BSG Saturdays: Season 4, Episode 1, "He That Believeth in Me"
By Todd VanDerWerff
Returning in our hour of greatest need, Battlestar Galactica began its fourth and final season (depending on if you follow the Sci Fi Channel’s rather asinine nomenclature of a season that will essentially be split into two smaller ones) with a dull, seething roar. “He That Believeth in Me” wasn’t a slam-bang premiere, outside of its opening space battle, but it contained enough roiling tensions to hopefully placate fans who lost faith in the third season, during a long string of stand-alone “personal” stories that served to flesh out other aspects of the ragtag fleet and (in too many cases) bore hardcore fans to tears. While Battlestar is, in many ways, a post-genre work (it’s only tangentially a science fiction tale much of the time, and when things like technobabble pop up, they often infuriate), the very genre it belongs to carries with it a legion of fans looking to nitpick each and every thing about the show they passive-aggressively love (one poster on the Television Without Pity boards questioned how Starbuck could have heard of a Petri dish if she had not grown up on an Earth where Julius Richard Petri had invented the thing). To that end, Battlestar often feels like a show at war with itself and perceptions of what it’s trying to do, and the tug-of-war between its small, personal side and its operatic side that indulges in things like a complicated mythology involving lost colonies and Biblical references galore is occasionally what makes the show fascinating—when it’s not leading to things like last season’s poorly thought-out “The Woman King.”
Happily, “Believeth” came down on the right side of that ledger, offering up a heaping helping of space battle action to kick things off, then quietly downshifting to tell a smaller, more personal story of the emotional fallout from the big events that closed out last season (in brief, four members of the fleet discovered they were actually—gasp—Cylons and the presumed dead Starbuck returned). Among the big themes Battlestar has always wrestled with is the idea of personal identity. How much of yourself is predetermined by things beyond your control and how much is determined by your own free will? It’s a question that science fiction, with its alien hive minds and brainwashing agents, has always wrestled with, and Battlestar made much hay out of this, especially in its first season.
Written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, two of Battlestar’s surest hands at melding mythos with melodrama, and directed by Michael Rymer, one of those most responsible for the series' now-famous docudrama look, what was most fascinating in the episode was the stuff focusing on the poor, beleaguered Gaius Baltar (James Callis, whose work—already great in the miniseries that functioned as the series’ pilot—improves even more with each season). While many fans will likely write this storyline off as completely tangential and a waste of time (as it doesn’t get to the heart of any of the series' big questions), the storyline does strike at the heart of these themes of identity. Throughout the series, Baltar has been the most fascinatingly unpredictable character, a highly competent man who’s reduced to incompetence by the sheer magnitude of the guilt resting on his shoulders and the strange insanity (or is it?) of the Cylon manifestation living inside of his head. Largely spurred by the fact that always having Baltar just escape detection would grow wearisome and by Callis’ ability to play just about anything, the show’s writers have had him try on an unbelievable number of roles and guises. His latest guise is Jesus, which, when you think about it, sort of seems inevitable.
What’s fascinating is how being cast as a holy man makes Baltar, for once, realize just how terrible of a person he’s been. He’s danced around this notion in the past, but his innate knack for self-preservation kept him from getting too introspective. Now that he’s essentially free and easy (and living with a harem of beautiful women while he, apparently, invents monotheism, no less), he has a moment to realize just how much damage he’s done to everyone around him and just how much he’s bumbled through life, a very lucky man so far. As he prays over the dying body of a very sick little boy (asking God to take him instead of the boy), Callis imbues the moment with an impressive tragic weight. He’s not Jesus, really; he’s much too flawed and imperfect for that. All he really wants is a sort of finality he knows won’t be coming. Instead, even as he’s assaulted in the bathroom by a man whose son’s death was Baltar’s fault, he’s saved by a most likely deus ex machina. And as all of this is going on, the Number Six (Tricia Helfer) in his head is feeding him the lines he needs to get through everything with the harem girls and acolytes. Throughout the series, Head Six has clued Baltar in to things that seem as though he shouldn’t have known them, to the point where it now seems as though Battlestar is putting God himself back into the question of predestination vs. free will. Did somebody up there choose Baltar to be a prophet? And is there any way he can shirk that duty?
The fallout from last season’s finale was also well-handled, particularly as our four newly-revealed Cylons dealt with their new identities. While an early scene where an activated Tigh (Michael Hogan) put a bullet through the forehead of Adama (Edward James Olmos) was too obviously a worst-case-scenario hallucination by the Cylon-despising Tigh, a later scene where Roslin (Mary McDonnell, clearly relishing a return to the center of the action) and Adama talked over whether or not Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) was actually a Cylon after her improbable return was terrific. While using the dramatic irony of having Roslin and Adama commenting on Cylon sleeper agents in a room full of them, including Tigh, Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) and Tory (Rekha Sharma), might have seemed a bit obvious, Rymer used the framing of the shots to his full advantage, situating the six actors in the scene (Jamie Bamber’s increasingly too-heroic Apollo was the other) in a fascinating manner where he could cut from a beautifully composed frame of all six actors that played up the Cylons’ anxieties to three separate two-shots that further exacerbated these anxieties. In particular, seeing Tyrol, staring into space in worry, half of him offscreen (one is tempted to say it’s the not-yet-activated Cylon half) while Roslin nattered on about the great threat of not-yet-activated Cylons encapsulated two very separate forms of dread.
