Battlestar Galactica 1.5 — "You Can't Go Home Again" (spoilers, natch)

Cafe Society
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New episode airs tonight in the US, after having first been shown in the UK back in, what, 2002? Bastards.

Okay, let’s see where we are:

Top question: How does Starbuck get off the rock?

Immediately following which: Will Adama forgive her? He was awful damn pissed last week. Maybe her blatant flirting with suicide, turning to face all eight raiders, changed his opinion of her a bit. We’ll see.

Back on Caprica: Is Number Six Two (Number Seven?) setting up Boomer 2 and Helo with that ready-made fallout shelter? Does Boomer 2 even know she’s a 2?

And will Boomer 1 follow up on what she learned about Baltar’s rumored “Cylon detector” being in the works?

Speaking of whom, given all the flirting in the card games, what does Baltar think about Starbuck being missing? And how does the Skullbound Sexpot respond?

Will Lee Adama ever manage to convince the Prez to quit being such a grumpy-puss when it comes to matters military?

What’s going on back on the prison ship?

Are we going to get an explanation for where the detachment of Cylons came from last week, or will it remain a frustrating deus ex frackina?

Is Tigh gonna set hisself up a distillery? And given the food sitch, how’s he gonna convince somebody to requisition his grain?

What piece of dangerous ordnance will the butterfingered materiels crew bollix up this week?

My wild-ass speculation about the stranded Starbuck issue:

Okay, her viper is pretty well fracked, so probably nothing useful there. But the Cylon went down with her also, right? It’s a robot ship, so I presume there isn’t anything like a cockpit, which means she’s not going to actually fly it out. But maybe she can bodge up a radio and call for help, or at least let the fleet know where she is. I hope it’s a better solution than that; whomping up transmitters out of piles of broke-ass components is so very Star Trek, y’know? Unless… unless in so doing, the use of Cylon technology acts as a beacon for additional Cylon reinforcements. Hmmm.

Ooo, can’t wait, can’t wait… Man, it’s a good time to be a geek…

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Why are you using spoiler tags when you’ve put “spoilers” in the thread title?

Anyway, the first two sentences of your speculation started how well, but I ain’t saying anything about the rest.

Also, it wasn’t shown in the UK in 2002. I think they started late 2004. We get Sky One in Germany too. Woo hoo!

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Didn’t the “Coming next week” promo last week have a shot of Starbuck being dragged across the sand? I seem to remember that.

So maybe it isn’t a robot ship.

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Huh. Dunno. Seemed like the right thing to do. Now I’m all confoosed.

Why? Do you know something? :stuck_out_tongue:

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All I’ll say is, it’s probably not what you think. It’s also not, not what you think. :smiley:

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Tease. :stuck_out_tongue:

I’ve been browsing the SciFi official website, and on the ships page, I see a note under Cylon Raider to the effect that humans don’t know much about them and acquisition of an actual functional Raider is an extremely high priority for military intelligence. HmmmmmmMMMMMmmmmmmmm.

There’s also a provocative note about the “flattop.”

I’m really trying not to spoil myself about the upcoming plot, but <whining> it’s so haarrrrrrd </whining>. :slight_smile:

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Ok, just watched it.

She was being dragged by her parachute caught in the wind.

Actually it’s un-frakkin-believable that she landed anywhere near the Cylon fighter.

And no matter how Commander Adama felt, it was absolutely unimaginable that he would jepordize the fleet by continuing the search after there was no rational hope she could still be alive.

And the Cylon soldier had to have had orders to leave Helo alive. There’s simply no explanation of how it couldn’t have finished him off otherwise. What the heck is going on on Caprica??

A pretty weak episode in my opinion. Maybe the plot development required them to somehow get a Cylon fighter intact. Maybe they analyze the tissue in the Cylon fighter, and get a DNA match?

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As though we care. The sooner she croaks, the better.
And what wusses to let her talk them into stopping the search as though she were Martin Sheen.

Indeed, let us pray that the big C takes her soon and Martin Sheen is the Secretary of Transportation, or whomever is next in line.

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Oh, yes, because West Wing and this have so bloody much in common.

Remarks with not but disparaging purposes are rather pointless in this discussion, carnivorous, as it is a means to discuss the series and not it’s future, not whatever feelings you may have towards it.

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Actually, I was on the president’s side in this episode. It was kind of interesting to see her be the hard ass and the military guys be the ones driven by emotion. I’m not sure it was realistic, but it was interesting.

I never thought

Starbuck would be dragged by her parachute–I was suspecting a cylon, or a cylon agent posing as a rescuer, or a rescuer too weak to carry her, or a Jawa. Never thought of a parachute. Okay, they got me there.

The episode was fun, but not as good as some of the others. Still good TV though. I’m hoping this is the end of the Starbuck arc and we can move on to some other characters. I don’t hate her as much as I used to, but I’ve tired of her a bit.

Okay, I got the silly giggles when


Helo is looking back and forth between the real toaster and the cylon “toaster” model. I guess I’m easy to please!

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I got a kick out of that as well.

And I agree with the President. 45% of their fuel reserves? Christ. It’s not like they can just go down to the local filling station when they run out. When it’s gone, it’s gone. I appreciate Adama and Lee’s feelings for starbuck and
“not leaving a man behind” but there’s a point when you have to admit it’s over.

I was suprised that starbuck was actually able to make the fighter work. As for the IDing, I kept expecting Apollo to say “Hey, that figher is Waggling”. Wasn’t there an original episode where that happened?

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You’ll want to catch ep 8 then.

