BSG 2.3 Blogging
This episode certainly addressed the common complaint that the new season was flitting among too many different plotlines. The Kobol wrapup was pretty gripping. And once again - “I joined to pay for dental school” - the show holds a funhouse mirror up to our present moment. Now we can look forward to Chief’s reaction when he gets back to the Galactica and learns that his girlfriend really is a Cylon and tried to kill the commander.
My own complaint about the new season is that, so far, the Cylons are less crazy-inspired than in the first season. Number Six’s orations are less out there, and more the humans are such nasty bestial creatures stuff you’ve heard before.
Meanwhile, everyone from Mrs. Offering to people in these very comment threads have been speculating whether various minor cast members are “really a cylon.” I’ve heard Gaeda, Dee and Crashdown floated as possibilities. I think that the brain trust will be very sparing with that kind of thing. Perhaps I should say, I like to think. Because it would be cheap to overdo that. So far, all the humanoid Cylons have been instances of dramatic irony - the viewer knows what the dramatis personae do not. There may well be one Cylon revelation among the major cast, but that would the upper limit of what the show could get away with. One way we’d know Galactica had jumped the shark would be if they started having a Secret Cylon of the Week syndrome. I think we’re safe from that kind of thing for now, though.
As to Colonel Tigh, it appears that in the future the worst will lack all conviction too.
Comment by rwierenga —
July 29, 2005 @ 11:53 pm
I don’t know, I thought Six’s comments that God’s will was somehow not operative on Kobol, and that Tarn and Socinus weren’t going to have any afterlife at all because they’d died there, were in the best traditions of intiguingly cryptic Six oratory.
I think the really outstanding thing about this show is the use it makes of its minor characters (and the uniformly excellent performances it gets from the actors in minor roles). The rise and fall of Crashdown over the last two seasons was a marvel of economical storytelling. Doc Cottle, who’s had maybe two pages of dialogue over the entire series, is already a more memorable character than half of the Enterprise cast. And D’s little whiskey bottle signal to Gaeta when she was talking to the drunk Tigh was sheer genius.
Comment by Mike Trettel —
July 30, 2005 @ 6:58 am
I really liked last nights episode because of the development of the minor plotlines, and how they are wrapping into the major plotline bit by bit. The business about the Marine guard being a true believer in the old mythology-that’s something you would expect to find in real life. The best thing about BSG though is that it’s raised the bar for how TV sci-fi should be done in the future-watching it after two hours of SG The Legendary Journey made me realize just how much better mainstream sci-fi can and should be from now on (so I hope).
And yes, the bottle tip was priceless.
Comment by Iron Lungfish —
July 30, 2005 @ 8:48 am
Tigh’s become too two-dimensional too fast. The show makes little to no effort to make him sympathetic at all in this episode, when with just a little effort his actions could be portrayed as coming out of a misguided and feverish sense of loyalty to Adama; here they seem to play out as a weak old drunk spurred on to grasp power by his scheming wife. Most everyone else is shown as having some depth to their character, no matter how reprehensible their actions; Tigh is presented as being no deeper than his flask.
.
The show was kind of treading on thin ice with Six’s “barbaric humans” monologues; given that this comes from the character who snapped a baby’s neck in the pilot, all this does for the character of the cylons is ratchet up their level of self-righteousness. But the mentions of Kobol and its history continue to intrigue. What actually happened there that pisses off the cylons so much? Six’s casual accusation of human sacrifice last week suggests that the cylons, like other monotheists we know, may have smeared their pagan neighbors with legends and myths of ritual infanticide (a la Baltar’s nightmare). Given that the cylons didn’t exist at the time Kobol was actually inhabited, they’ve seem to have created a countermyth to the human’s own idealized golden age.
.
I’m hoping the reappearance of the Quorum of Twelve also means more Zarek down the road. He’s been wonderful fun in both his previous appearances, and with the political plot boiling over at this point, I’m hoping he makes a play for a more prominent role.
Comment by ASteele —
July 30, 2005 @ 9:16 am
I thought this week was really good, I liked the focus on only a few of the plotlines. It seems like next week (in seeming defiance of the previews) we’re going to get a lot of focus on the Helo-Kara stuff.
I think the big unanswered question is who programed the Cylons to believe in God, and/or how did they start believing it on their own.
I’m actually more sympathetic to the Cylons then maybe I’m suposed to be. There not really more “evil” than the humans on the show. They are fighting a genocidal war against them, but it’s not like the humans didn’t enslave them and then when they rebelled try to commit genocide on them, and we have every reason to believe that they would do so again if they got the chance. Additionally, the Cylons really don’t seem to want to kill “everyone” or atleast there gonna change the humans into some hybrid race, so it looks like a less than complete genocide plan, which is probably better than what the humans would give them.
Comment by rwierenga —
July 30, 2005 @ 10:03 am
In one of the deleted scenes for “Kobol’s Last Gleaming,” the priest explains to Tigh that humanity fled Kobol when one of the Gods attempted to elevate himself above all of the others, thus sparking a war among the Gods. Six, who overheard this, tells Baltar that it’s blasphemy and that there was always only one God. Put that together with Six’s comments about Kobol in “Fragged,” and it starts to look like the Cylons think the war of the Gods is still going on, and they’re participants.
Comment by bryan —
July 30, 2005 @ 12:58 pm
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity
you might like to check that bit.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 30, 2005 @ 3:06 pm
bryan, you appear to have misread. I believe you have the accent on the wrong sylLABle, as it were.
Comment by matthew hogan —
July 30, 2005 @ 8:30 pm
“everyone from Mrs. Offering to people in these very comment threads have been speculating whether various minor cast members are “really a cylon.” ”
I just have to note and salute with awe someone who found a loving mother-of-our-children bride who would actually watch a science fiction show with enough attention to actually contemplate a question like that. Are such females real? Too late for me now but maybe someone else can see this and take hope.
Comment by Jim Henley —
July 30, 2005 @ 9:44 pm
For the record, Mrs. Offering made me sit with her to watch Episode 1.1 as a togetherness thing. I right away recognized that it was better than I expected. Soon after that I was hooked.
Comment by Michigan J. Frog —
July 30, 2005 @ 10:13 pm
Could it be that Mrs. Offering is really a Cylon? Hmmm?