But will these Cylons be able to override their programming? Or is that programming so much a part of them that to even try would be useless? Circling back to those ideas of identity, the episode put such questions up front, as the four gathered in a room to talk about what they needed to do to keep their fleet from falling at their hands. Earlier, Starbuck’s husband Anders (newly-promoted series regular Michael Trucco) had an encounter with a Cylon centurion in the midst of a frenzied space dogfight, who apparently scanned him, found him to be of Cylon origin and called off the attack (another convenient deus ex machina?). So while there’s some benefit to being one of the final five Cylons, clearly the others also argue that a switch could be flipped at any time and lead to mass chaos. Tigh bets, however, that self-knowledge is the key. Now that they know they’re Cylons, they can step up and change and fight against their programming. Surely, though, it can’t be that easy. What everyone’s circling around and afraid to directly confront (only Apollo, in the guise of questioning whether Starbuck is a Cylon, actually even asks it) is the idea that being a Cylon doesn’t really change you, if you’ve already got your allegiances. Athena (Grace Park) has switched sides, fighting for the humans, so isn’t it possible for others? Time will tell.
Finally, there’s Starbuck, who finds her return to the fleet greeted with incredulity. While she thought she was gone for only a few hours (after finding Earth, she made a hasty return), the fleet informs her she’s been gone for over two months (as a side note, one of Galactica’s bigger problems is how poorly it explains that its events are occurring over the sweep of months, not just weeks—the late series Rome and AMC’s Mad Men occasionally have similar problems). Suspected by almost everyone of being a Cylon and taken in a direction she knows to be away from Earth, Starbuck goes a little more bugnuts than usual (which is good—Sackhoff plays desperate and crazy well), desperately trying to hang on to the path to Earth before it escapes from her head, like a good song she heard on the radio. While Starbuck is often on the periphery of the episode, she’s a constant reminder of the real dangers and uncertainties the fleet faces, and the question of whether or not to trust her (particularly in light of a bit of prophecy from the TV movie Razor that says she will lead the human race to its destruction) will weigh heavily on the rest of the season. Indeed, the cliffhanger (another sequence marvelously staged by Rymer) features her telling her husband she’d kill him if she found out he was a Cylon after he says he'd be OK with her being one (there’s that dramatic irony again), pistol-whipping him until he tells her where Roslin is, then using a grenade to blow open that room. She enters, wreathed by smoke, seen from Roslin’s perspective as a hazy angel of death (I love the grim little smile McDonnell wears during this sequence, as if she’s been expecting this all along), ready to force Roslin (at gunpoint, if need be) to turn this fleet around.
“He That Believeth in Me” was one of those episodes that raised more questions than answers, allowing fans to muck about in the series' larger storylines for a little while and wonder if series creator Ron Moore has a point to all of the mysticism and religious stuff he’s been piling on over the course of the series (it remains the least-explained element of a series that has actually been pretty concrete so far). Moore will rather cheerfully admit that he and his writers are making a lot of this up as they go along, but so much of the series has hung together so far that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It certainly helps when they’re able to do things like the sequence that opened “Believeth,” where the newly-revealed Cylons ran around, wondering if they would be the next to betray their friends, even as out among the stars, the humans and Cylons did battle and Apollo wondered if this was really the real Starbuck (so did Roslin and Adama, as Roslin tried to get everyone to ignore Starbuck, saying it was a Cylon trick. Marvelously tense and filled with special effects that are, hands down, the best on television, the sequence was a great example of how deftly Battlestar blends personal and political intrigue with outright action when it wants to. The series often then leans more toward the former in individual episodes, but that’s, on the whole, a good thing. Battlestar succeeds where many others have failed because it’s less concerned with what these people can do in a space battle and more with what personal issues and identity crises put them in that situation in the first place.
***
Random speculation will be the order of the day in the comments section, I hope, so here are some grossly uninformed guesses as to the answers to various questions. Firstly, I think the Cylon god will prove to be the one, true god, but it will be one of those things like in Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” where “God” is an artificial intelligence or something, so the series doesn’t drift too far into mysticism. Secondly, I think the final Cylon will be proved to be Apollo’s wife Dualla (Kandyse McClure), the better to eventually get Apollo and Starbuck together to end the series. Thirdly, I don’t think Starbuck’s a Cylon (obviously), but I also think the Cylons have something to do with her return. And finally, I really have no idea what to make of the human-Cylon hybrid babies and their importance to the narrative (since there are two of them now). Think I’m off-base? Have your own ideas? Spout off in comments.
