Battlestar Galactica 2.15 — "Scar" (rampant spoilage)

Cafe Society
41

I think Starbuck’s behavior is right in character. You’ve got a rough 'n tumble, love 'em and leave 'em guy type chick who fell for someone a lot harder than she thought she would, then had to break a promise to come back, which doesn’t go well with her self image as the “I can always pull victory outta my ass somehow, and the worse the odds are the better I like 'em” hotshot.

Then she has to deal with the whole Pegasus thing, the initial uncertainty and unease about the changes to the fleet and personnel–gets promoted to a job that’s so perfect for her and so much up her alley it isn’t funny, and by a CO who with slightly different circumstances could be the one person she could look up to more than Adama, then her father figure tells her to A) go against everything a soldier IS by fragging a superior officer–and on the bridge no less; and B) KILL that person who with slightly different circumstances could be her perfect mentor.

Okay, so that doesn’t happen, the pressure is off. Unfortunately for the tightly wound, risk loving personality, having the pressure taken off is often the very worst thing that could happen. Suddenly there’s all this time to THINK and REMEMBER and HATE YOURSELF FOR FUCKING UP, and this type of person is SO not good at regulating her own behavior from inside–that’s what risk and pressure are for, to keep her from flying apart.

So she goes for what she knows, drink until your head shuts up, get laid a bunch to take care of those nagging little urges (it couldn’t possibly be that she only wants to get laid by one certain guy, oh no, that would be too much like mushy love or something!) and shoot some bad guys.

Problem is, she can’t drink enough to shut up her head, she IS grieving over losing someone, and there’s a part of her that hates herself for being willing to frag her CO and for being so damned relieved she didn’t have to do it, and part of her kinda sorta thinks how nice it would be if she just kinda lost it for JUUUUUST long enough for that legendary Cylon raider Scar to take her out–it’s a hero’s death, right? Nobody would look down on her if she got taken out that way–when she was naming the list at the end, she was accepting the fact that she herself wasn’t on that list and it’s maybe okay to keep living.

This ep is all about redemption.

42

I have a bad feeling that we will only get to Pegasus when we are watching it get blown up by the rebel’s nuke.

43

I kept thinking of that the entire episode. It worked well, but It would have worked better if Chiggy had been metioned a few time over the last episode or two.

Some throwaway line like “We lost another viper, but nobody saw what happened”

44

Could be worse, the crew of Galactica could find the U.S.S. Voyager’s “Magical Shuttlecraft Replicator” and modify it to replicate Vipers…

45

I could use more flashbacks of Starbuck getting her panties pulled down. I’m starting to believe that the last episode was supposed to confirm Apollo as straight but his pulling away from Starbuck makes me wonder. Sexy woman jumps you and you get all upset because she comes on too strong. Damn you man!

46

My blood pressure was going up during the first 15 minutes. What? The fleet’s been hanging out for four weeks, the Cylons have known where there were the whole and all they’ve sent is one Raider?? Thankfully, they later gave us semi-plausible explanations. Whew.

So now we’re getting some good info on the fleet. They can mine an asteroid for “ore” and turn it into new vipers. With magic Viper-building ore! But that answers that question anyway.

And some juicy details about Raiders! They reincarnate, and they ain’t happy about getting killed over and over.

Scar’s first appearance was great, I thought. He just looked evil & malevolent & dangerous.

About the 3D flying. It is cool and all, but I have to wonder how smart it is flying through a dense asteroid field, turning around and flying backwards at high speeds.

Starbuck’s drinking binge is understandable, but for crying out loud. It looked like she & Apollo polished off a liter while they were talking and then after their almost-sex she downed another liter. Unless their liquor is only about 6% alcohol, that’s got to be just about a lethal dose. And all she needs is a couple extra hours of sleep to be ready to fly? I thought pilots these days required 12 hours of no alcohol before flying. Don’t know how it is with military pilots.

speaking of military pilots, anyone know who the little red-headed male pilot was? I liked him.

Kat was bugging me too, has for awhile. But the scene in the briefing room was well done. I liked how Kat got in Starbuck’s face, but when Starbuck stepped forward into Kat’s face, she tried to be all tough, “what’re you gonna do, hit me?” But she was backing up anyway. Starbuck was right, Kat was being a little shit to cover her own fear, as well as her disappointment with her hero not acting like her hero. I also agree that really was Starbuck’s kill. Starbuck has grown and knew she couldn’t take Scar on her own and was willing to give the kill to Kat. Realized she had to actually, if she really wanted Scar dead.

I was really impressed with Helo this ep. About damn time Ron Moore did something with besides shout “Sharon!” He’s such an all around nice guy and seems very sage. The guy you go to for some old fashioned good advice, no games. His relationship with Starbuck is great. Honest good buddies with no sexual tension drama and all that crap. The final scene was just about as perfect a feel-good ending I could want. I almost got a little misty there.

47

I thought the way she actually did something similar: with a sarcastic/knowing smirk and gleam in her eye was well played (acted).
**
ronciycyberpunk**'s noting the tendency to introduce a bad guy and kill 'em by the end worries me too: I think it may be because BSG is now a certified hit. Whereas before it was a miniseries and each episode was intended to be viewed as a piece of a whole, that doesn’t sell as well in syndication – where something more episodic makes a show easier to sell [and more profitable] I hope I am wrong - but that is partially what I think we may be seeing: the development away from a miniseries format to a more episodic format.

