Battlestar Galactica: "Someone to Watch Over Me"

This was a damn good episode (at least for one with no Baltar)!

[This weeks music, by a guest from the Galactic Water-cooler]
[The "so say we all" Blog Carnival is up here]

With only three shows left, things finally seem like they are beginning to tie together and the show feels again like it is moving towards a well thought-out ending that ties up all the loose ends... but boy are there still a lot of loose ends. The show has had so many cryptic predictions of events to come, dreams of the Opera House, cryptic prophesies from hybrids in goo tubs, etc.. Then there were the mysterious "head" characters that Baltar and the Cylons see, they seems to be manipulative and in contact with some hidden source of information.

What frustrated me about the last episode, Deadlock, was that it didn't seem to move the final end game story forward, but instead added more loose ends. Though I might be proven wrong about that. Adding to that frustration was the knowledge that the writers had winged it through much of the series. People had been calling them out on apparent errors. The writers seemed to have retrofitted a missing 7th Cylon, Daniel, because the Boomer/Athena was model number 8. Caprica-6 used to have a Head-Baltar which apparently they've forgotten about. They apparently changed Tyrol's son into Hot Dog's bastard because they needed there to only be one half-Cylon. If they've made any more errors, they will not be able to retrofit anything now.

However, in this episode things do seem to be rapidly moving towards an ending that does pick up all the loose threads and ties them together, though few of those loose ends actually got tied this time... but at least they finally got picked up and used.

There were basically two stories in this episode, one involving Starbuck and the other involving Boomer. The Boomer story is the one that seems to be driving the end game plot while the Starbuck story remained cryptic and ultimately unresolved and leaving us with only a tiny bit more information than we had before. Yet it was the Starbuck story that was the real emotional and story worthy triumph of this episode. And a lot of the credit for that goes to Bear McCreary who has three detailed posts on his blog about working on this episode:

1) PRE-PRODUCTION
2) PRODUCTION
3) POST-PRODUCTION

Bear's blog may eventually become required reading for the next generation of TV and film composers. The blog should probably be re-packaged as a book and and used as text in music schools for any classes that might be about film and TV composition (do such things exist?). Maybe Bear intends to teach one and is trying to use his blog to attract students?

The Starbuck storyline:

The episode begins with the Starbuck storyline. A close-up on a pair of hands as they remove a red velvet covering to reveal a set of warped and yellowed piano keys, and then the hands start to play and they cut to a montage of Starbuck’s repetitive and dreary daily routine while the piano music continues. After the intro we are shown Starbuck in the bar, drinking away her pain and confusion, and listening to the same guy play piano.

Starbuck has some huge loose ends hanging over her. Her viper blew up back in season three and, presumed dead, she somehow came back to life and to the Fleet piloting a factory-fresh Viper. Then the Cylons get spooky feelings about her viper and then Starbuck found a signal on one the vipers instruments that led them to Earth, which turned out to be a radioactive wasteland. And there on Earth, presumably light years from where her old viper blew up, she finds that old viper and her charred body with dog-tags still attached.

How any of that could possibly be is a mystery, a loose end that needs explaining. So far, little light has been shed on that mystery. Only a tiny bit was shown in this episode.

Starbuck got annoyed at the piano player for continuing to play "the same Lame-Ass Song." The guy looks up from the piano and tells her that he's trying to compose a sonata. Their conversation eventually leads them to talking about their life stories. It turns out that the piano player is a lot like Starbuck's father who was also a piano player and Starbuck has flashbacks of taking piano lessons from her dad. A happy memory of her father. They are of course dealing us some clues that this guy is her father.

But for some reason, in spite of all the speculation, it didn't really hit me that this was where they were going until Starbuck had a nightmare about walking through an empty hangar deck towards a young girl who seemed to be her childhood self from the flashbacks. I've been calling it the "Phantom of the Opera" scene because that old movie had this famous unmasking scene:



However, Starbuck's nightmare also uses a bit from Psycho, and Psycho also borrowed from "Phantom of the Opera":



When Starbuck spins the child's chair around we see the charred skull of Starbuck with her viper helmet on, something like the Psycho scene. At that point the piano player had a stronger emotional connection to Starbuck's childhood and to the mystery of what had happened to her after her viper blew up. I was even starting to suspect that I'd hear "All Along the Watchtower" by then. Nothing says you're a Cylon like finding one of your old dead bodies and they had just reminded us that this had indeed happened to Starbuck.