______________________________________________
House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Returning in our hour of greatest need, Battlestar Galactica began its fourth and final season (depending on if you follow the Sci Fi Channel’s rather asinine nomenclature of a season that will essentially be split into two smaller ones) with a dull, seething roar. “He That Believeth in Me” wasn’t a slam-bang premiere, outside of its opening space battle, but it contained enough roiling tensions to hopefully placate fans who lost faith in the third season, during a long string of stand-alone “personal” stories that served to flesh out other aspects of the ragtag fleet and (in too many cases) bore hardcore fans to tears. While Battlestar is, in many ways, a post-genre work (it’s only tangentially a science fiction tale much of the time, and when things like technobabble pop up, they often infuriate), the very genre it belongs to carries with it a legion of fans looking to nitpick each and every thing about the show they passive-aggressively love (one poster on the Television Without Pity boards questioned how Starbuck could have heard of a Petri dish if she had not grown up on an Earth where Julius Richard Petri had invented the thing). To that end, Battlestar often feels like a show at war with itself and perceptions of what it’s trying to do, and the tug-of-war between its small, personal side and its operatic side that indulges in things like a complicated mythology involving lost colonies and Biblical references galore is occasionally what makes the show fascinating—when it’s not leading to things like last season’s poorly thought-out “The Woman King.”Happily, “Believeth” came down on the right side of that ledger, offering up a heaping helping of space battle action to kick things off, then quietly downshifting to tell a smaller, more personal story of the emotional fallout from the big events that closed out last season (in brief, four members of the fleet discovered they were actually—gasp—Cylons and the presumed dead Starbuck returned). Among the big themes Battlestar has always wrestled with is the idea of personal identity. How much of yourself is predetermined by things beyond your control and how much is determined by your own free will? It’s a question that science fiction, with its alien hive minds and brainwashing agents, has always wrestled with, and Battlestar made much hay out of this, especially in its first season.
Written by David Weddle and Bradley Thompson, two of Battlestar’s surest hands at melding mythos with melodrama, and directed by Michael Rymer, one of those most responsible for the series' now-famous docudrama look, what was most fascinating in the episode was the stuff focusing on the poor, beleaguered Gaius Baltar (James Callis, whose work—already great in the miniseries that functioned as the series’ pilot—improves even more with each season). While many fans will likely write this storyline off as completely tangential and a waste of time (as it doesn’t get to the heart of any of the series' big questions), the storyline does strike at the heart of these themes of identity. Throughout the series, Baltar has been the most fascinatingly unpredictable character, a highly competent man who’s reduced to incompetence by the sheer magnitude of the guilt resting on his shoulders and the strange insanity (or is it?) of the Cylon manifestation living inside of his head. Largely spurred by the fact that always having Baltar just escape detection would grow wearisome and by Callis’ ability to play just about anything, the show’s writers have had him try on an unbelievable number of roles and guises. His latest guise is Jesus, which, when you think about it, sort of seems inevitable.What’s fascinating is how being cast as a holy man makes Baltar, for once, realize just how terrible of a person he’s been. He’s danced around this notion in the past, but his innate knack for self-preservation kept him from getting too introspective. Now that he’s essentially free and easy (and living with a harem of beautiful women while he, apparently, invents monotheism, no less), he has a moment to realize just how much damage he’s done to everyone around him and just how much he’s bumbled through life, a very lucky man so far. As he prays over the dying body of a very sick little boy (asking God to take him instead of the boy), Callis imbues the moment with an impressive tragic weight. He’s not Jesus, really; he’s much too flawed and imperfect for that. All he really wants is a sort of finality he knows won’t be coming. Instead, even as he’s assaulted in the bathroom by a man whose son’s death was Baltar’s fault, he’s saved by a most likely deus ex machina. And as all of this is going on, the Number Six (Tricia Helfer) in his head is feeding him the lines he needs to get through everything with the harem girls and acolytes. Throughout the series, Head Six has clued Baltar in to things that seem as though he shouldn’t have known them, to the point where it now seems as though Battlestar is putting God himself back into the question of predestination vs. free will. Did somebody up there choose Baltar to be a prophet? And is there any way he can shirk that duty?
