You Can't Go Home Again

It's taken me a long time to figure out this episode, not so much the what but the why. For a long time I thought that it was a one-two punch, in other words, pull Starbuck down and then pull her back up. I think the timing on this is primarily responsible - Starbuck is lost immediately after Adama finds out that she is indirectly responsible for his son's death. In that respect it feels rather contrived.

After giving it some thought I concluded that prior to this episode (IMHO) Adama's relationship with Starbuck was mediated by their connection to Zak. In this episode I think Adama realizes how much he cares about Starbuck for herself. In other words his affection (and even love) for her is independent of the fact that she came into his life because of Zak. In this respect, I think that Roslin is somewhat (but not completely) wrong when she tells Adama and Lee that they can't let go of Starbuck because they haven't gotten over Zak's death.

In fact, Adama's sense of urgency leads him to contravene his own rules. For example, in "Water" Adama tells Roslin (who is asking Gaeta to speculate on the cause of the water tank explosions) that he doesn't like his officers to guess. In this episode Adama tells Gaeta, who has no data on where Starbuck could be, that it's time to start guessing. In fact, in the next scene Gaeta says "I would guess" with just the slightest emphasis on the word "guess."

In the meantime.... on the moon where she is landed, Starbuck is busy having a conversation with the Lords of Kobol. Its flippant tone struck me as completely at odds with the dire nature of her situation and somewhat contrived, but, after thinking about, it is in character with Starbuck's generally insolent behavior towards her superiors. Maybe the awkwardness of the monologue stems from the fact that this is the kind of conversation I would have in my head. Of course in that case we would have no idea what Starbuck is thinking. (Duh)

Starbuck's discovery of the Cylon ship provides the first "inside"glimpse of Cylon technology. Despite the sleek design and impression the ship gives of being an automaton, the inside is completely organic, once again blurring the distinction between "machine" and "man" that is typical of encounters with the Cylons. (In a later episode Boomer says to treat it like a pet.)

Finally, this episode is another instance of how alliances change based on circumstances. Tigh and Roslin, who have been polite adversaries until this point, become allies in their concern over the risks presented by continuing the search for Starbuck. Roslin's behavior towards Lee and Adama is very very tough, while still hitting the right button to bring them back in line. Even though the death of a child is an enormous tragedy, she doesn't provide a drop of sympathy. Instead, she provides a concise summation of the psychological forces driving their behavior, appeals to their "sense of honor," (a trait they both pride themselves on), and tells them to "clear [their] heads." In two minutes she accomplishes exactly what she set out to do. In this respect Roslin is a complete politician since she so quickly grasps the two men's personalities and uses this understanding to her advantage.

My favorite scenes:

When Adama climbs the ladder to the cockpit and gives Lee his helmet. I think this scene made an impression on me because Adama is almost never on the hangar deck, let alone climbing ladders. Although Adama maintains his usual tight-lipped mien, the fact that he does these things which are not typical of Adama, sends up a signal about his agitated state of mind. (Of course, it is always possible to read too much into these types of things. If the director read this he might say "What? I never thought of that! We just did it that way because we couldn't think of anything better.")

Baltar's conversations with Roslin. If you look very very closely, while Baltar is talking to Roslin, he is looking at Six. Roslin briefly glances in the same direction, but Six, of course, is completely invisible to Roslin. It's just an interesting little moment, that's all. Again, I have no idea if Mary McDonnell does this intentionally, but she is such a good actress it wouldn't surprise me at all. It certainly amps up Baltar's oddness factor.

I will be devoting a lot more time next post to Athena/Helo's developing relationship back on Caprica, but I just want to briefly mention the scene in the kitchen when Helo is making breakfast. First off, it reminds me a LOT of the scene in Jurassic Park when the kids were in the kitchen hiding from the velociraptors (mind you, I haven't seen Jurassic Park since it came out, so I may be completely wrong on this one). Second, it is a very nice visual pun with the toaster popping up, and alerting the "Toasters" that someone is there.  Very cute.

