly dooming themselves once again to repeating their mistakes, despite whatever head Six might have to say about it. If this science fiction story were a true chronicling of our real history and if we ever found out, I think we'd be pretty pissed off at them for their arrogance and shortsightedness. I don't think writing it off as "their souls weren't ready for science" would go over well in the real world.

Frankly, we deserved better than this. We deserved real closure, not wishy-washy anti-consumerism, luddism, and religious mumbo jumbo. Yes, one could say that religion has always been an important part of the show, but up until now it's always been accompanied by a rational alternative explanation, or at least the possibility for a rational alternative explanation. We deserved internally consistent continuity. We deserved the characters' actions to make sense and have a realistic progression. While it was still on the air, I used to describe BSG to friends who had never seen it before as "one of the greatest science fiction shows there is." Thanks to this finale, I now have to describe it as "one of the greatest science fiction shows ever done, except for the ending." Personally, I think that's very unfortunate. We deserved better than this.