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.