Somebody was added back in on the survivor count. Last episode it was 47,857, now it's 47,858. So the question is, who is the lucky number? Is it Helo? Is it Sharon?
Hey, the little pre-show teaser is back in the title sequence! It's a little shorter, but it's good to have it back!
President Roslin says she'll put Sharon in a cell if everyone lowers their guns. They do, and she orders Sharon thrown out an airlock. Look, I'm all for throwing Cylons out airlocks. I was big admirer of her for it the last time. But she flat out lied to their faces. That is SO wrong in my book. I want a President who makes tough calls, but be honest and up front about them. At least have the guts to do that. Roslin is a LIAR. And essentially that was Adama's problem with her too. In the second part he says "You broke your word" and she replies "that's the part that bothers you." Well no frackin' duh, Madame President! The moment you start lying to people, you lose all credibility. We want to trust our elected officials and cannot do that if you lie to our faces. This is just one reason why Lincoln and Washington stand so highly in our mythos as Presidents. Lincoln is known as "honest Abe" (though he hated being called Abe), and Washington for the apocryphal "I cannot tell a lie" thing. Juxtapose that with Nixon covering up Watergate, but claiming he didn't; George Bush who said "No new taxes" then added taxes, prompting many to think him a liar; Clinton who committed perjury (there's a fifth amendment for a reason, Mr. President); and George W. Bush who many believe lied about Iraq (personally I don't; he was either a lying mastermind or a total idiot but he cannot be both. It seems clear to me that he really believed the misinformation.). Gutsy Presidents I am all for. Liars I am not. I was no proponent of Adama's action; I thought it was rash. Looking back though, I can see why he did it!
What happened to Starbuck's Raider? Sharon took it, spun around the planet for awhile, landed somewhere, then followed Helo on foot. Then they took the Heavy Raider back to Kobol. I guess it's still on Caprica, then? Wouldn't that have been handy to bring back?
Looking over the two parts, I feel like they wasted screen time with the whole Adama still bitter thing. To me, that feels out of character for him. I don't see why he's still so ticked at the President, nor why it should take the whole episode to get to the point where he has to find her again. And why was Baltar never put in charge? He's the Vice President! I don't see why Adama would support martial law.
The scene between Kara and Lee with the triad ball (that's right, I'm still calling it triad regardless) was just too juvenile for me. It wasn't cute or funny to me for them to be like little schoolchildren. It was just weird. And the scene really doesn't go anywhere; it is essentially just playground banter for no reason. The chainlink fence, the "give me my ball back" (Lee's a schoolyard bully!), and the taunting "You looooooove me! No take-backs!" was all just silly. Some will say, "But it WAS important! He said he loved her!" I think we got that from the kiss at the start of the episode. This was just filler because they had too much for one episode, but not enough for two.
The priestess says something about the bodies of the tribes' leaders being offered to the gods. Is this more human sacrifice? What does that mean? Oh, and Gaeta calls the scrolls of Pythia a "gospel", but I really don't think it qualifies much as "good news". Maybe the bit about finding Earth, but still not so much.
What's with the mines on Kobol? Did the Lords of Kobol booby-trap the planet (and thus the prophecied blooshed)? It seems a bit too advanced for that (though they had fancy opera houses, so I really don't know what to make of them. At least Larson's Kobol was ancient.). Did the Cylons plant them? They seemed to show up awfully quickly when they blew, but if they did, WHY did they? They took the time to plant mines just in case some humans showed up?
The opening of part 2 reminded me so much of Lost. We had the pouring rain, the guy with the compass, the maps, and the music was uncharacteristically arranged for strings.
The survivor count dropped by 3. I'm wondering who else died. The mine blew up the priestess, and another guy was clearly shot by Cylons. Who's the third? A couple guys were shot at or blown around, but I'm not sure they died. So who is the last?
For most of the episode, I couldn't understand why Zerek was plotting to kill Apollo. It seemed so inconsistent with his character. Then I came to realize that he must have just been stringing the other guy along with that dangling carrot, never intending to go through with it.
I like the moment when Six makes herself look like Kara. And it's a good look for her too. But then, maybe I'm just a sucker for ponytails. But this scene really bothered me because I was fighting the very idea that Baltar was just crazy. That couldn't possibly be true. And it wasn't. It just didn't gel with the stuff that happened in season one; Six knew things that Gaius couldn't possibly know. So to me it was very frustrating to even go through the silly exercise of the question. Like the whole arc in season five of X-Files when Mulder stops believing in aliens even though he has SEEN them and their ships on numerous occasions. There's only so much disbelief one can suspend in a case like that. Too much of that leaves writers confused (hence the whole Samantha Mulder has been dead since 1989 thing which is absolutely untrue). I've gone off-topic again. Last season was very DS9, this season is getting very X-Files. At least they've stated once and for all that Six is not a product of Gaius' delusion, nor a "chip in his head". Now she claims to be an angel. I don't believe it. Is that some callback to the "War of the Gods" stuff in the old series? Is Six the equivalent of Count Iblis?
I like that the stuff on Kobol finally starts to be similar to the "Lost Planet of the Gods" of the original. There, the quest also led them to a tomb. Of course the circumstances are vastly different, but the essential beats -- go to Kobol, find a tomb, get directions to Earth -- are hit. It has the same kind of Indiana Jones feel to it. I like the arrow connected with Sagittarius. And in a weird sort of way, it also contains the same glaring error. I asked before how there could be directions to Earth unless someone came back and put them there. By the same token, I want to know who put the constellations there in the tomb of Athena, and how Pythia knew that those on Earth looked up and saw their twelve brothers. Who came back to report this stuff?
Were they ACTUALLY standing on Earth, or just figuratively? And how do they get back from there? They seemed closed in, or transported. Do they just say, "Okay Athena, we're done now" and some magical holodeck door opens up?
I do like the connection to the constellations, and the notion that they were on the original flags. Though I wonder, wouldn't they look more different from Kobol than from Earth? Would the stars all line up the same? And were the colonies always recognizable by constellation, or did that come later? Did the humans on Kobol look at the sky and see "just a guy made of dots and lines"? (I've been listening to They Might Be Giants. That's from "See the Constellation".) I don't like that they hit us over the head with their real names. It makes the mythos start to fall apart for me, like it's talking down to the viewers too slow to have gotten it yet.
I don't trust any Sharon. The whole turning in her gun to Adama bit is obviously a trick to get her in his good graces. I still don't see how she knows so much about life on Galactica but insists she's a different person. DOES she remember shooting Adama? Probably not, but then where is the consciousness of Boomer? Where's THAT Cylon? When she started talking about how the Cylons are treated like things and not people, I started to realize that this whole humanoid Cylon story also has shades of the bit with the clones in "The Gun on Ice Planet Zero". I may develop this angle in a later post. But that parallel struck me today.
This episode was pretty good. The second part was better. It did feel to me like there was a lot of filler. Maybe they should have just done a special hour and a half or something. Even so, it was good to have callbacks to the original series, something of a resolution to these arcs (finally) and a direction to Earth. ...Is Apollo still on parole now, or has he been exonerated? Is he the CAG again?
Favorite line: "If there's one thing we know about human beings, they are masters of self-destruction." Normally I don't espouse Six's anti-human sentiments, but I can't argue with this.
As an added bonus, here's that They Might Be Giants song!
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