I do understand that there is an emotional factor with both Adamas to find Starbuck, which is probably primary, but remember Starbuck is, per the previous episode, the only person they really have to train new pilots. That seems an important factor to me. If you ain’t got pilots, who cares how much fuel you have.

Personally I found this episode pretty cheesy:

I mean come on, Starbuck crawls inside a formarly living thing (it is clear that Cylons are biological now), pokes a couple levers and is able to fly it?

Not to mention that she cut a huge chunk, presumably, as she says, the “brain,” out of it, and all the important systems(O2, and the 4 mentioned flight controls) still work. Didn’t she basically rip the flight/environmental controls out of the cylon?

Not to mention, with no O2 left when exactly did she paint her name on it’s wings?

All in all though, I’ll keep watching.

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Etherman, I thought that I thought it was cheesy as well.

Beyond the weirdness of her being able to fly the ship to being with, how the hell did Starbuck manage to get through all that extreme turbulence they kept talking about when pilots in fighters they were trained to fly were having trouble?

As to your question, I think Starbuck painted the wings before she got into the ship (we just didn’t see it as it would ruin the ending). When she found the fighter, she said something to the effect of “now I have a flight out of here.” So she probably thought about it before getting in. I didn’t think it was paint. I thought it was that yellow Galactica duct tape she’d used to wrap up her leg (or maybe I’m just looking for yet another use for duct tape).

I did think the cylon fighter itself was kind of cool (it was just so oogey).

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If they’d wanted to be a bit obscene, they could have made the oxygen tube a little more… suggestive.

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I had trouble with Will Smith being able to fly the alien fighter in Independence Day, on the grounds that the controls were all completely unfamiliar. In the Cylon fighter, there are no controls. Presumably the brain would interface directly with the ship. It certainly would not be a matter of “pull this, squeeze that”.

But I don’t care. It was a ballsy, cheesy, kinda fun thing to do.

As for the turbulence: This would be a major problem for pilots who were attempting to maintain a constant (and low) altitude while carrying on the search. Starbuck didn’t need to do any of that; she just took off and got the frack out of there.

I also laughed at the “chrome toaster” bit.

By the way, Number Six was getting a bit bitchy to Baltar about Starbuck… noting that he hadn’t even managed to verify that she was a real blonde…

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D’oh! I had forgotten about Starbuck being the only Pilot trainer. Actually, she’s just amazingly talented, isn’t she? Training new pilots, best shot in the fleet, best pilot in the fleet, able to take a completely unfamiler control system and make it fly(and yeah, I found it a bit hard to believe).

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Here’s the thing though, I don’t think it’s entirely unbelievable that she’d be the best shot in the fleet. Remember that the only Marines left would have been the ones on the Galactica. And the Galactica was a museum. It’s likely that the best Marines would have been killed with everyone else and only a skeleton honor guard left on Galactica. Remember that the only reason the two best Viper pilots are still alive (Starbuck and Apollo) are because Starbuck was in the Galactica brig and Apollo was attending the decommission ceremony. Again, most of the trainers and the other good Viper pilots would probably have been on the other Battlestars that were blown up.

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One way I’m kinda reconciling in my own head how Starbuck got off the planet, is maybe that wasn’t its “brain” she cut out & discarded. Maybe that was just its control system, but the animal itself is still basically alive, and just waiting for the right master to come along & ask it what to do. And that’s the thing. Starbuck talked to it. Stroked it, and asked it nicely how it works, then intuitively figured it out. But somehow I’m thinking if it had been anyone but Starbuck, that thing may have just sat there.

When it comes to Cylons, it seems nothing happens just by chance. I wouldn’t be surprised it Starbuck is the only human that thing will fly for, at least partly because she can “become one” with it, and treat it nice.

Who knows? The whole Cylon war started because humans were treating their Cylons like slaves. Maybe if they had just talked nice to 'em, they wouldn’t be in this mess.

One other thing. I highly doubt that two bodies, one a heavy Cylon Raider, the other a human with a parachute, falling into a large moon’s atmosphere at slightly different times, and vastly different velocities, would land anywhere near each other. Nope. That Raider was lonely, and managed to soft land as near as it could to the only other living thing on that moon.

I know. Far-fetched, but it’s what I’m playing with today.

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Sure there were. The first control she squeezed fired the weapon. There was a shot of her feet manipulating “rudder pedals”. I believe we saw her use the throttle, too.

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See, that’s what I had a problem with though. There shouldn’t be “controls,” there should be muscles. If she’d attached electrodes and made muscles twitch to control things, I’d have bought that a bit quicker. But living things don’t have rudder pedals internally to control thier movement, they have ligaments and muscles.

Now if she were pulling on tendons and whatnot, maybe, but you’re not going to get the movement that you are from muscles contracting.

Given that, I do understand that they are at least part mechanical. If you look at them as a mechanical shell with meaty bits instead of the hydraulics and a pilot like in an airplane(which is what I think they are), then why are all the controls in one place, instead of out by the control surfaces? My feet are controlled by muscles/tendons/etc down in my legs, not in my chest. Although I am maybe anthropomorphizing(is that a word?) a bit here to.

As for Caprica, I am guessing they are experimenting on Helo. To see how he reacts to different situations, so they can refine thier models of human behavior. Possibly also beta-testing Boomer mark 2. Remeber in the mini-series, when they(Boomer) had to leave a bunch of people (including Helo) behind on Caprica? We have seen nothing of any of those other people. Maybe the Cylons are allowing a few survivors to live on here and there, so they can observe/test on them. A single person here, a group there, etc. Perfect control groups

I am having a hard time not spoiling things for people, since I have seen all but the last episode, but Levdrakon, that animal observation is pretty damn insightful, have you seen the other (unaired in the US) episodes?