I think they should have had the young girl playing a version of "All along the Watchtower" or the "Final Four" theme and underlined that Cylon aspect for us. We've been strongly suspecting that Starbuck is Cylon ever since she found her body on Earth, and even before that. Bear said he had planned on scoring the scene with something like "Chopin-Meets-John-Zorn-Meets-Trent-Reznor." Oh, I wish he had. Alas, Bear felt that the cliche of a kid playing a creepy song had been done to death in horror films and that the child-like simplicity of the young actresses' real playing was more spooky and unnerving. Well, yea, kids playing spooky tunes is a cliche, but so was the whole Phantom of the Opera nightmare scene. The way to transcend cliche isn't always to run away from the cliche elements but rather to infuse them with a new layer of meaning they've never had before.

One of the elements of Starbuck's storyline that did catch me by surprise was Hera's "star drawing," just a line of dots. The drawing turned out to be a musical score, and it was supposedly "All along the Watchtower." That reveal would have still been a surprise and having heard it in a nightmare previously would have given it more emotional resonance, making the reveal even more chilling I suspect. It also would have linked childhood Starbuck to Hera more strongly. Perhaps Hera's drawing should have been in the lap of the girl in Starbuck's nightmare?

Toward the end of the episode, when Starbuck began to play Hera's score, Saul Tigh was in the bar and he recognized the music that switched him on. The music picked up percussion and other instruments as rocking version of the Final Four theme played (it wasn't Watchtower at that point). Next, Tory says, "That’s the song" and then Starbuck finally recognizes her father as her father. Tigh rushes up to the piano and asks where she heard that song, Starbuck looks to her dad as she begins to explain, but her dad isn't there, he was just a "head-dad." Starbuck had played the music all by herself.

Bear and the writers had worried that the audience would guess too early about Starbuck’s dad. I don't think this was as big a deal as they feared. Bear saw on his own blog that fans had speculated that he would be Starbuck's father. We didn't need to be completely surprised by the revelation. Guessing isn't certainty. The trick is to load our guessing and speculation with foreboding and make us fear and hope for that very reveal. It's not mere surprise that makes for a chill.

The Boomer storyline:

The episode’s other major plot line was the Boomer story which was weaved in and around Starbuck's story. It began when Tyrol learned that the Cylons wanted to execute Boomer for her role in the Cylon Civil War. Tyrol had just informed Adama that the Cylon silly putty they've been using to fill the cracks in Galactica's hull wasn't going to hold the ship together for much longer (no wonder he wanted to leave Galactica in Deadlock). Then one of the sixes dropped the news bomb, they wanted Boomer for a trial.

Tyrol eventually decides to break her out of the brig. There was a lot of good stuff here, Tyrol being taken into Boomer's projected fantasy of domestic life and freaking out, then his remembering her with lots of flashbacks, etc., but I'm not going to recap all that. You'll read about it elsewhere if you want. The point is that Tyrol got used by all that. Boomer was still on Cavil's side and before she left Galactica she frakked Helo while Athena, tied up in a closet, watched and then Boomer stole Hera from some daycare center. Tyrol even unknowingly helped Boomer carry the crate with Hera in it onto the raptor.

Some comments I've read show that some people are having a hard time buying that Boomer has become "evil" because Boomer fought for humanity in Downloaded, she argued for the Cylons to stop being butchers on New Caprica and she was unwittingly used as a sleeper agent in the first season and she tried to commit suicide to protect the fleet. So, how is she now a bad guy? Boomer turned into a villain seems out of character to some fans.

I suspect one clue to her motives was in Tyrol's flashbacks. There was a scene where Tyrol told her that, I paraphrase, "you're a machine. You don't have feelings, you have software." I think Boomer took that to heart. Remember what Cavil was teaching her -- how to be more of a machine. She repeated Cavil's rhetoric about humanity and Cylons to Ellen. Boomer would also realize that, even if she wanted to go back, she'd never be accepted by the other Cylons nor by many of the humans.

Now she can easily steal babies and sleep with Helo. She not only treats her own "illusory" humanity coldly, she treats other people's humanity coldly too. To her, it's not just her own Cylon feelings that are an illusion, but human feelings too. Thus she seems to have no more sympathy for human beings.

