So after the long and bitter debate over whether Tom Zarek was right (and given what we found out about Galactica’s structural integrity this week, I’m saying that’s an emphatic no, though of course, reasonable minds can differ), we have the infodump episode.
There was really no way around it — we have only seven episodes left. There’s almost no way to parcel out answers to all the questions over that time; at some point, the writers simply had to dump a bunch of material on us, hopefully in an entertaining and relatively organic manner.
And the information, of course, had to be interesting too.
YMMV on whether the infodump was done well (I thought it was handled about as well as they could — at least there was some dramatic tension about it, rather than just a matter of Saul walking in and saying, “Okay, Bill, here’s the frakkin’ deal.”) The information that was dumped, though — that was intriguing as all get-out, and in many ways, it opened up more questions than it answered.
The opening has changed this week — “All of this has happened before” is highlighted at the start. We are told what we know — there are twelve Cylon models. One was sacrificed.
We drop back in on Ellen and Saul, and the last drink on New Caprica. Ellen drinks deep, Saul tells her to sleep. She does, and she leaves her mortal body, traversing the landscape of 2001 as interpereted by the Wachowski brothers. She awakes in a Cylon resurrection tank. She screams in terror, and then, she stops. Calms down. Remembers. She asks for help from the centurion standing guard; it comes to her, pauses, then reaches out a mechanical hand. She thanks it; tells it that it’s kind.
Someone arrives. She calls him John. We know him as Cavil, the head of the Number Ones, the first Cylon designed by the Final Five.
On Galactica, Sam is remembering. Remembering everything. The bullet in his head has loosened whatever block kept his memory from flowing. He asks Kara to get the others — Saul, Galen, Tory, Ellen. Kara reminds him that Ellen is dead; he agrees, but says that something marvelous has happened. He remembers.
He tells them how they knew the end was coming, how they were working on resurrection technology. Said that Saul and Ellen were married, Galen and Tory were dating. They escaped the confligration, tried to get to the other colonies — they knew of the other colonies — to warn them against mistreating the centurions. To warn them to treat them well.
But they didn’t have FTL drives. They could only travel at sublight speeds. Time slowed down. Four thousand years for the colonies, some shorter time for the Final Five. And when they arrived, the first Cylon war was being waged.
The Five went to the Cylons, the ones working on hybrids, and made a deal: you stop the war, and we’ll help you achieve the humanity you crave. Ellen thought their belief in God would keep them from turning against the humans in the end.
It didn’t.
Galen goes to fix the cracks in the ship that he saw in the last episode; he’s been made Chief again. The position was open. Saul and Tory debate whether they are responsible for the war, responsible for the genocide. Tory says that the humans attacked them on their world; Saul thinks that’s a cop-out.
Time has passed on the base ship; Ellen is surprised to hear that the Temple of the Five gave D’Anna a vision. Of course, she can’t ask D’Anna — only Cavil and Boomer are allowed to talk to her. (And now, perhaps, we understand why Boomer split with the Eights. We understand why she had a different perspective.) Cavil tells her that he’s boxed D’Anna. Ellen replies that boxing isn’t permanent, not like what was done to Number Seven.
In the now, Sam seizures, just after telling them that they made eight Cylon models; Kara fears that she knows who the eighth is. The Daily Show’s John Hodgman helpfully explains that Sam is near death, but might pull through. Sam begs for time, begs not to go under. Kara tells Doc Cottle and the Resident Expert to prep for surgery.
The damage to Galactica is too extensive — the metal is fatigued, falling apart. The Chief tells the Admiral that there is Cylon technology that might help fix it; Adama refuses, wanting the ship to be human in its heart. But there is no getting around it; when he sees a crack in his own cabin, Adama makes the call: do what we can to save her.
Soon enough in the flashback times, the Hub is destroyed, and Cavil angrily demands that Ellen rebuild it; she refuses. He says he will open her skull up to find the memories; she tells him that he was jealous and vengeful. That he killed Daniel — Number Seven — because she loved him.
