A couple more BSG eps
Jul. 10th, 2021 04:44 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shallownessBSG 4.8 Sine Qua Non
We’re bringing in the Latin now? (Possibly Latin has been used before, but a Latin episode title is particularly attention-grabbing.
It was a scrappy look at the fallout of the previous episode’s DRAMA. I got increasingly sour-faced at Adama’s unwillingness to engage with Verek, who, whatever you might think of him, is the Vice President and the link with the civilian fleet, who needed to be brought along after the panic.
Lambkin returned for some more scenes with Lee, and there was business with the cat, which was gross and sad ultimately (and as a cat person, I don’t think much of giving a dog to a cat person.)
The brain storming about an interim President was always going to go one way, but the stuff about Lee and Laura’s repressed ambition rang true.
I don’t know why they bothered to stretch out the death of Leader!Six. Lots of emotive cutaways to Athena suggest they needed to make up the episode’s length. Sure, let her look after her kid after she killed someone in an abnormal state of mind because of that imperative, it’s the humane thing to do!?!?!?
Adama eventually recognised that he was way out of control without Laura, but leaving the command to TIGHE who had knocked up Caprica? Where do you begin to rank the bad calls he made in this episode?
(So, Caprica is unknowingly carrying a Cylon-Cylon baby, the first we know of, then, while she maybe thinks ‘Ha, Athena, Hera’s not s special now.’ Actually, even if she wanted to reproduce, TIGHE, REALLY? I’d been trying to convince myself that Caprica had been doing what she had to to get intel from him, and he did give her a lot in the scene we saw between them. (So, again: TIGHE IN CHARGE?) Otherwise, we are left with the fact that Caprica’s taste in men is SO BAD and I don’t like how the writers write her.
Also, Tighe wasn’t shown facing the reality of what he’s been up to at all.
Kara was being quite a professional CAG all of a sudden. Probably because she wasn’t the star of the plotline.
And Lee got to play President for a while, while his dad stayed behind to wait for Laura to come back, reminding us that we have no idea of what’s going on on the basestar, which may OR MAY NOT be destroyed, in the Search for Lucy Lawless.
Watched several days later: 4.9 The Hub
I felt it had been a little too long since I’d seen the episode before last, because I was surprised by who - Roslin, Baltar and Helo apart - was on the basestar. That’s parly because the show hasn’t given me much incentive to watch double bills regularly when I’ve had other choices about what to do with my time.
I couldn’t always see what was going on, and it was a confusing episode anyway, with Laura going to another plane (an atmospherically empty Galactica/cheap-to-recycle set) whenever the Hybrid jumped them, which was a lot of random times, and being shown visions by the Ghost of Christmas Whatever/the priestess from back when the show was consistently good.
For a second, I did wonder if Laura really was the fifth Cylon because of all this. But no, she mainly seems to be human, with A Being/Her Subconscious testing that humanity, as she continued to mistrust the Cylons, and paid the price for it.
They lead up to her dilemma over Gaius beautifully, though. He was being a bit annoying over communicating with the Hybrid, and then he went off to try his ‘I understand the pain of the little people’ spiel on a Centurion (he had something of a point, and they could examine the ramifications of some of these big existential decisions for the Centurions, the Raiders, and indeed, the Hybid as well as the humanoid models. Farscape would have.)
Then Baltar got badly injured, and I was amused that he was at the mercy of Laura’s field medicine, but the conversation with him drugged turned interesting, and totally built on the past few years between them, with her finally taking the chance to get him to admit his crimes (he seems to have forgotten arming the traumatised Six with a nuclear bomb and what that meant), while he tried to get her to see/believe in God. So, she decided to let him die, despite all that her visions had been showing her about the price of that, until Bill’s love touched her. And it’s not that that wasn’t beautiful, and the real-life devotion (if one forgets LEAVIG THE FLEET TO TIGHE) and their reunion too, it's just there was a lot of other stuff going on.
D’Anna was willing to kill directly after being brought back. Well, One was annoying, plus he’d temporarily killed her. I don’t know how Boomer could stomach him describing her as a pet to her face. But she lives to see another day.
I’m sort of pro D’Anna right now. Totally understood her not trusting Laura, which Roslin should have seen coming – in one way, I have no idea why the Eight just…let Helo have her and didn’t go get reinforcements. Although D’Anna insisting on being flown back to Galactica when she doesn’t know how the Five will feel about being informed they’re the Five seems like an odd choice, even if she doesn’t know what we know. And she did get the meaning of being really dead if the resurrection hub was destroyed.
Speaking of, dead! Six leader was given a name, Natalie, which just feels random as everyone has been taking on audience-friendly names with no Watsonian reason. But there was a little more differentiation/giving Grace Park something to do, as we and Helo learned that the Eight had downloaded Athena’s memories. DUDE! That is such a violation of trust – Athena was only a temporary ally, not rejoining you, and certainly not consenting to this. And though Memory Athena said it was for personal reasons, and it seemed to play out on that level, that’s a total security breach that I doubt Captain Agathon will report. (Poor actual!Athena, getting screwed by her vision and her sister.)
Watching him and Not!Athena was interesting, but mainly I was left wishing we’d had more of this over the show. Memory!Athena was conveniently used as representative of her model, while we’ve seen more shades of Six. Bless Helo, he only knew a very little of how bad things really are.