Oh, and what she just did to Tyrol. What a gut punch for him. If the road to hell is paved with good intentions then Tyrol just paved himself a four lane highway down into the freezing seventh circle of Hell.

By the end of the episode the two stories are put together when Ellen figures out that Boomer had been set up by Cavil all along. It was his intention from the beginning to use Boomer to steal Hera. And Hera is somehow connected to whatever force is manipulating them because of the music score she had drawn.

And then there was Sam Anders:

Another scene I should mention is that Starbuck checked on Sam Anders in sickbay. Sam's brainwaves have gotten weird. The Doc says he is in a comma, but the harmonic complexity of those brainwave patterns looked familiar to me. I think they might herald a chronic case of Deus Ex Machina accompanied by another acute bout of exposition-dumpitis.

Battlestar Galactica: "The Oath"

The new episode, "The Oath," confirms the suspicion I had in my last review. This mutiny storyline will eat up a lot of time I would have rather seen spent on solving the mystery of how Cylons can be an older "race" than we were told.

You can watch the episode here, without commercial interruption, if you missed it. And if you missed the other two episodes this season, you can go here for the links.

There is something regressive about this storyline. It would have been a great episode back when they were having stories like the one about Adm. Cain, the Pegasus and how Adm. Adama almost mutinied on her for reasons just the opposite of Zerak's and Gaeta's. Cain was too ruthlessness, she shot her own executive officer (XO) and she let her crew torture and rape Cylon prisoners. She had let them sink so far into savagery that it was doubtful they could ever again become civilized. In fact, two characters from Cain's ship have joined with the mutineers and they seem intent on picking up where they left off, raping the Cylon women.

When Tyrol and Helo killed one of the Pegasus's officers for trying to rape Helo's wife, Adama was ready to launch Vipers and a Raptor full of Marines in order to take them back from the Pegasus brig. Cain was ready to counterattack. Starbuck was ready to shoot Cain.

And there was another mutiny, on the poo-barge. The one that cost Gaeta his leg. As they keep saying, "all this has happened before..." This is the third mutiny. Come on, if even your robots can't follow orders like robots should and they rebel on you, why would you treat people like robots? A soldier's faith in your command decisions still has to be earned and you have to keep your ears open for doubts about your decisions so that you know when you need to explain or compromise.

This story worked in the same way as the other mutiny stories, it was visceral, angry, tense, raw and action packed. Everyone's old resentments and fears were on display. And I think it will be the best of the three mutinies we've seen. Gaeta and Zarek pulled off their mutiny in a much smarter and more devious way than Adm. Adama or the poo-barge mutineers. Gaeta and Zarek were meticulous in their set up. In fact, Gaeta and Zarek are so devious that it may undermine the trust of their fellow mutineers. Everyone on the bridge saw how callously Gaeta lied to everyone who trusted him to set up the mutiny. He's undermining their faith by doing that.

The problem is that we've already been there and done that even if this one is the best mutiny on the show. Another aspect of the show's regression was the way Baltar and Roslin snipe at each other. I thought they had gotten past that after what had happened in "Hub" episode. The writers seem to be slipping back into the old conflicts they know how to write instead of developing the new ones, like the conflict the characters should be concerned about but cannot be now. The conflict between what 2,000 year old Cylon memories and the fact that we've all been told that Cylons were of more recent manufacture. That's a mystery story instead of an action story, at least it could be if someone cared enough to investigate. They need to be thinking "is our whole history a lie?" By my calculations there are only 7 episodes to go and we are no closer to answering that question.

Now the characters don't even have time to think about that and previews for next week’s episode look like the show will still be dealing with the mutiny and leaving them only six episodes left for answering the questions they raised.

I hope they had an end game in mind. These last half dozen episodes shouldn't be retreading old territory like this unless they've got something I'm not seeing in mind. How does all this get us closer to understanding the shared visions of the opera house? How can they answer why Earth was like it was when they haven't left a scientific team there to tackle the questions and report back?


And remember, TV Tyrant has the BG blog carnival: http://www.tvtyrant.com/

Part 2: Battlestar Galactica: "The Disquiet That Follows My Soul"

Check out the Battlestar Galactica Blog Carnival, "So say we all" to get other opinions.