She says he tortured the Five, sent them back without their memories, sent them back to torture them. She tells him that she loves him anyway, that he’s her son, and he angrily slaps her away.
Sam goes into surgery. Boomer arrives to retrieve Ellen for surgery. Boomer helps Ellen escape.
Sam is brain-dead.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
I spent most of that episode going WTF? And am still asking it.
Here’s what I don’t get. Who the hell was involved in the war on Earth? The Five are human-form Cylons, as apparently all of Earth was. So who shot the nukes? Was it an inter-Cylon thing? I’m guessing maybe it was Centurions vs. human-form Cylons, but if so then the Five shouldn’t’ve tried to warn the humans to treat the Cylons well; they should’ve tried to warn the Cylons that these human-types might get a little uppity, teach them to show respect.
And why the hell would the Cylons want to be human-form anyway? I’m with Cavil on that one; it makes no sense. If they’re a sentient life form in and of themselves, why shouldn’t they explore the wonders of that life form, rather than aping their masters? Is this some kind of commentary on the post-colonized mindset? Or are they just pulling all this stuff out of their asses and throwing it at the walls to see what sticks?
This week’s episode sucked. I felt sorry for Grace Park (“Boomer”) standing there in the Cylon ship listening to the claptrap between Ellen and whoever the other one is. Notice how she was shifting in her stance out of pure boredom? “Good grief, this is the 7th take of this scene and it’s not making any sense.”
Yeah, Ellen is the mastermind of the whole thing. Puh-leez.
I’ve been with this since the start and feel obligated to watch it all. But it’s getting ridiculous. The previous two episodes showed a little life. But this week mired back down in the muck.
I say let the next 6 episodes just be Grace Park and Tricia Helfer “lingerie pillow fights.” That’s all I’m asking.
Off topic – Obama’s stimulus plan. While Ellen may be the mastermind of that, too, I’m afraid much of it will flow into the pockets of OPEC as Obama’s domestic energy plans are falling short of what is needed. Don’t mean to blog whore, but click my link if interested. Trying to spread the word. We need a populist movement for energy. Before gasoline hits $4-5 again.
Cheers!
Geez, have you failed to figure out the norms of the blog you’re posting on. It’s kind of impressive.
I liked this episode — certainly better than last week’s. Yes, it was an infodump, but it’s the right time in the story for an infodump.
Nojojojo, my guess is that increased squishyness — being more human than machine — is a necessary requirement of increased free will. The Centurions do seem to have free will, but making choices seems to be very difficult for them; their natural state is obeying orders.
That seemed to be Ellen’s take on why being made of flesh is a blessing, anyway.
It’s also possible that the Centurions believe that God wants them to be flesh, not machine.
Jeff – I don’t think anyone argued that the writers didn’t want us to believe that Adama and the president are the best leaders there are. So it’s no surprise that they structure teh story to demonstrate his rightness. To me, that doesn’t engage with what the important questions are – such as who gets to make decisions. Are there any circumstances where you think people should have a dictatorship for their own good? How important is self-determination?
BSG consistently answers these questions diametrically opposite from the way I would.
I wasn’t that into this week’s episode (although I agree with Amp that it was better than last week’s). I thought some stuff was interesting, but a lot of the stuff about the final five was moer interesting to me when it wasn’t spelled out. “We uploaded into a space ship and flew for 3,000 years.” is just a little prosaic for me. Also quite nonsense – they’d come all this way to tell people not to build centurions and then they helped the centurions?
Plus my favourite thing about is that I assumed it was our earth – what with Jimi Hendrix and Mario Savio. But it doesn’t seem to be, because they thought of themselves as lords of cobolt.
Are there any circumstances where you think people should have a dictatorship for their own good? How important is self-determination?
Ooh! Good questions.
The short answer is yes — there are times that self-determination needs to take a back seat to self-preservation. These are extremely limited circumstances, mostly involving situations where a nation is literally fighting for its very existence against a foe that is actively invading, where the niceties of civil society are breaking down amidst the chaos. That is, of course, pretty much what the Colonists are dealing with, and one of the reasons why I can accept the liberty-for-security trade, at least up to a point.