BSG 101 - Quiz number one

True or False - Starbuck loves Lee more than she ever loved Zak.

Why is BSG filmed in British Columbia?

a. Because the weather in Vancouver is so great

b. Because James Callis hasn't been able to get a visa to enter the US since the lewd behavior conviction back in '98

c. Because Canadians work cheap

Roslin was appointed Secretary of Education because:

a. She was a terrific teacher

b. She was great at getting out the vote

c. She was President Adar's girlfriend

Admiral Adama most resembles which of the following captains:

a. Jack Aubrey of HMS Surprise

b. Joseph Hazelwood of Exxon Valdez

c. Captain Feathersword of the Wiggles

Felix Gaeta prefers:

a. Men

b. Women

c. All of the above

Doc Cottle is a chain smoker because:

a. He's smoking cannabis and not tobacco

b. There is no tar or nicotine in Colonial cigarettes

c. He hasn't read the surgeon general's report

Which couple does NOT need to get drunk before having sex

a. Starbuck and Sam

b. Starbuck and Baltar

c. Starbuck and Zak

d. Starbuck and Lee

e. None of the above

Who is smarter - Sam Anders or Lee Adama? (hint - this is a trick question)

Essay question: Explain the political, social, economic, and technological conditions that contributed to the first cylon war. Discuss in detail the consequences of the Armistice in the development of the post-war political and military organization structures. Use both sides of the paper if necessary.

Essay question: Explain why Callie would allow herself to get beaten up by Tyrol in order to get him to marry her, and then proceed to one-night stand Hotdog immediately before the wedding?

Followup question: Do you think that this might have something to do with randomly choosing Tyrol to be a cylon without considering the consequence of having another half-cylon child running around?

Act of Contrition

Before I get into details, I want to say that I like every part of this episode except the underlying story about Starbuck's relationship with Zak. It's told in a series of short flashbacks, which I think fails to provide a full picture of their relationship or help us understand why Starbuck does what she does. For me the problem was getting a sense of who Zak is. The flashbacks tell what happened and they tell us what Starbuck says and does, but they don't really say anything about this man she so desperately loves.

This is a fairly significant problem from the standpoint of plot. However, what I really love about this episode is that it consists of a series of brilliant scenes set on Galactica that capture the nature of the latest crisis in the context of relationships on board the ship. 

"Act of Contrition" starts out with a glimpse of Starbuck on a viper that is out of control, and then periodically returns to this same scene. This scene is the episode's end, and while I am not sure that I understood that the first time I saw "Act of Contrition," I think it nevertheless serves as a way of creating suspense. In other words, how do we get from the current story (which is set almost entirely on Galactica) to Starbuck ejecting from a viper?

OK - so here are my favorite moments in this episode:

The scene where Flattop is celebrating his 1,000th landing. It gives us a glimpse of the pilots' lives (when they are not dealing with crises) and rituals.The Chief's question, "Why didn't anyone tell me this is Flattop's 1,000th landing? Now we look like fools" is so prosaic - it is exactly the kind of thing you would expect to hear in almost any circumstance (birthday party, major system implementation, grocery shopping) when someone isn't in the loop. The metal wagon, of course, turns out to be fatal because the drone locks in on the metal assuming it is a ship.

Speaking of which.... I also like the way that the perspective switches to the drone's viewpoint as the cart wheels round and round. This also means that we get to see the look of stunned horror on Flattop's face just before the drone hits, transforming the moment from a celebration to a tragedy.

The poker game. OK, I know it's not poker, but they are playing a card game & gambling, so calling it poker is good enough. I love the way the camera circles around, closing in on the individual players, and moving between their faces and their hands laying down cards and throwing money into the pot. It starts with a closeup of Starbuck's eyes looking around the table, and skips around the table at the other players sizing each other up and trying to figure out who is bluffing. It is also a pretext for discussing other things. It focuses on Crashdown head-on when he asks Gaeta about the Cylon detector, then on Gaeta when he responds, and on Boomer looking back and forth between the two. We get a look at Baltar smoking his cigar and making a crack about a bad smell. Given that everyone is just sitting around, it is very dynamic. Boomer kissing the cubits after she wins is  a nice touch.