In the first part of my review I expressed some disappointment with this episode, but there were still a few crumbs of some excellent stuff even here.

First, Baltar has taken another major shift in his world-wiew. We see him preaching an angry sermon aimed at God saying things like this to his flock; "what have you done to deserve this punishment?" Bear McCreary in his blog called it a "sermon brimming with atheistic rage."

Which makes me wonder if McCreary understands atheism. You can't be angry at God unless you believe that God exists. It would be like being angry at Santa Claus for not giving you a new car for Christmas. If you're angry at someone, then you believe that someone exists. However, there is a kind of empathic anger that one can feel at God which is more like the anger you feel at fictional villains in movies, but that is not what Baltar was doing. Another kind of anger that Christians think is anger at God is when atheists express anger at the Christian in question. That's really more like Starbuck's anger at Gaeta. Starbuck doesn't really hate Gaeta, she hates his bigoted and paranoid ideas about Cylons. If Gaeta changed his tune, Starbuck's anger would evaporate. You can see plenty of that kind of atheist anger on Ray Comfort's blog, I've dealt him a few insults myself.

Baltar's anger may lead to his followers and himself questioning God, but it wasn't explicit. McCreary says that Baltar "questions the existence of God and tries to understand the tragic revelations of Earth." I didn't see that. I saw Baltar merely react to that revelation with a kind of childish and self-centered way which was very revealing of Baltar's character for such a brief slice of time. It's that very self-centered, egocentric attitude that you really have to question to become an atheist. It is religions like fundagelical Christianity that preach that you are so special and important that you are loved by the creator of the universe. It is science that has shown us how small and insignificant we are.

However, McCreary probably saw a different cut of the show for he also says; "...Head Six appears and attempts to comfort Baltar." That never happened in the version I saw and when a commenter asked why not, McCreary said:

You might be right. The version I scored was the director’s cut. To be honest, I’ve never even seen the shorter version that went on the air! So, yeah, I’ll bet that wasn’t in the episode last night. Too bad, too, it’s a great musical moment.

McCreary also says nothing very important was said by either, it merely reinforced Baltar’s despair and that Head Six disapproves of his blasphemy.

WTF! I think I would have rather have seen that Baltar/Head-Six scene than the one between Gaeta and Starbuck where they just insult each other. I had no idea that Head Six was still with Baltar much less that she disapproved of his "blasphemy." Since when are expressing real emotions and questioning God "blasphemy"? Why doesn't McCreary know that's an important clue we were not given. If Head Six said that it would be another clue that Baltar was a Cylon tool because that is nakedly manipulative. "Do not question me! Just fear me." Maybe they should fire the editor.

McCreary says another scene cut from the aired show was between Gaeta and Tigh where Tigh tries to put Gaeta in his place and you see the anger broiling up in Felix. Sounds like the scene between Gaeta and Starbuck. If the Tigh and Gaeta scene was really good, then why cut it and replace it with the Starbuck and Gaeta scene? That scene was one of the weaker ones in the show. The acting was good but the dialog was pretty weak, especially Starbuck's insults.

Another thing Baltar's sermon accomplishes is that it gets the crowd worked into a frenzy, even before a fight breaks out between Tyrol and Hotdog (which has nothing to do with the sermon, it was because Hotdog fathered the child that Tyrol though was his). If Baltar were rational enough to think about what he's doing he might realize that he's near to blowing an opportunity to increase his flock. Now that the Pythian prophesies look bogus there might be a lot more people looking for a new religion.

Baltar might become a conscious fraud as he gains power from his religion while he ceases to believe in God. He could invent reasons why God might not be happy with them and one of them might be that they don't serve Baltar enough. Start passing around that collection plate and see if you want to vocally doubt God now, Baltar.

The second really nice tid-bit in this episode was what has begun to happen to Roslin. She's getting tired of being president and she wants out. She's lost hope and wants to stop and smell the roses before she dies. Let me quote again the anti-hope argument from H.L. Mencken I used in my post "The Dark Side of Hope":

"Despite the common delusion to the contrary the philosophy of doubt is far more comforting than that of hope. The doubter escapes the worst penalty of the man of faith and hope; he is never disappointed, and hence never indignant. The inexplicable and irremediable may interest him, but they do not enrage him, or, I, may add, fool him. This immunity is worth all the dubious assurances ever foisted upon man. It is pragmatically impregnable. Moreover, it makes for tolerance and sympathy. The doubter does not hate his opponents; he sympathizes with them. In the end he may even come to sympathize with God. The old idea of fatherhood submerges in a new idea of brotherhood. God, too, is beset by limitations, difficulties, broken hopes. Is it disconcerting to think of Him thus? Well, is it any less disconcerting to think of Him as able to ease and answer, and yet failing?"