The fallout from last season’s finale was also well-handled, particularly as our four newly-revealed Cylons dealt with their new identities. While an early scene where an activated Tigh (Michael Hogan) put a bullet through the forehead of Adama (Edward James Olmos) was too obviously a worst-case-scenario hallucination by the Cylon-despising Tigh, a later scene where Roslin (Mary McDonnell, clearly relishing a return to the center of the action) and Adama talked over whether or not Starbuck (Katee Sackhoff) was actually a Cylon after her improbable return was terrific. While using the dramatic irony of having Roslin and Adama commenting on Cylon sleeper agents in a room full of them, including Tigh, Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) and Tory (Rekha Sharma), might have seemed a bit obvious, Rymer used the framing of the shots to his full advantage, situating the six actors in the scene (Jamie Bamber’s increasingly too-heroic Apollo was the other) in a fascinating manner where he could cut from a beautifully composed frame of all six actors that played up the Cylons’ anxieties to three separate two-shots that further exacerbated these anxieties. In particular, seeing Tyrol, staring into space in worry, half of him offscreen (one is tempted to say it’s the not-yet-activated Cylon half) while Roslin nattered on about the great threat of not-yet-activated Cylons encapsulated two very separate forms of dread.But will these Cylons be able to override their programming? Or is that programming so much a part of them that to even try would be useless? Circling back to those ideas of identity, the episode put such questions up front, as the four gathered in a room to talk about what they needed to do to keep their fleet from falling at their hands. Earlier, Starbuck’s husband Anders (newly-promoted series regular Michael Trucco) had an encounter with a Cylon centurion in the midst of a frenzied space dogfight, who apparently scanned him, found him to be of Cylon origin and called off the attack (another convenient deus ex machina?). So while there’s some benefit to being one of the final five Cylons, clearly the others also argue that a switch could be flipped at any time and lead to mass chaos. Tigh bets, however, that self-knowledge is the key. Now that they know they’re Cylons, they can step up and change and fight against their programming. Surely, though, it can’t be that easy. What everyone’s circling around and afraid to directly confront (only Apollo, in the guise of questioning whether Starbuck is a Cylon, actually even asks it) is the idea that being a Cylon doesn’t really change you, if you’ve already got your allegiances. Athena (Grace Park) has switched sides, fighting for the humans, so isn’t it possible for others? Time will tell.
Finally, there’s Starbuck, who finds her return to the fleet greeted with incredulity. While she thought she was gone for only a few hours (after finding Earth, she made a hasty return), the fleet informs her she’s been gone for over two months (as a side note, one of Galactica’s bigger problems is how poorly it explains that its events are occurring over the sweep of months, not just weeks—the late series Rome and AMC’s Mad Men occasionally have similar problems). Suspected by almost everyone of being a Cylon and taken in a direction she knows to be away from Earth, Starbuck goes a little more bugnuts than usual (which is good—Sackhoff plays desperate and crazy well), desperately trying to hang on to the path to Earth before it escapes from her head, like a good song she heard on the radio. While Starbuck is often on the periphery of the episode, she’s a constant reminder of the real dangers and uncertainties the fleet faces, and the question of whether or not to trust her (particularly in light of a bit of prophecy from the TV movie Razor that says she will lead the human race to its destruction) will weigh heavily on the rest of the season. Indeed, the cliffhanger (another sequence marvelously staged by Rymer) features her telling her husband she’d kill him if she found out he was a Cylon after he says he'd be OK with her being one (there’s that dramatic irony again), pistol-whipping him until he tells her where Roslin is, then using a grenade to blow open that room. She enters, wreathed by smoke, seen from Roslin’s perspective as a hazy angel of death (I love the grim little smile McDonnell wears during this sequence, as if she’s been expecting this all along), ready to force Roslin (at gunpoint, if need be) to turn this fleet around.“He That Believeth in Me” was one of those episodes that raised more questions than answers, allowing fans to muck about in the series' larger storylines for a little while and wonder if series creator Ron Moore has a point to all of the mysticism and religious stuff he’s been piling on over the course of the series (it remains the least-explained element of a series that has actually been pretty concrete so far). Moore will rather cheerfully admit that he and his writers are making a lot of this up as they go along, but so much of the series has hung together so far that I’m willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.
It certainly helps when they’re able to do things like the sequence that opened “Believeth,” where the newly-revealed Cylons ran around, wondering if they would be the next to betray their friends, even as out among the stars, the humans and Cylons did battle and Apollo wondered if this was really the real Starbuck (so did Roslin and Adama, as Roslin tried to get everyone to ignore Starbuck, saying it was a Cylon trick. Marvelously tense and filled with special effects that are, hands down, the best on television, the sequence was a great example of how deftly Battlestar blends personal and political intrigue with outright action when it wants to. The series often then leans more toward the former in individual episodes, but that’s, on the whole, a good thing. Battlestar succeeds where many others have failed because it’s less concerned with what these people can do in a space battle and more with what personal issues and identity crises put them in that situation in the first place.
