|
Chief chooses action over despair, because
even inertia is forward movement. Adama trusts Sharon
about as far as he can kick her, but when she's served
her purpose, he boots her toaster butt back down to
the brig. Some beautiful editing work this week -- the
cuts were really inspired, with movement from one flowing
into the next so that it seemed the context was linked.
And no Six at all, to my surprise. Wonder what she was
whispering in Baltar's ear while he was working on the
virus. A few predictable turns, but well-done nonetheless.
By the way Chief was stroking the ship,
and the way his thoughts kept going back to Galactica
Sharon, I thought that was her ship, but hubby insists
she only ever flew a Raptor, not a Viper.
Ouch! Poor Helo. We see him as sympathetic
because we were with him for a season and a half, but
the other pilots see him as a traitor, as literally
sleeping with the enemy. Kara trusts him because he
rescued her, but what does she think of Sharon? Is she
less hostile to Helo because she's less hostile to the
Cylon?
I spent a summer in Italy with my two
sisters, and we had one deck of cards. By the end of
August we could read that from the back too. Plus the
seven of diamonds was from a red deck while the rest
of the deck was blue, so that one might as well have
been face up all the time.
At first I thought Helo and Chief were
going to bond in some way, because they're the only
two who could have understood one another: they're the
only two who loved a Sharon, who had a woman they loved
turn out to be something else altogether. But they did
need to have it out, as I noted in previous commentaries.
Chief is a bundle of mixed emotions -- jealousy, grief,
bitterness, a queasy relief that "the freak in
her belly" isn't his even though he wanted children
with the Sharon he thought he knew. (I wonder if any
unit argued for a Plan B of creating many more than
12 models and breeding the humans out rather than slaughtering
them?) Helo's a convenient target, but not necessarily
the right one, as even Chief concedes.
Nice symmetry between Adama fussing over
Dee and Dee hovering over Adama when he was shot...
I still think Gaeta's a Cylon! They have
only his word on this virus and the code at first. What
if he helped plant it?
Why is Tigh such a jerk? The goodwill
he engendered by making good decisions under fire (not
when he was in command) is being eroded by his hardass
attitude and constant yelling. I kept wanting to smack
him.
My five bucks are now on Roslin getting
a miracle cure by episode three of the winter season.
When you take the oxygen out of a room
but leave the nitrogen and carbon dioxide, you get...
nitrous oxide, or laughing gas. That's why Kara was
giddy when Hotdog passed out in the firing range room.
(We did call the shoot-the-window solution early on.)
Does Helo or Sharon know that Sharon's face is now stenciled
onto the firing targets? And why the cute over-the-shoulder
pose and not, say, a copy of her service ID?
See, if the Colonial Fleet were working
on Macs instead of Windows, they wouldn't be having
this spyware problem. The last Mac virus, worm, or spyware
that I remember was written back in 1995.
Somehow, I wasn't too worried about the
virus, maybe because the characters didn't seem too
threatened. If they'd jumped the fleet to some other
location, or if the guns had randomly started firing
on Galactica or on other ships, I actually would
have been concerned. And the posse of Raiders showed
up too late in the hour to do any real damage.
When Sharon looked at the strings of numbers
and her face flatlined, I thought at first it had triggered
some dormant program despite her protestations that
she doesn't have any -- or that she "remembered"
Galactica Sharon setting some software booby
trap. Maybe she was just overwhelmed with deciphering
what the code meant? She went machine for a minute?
She apparently really does want to help,
which makes Adama's repeated hostility jarring. The
audience keeps whipsawing in their sympathies, or we're
asked to like and support both people on opposite sides
of a deadly argument. We're asked to regard and like
Sharon as a person, but to remember that Adama has every
reason to see her as a homicidal toaster. She could
be sending a virus to the Raiders, or she could be sending
everything in Galactica's computers.