LOL ** Elvisl1ves** for the USC crack

48

Posted by Finagle:

That’s a cinematic technique; I wouldn’t take it literally.

Boomer did a good job of describing what a huge advantage Cylon resurrection is – turning death into a learning experience rather than the wasteful loss of a person. I guess for Cylons, even what does kill you makes you stronger. (Until they lost their resurrection ship; now they’re learning about mortality.)

When the original series was on, one of its many silly aspects was that the Cylon raiders were flown by humanoid Cylon robots, who sat in cockpits and manipulated controls. At the time I thought, “why isn’t the whole ship a robot?” So that’s something I like about the new show.

Technical question: why doesn’t the trail of exhaust left behind by the Vipers expand and dissipate rapidly in space? Assuming there’s a reason, I’d have to guess that it’s particulate matter and not gaseous; do we know what the Viper engines actually run on? (And they always seem to be burning; apparently Viper pilots don’t like to coast. If a Viper heads out at top acceleration, say 6 gs, with the intention of going no further out than, say, 10,000 clicks, it’s going to have to do a 180 at the 5,000 click point and decelerate at 6 gs the rest of the way. You can’t continually accelerate in one direction and then just head back the other way – you’ve got to cancel the tremendous speed you’ve built up, which takes as much energy to get rid of as it did to attain.)

49

For that matter ships and missiles shouldn’t leave a smoke trail at all, unless they’re accellerating. The smoke should retain the same relative velocity as it’s source. It’s only in atmosphere that smoke more or less instantly loses it’s velocity relative to the air.

50

Bleah. I still love this show, just not last week or this week. I can forgive a bunch of story cliches, but when the character development gets cliched (Kat vs. Starbuck), I eventually start to groan.

And don’t forget:

Lee: What about us?

Kara: There is no us!

Thank you, Dawson’s Creek Writers.

I can’t wait until next week. :cool:

51

Damn, I was late watching and thought I’d be the one to point that out. She is sooooo Ana-Lucia it’s scary!

Good ep, though. I feel like the writers are back in gear. The flashback gig is getting tired, but at least we saw some good action and some devlopment of the story line.

52

I concur. This was the worst use of flashbacks since Robert Jordan abused the hell out of them in the Wheel of Time books. Starbuck’s climactic chicken duel with Scar was completely robbed of tension and impact. The show cut to commercial at the last instant before collision, then showed more flashbacks, then showed the run-up sequence to the duel again, then slowed down time so Starbuck could have still more flashbacks. At that point I stopped giving a damn what the outcome was.

Even besides the egregious flashbacks, the story wasn’t all that compelling. Here’s a named Raider we never heard of before and will never hear of again, here’s some dead pilots with the same status, here’s a flashback with some of them, here’s a one dimensional Starbuck wannabe who grates me like I was a block of cheese. Bleah.

Too many more episodes like this will remind me why I don’t watch a lot of TV.

53

Come now, it’s not like the “Enemy Ace” story hasn’t been around since WWI.

I can hold mine. That’s not to say I can’t still get shitfaced when I try hard enough. Like when I’m depressed…

I hope Michelle Rodriguez from “Lost” guest stars on BSG. Then she and Kat can touch and the whole matter/antimatter thing will make a big explosion and take both of them out…

jkirkman - I think the photo Kat put in there was Reilly’s girlfriend. The one whose name she couldn’t remember.

When Lee and Starbuck were going at it…did it occur to anyone besides me that the universe of BSG seems to almost exclusively consist of male brunettes pairing with female blondes? Boomerbot being the exception, of course.

-Joe

54

Dualla and Billy. Adama and Rosalyn.

55

You know the last couple of times I’ve watched this show, I did so while quaffing a few (too many) beers. Those damn flash back scenes when you’ve got a buzz going on are confussing as hell!!

Not to mention, I’m pretty sure, I damn near went into epileptic shock a couple of times!

Over all I liked the show though.

56

It was my impression from watching the episode that the area of space in the asteroid field being mined by the mining ship was filled with some sort of gas or particulate matter. The trails being left by the Vipers was a result of their passage through this “cloud.” In the more traditional space scenes of Viper flight in past episodes, they did not leave a trail of debris/contrails unless they were damaged and venting something (hydraulic fluid, air, etc…)

57

The contrails of the Vipers are there for the same reason the contrails of the Raiders’ missiles are there. So your TV screen won’t look like just a blank black space with a few dots on it, and so you can follow the action.

Not *every * production detail has to have a technobabble explanation backfilled under it, people.

58

Ah…but not squelchy squelchy, yet!

-Joe, defending his theory to the last

59

And, by the way, the inclusion of an asteroid field that looked like that was horrible, horrible science, but it’s strongly established sci-fi fodder at this point. Oh, well.

60

I wonder what the relative velocity of an asteroid would be to a ship navigating the field. Would it come shooting out of the empty darkness faster than you could avoid it, or do they move slowly with respect to each other hundreds of miles away?