Roslin is arriving at the same conclusion.

UPDATE:

Bear responded to my comments on his own blog:

Norman Doering…

I was skimming your blog and saw your comments regarding my “atheistic” adjective for Baltar’s sermon.

You pointed out the obvious, that to be angry at God means you must acknowledge his existence. But I always interpreted this episode to show that Gaius, in fact, no longer believes in God. (And as you correctly guessed, there are lines of dialog in the extended version that would suggest this.)

Baltar only believed in God in the first place because it gave him an ego-boosting God-Complex, allowing him to feel he was somehow instrumental in the inner-workings of the universe. In “Disquiet,” he’s reached this new low, and realized that all the prophecies are bullshit (a conclusion Roslin now shares with him apparently).

The way I saw it, Baltar was preaching anger at God not because he, himself, was angry at God, but because it would be the quickest and easiest way to get the crowd really pissed off. He was venting his frustrations and wanted to stir up trouble. And it obviously worked.

However, my term “atheistic rage” was probably an exaggeration. I’ve never, in my life, met an atheist who was angry at the universe. That is, after all, one of the points of atheism: to strip away the personification of the cosmos that is implied in so many religions.

Duly noted and corrected, sir. :)

- Bear McCreary on February 1st, 2009

Bear got it exactly right, "...one of the points of atheism: to strip away the personification of the cosmos that is implied in so many religions."

Also, since Bear talks to the writers and producers, and he sees what the editors have left on the cutting room floor, his interpretation that this shows that Gaius no longer believes in God is most likely correct. Alas, what showed up on TV in the Disquiet episode wasn't enough by itself to show this in my opinion. It is, however, beginning to show in Baltar's relationship to his female followers which we saw in "Oath." Baltar seemed annoyed by their continued religiosity.

Battlestar Galactica: "The Disquiet That Follows My Soul"

SPOILERS BELOW, watch out:

So, this is how they're going to wrap it up in these last few episodes? They're going to create a violent conflict between Adm. Adama and Tom Zarek with Felix Gaeta joining up with Zarek near the end of this episode.

Of all the dormant storylines one might have left dangling, Tom Zarek's would have been one I would have left behind. For the most part his character's conflicts had seemed resolved once he had a voice in government, yet Bear McCreary's blog says that this conflict is the essential one to go forward.

I'm not so sure about that. There is a clue there when Bear quoted Ron Moore as having said that Moore "found him [Hatch] incredibly professional and prepared on the set." This storyline might be based on the fact that they discovered that Richard Hatch had more acting chops than they had expected and they wanted to use them better. Alas, this takes us farther from the questions I wanted to see answered, the mysteries that I think cry to be resolved.

I want to know how the four new Cylons are getting along with the old Cylons. I want to know that they are trying to solve the mystery of why five Cylons were there in the fleet, with repressed memories from 2,000 years ago, in the first place. If they weren't sent by the original Cylons or whatever computer intelligence instructs them, then how did they get there?

Early in the series I had assumed there was some monstrously intelligent mainframe kind of Cylon computer, or something like "Skynet" from "The Terminator," that had genetically engineered the human-like flesh puppets to do its bidding. These humanoid Cylons might have felt like they had free will but deep down their very psyches would have been designed as weapons of war in ways they couldn't understand or anticipate, as exemplified by Boomer when she was compelled to shoot Adm. Adama. I'm still not sure that isn't true, but ever since those four new Cylons were activated they've never been given a destructive mission, most of them, except for Tory, have done a lot to help the fleet.

Now, if they were not designed by some Cylon mainframe then where do they come from? Why are they different?

In the last episode we were told something astonishing: Earth was inhabited by humanoid and centurion Cylons 2,000 years ago. Tigh, Tory, Tyrol and Anders have memories from 2,000 or so years ago and those couldn't have come from a computer less than a hundred years old. It contradicts our expectations provided by the first history of the Cylons we were given. During the opening of the show each week we were told that the Cylons were "created by man" and that they "evolved." We were even told, I thought, that humans made the chrome plated robots, the centurions, less than a hundred years ago and that Saul Tigh served in the first Cylon War 40 years ago when there were no human-like Cylons known.