Chief tells Tigh he's making moonshine
to trade for engine parts. Tigh predictably arranges
for him to get an engine...and then takes a jar of moonshine.
I wasn't surprised to see Sharon brought
up to CIC with the choke collar, but after Cally's stunt,
the halls should have been cleared. Period. There's
no reason everyone can't be out of that section for
five minutes.
It was a little freaky to hear this copy
of the woman they knew referring to everyone in such
a familiar way. I thought Dee was going to tell Sharon
coolly that she should be addressed as Petty Officer
Dualla -- or at least demand the knife back when Sharon
was done -- but she just took it. (and Gaeta didn't
flinch! and addressed her by name! I'm tellin' ya, he's
a Cylon.)
Leeetle bit of Christ imagery with Sharon
jamming the needle into her hand (eek!) and the
blood dripping onto the floor, but that's the religious
side which the Cylons are taking. Wasn't she worried
about the virus getting to the sprog? Or was that part
of what she was supposed to be doing, or something she
wanted to do? Did the offspring get an info dump while
she was sending the virus back to the Raiders? They
sacrificed two Raiders last week for Xenanne's footage;
it's not inconceivable that they'd be willing to give
up a fleet to get something critical to the child. And
then it's more fuel for the fire that the humans pounce
on and slaughter the defenseless, powerless Raiders
(even though the Cylons were planning to use Galactica
against itself -- that doesn't count). Did it
bother Sharon to take out a whole fleet of her people?
(Even though she says to Helo "the Cylons are coming
after us," she has also said straight out that
she is a Cylon, and isn't ashamed of that.) Moogie wanted
to know why the Colonials didn't grab a few of the Raiders
for more study before shooting all the fish in the barrel.
Okay, the Cylons are so evolved that we
can't tell them from human on casual or even close medical
inspection. We need a special sophisticated machine.
But Sharon just jams the fiberoptic into her wrist and
she's live with the universe. Doesn't that hint that
some part of her nervous system looks or behaves mechanically?
Or is somehow simply, visibly not human? I would like
to start getting some more information on how the Cylons
were "created" and "evolved" and
how, biologically speaking, they could eventually conceive
with a human.
Are they going to build more Blackbirds?
Will that be any kind of tactical advantage against
the Cylons? Is someone going to yell at Kara for disappearing
like that and scaring the hell out of everyone? If she
was hiding right in front of Lee (which I didn't get
until someone else pointed it out to me; I thought she'd
jumped to lightspeed and then came back) and he'd started
up his engines and blasted off, he would have plowed
right into her. Isn't that reckless flying, and therefore
disciplinable? Was Kara still suffering from the nitrous
oxide poisoning? It's a Starbuck thing to do, but in
this BSG actions have consequences.
Was it Sharon's idea to use the carbon
composite for ship skin, I wonder? Is that why Helo
didn't thank Racetrack for coming around?
I thought they were going to name the
ship Phoenix, but I guess that was just episode
name symbolism. So the question now is, what other phoenixes
flew? The Cylon virus? Did Sharon send something back
to the groupmind through the link besides the virus?
Was it even a virus, or a command which they willingly
followed? The second half of this season starts in January,
and I'd like to start seeing more of the Cylon side
of the puzzle already.
Dangling plot threads as we head into
the break: What happened with Sharon's bleeding from
last week? What brought that on? Is it going to happen
again? I thought Kara was going to insist that a rescue
team go back to Caprica and the other colonies to get
Anders, but that seems to have disappeared (and she's
not too worried about it if she's playing cards). And
what about that second operation in the vicinity of
Kara's ovaries? What's the damn Plan already and how
do machines conceive? How were the Cylons created in
the first place? If Baltar is VP, has he gotten even
another minute of briefing? What is he officially working
on, fixing the Cylon detector? When is someone going
to interrogate Sharon sufficiently to get some answers?
What are the Colonials planning on doing with the cybrid
(™ Moulin Rouge, thanks again!) sprog when she's
born?
|
