The Oralce 3 visited confirmed that Hera (Juno) is the wife and sister of Zeus (Jupitor) in Kobolian religion just as she is in Greek (Roman) religion. Not that that ever stopped him from frakking anything he wanted. I wonder if the 12 Colonies each have their one language (derived from Kobolian) could Jupitor just be Zeus in like Virigonese?
And just what do they mean by “processing” the algae? And why were they sending pilots solo? Wouldn’t it make more sense to send 'em in pairs in case something happened to one of them?
I still don’t understand Kat’s sacrifice, or purpose of it.
OK–she clearly is feeling guilty after her Starbuck encounter, and has a bit of a death-wish.
But why steal Helo’s badge? What did Helo do when he opened his locker and saw he couldn’t fly? Did he just hang out? Were they planning to send far fewer pilots through on the last run, anyway? Was there some implication that, if Kat didn’t go, then there wouldn’t have been enough pilots with enough white space on their badges to escort the last ship through, condemning that ship to be left behind? Or is she just one of the few pilots good enough to make the trip?
And why is Adama praising her “choice”? (And what WAS her choice–to steal the badge and fly at all, or to stay in the hot zone too long so she could find the ship she was escorting?) Is he just being nice because she’s dying? Seems to me she made the same choice Hot Dog (or was it Race Track? I forget) did early in the episode, when he lost his ship and hung around in the cluster a bit too long. Only she ended up finding her ship, and ended up dying.
I like Jane Espenson from years of Buffy watching, but I get the distinct feeling that about 25 minutes of scenes were cut from this episode, and we’re left trying to sort it out. Sigh. I’ll have to go download the podcast.
Her choice was to hide the fact that she had received a potentially lethal dose of radiation, and instead go back and fly. That was her, choosing to be “Kat”, and not “Sasha”. Starbuck’s point was that “Sasha” was selfish, someone who would hold out on protein bars when the other pilots were sharing. “Kat” was someone willing to sacrifice herself to complete the mission.
We don’t know that there weren’t enough other qualified pilots to complete the mission, just like we don’t get an explanation about why they had to go through the cluster, or why the Raptors had to fly solo, or why the food processors got contaminated. That’s just the set-up, and BSG usually doesn’t linger on the set-up. What we know is that the mission needed pilots, and Kat chose to place the mission above herself.
And she is one of their best pilots – she took the best pilot cup from Starbuck as of “Scar”; so losing her the mission would have been harder on the remaining pilots. But we don’t know, for example, if they only had exactly enough pilots to compress it down to five jumps, and if they were short one pilot it would’ve taken an extra jump.
Helo ended up flying the mission, although we don’t see him in the cockpit; he’s suited up in his flight suit along with the other pilots waiting for Kat to go through decon on her return. (which, of all of 'em, Helo could’ve stood a little less radiation; he got quite an exposure from his time on Caprica, too).
Hotdog was the one who lost his ship on the first jump.
Probably only Starbuck fully understood what choice Kat made, though, in going through with the mission. Everybody else was impressed because she wouldn’t leave her lost ship behind – even though it meant that she took an obviously fatal dose of radiation (which they’d assume she got on the last jump, since her badge had been good to go when they’d left; of course, her badge was black from the previous jump).
I’m still trying to figure out what the Hell they were supposed to be flying through. What is there in interstellar space that would be remotely like that? I guess if you were in the middle of a supercluster of blue-white giants you might get that kind of hard radiation, but what about the orange fog. They were getting turbulance as if they were flying through atmosphere.
The whole thing just seemed awfully contrived. (Was there any explanation of exactly what the “contamination” was in the food?)
I loved getting to know the story of another character - Kat. Her rags to riches kind of story made me think “what other people’s stories are also fudged or simply made up?” That’s the good part of this episode - it made me think about all the characters and their motivations.