Tyrol and Tigh should be asking the old Cylons, "What do you know about us? Who told you we were here? What other intelligences in Cylon civilization know about us, what triggered us? What do you know and how do you know it?" And our old Cylons should be asking of the new group, "What kind of memories have you had? What can you tell us?"

Did something get skipped over or done behind our backs?

Nothing was added to answer those questions in this episode, except maybe the fact that Tigh and the Six have a baby, and Cylons aren't supposed to breed except with humans. Instead, those questions are swept under the rug while the writers cook up what, to me, looks like an unnecessary conflict that intelligent and rational people should be able to resolve through voting and debates instead of mutiny.

If they wanted to show growing tensions between human and Cylons why not show us that instead of just dropping in a few clues? I can imagine Tory hanging around almost exclusively with Cylons now. She might have a little orgy with three or more Leobens. She could be having interesting and revealing problems adjusting to life as a Cylon. Would she be finding life on a Basestar a bit sterile and boring and want to go over to that bar on Galactica only to find herself rejected there, facing fear and bigotry, and in her case partly deserving it? If the Cylons socialize with humans I'd expect them to show up at Baltar's religious services (Baltar's God is supposed to be the Cylon God). Doesn't at least a Six or two believe in that God Baltar preaches about? Couldn't she tell him more and confuse him by being too much like his head-Six vision? Wouldn't she be asking questions about Baltar's relationship with God? Does Caprica Six even listen to Baltar on the radio now?

I don't think the writers have quite got a grip on what it means to be a Cylon and they avoid the problems as much as they can. Instead of showing us the Cylon side of this tension we are only shown the human side. We see Gaeta reacting to Tigh and the Six watching their baby on some sonogram-like device and he resents how they are being so accepted now, so does a nurse. We see Gaeta argue with Starbuck, they share insults and it becomes very clear that Gaeta doesn't trust the Cylons -- why would he? One of them shot him in the leg and he lost it. He probably hasn't been informed on some recent developments. Starbuck really shouldn't be insulting him back, she should be trying to explain and save the insults for when he turns out to be too dense to get the explanation.

There's been some decision about Cylons giving the fleet their jump drive technology in exchange for full citizenship in the fleet, but we were not let in on the full explanation of this deal. It happened behind our backs.

The problem with the deal is that many people in the fleet aren’t happy with extending their alliance with the Cylons. Zarek gives a speech to the Quorum, convincing them it’s a bad idea to accept the Cylon technology. They vote to give each ship’s captain permission to refuse Cylons to board their ship. The new rule is soon tested by an uprising on the fuel processing ship. When Athena tries to board the ship, Zarek gives them the go ahead to jump away, they do, leaving the fleet without fuel.

Zarek is arrested and Adm. Adama bluffs him into, apparently, giving him the jump location for the runaway ship so they can find it. Great scene that, but they had plenty of conflicts to deal with without cooking up new angles on mostly old, and I thought resolved, conflict. I thought Zarek had turned a corner once he got his position as vice president and that he had the power he sought. Instead of violence he used debate and votes. Why turn back to an active rebellion now?

Well, it seems Adm. Adama and Apollo are being ignorant and authoritarian pricks. They are not telling people everything they know. Apollo had told the Quorum that they had reason to believe the 5th Cylon was dead, he referred to her as she, and the Quorum erupted with questions that Apollo and Adm. Adama refused to answer.

Big mistake, hinting at an even bigger mistake. If the citizens of the fleet don't know about those 2,000 year old Cylon memories they probably still think Cylons are nothing but weapons of war.

I can see why Zarek and Gaeta would be suspicious of the Cylons, I would be too, but it's not rational of them to be cooking up a violent rebellion at this point since they would most likely loose more than they gain. What are they afraid of at this moment? Do they fear that the Cylons will turn on them after some goal is achieved, like getting the Cylon jump drives installed on all the fleet's ships? Do they fear that if the jump drives are installed then the Cylons (or a crazy hybrid living in a tub of goo) will be able to control where they jump? Do Zarek and Gaeta even know much about hybrids?