Roslin and Cottle.  Cottle calling Roslin "young lady" is a stretch. But her response to his question about why she didn't get breast exams is pretty interesting, she says "Yes I DO mind" and then as an afterthought makes the most overused excuse, "I was busy." In the meantime, while Cottle is lecturing Roslin, he lights up a cigarette, and  Cottle's chain smoking pretty quickly becomes a recurring joke.

Starbuck training the nuggets. When she is lecturing them in the ready room about how she is God, etc., etc. it felt kind of heavy handed. But there are two small actions that I think keep it on keel and give a great sense of how Starbuck is trying to instill a sense of discipline in her recruits: first, she takes off Chuckles' cap, and second, as she walks back to the podium she turns around and points to someone off-screen and says "Sit up." In my opinion those two moments make the scene work and convey perfectly her relationship to her nuggets.

Lee's conversation with Commander Adama. This scene gives a sense of how fraught the father/son relationship is given that Lee's father is also his superior officer. At the beginning of the scene Adama says to Lee, "Sit down, Captain." And it seems to stay on track as a professional conversation. It ends, however, with Lee saying "You'll have to ask her yourself, Dad." switching very suddenly from military formality to familial intimacy.

Starbuck's conversation with Commander Adama. Katee Sackhoff and Edward Olmos are wonderful in this scene. The more distraught Starbuck becomes, the colder Adama becomes. His lips are pressed together and he is stony-faced, and he says absolutely nothing although it is obvious he is furious. (He does the same thing with Baltar in "Bastille Day.") When he finally speaks, he only says two things, both without much inflection. But his second statement, "Now leave while you can" is all the more powerful because the tone of voice is completely at odds with the content.

This is actually one of my all-time favorite scenes with Katee Sackhoff. Starbuck is trying to do so many things - she wants to avoid telling Adama the truth, she wants him to know she did it because she loved Zack hoping that Adama will understand, and she is trying desperately to hold on to Adama's respect and affection. She whimpers and is incoherent, but at some point she just tells Adama the truth in plain language. When Adama says, "reinstate the pilots" she rushes to say "Yes, yes I will" in a way that shows how much she wants to please him and hold on to their special relationship which was held together by their common love for Zak. The dialogue is very short but includes a lot of conflicting emotions.

This is the first episode of a two-parter. The first part is used to tear Starbuck down in Adama's eyes so that he can spend the second part proving that he still loves her anyway by leading a desperate search. A crude, but nevertheless accurate summation of these episodes.

Top Ten Reasons Why Lee Adama is a Jerk*

In no particular order:

1. He has no sense of humor
2. In spite of being a hunk, he has no sex appeal. None of his relationships with women are particularly compelling on the soft porn front. Whenever he and Dualla kiss they always end up rubbing foreheads. His only sex scene with Starbuck is short and not particularly convincing. It certainly doesn't stand up well when compared with her sex scenes with Anders. Or Zak. Or Baltar. Or Leoben.
3. His anger is one-dimensional, and shouting is his only mode of expressing it. His absolutely first meaningful scene in the Miniseries has him yelling at his father. Obviously Lee hasn't caught on to the fact that the scariest anger is often based on intonation, not volume.
4. His second most-frequent emotional expression is that of being deeply, quietly moved. This is manifested by his eyes shining with unshed tears, and sometimes he presses his lips together.
5. He is a maudlin drunk.
6. He is pompous. When he says to Dualla in "Exodus Part 2" "I am proud to serve with you and proud to call you my wife," I had a hard time keeping my gag reflex under control. Barf.
7. He is self-righteous, and is always explaining to people (lecturing, actually) why he is right and they are wrong. He does it at the end of Bastille Day and a WHOLE BUNCH the minute he decides to play lawyer and defend Baltar.
8. He has a huge ego.
9. Notwithstanding reason number 8, he has all these ridiculous insecurities and is in constant need or reassurance. In "The Hand of God" he keeps whining about how everybody thinks Starbuck would do a better job, and instead of slapping him in the face and telling him to pull himself together, everyone caters to him. In "Sometimes a Great Notion" Dualla spends the entire time she is with him (her last moments alive, actually) telling him how smart he is, how he did such a good job handling the Quorum, and on and on until you just want to kill yourself (which, of course, is exactly what Dualla does).
10. Speaking of Dualla, Lee cheats on his wife, and then we are supposed to feel compassion for him because he is obviously suffering tremendous guilt over it.