Random speculation will be the order of the day in the comments section, I hope, so here are some grossly uninformed guesses as to the answers to various questions. Firstly, I think the Cylon god will prove to be the one, true god, but it will be one of those things like in Isaac Asimov’s “The Last Question,” where “God” is an artificial intelligence or something, so the series doesn’t drift too far into mysticism. Secondly, I think the final Cylon will be proved to be Apollo’s wife Dualla (Kandyse McClure), the better to eventually get Apollo and Starbuck together to end the series. Thirdly, I don’t think Starbuck’s a Cylon (obviously), but I also think the Cylons have something to do with her return. And finally, I really have no idea what to make of the human-Cylon hybrid babies and their importance to the narrative (since there are two of them now). Think I’m off-base? Have your own ideas? Spout off in comments.House contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
posted by Todd at 9:30 AM
18 Comments:
I had a different reading on those final scenes with Starbuck. First, she didn't get any information on Roslyn's whereabouts from Sam; she knocked him and the other guards out, took a weapon, and went hunting. That she went first to Adama's quarters was probably to ask him where Laura was, but finding Laura there, recuperating from her chemo treatments, was convenient.
I don't think Starbuck wanted to persuade Roslyn, I think she wanted to kill her. While it would suck to lose Roslyn so early in this final season, all previous clues point up that she has to die before the fleet finds Earth. We all thought the cancer would kill her, but maybe Starbuck does.
The thing I'm most curious about is what the heck Lee is going to do now. He said something about an opening in the political sphere, was he talking about the presidency (Roslyn's dying), and wouldn't that be a bit presumptuous, even for him? And isn't it ridiculous for him to say, "Nah, I don't want to fly anymore" when there aren't all that many experienced pilots and the Cylons are kicking their asses? Starbuck will treat all this news with incredulity, but the news that Baltar got off will most likely incense her. Can't wait to see those scenes.
one of Galactica’s bigger problems is how poorly it explains that its events are occurring over the sweep of months, not just weeks—the late series Rome and AMC’s Mad Men occasionally have similar problems.
Add HBO's otherwise brilliant John Adams to this list. "Reunion" would have been so much more poignant if we understood how long the couple had been separated. He was over there for something like six years before Abigail came to join him.
Todd wrote: "Battlestar often feels like a show at war with itself and perceptions..."
Ain't that the truth. It would seem that Moore, et. al., are not playing by a series bible, but just winging it. There are some serious plot holes with respect to certain characters and even in the story line. For instance, they really haven't taken up the Final Five and Five Lords of Kobol connection yet, Tighe's age as he fought in the First Cylon War - well, I'll just stop there before I rip off a rant.
"Random speculation will be the order of the day in the comments section, I hope..."
It was a great review and I really enjoyed it. I have a few issues to take up, but I will save that for future discussion. For now, I'd like to indulge in some random speculation. :>)
Over the past three seasons, there have been little hints about who is what. You don't necessarily see it when watching the first time, but the second time around, you pick up on certain things - in particular now that you know who four of the Final Five are - Tighe and Tyrol in particular. Moore is clearly enjoying the cryptic nature of the mysticism and dropping hints right and left.
Having said all that, I think that Moore is digging himself a hole that he may not be able to get out of without pressing the Giant Cosmic Reset Button. With respect to the Final Five, Tighe is a particularly interesting case - he's old enough to have fought in the original Cylon war well before the Cylons supposedly evolved into the "skin jobs". There also appears to be a connection between the Five Lords of Kobol and the Cylon Final Five.
There is also the interesting connection between the Tyrol/Cally baby and Agathon/Sharon baby - the first being a male and the later being a female. Hera, the A/S baby has gotten most of the attention to this point, but it's only a matter of time before the T/C baby becomes a focus point.
One of the more intersting points in "Believeth" was Anders and his connection to the Cylon Raider. Clearly, being one of the Final Five, the Cylon recognised him, relayed the information to the Basestar Cylons and the attack was pulled. This lends some credence to the Final Five theory of being the leaders of the pack - the Final Four being the acolytes and the Final One being the over all boss Cylon - or God. This could lead to some very interesting interactions with the original Seven models.
In the "Razor" DVD, there was an extended scene where the Cylon Basestar Hybrid had a rather long mystic revelation - here's the high lights.
"The denial of the one true path, played out on a world not their own, will end soon enough. Soon there will be four, glorious in awakening."
The Final Four is foretold by the Hybrid during the last war - curious what?
"And in the midst of confusion he will find her, enemies brought together by impossible longing, enemies now joined as one. The way forward, at once unthinkable, yet inevitable."
Nostradamus had nothing on Moore with regard to cryptic revelations. It would appear that he's hinting about Baltar and Six, but that doesn't make a lot of sense because Baltar and Six were never enemies. - the opposite in fact. It can't be Starbuck and Anders - that would just flat out suck.
"And the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering."
Baltar as the Final One? It would seem to fit as D'Anna tortured Baltar and that would make sense of the Temple Scene where she said she was sorry. However, that would be a cop out and ruin everything - Baltar as a character doesn't deserve to be the Final One.