Of course, there is a point beyond which a dictatorship becomes more dangerous than the threat — think the fleet, but with Admiral Cain in control. Adama is, at heart, a benevolent dictator — he wants to do right by his people.
It’s tough to tell the difference, though, between a “good” and “bad” dictator, and I don’t want to get off into the weeds here. Had Zarek and Gaeta had a better plan for after the revolution, and a better raison d’etre than “throw the bums out,” I might have been more sympathetic. Certainly I understood why they took their actions, and my disagreement with their actions turned more on the political argument than the procedure they took to achieve it; I disagree with their argument about ousting the Cylons from the fleet, and therefore their coup is not acceptable. The coup itself was legitimate insofar as it is the only way to change a repressive government.
I say let the next 6 episodes just be Grace Park and Tricia Helfer “lingerie pillow fights.” That’s all I’m asking.
headdesk. Look, as a heterosexual male, I appreciate that both actresses are attractive women, but I also appreciate that both actresses are good actresses. I, myself, am mainly happy that Boomer’s finally going back to Galactica. I’m wondering how she’s going to deal with Athena. That would be awkward, I would think.
I kind of wondered if the centurions wanted to have a more human form because they had faced severe discrimination/oppression in their obviously different centurion bodies. By looking more human, they could go back and integrate in society (in the colonies or wherever) and not be able to be discerned from the humans. Thus giving them both protection from harm and an equal shot at fair treatment.
When they got the eight models down who had no ability to reproduce, they knew this plan wasn’t going to work. So they got mad/gave up or decided to demand reproduction with humans by starting the most recent war.
Oh, yeah. And Right On Demand?
Take your pillow fights and get off the blog. I come here because people are intelligent enough to not resort to that stupid shit.
Also quite nonsense – they’d come all this way to tell people not to build centurions and then they helped the centurions?
I thought their message was intended to be “treat the centurions well; don’t treat them like mindless slaves.
I liked this episode, particularly the fact that they’re not going to hang the final story on time travel. I thought Sam was well-played – the desperation of trying to communicate when you’re injured, ill, or otherwise impaired was palpable with him. And I particularly liked John/Cabal/Number One’s speech at the end. His self-loathing made my skin crawl.
elusis – I must have missed that – woops ignore me. I definately found Cabal most interesting this episode.
But I still want an uprising, a proper one (although as my friend pointed out to me, the only way Adama could retake the ship last time was through a popular uprising, so there was an uprising, but we didn’t see it. Also now apparently it’s gone).
Maia, I’ve so been wanting a popular uprising on BSG since sometime towards the end of Season 2.
Unfortunately, with six episodes left to go, I think it’s a little too late for that now. It would have been nice to see it happen, but that train left the station ages ago.
What rather chaps me, though, is my perception that the writers of the show had also been thinking that something like that should occur eventually…but that when they finally sat down to write it (far too late for it to fit into their own story structure), all they could come up with was that two-episode-long mutiny plotline. No, guys! No! That wasn’t the way to do it!
Sheesh.
I liked this episode but had two questions:
How did Ellen resurrect? We saw when they destroyed the hub that they had spare bodies for all the cylons to, presumably, ressurrect in. But by their nature, wouldn’t she not have a spare body waiting for her, since none of the cylons knew who the final five were or looked like, previous to Deanna seeing them?
Or did Cavil/One know the whole time who the final five were and planned for their resurrection (as implied), and had planted the programming for the other cylons to not remember them? He was the one most insisting that they not think about the final five.
And has anybody else noticed that they keep using footage of the black cylon in the theme footage, four, even though he hasn’t been on in a few season? Heh.
Let me apologize for ruffling feathers. My attempt at sarcasm/humor obviously fell flat, and I’ll keep it more above board. Again, I’m sorry.
Still didn’t like the episode, though.