What frustrates me about this episode and the previous few is that the pieces are there for it to be really good. Take this episode for example. A small thing like a few mentions of Scar before now would have really helped it feel like he wasn’t a one episode deal. Having him escape would have worked too.
Kat needed to be toned down a little. The punch was over the top for me. She should have either been punched back or sitting in the brig.
As others have said, the flashback device is really tired at this point.
I think there was one major flaw in this episode. It was the actual execution of the dogfight between Kat, Starbuck, and Scar. Didn’t we have a scene where Kat took Starbuck’s place explaining how the nuggets got themselves killed? Then she goes out and does the exact same thing. Not only that, but she can’t hit the broad side of a barn as she is chasing the decoy. Wasn’t she telling the others not to fire too soon?
Didn’t we hear about how cagey Scar was behaving? How he was avoiding fair fights? Then he goes head to head with Starbuck and completely forgets about her wingman. That isn’t right. He should have never went head to head. He should have jumped as soon as his first pass failed.
Last, Starbuck recognized the ambush. She goes toe to toe with Scar for several minutes. She finally serves him up to Kat on a silver platter. If Kat was any kind of pilot, she should have recognized this. Kat may have pulled the trigger, but she displayed zero skill. That kill was 100% due to Starbuck. I don’t know if that was an intentional move by the writers or just poor writing. It could work if it becomes a reoccuring theme. She thinks she is much better than she really is, but manages to scrape by on luck and riding the coattails of others to the annoyance of us all.
Want to do it a little better? Have Lee and Starbuck talking about Scar at some point before Lee decides not to have himself some. Then show the confrontation with Kat and Starbuck that Lee interrupts. Have Lee send Starbuck out with a nugget instead of Kat. The nugget chases the decoy. Starbuck’s confrontation with Scar plays out the same. She tries to kill him herself and then has her epiphany… and tries to run… and leads Scar to a waiting Apollo and Kat. Kat can still punch Scar’s number. The same events unfold, but neither Kat or Scar look quite like such chumps.
I agree that parts (especially the part of your post I selected above) had great bits but could have been done much better.
I understood that Scar wasn’t fighting purely logically at that point. After hearing Boomer’s explanation that fighters are reincarnated and Scar had likely “died” many times and was plenty pissed about the whole thing, it made some sense that he’d be so angry and so into the fight that he’d forget about the wingman and focus on killing the hated viper in front of him.
That’s why I didn’t like Kat’s line of “he’s not going to pull up–he’s a machine.” I thought the point was that he wasn’t acting like a machine in that moment. He was one angry mother fracker that was going to take out the viper no matter what. He didn’t care if he died in a head on collision even if there was no reincarnation. He just wanted the kill. That’s why he wouldn’t pull up.
Without that stupid line of Kat’s, it would have made much more sense that Starbuck recognized Scar’s anger and used it against him. But Kat’s stupid line kind of messed it all up.
See, the thing is, an asteroid field would be mainly a nonissue to a ship navigating it. I once heard it described this way: if you were standing on an asteroid (they named a specific one, but I forget which) located in the most crowded part of the asteroid belt and looked up, you’d see…pretty much the same thing you’d see anywhere in the solar system. If you knew where to look and had a good pair of binoculars, you could see a spot of light that was the nearest asteroid.
This whole thing of wildly zooming chunks of rock careening around is just pure fiction. In reality, any area with that much stuff in it would be reduced to dust or congealed into a planet right quick-like, astronomically speaking.
And how did anyone get close enough to see a scar and survive? Why wasn’t it buffed out in the Cylon Body Shop hunh? What about body filler? And how come they knew it was him that killed so many folks if the guys were killed?
I not only got the impression from the episode that it might have been personal with Scar, but that it was possible that he had been killed by Starbuck before, and knew it was her.
What I remember of the episode is that when we first ‘see’ Scar, we’re looking out through his viewport as the Vipers go past. And you can hear (and presumably Scar hears) Cat and Starbuck talking, so I’d think that raiders can listen in on colonial radio chatter.