"I can see them all. The seven, now six, self-described machines who believe themselves without sin. But in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know enmity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many."
So the prediction is that the Seven will become Six - meaning that one model will be eliminated - and that factionalism will break out shattering the once united front. That does seem to fit the D'Anna boxing scenario, but apparently not so fast - Lawless is booked for this final season so it may be that the Seven are so curious about the Final Five that they unbox the D'Anna model.
"And then they will join the promised land, gathered on the wings of an angel. Not an end, but a beginning."
Who knows what the hell that means. :>)
Back to Moore's problem, he also has a problem with two of the main characters - Starbuck and Roslin. In Starbuck's case, she is the harbinger of doom - if they follow her, they will be fail in their effort to reach Earth. That has been foretold, but I can't find the reference at the moment. Which means that at some point, Starbuck has to be eliminated if they are to get to Earth.
As this is already way too long and wanders all around, I'll just put my prediction out there.
Despite denials to the contrary, and the prophesy that says Roslin has to die before the Fleet reaches Earth, my money is on Roslin as the Final One.
I could be wrong, but there it is.
Sorry for the length.
By the way, did anybody else get a very Bablyon 5 vibe from the Baltar worship scenario?
Byron/Baltar?
My fear for the last season is that they will reverse the most interesting aspect of the show, namely that the bad guys are monotheistic and the good guys are polytheistic/pagan. This was matched by the terrorist/occupier dynamic on New Caprica, but I'm seeing hints that the series will end with the ultimate vindication of monotheism as the true and liberating religion. Roslyn and/or Adama as Moses (dying after seeing Earth), Baltar as John the Baptist, Starbuck as the messiah. This is a plausible way of wrapping it up--although there are other possible combinations--but I'd rather not be forced to interpret the series as an evangelical allegory.
I'm really trying to get back on board here, but I thought Episode 4.1 reeked of the main problem I've always had with the show (and one that's become particularly glaring with the Dylan 4): Moore & Co. hit the reset button WAY too often. So, Starbuck is actually going to kill Roslin now? Riiight. This is sorta akin to Apollo-Adama either hating each other or having yet another father-and-son make-up session every other episode. Roslin has cancer!...wait, wait, no she doesn't...wait, she does! There's a hybrid baby that's terribly important, until we forget about her, and, oh, yeah, I guess we just wrote ourselves another hybrid baby, didn't we?
In other words, it just feels to me like Moore et al are completely winging it, and they're just contriving dubious plot twists (Cylon Tigh) or throwing out major arc prophecies (that hybrid-gobbledygook Sheik posted from Razor) to keep the ball moving. In other words, much as it pains me to say it, I get the sense we're in late-season X-Files territory.
Mind you, I hope I'm wrong, and that in fact "they have a plan," even if there's been no indication of it. I thought the New Iraqprica stuff at the top of Season 3 was still as good as the show's ever been. But my patience with the reset button has grown thin.
The series sort of jumped the shark for me last season - I used to find it riveting, always surprising, raising the stakes. It's interesting, highly watchable, etc., but it seems like Moore & Co. have run out of ways to credibly raise the stakes higher, and are trying too hard to maintain the extreme, existential melodrama that carried them through the first seasons, until the end of the New Caprica arc.
That said, I thought the Baltar scenes in 4.1 were great. I fully expected this plotline to be stupid, containing as many cliches as it does. But as Todd notes, Callis is terrific. He was hilarious, genuinely affecting, unpredictable, ambiguous. Jesus Christ? Why not!
First off, how nice it is to see all of you again. Would have been nice to meet up to discuss the occasionally underwhelming Razor this past fall, but things got in the way.
Joan: I think your reading of the Starbuck/Anders scene is right, but I do think Starbuck is going to get Roslin to turn the fleet around rather than kill her. It's nice to know this is the last season (so we can be reasonably certain all bets are off in regards to who lives and who dies), but I don't think the show is going to go THAT far just yet (not even having Starbuck not succeed at killing Roslin, though she tries).
Finally, I think a lot of you have some good speculation as to what's going to happen in the latter half of the season, but I disagree that the show has jumped the shark because not every thread in the masterplot is going to make sense (X-Files or, I guess, Alias style). It's not that I don't enjoy the masterplot, and it's not that I'm not completely interested in who the final Cylon is and other matters, but I don't really care all that much if the story, in the end, completely hangs together and if all foreshadowing points to an accurate end. It's an issue I hope to get to more often in future installments of this season. For now, though, suffice it to say that the demands of a television production schedule make it all but impossible to come up with a masterplot that hangs together completely (it's one of the reasons I've been kinder to Lost than others on this blog).
"But wait!" I hear you saying. "What about The Wire?" I'll get to that.