There were some good bits, then, but as to how it ties to the whole and what has come before… not so much, because it still…doesn’t make sense.
We’re bringing in the Latin now? (Possibly Latin has been used before, but a Latin episode title is particularly attention-grabbing.
It was a scrappy look at the fallout of the previous episode’s DRAMA. I got increasingly sour-faced at Adama’s unwillingness to engage with Verek, who, whatever you might think of him, is the Vice President and the link with the civilian fleet, who needed to be brought along after the panic.
Lambkin returned for some more scenes with Lee, and there was business with the cat, which was gross and sad ultimately (and as a cat person, I don’t think much of giving a dog to a cat person.)
The brain storming about an interim President was always going to go one way, but the stuff about Lee and Laura’s repressed ambition rang true.
I don’t know why they bothered to stretch out the death of Leader!Six. Lots of emotive cutaways to Athena suggest they needed to make up the episode’s length. Sure, let her look after her kid after she killed someone in an abnormal state of mind because of that imperative, it’s the humane thing to do!?!?!?
Adama eventually recognised that he was way out of control without Laura, but leaving the command to TIGHE who had knocked up Caprica? Where do you begin to rank the bad calls he made in this episode?
(So, Caprica is unknowingly carrying a Cylon-Cylon baby, the first we know of, then, while she maybe thinks ‘Ha, Athena, Hera’s not s special now.’ Actually, even if she wanted to reproduce, TIGHE, REALLY? I’d been trying to convince myself that Caprica had been doing what she had to to get intel from him, and he did give her a lot in the scene we saw between them. (So, again: TIGHE IN CHARGE?) Otherwise, we are left with the fact that Caprica’s taste in men is SO BAD and I don’t like how the writers write her.
Also, Tighe wasn’t shown facing the reality of what he’s been up to at all.
Kara was being quite a professional CAG all of a sudden. Probably because she wasn’t the star of the plotline.
And Lee got to play President for a while, while his dad stayed behind to wait for Laura to come back, reminding us that we have no idea of what’s going on on the basestar, which may OR MAY NOT be destroyed, in the Search for Lucy Lawless.
Watched several days later: 4.9 The Hub
I felt it had been a little too long since I’d seen the episode before last, because I was surprised by who - Roslin, Baltar and Helo apart - was on the basestar. That’s parly because the show hasn’t given me much incentive to watch double bills regularly when I’ve had other choices about what to do with my time.
I couldn’t always see what was going on, and it was a confusing episode anyway, with Laura going to another plane (an atmospherically empty Galactica/cheap-to-recycle set) whenever the Hybrid jumped them, which was a lot of random times, and being shown visions by the Ghost of Christmas Whatever/the priestess from back when the show was consistently good.
For a second, I did wonder if Laura really was the fifth Cylon because of all this. But no, she mainly seems to be human, with A Being/Her Subconscious testing that humanity, as she continued to mistrust the Cylons, and paid the price for it.
They lead up to her dilemma over Gaius beautifully, though. He was being a bit annoying over communicating with the Hybrid, and then he went off to try his ‘I understand the pain of the little people’ spiel on a Centurion (he had something of a point, and they could examine the ramifications of some of these big existential decisions for the Centurions, the Raiders, and indeed, the Hybid as well as the humanoid models. Farscape would have.)
Then Baltar got badly injured, and I was amused that he was at the mercy of Laura’s field medicine, but the conversation with him drugged turned interesting, and totally built on the past few years between them, with her finally taking the chance to get him to admit his crimes (he seems to have forgotten arming the traumatised Six with a nuclear bomb and what that meant), while he tried to get her to see/believe in God. So, she decided to let him die, despite all that her visions had been showing her about the price of that, until Bill’s love touched her. And it’s not that that wasn’t beautiful, and the real-life devotion (if one forgets LEAVIG THE FLEET TO TIGHE) and their reunion too, it's just there was a lot of other stuff going on.
D’Anna was willing to kill directly after being brought back. Well, One was annoying, plus he’d temporarily killed her. I don’t know how Boomer could stomach him describing her as a pet to her face. But she lives to see another day.
I’m sort of pro D’Anna right now. Totally understood her not trusting Laura, which Roslin should have seen coming – in one way, I have no idea why the Eight just…let Helo have her and didn’t go get reinforcements. Although D’Anna insisting on being flown back to Galactica when she doesn’t know how the Five will feel about being informed they’re the Five seems like an odd choice, even if she doesn’t know what we know. And she did get the meaning of being really dead if the resurrection hub was destroyed.
Speaking of, dead! Six leader was given a name, Natalie, which just feels random as everyone has been taking on audience-friendly names with no Watsonian reason. But there was a little more differentiation/giving Grace Park something to do, as we and Helo learned that the Eight had downloaded Athena’s memories. DUDE! That is such a violation of trust – Athena was only a temporary ally, not rejoining you, and certainly not consenting to this. And though Memory Athena said it was for personal reasons, and it seemed to play out on that level, that’s a total security breach that I doubt Captain Agathon will report. (Poor actual!Athena, getting screwed by her vision and her sister.)
Watching him and Not!Athena was interesting, but mainly I was left wishing we’d had more of this over the show. Memory!Athena was conveniently used as representative of her model, while we’ve seen more shades of Six. Bless Helo, he only knew a very little of how bad things really are.
There were some good bits, then, but as to how it ties to the whole and what has come before… not so much, because it still…doesn’t make sense.