*I can think of more appropriate terms than "jerk," but none of them seem appropriate in polite society, so I am hesitant to use them in the title of a post. Were it not for my desire to avoid offending sensitive souls, I would probably choose to call Lee a prick.

Bastille Day

This is not my favorite episode by a long shot, since its primary purpose seems to be to show how Lee Adama is a really deep person and not just a viper jock, while also providing us the opportunity to see what a hunk he is by having him appear, for no apparent reason, without his uniform jacket. I did wonder, btw, whether it was written into Jamie Bamber's contract that he has to show his chest at least 2-3 times during the course of a season.

This episode also introduces Tom Zarek who will be a thorn in everyone's side until season 4.5, when .... well, I don't want to give it away. I do think including a prison ship in the fleet was a terrific idea, the survivors are now a more diverse group and coping with them will make life complicated. In addition, it also makes clear that the Colonies were not an egalitarian utopia. There are haves and have nots, sometimes defined by cultural differences, and these distinctions carry social and economic consequences.

Lee spends all his time in this episode demonstrating to Zarek how he is a truly intellectual person and how much he values social justice blah blah blah blah. The crowning moment is when Lee goes I read your book in college, and Zarek goes but it's banned and Lee goes like, yes I read it anyway. Yeah right. And John McCain read Frantz Fanon's  The Wretched of the Earth. Oh, and Lee even saves Zarek's life, and is thanked by him. Of course, Zarek's gratitude lasts about 10 minutes.

So Lee shows all sorts of psychological insight while at the same time getting to deck a few really powerful looking guys. AND he manages to lose his jacket. One scene he is wearing it and the next scene we have a front row view of his biceps.

We also get to learn something about Tom Zarek, whose arrival on the scene is extraordinarily dramatic. He obviously views himself as a "prisoner of conscience," and yet speaks in the kind of vague generalizations that led me to suspect from the start that he is a demagogue at heart. He certainly evokes widely divergent reactions. He blew up a government building - is he the Oklahoma City bomber or a member of the Weather Underground? Is he the Unabomber? He produced writings from prison - is he Nelson Mandela or Adolph Hitler? He talks about freedom - is he Barack Obama or George W. Bush?

He talks a good talk, but my decision is based on the attempted rape of Callie. When Callie defends herself from rape and gets shot by a prisoner, Zarek stands around spouting slogans about the oppression suffered by her would-be rapist, implicitly absolving him for an act of violence against women. Callie is a typical (if such a thing is possible) Galactica woman. She doesn't go down without a fight, notwithstanding the fact that she doesn't look old enough to babysit my kids. (I will be dedicating a future post to the portrayal of women in Galactica).

Some other thoughts....

Whose side are you on? I just wanted to point this one out - Adama pére asks the question and Adama fils seems, by his actions to give his answer. This will bite them in the ass by the end of Season 1.

They would have destroyed themselves anyway. Six and Doral have a short conversation about the destruction of the Colonies. Doral speaks of the Cylons as being the children of humanity. This is an important theme that will be referenced many times in the course of the series, and is thematically related to Adama's question from the mini-series - is the human race worthy of survival?

My favorite scenes

Based on the above, it should be obvious that none of them includes Lee Adama.

I love Starbuck's briefing of the pilots, with Boxey by her side. It is funny and showy, with just the right touch of insolence. It's a shame that somewhere in Season 2.0 (probably after "The Farm") Starbuck, understandably, begins to lose her sense of fun.