I think one of the problems with evaluating television through a holistic approach is that you can never really see the whole until the work is complete and then, you can always find flaws in the whole -- places where the characters acted out of character or where the plot made little-to-no sense. It remains one of the chief criticisms those in the school of "Film will always be better than TV" thought will always have on TV. And, to a degree, they're right, even with all of the crowing about how TV is really more like a novel in the end. Looking at a TV series as a cohesive work is rarely going to result in something that you can point to as a kind of ideal for how to do it because personnel change, storylines get adjusted and things go wrong. As an example, do the recent, underwhelming seasons of The Simpsons count against its place in the pantheon? Or do its first, incredible seasons assure it a spot at or near the top?
Really, when you're making a TV show, the best you can do is plan about a season at a time (which is why most genre shows have adopted the Buffy model of the season-long threat that's finally dealt with in the finale, as opposed to the X-Files overarching narrative). Between seasons, things will often change -- Nancy Marchand's death took away one of the primary story engines on The Sopranos, and the third season there is as much about Tony trying to escape from her shadow as it is about THE SHOW trying to escape from her shadow. Sometimes, these changes have a surprise benefit (as Gillian Anderson's pregnancy created a story arc on X-Files that drove much of the rest of the mythology in the series), but, more often, they cause the show to flail for a while before finding its footing. So an individual season of a series can sometimes tell a cohesive story, but asking a whole series to is rarely going to pay off. Deadwood, for example, is one of my favorite series of all time, but it's filled with digressions and dead ends that make it impossible to approach on a level as a whole work.
What CAN stay consistent in a series is theme and character. There's something Deadwood excelled at -- the themes grew richer as the series went on, as did the characters. But even if all series can't be as terrific as Deadwood, I think the least we can ask is that they remain consistent thematically and character-wise, and BSG has managed that and then some for the most part. It's the trick of not criticizing the whole, but the parts that make up the whole, if that makes sense. Now, there have been times where characters have behaved out of character or where the themes got lost in the morass on BSG (and more than usual in season three), but, on the whole, the series is still driving towards its initial goals, even if the story is not as clear-cut as we might want it to be. Put another way -- I suspect Ron Moore has always sort of known what Earth would be like when it was found, but I doubt he knew from the first exactly which twists would lead to finding it (otherwise, why all of the derivative quests to find ancient artifacts that point the way there?). This is all a long-winded way of saying that if Tigh's backstory has a few plot holes that become obvious after intense inspection, it won't bother me nearly as much as if his backstory blatantly contradicts what the show has developed Tigh as being and standing for over the course of three seasons. I don't mind plot goofs because, after years of doing this, I EXPECT them. Should we demand better? Perhaps, but I'm just not sure it's humanly POSSIBLE, and I'm willing to account for error, for the excitement of finding a cool, character-building storyturn, as the Tigh-is-a-Cylon twist could very well be. Certainly I PREFER when the master plot and the micro plots sync up, but how often does that REALLY happen? (As a completely unrelated sidenote, Noel Murray over at the AV Club has been writing about the second season of Lost during the show's hiatus. He's much more charitable toward the season than most fans, including me, but his argument -- that the show's masterplot makes no sense at this point, but that doesn't matter because the individual episodes are so well-written, directed and acted -- kind of ties in to what I'm saying here. You can read more about it here.)
All of this, of course, leads in to a discussion of The Wire, often held up as a reasonably "complete" work in the way no series is. But you'll notice that that series is a collection of SEASONS that loosely hook together into a master narrative. Sometimes, events conspired to make David Simon's master plan work (as when Kenard shot Omar, which had been foreshadowed in season three), but sometimes, events did not -- witness how the show had to wrap in the politics story in season four because a proposed miniseries never got off the ground and how McNulty's absence in season four arguably made it better when the plan couldn't have been to have the character be such a supporting role all along (and, apparently, Dominic West made that call). The Wire caught a few lucky breaks, sure, but it was also a triumph of tightly plotted individual SEASONS that could then be hooked together loosely. So, yeah, The Wire is the show all producers should be looking up to, but not in the way we think they should. To my knowledge, a completely coherent masterplot for an ongoing series (not an intentionally limited one) has never been pulled off at the scale Galactica is attempting. That it's coming as close as it is speaks volumes both to Moore's ability to keep all of this in his head and his ability to dream stuff up on the fly.
I gotta gotta gotta defend MAD MEN against the charge of not being clear about the passage of time--indeed, I thought the series did an exceptional job of pegging the continuing action to the calendar and making it fairly clear at almost all times as to exactly what month--heck, sometimes even the week and the date--a specific episode took place during. More impressively still, it never seemed like we were being slammed upside the head with the information.
Andrew, on a first watch, I thought it did a really good job at that too, but enough people I know who watch the series were completely confused by how much time was elapsing between events (and these are really smart TV viewers who aren't distracted by other things) that I've started to give them the benefit of the doubt. I was following everything, but I was a little. . .obsessive about the show, I guess.