Although the episode didn’t go into it, I’d argue that Scar wasn’t just pissed in general, and he wanted a piece of the chick that had blown him up on previous occasions. If I had been directing the episode, I’d have canned Starbuck’s little flashback, and instead switched at the last moment to Scar’s POV again, right before he crashes, and his whole ‘life’ flashes before his eyes.
Images of Starbuck killing him, over and over and over.
“On Previous Episodes”… they specifically showed the scene where Starbuck gutted the raider.
Boomer ‘knew’ that raider.
Boomer tells Starbuck about the resurection bits… and also specifically mentions that ‘one raider died horrifically’… I’m not sure that she specifically stated that was Scar, but the implication was that…
Scar is/was the Raider that Starbuck gutted.
And he was picking off the other Pilots ‘waiting’ for Starbuck… (that’s a bit of a stretch, but I can live with it.)
If I had been directing this episode… the second time they used the dogfight to lead into the commercial I’d have done what you said, and The entire dog fight would have been from Scar’s POV…and I would’ve indicated in whatever way possible his ‘emotions’.
Next time I’ll get all my thoughts in before I hit submit :smack:
Yeah, imagine the conversation with a neighboring docked raider the umpteenth time Scar gets reincarnated. All in the robotic monotone of the original series.
Neighbor: “Crazy slut shot you down again, huh?”
Scar: “I swear to the One God, one of these days…”
Neighbor: “Then you really won’t like what I heard.”
Scar: “What?”
Neighbor: “Remember that time when she shot you clean through the head?”
Scar: “They all kinda run together for me.”
Neighbor: “And you crashed on that moon? You winged her that time, you know. She crashed too.”
Scar: “Really? Hot damn. And then her buddies picked her up, that figures.”
Neighbor: “No.”
Scar: “No?”
Neighbor: “She carved a hole in your ass with a pocketknife, flew your corpse home, then used it to sneak back to Caprica and steal the Arrow of Apollo.”
Scar: “WHAT? SHE DID WHAT?!”
Neighbor: “I’m totally not kidding. She jacked a Sharon and killed a Six too.”
Scar: “Oh my God. Oh my God! No wonder that frosty bitch keeps putting arsenic in my feeding tube! Oh that’s it, that is absolutely it.”
Or, if not streaming, then recordings from the black box.
Apart from that, though, eventually Scar is going to get all the kills - whether he actually does it or not. Think about it - Meano goes out and gets whacked. No evidence of anything except a floating chunk of Viper bits.
Of COURSE Scar got him. You think some generic Raider did it?
It was a bit catty for Starbuck to bring everybody down at Kats celebration. A poor sport if you ask me.
So now that Pegasus is manufacturing Vipers, are they the newest model? I’m guessing that they’ve removed that little computer bug that let’s the Cylons shut them down.
Though I think really the “previously” was meant to remind us that raiders *are * Cylons, not just flown by them.
I gotta stop watching the “previously” bits. They are terrible spoilers. For instance, the next time we see one with Baltar asking Adama for a nuke, we all know what will happen in that episode.
I’ll raise you with a stinker of the season for it – they really need to get back to the ongoing story-lines and stop monkeying with these one-offs that go NOWHERE!
I really needed to see Kat struggle to get straight before she was back at the helm. As desperate as they are, she needed to re-earn her place behind that stick.
We needed to know more about Scar too (was that the one Starbuck shot down and took home?) Was there history? We’ve gone several episodes without seeing things from the Cyclon side of things – that’s a real problem.
Baltar needs to be exposed almost as badly as Lana needs to be dead on Smallville.
And, I didn’t think it was possible, but I’m really disliking Starbuck more and more – which is bad, because I didn’t like her all that much to begin with.
The casts stories need to fit within the overall story–a breakout ep about each character once every 4 eps or so is plenty, but I’m more interested in the overall arc (and what the Cylons are thinking–what the heck are they thinking? We don’t know, they’ve been practically dropped so far this Season 2 Pt. 2 era)