Isn't this a problem that could be resolved with a bit of public education, a press conference, on the matter? If all their jumps are going to be controlled by a hybrid I'd be saying "no!" too, but that shouldn't be the case. And if it is the case that would make Adm. Adama worse than Baltar. Baltar didn't know that Caprica Six was a Cylon when he gave her codes he shouldn't have, but Adama knows full well he's installing Cylon technology without proper precautions. Adm. Adama and Apollo shouldn't be keeping secrets about why they know the 5th Cylon is probably a dead female. How much else have the citizens of the fleet not been told? Have they not been told the biggest revelation yet, that the 4 new Cylons have 2,000 year old memories of Earth? Do most people in the fleet still think the Cylons are just weapons of war?

Zarek apparently wants power for power's sake and he is exploiting the fear and bigotry of people like Gaeta, but the president and the Adamas are stupidly setting things up so that the people will side with Zarek. They are keeping secrets that it would be better off if people knew about.

There was a lot more going on this episode, but that's the big problem I have with it. I may do a part 2 for this review to cover those things later, but this post is long enough.

UPDATE:

I've added part 2 now.

Check out the Battlestar Galactica Blog Carnival, "So say we all" to get other opinions.

What the frak is going on with Baltar?

Before I get to Gaius Baltar I want to note that in my previous post I had predicted that the young boy, Derrick, that Balter was willing to die for in the episode "He That Believeth in Me" was the 5th Cylon. I thought the lymphocytic encephalitis that killed the Cylons in "A Measure of Salvation" was what the boy had too. Galactica humans are immune to it.

I think I was wrong. The boy is not the 5th Cylon.

I'm betting now that the fact that both the boy and the Cylons had some kind of encephalitis is a red herring to make us wonder if there is a connection. ( Still it's a whole lot of encephalitis going around. Maybe the writers just encephalitis on the brain ;> ) I went over to one of the Galactica forums and found that very idea discussed. Turns out that I heard wrong, the boy was only said to have "viral encephalitis," not "lymphocytic encephalitis" which could be a different virus. I also misunderstood how the term encephalitis is used. Encephalitis is a blanket term for inflammation of the brain. Saying all encephalitis is the same is like saying all cancer is the same. Encephalitis is a symptom, not a cause. Meningitis, rabies, syphilis, and malaria can all cause encephalitis.

I'm not a medical expert and so my initial impression was that it didn't seem possible for a child in advanced stages of such an infection to turn around so rapidly and seem entirely cured in about 30 minutes without some Cylon trickery or a miracle.

I had to look it up, here. And here's what that website said:

"Treatment for encephalitis depends on the virus or other germ that caused it. People with mild cases of encephalitis can recover at home as long as they're watched carefully by a parent or other adult in the household. Most cases of encephalitis just run their course and the person gets better without treatment."

Now it looks like the cult might be fooling themselves, talking themselves into seeing a miracle where it was just nature taking its course. Baltar might be helping them fool themselves, or he might himself be taken in by the illusion of a miracle. He had said the boy "looked worse" when going to the restroom to shave, but that was just a subjective impression by a non-doctor (though in this series Balter also seems to be some super-scientist, a common and unrealistic sci-fi trope that can do anything sciency).

Baltar being a super-scientist just might know he's scamming on the cult's expectations for him.


Let me recap that part of the story to put this in context: First the mother of a young child visited Baltar in prison and asked him to bless her child. The child's mother thinks her boy is suffering a deadly illness (this was never confirmed by a doctor). Then Baltar, while acquitted of the charges against him, is shamed and humiliated in court before all the last remnants of humanity. When Baltar gets out of prison, with more than half the population hating him, that same mother and some of her friends take Baltar to a small monotheistic cult where they consider Baltar to be some kind of prophet or maybe even a "savior." When the mother and sick child are brought to him again, with hopes that Baltar's prayers might heal the child, Baltar says he prayed for the boy, as his mother had asked him to, but we never saw Baltar pray.

Later when the mother questions God, "does God want my child to die," and just seeing the sick child, it seems to lead Baltar to his first moment of honest self-reflection and a sincere prayer. Baltar puts his hand on the boy's head, looks up, and then admits his own humble failings to their monotheistic God, he reveals his feelings of guilt, and then he offers to die in place of the boy. It’s not something he'd have sincerely done in the beginning of the series.