I think the problem was that the timeline details were never foregrounded except in a few episodes. We subconsciously fall back on the idea that TV shows are occurring roughly analogous to the timeline we're watching them in, unless we're repeatedly beaten over the head with it, like on Lost. This comes from years of holiday episodes that match our own real-world holidays, I think.
Todd -- While I agree that The Wire is the best example of a "complete" series, there's another example: Babylon 5, for which JMS reportedly planned out most of the episodes in advance of season 1 (short blurbs; not lengthy treatments). There were changes due to circumstances, of course, even some big ones. But he had a relatively good idea of how the show should progress through the seasons and came pretty close to pulling it off.
Baltar as the Final One? It would seem to fit as D'Anna tortured Baltar and that would make sense of the Temple Scene where she said she was sorry.
I always interpreted that as Tigh being one of the Final Five, after the whole eye thing. And weren't D'Anna and Baltar in their weird threesome with Six thing when she entered the temple? I think that one thing most people would assume is that Baltar is not the Final One. Going from Jesus to the Last Cylon would be pushing things just a bit too far for my taste.
"By the way, did anybody else get a very Bablyon 5 vibe from the Baltar worship scenario?"
No, because BSG is good.
For the whole, Tigh being too old to be a skin job thing. Weren't all of those 4 on New Caprica for a while? Would it be too presumptuous to think that they may have been "replaced" during that time with a new Cylon model and that the originals are somewhere yelling at the top of their lungs on some prison ship?
Nope. The Castle Anthrax. I literally expected them to ask him for a spanking (not that there's anything wrong with that).
By the way, did anybody else get a very Bablyon 5 vibe from the Baltar worship scenario?
I am with you on the Dualla bit, only because I am so sick to death of the back and forth between Apollo and Starbuck. I THOUGHT that was FINALLY finished!! Apollo chose Dualla, someone who could actually LOVE him and not compete with him constantly, build up his ego with tough love after Starbuck or Adama stomped all over it when he did,said or reacted to something inconsistent with how they wish. What an opportunity that is being WASTED here in my eyes!!!
Here are my thoughts:
I don't think the cylons had anything to do with the return of Starbuck to Galactica. If they had, and Starbuck really went to Earth, it would also mean the Cylons know where Earth is.
I also think that the Cylon God has to be artificial in nature. I have a feeling however that the Cylon God is the last model cylon. No one has seen the last model within the cylon community and it would be very poetic indeed if the last model turns out to be the creator of them all.
As for the identity of the final one: I also have a feeling it might be Roslin. I don't know why, it's just a feeling. It would fit in with the feelings of the final 4 who so strongly are against being a cylon. It would go against every fiber of Roslin's being. Perhaps the Roslin we know dies when she is activated and becomes the final one.
About the age of Ty and the connection to the lords of Kobol. Don't forget the other profecy of Razor (beside the beautiful Kyra Trace is the Harbinger of Death, The Herald of the Apocalyse). He also stated that all of this has happened before and will happen again. It connects to the theory of the collapsing universe where every end brings forth the new beginning: the Oroboro. This theory also delves into the question of controlling your own destiny vesus being victim to the will of the creator/universe. I can not wait to see where this goes :)
I'm very happy Battlestar is back and I don't think we got another x-files on our hands. I think this will come to a beautiful close........
I like the final four as follower/apostle theory. Remember, Paul the Apostle's orignal name is Saul. And the most shocking Cylon reveal is -- Saul Tigh. There's your Ron D. Moore-certfified biblical reference of the day.
As for Starbuck as the angel of death. Perhaps Earth isn't Earth, but what we conceive of as heaven. Remember, the monotheistic Cylons and pantheistic Humans are both seeking the same thing, similar to competing monotheistic religions and pantheistic religions in the real world. Heaven, enlightenment, etc. And each religion more or less teaches that death is a gateway to heaven. So if she's taking them there, why do we presume they all have to be "alive" to get there.
The Oroboro theoryvseems too much like the second and third Matrix movies. If it's all happened before and will happen again, then time really is immaterial. But the idea that competing groups have waged massive wars over and over again, repeating old saws about causality does have some weight to it.
I'm a relatively new viewer, so please excuse my post if much of this is old hat to everyone.
I thought Moore et al. had made it pretty clear in interviews for a while now that they're more or less winging it. I didn't really think that was in question.
Also, there was a recent EW Moore interview that included a Last-Supper parody photo of BSG characters, and Moore basically said in the interview that the final Cylon isn't in the photo, which would eliminate a number of "suspects" incl. Roslin and Baltar.
Personally? I think it'd be kind of interesting if it ended up being Billy. True, he was killed quite a while ago, but he could've been resurrected somewhere else, removed from current events. I doubt this'll be the case, but it'd be kind of interesting - esp. considering that Tory, who took over Billy's position, turned out to be one of the 5.
A lot of folks seem to have their money on Dee, though.
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