I also got a lot of pleasure out of Baltar's meeting with Adama. He is obsequious and talks too much. The more he talks the more suspicious Adama (who says almost nothing) looks. Six is in great form scaring the shit out of Baltar until Baltar requests the nuke. In fact, Baltar is at his most convincing when he is thinking aloud about how he would use the plutonium to build a cylon detector, which probably explains why Adama gave it to him.

And finally, for once Tigh gets the last word in a conversation with Starbuck. This is a nifty response to Starbuck's snotty remarks about Tigh's alcoholism in the ready room, and also (looking back) her smart-ass remarks at the end of the mini series.

Water

"Water" introduces a new crisis before the fleet has recovered from the crisis in "33." The episode starts with Roslin's extremely formal, uncomfortable visit to Galactica. As soon as the water tanks explode, the formality disappears and once again Adama and Roslin, who barely know each other, must work together to cope with another threat to humanity. This episode is a reminder that the fleet is a small remnant of the human population traveling with limited supplies through a vast universe that is largely empty. (In discussing season 4.5, the New York Times made the apt analogy of a wagon train travelling through uncharted wilderness).

I think the core of this episode is the meeting between the leaders of the fleet to review the situation. These scenes are as much about the divide between civilian government and military authority, as they are about the water shortage.

The expression of these separate agendas is subtle but critical, and will explode by the end of Season 1.

For example, after Gaeta does his presentation, Roslin presses him for an opinion on the cause of the explosion. When Adama finally gives permision, Gaeta avoids saying it was caused by an explosion and instead offers the theory that the cause is structural damage from the war. It's obvious that Gaeta is lying, and everyone in the military knows it was caused by sabotage. In fact, Roslin probably suspects that herself when she responds "Interesting."

Another example is the comments made by Tigh, which display unconcealed contempt for the civilian population. When Tigh says to Roslin, "Now you want me to guess," Adama, who is looking at some papers, says, without raising his eyes, "Colonel." This small act establishes Adama's total authority over his officers, and is also a small concession to the president.

Finally, Gaius Baltar's relationship to the other characters begins to develop. His conversations with Six continue, and their discussions about god and religion have sexual overtones (actually, overtones is not a sufficiently strong word). Baltar's simultaneous conversations with Six and Adama are very funny, mainly because Baltar is having a nervous breakdown trying to manage what he says, Six is provocative, and Adama is not saying much, but looking distinctly dissatisfied. As usual Baltar is a very bad liar, which doesn't prevent him from doing it all the time. That he is always caught doesn't prevent him from lying again. (In other words, he meets the definition of insanity by constantly doing the same thing but expecting different results.)

As outcome of the meeting is that Baltar and Gaeta begin working together, which thrills Gaeta (who runs after Baltar like a little puppy), and bores Baltar. This is the start of a very complicated relationship that changes drastically over the course of the series and has a profound impact on Gaeta (see my entry on Felix Gaeta for a lengthier discussion).  

The parallel Sharon stories also start to unfold. On Galactica Boomer's actions, for the first time, are a threat to the fleet, and Boomer's sense of self starts to deteriorate. On Caprica, Helo and Athena's relationship begins to heat up. Both these plot lines become more important in determining events as the two Sharons' personalities start to diverge.

Some final thoughts:

I never bought Tyrol and Boomer as a couple. I just never felt that there was any chemistry between them. I also don't believe that Tyrol would cover up for her. On the other hand, I always thought that Helo / Athena and Tyrol / Callie were great matches.

I didn't understand either why Boomer placed the last detonator in the raptor next to her seat. I finally concluded that if they found water that she was supposed to blow the raptor up before they could report back to Galactica. And, in fact, she has to turn it off before she is capable of telling Crashdown that she has found water.

I have already said how much I like the card game between Starbuck and Baltar, but I'll repeat myself here. As far as I am concerned the game is played as if it is another form of foreplay. There is also a nice little touch in the background - as Baltar says he doesn't have any money, Gaeta, anxious to please, reaches towards his pocket to get some out for him.