Later yet, as Baltar goes to a restroom with one of the women to shave off his beard, he remarks that the boy seems to have gotten worse. While he is shaving two men come in and one of them tells Baltar how his own son died under Baltar's orders. The two men then make an attempt on Baltar's life. One guy has a knife to Baltar's throat and is starting to cut it when Baltar goes all self-pity and guilt, remembering he offered up his own life, reminded of it by his "Head 6" (the "hallucinated" version of the beautiful female Cylon Baltar knew on Caprica), he tells everyone out loud that he is ready and willing to die in payment for his sins. The guy who was ready to cut Baltar's throat is baffled and startled. He can't kill Baltar so easily now.

Then the woman Baltar came with manages to clobber both men with a pipe claiming she felt God giving her strength. When they go back to the cult's quarters they discover the boy seems miraculously cured.

Now, Baltar had said before that the child's own immune system had a chance of curing the boy, so he might know there is possibly a low probability of a miracle here and also that the cultist want to talk themselves into believing they'd witnessed a miracle. Also the fact that the cult was mostly young, attractive, and sexually willing women could motivate him to want to be seen as their prophet since he does take advantage of it. Or... Baltar might be fooling himself too and talking himself into believing the miracle. That will no doubt be dealt with in a future show.

I don't think Baltar can continually be presented as a lying sack of shit who manipulates everyone, especially not after what he has just been through. If he did he'd no longer be an interesting character, he'd be cartoonishly evil. The writers have done a great job with Baltar's character so far, I don't think they're going to slip up now and turn him into a cartoon. They know that the hook for a villain like Baltar is to make him just sympathetic enough for us to identify our own weaknesses with him, just enough to care. I'm a pretty hard core atheist, but if I'd been through what Baltar had been going through I think I too might pray to a God I thought had a very low probability of actually existing. What harm could it do? What else could he do in that place, he doesn't have a lab or computer? And when you're that low in your own opinion of yourself you just might look anywhere for help, even improbable gods.

Also keep in mind that Baltar's "Head 6" has been repeatedly trying to mindfrak Baltar. She's been trying to push him toward belief in God and the belief that he has been chosen by God. She gives him answers and points him in the right direction. She is always loving but intolerant of Baltar's lack of faith. She is always stern and abusive when he turns from the path laid out by the one true God. This conversion seems to be part of her goal.

It seems to me that Baltar, in his desperation, is now more than sincere enough to consider the possibility of a God. He doesn't have the knowledge of God the cultists think he does, so he's not sincere about that. And as a scientist, and therefore at least a methodological naturalist, he is necessarily going to have real problems integrating such religious concepts as "prayer works" into his world view. (Galactica's writers may not understand the problems though -- at least as those difficulties exist in our world.)

There is something going on with Baltar as far as how he is connected to some source of information through "Head 6" that it seems he shouldn't have. But are the writers really going to introduce a miracle working "one true God" into their story to explain such things? I don't think you'll ever get confirmation on that as a miracle, but it's a wimpy kind of God who's only miracles are sometimes fiddling with life's chance die rolls. Such things are vulnerable to "confirmation bias."

The other thing that seems to be going on with Baltar is that he's discovering that he's having a hard time living with himself. A lot of people died because of his decisions. He's got guilty secrets he can't ever tell anyone about or they really will kill him. He gave Caprica 6 access to the defense mainframe, he knew Boomer was a Cylon and never told anyone. He's done such things, in part, because he hasn't really taken a side in the war and neither side cares much about him. He'd rather have peace, but he has no means to achieve it.

Baltar's guilty secrets only isolate him from the human culture. The Cylons know his guilty secrets and they also know they can't entirely trust him. As someone who, until recently, has been mostly concerned with staying alive I think deep down Baltar would have rather been a Cylon because they don't die so easily. They're the side with the technology and science he adores. As he said before on the Cylon ship - at least he'd have a place that he belonged. He couldn't really fight them before because he wanted to be one of them. He wasn't, when he surrendered, expecting them to be a bunch of Nazis. He's now learned they have some inhuman flaw that he can't live with.

The religious group, in Baltar's eyes, is also flawed by its loony approach to life -- praying and expecting God to do things for you instead of doing them yourself. But it's an easier flaw to learn to live with than is Cylon inhumanity.