The problem is I feel cheapened when the physics and the logistics are dumbed down. It draws me out of the story because it makes me think the characters are stupid, when it’s just cheap execution or lazy writing.
I’ll grant the contaminated food supply. They said it and didn’t explain it - okay, it’s real. When they ventured into a small explanation they almost ruined it. Tainted food being recirculated but it got past the filters and systems that would be looking for exactly that … ?
Then they found an algae planet and its hard to get to. Okay. But then they contrive why you can’t jump there, why the whole fleet needs to go, etc. They started stepping onto shaky ground. Just say it’s hard or get some better science to explain it all.
[ul][]Why couldn’t the ship(s) that process algae go in, get the stuff and get out? Or go in, get the stuff, process it there, and get out?[]Why wasn’t Tyrol working on putting some lead shielding over some cockpit windows?[]Since the Raptors weren’t navigating by sight, why didn’t they put a black curtain over the windows to keep out some light? Even if the instruments were messed up, visual navigation was useless too.[]Why didn’t the Raptor pilots put down the sunshields that must be built into their helments? {because we have to see the actors faces - Apollo’s contract was obviously better than Kat’s because his helmet lights lit up his face better than hers}[]Why didn’t the Raptor pilots wear an extra radiation hazmat suit over their jumpsuit?[]When a pilot lost visual sight of the ship they were babysitting - who cares? Let’s say the Raptor couldn’t be attached to the ship it’s ferrying because the Raptor couldn’t navigate or calculate jump coordinates. Okay. When it got the coordinates what was it planning to do? Use morse code and flash the ship? No, it would use the radio and it doesn’t matter if you can see it or not - Just Call It. Remember Apollo telling a pilot (Kat?) to give the right coordinates to the right ship? Then they are using radios. Don’t tell me that they have to see the ship they’re ferrying so that they can adjust the jump calculations based on some position they get through sighting?[]Why does Galactica need some big computers and time to calculate jumps but Raptors can calculate quickly enough for themselves and a ship they’re ferrying?[]Last episode, Adama got all preachy about letting down his guard and treating the crew like family. He said he needed to stop that. And then we have his hero/daughter scene in sickbay with Kat. This doesn’t seem to fit.[/ul]Again, I loved Kat’s backstory but the logistics kept pulling me out of the story.
I feel somewhat guilty agreeing with your points, but it does seem to be failing in physics and characterization.
I was hooked simply with the no sound in a vacumn when the series started. Yours and other’s complaints about radiation, plasma, gas clouds are well founded. I particualrly hate the two dimensional board they move models about on.
Adama with his father figure role has indeed become Pa Cartwright. Starbuck is Little Joe, Apollo Adam, although for a while it seemed he was to be Hoss.
I fear the family oriented plot, I fear relgion being used as deus ex machina. I fear Hera being some V type alien child that “brings them all together”. I fear the series ending by beginning Terran civilization.
It’s a shame to see a series with such promise decline, but I remain optimistic and hope for a return of the quality we saw before.
The Kat story was good, but the supporting physics fellated with great allacrity.
What would a “background” check even have consisted of? A ship’s manifest and passport? The Colonial government has some very strange record keeping policies. Every battlestar apparently contains DNA records for the whole fleet, yet convicts are transported with no records at all! :dubious:
Like everything else this ep, it doesn’t really make sense. Apollo issued the radiation badges but because things were going to be hectic, it was up to each individual pilot to monitor his/her own badge and pull themselves off the mission if it were about to go black. A dead pilot is of no use to the fleet.
So Helo apparently ends up flying anyway, meaning no one is checking badges. If no one is checking badges, Kat didn’t need to steal his. Not only that but she put Helo’s life in danger because he was going to fly another mission but now has no way of knowing when is badge would have gone black.
We probably should have lost both Kat and Helo this ep, but maybe Helo developed an immunity by being on Caprica so long. (I’m kidding, it was just stupid)
Anyway, they must have known pilots would begin dropping out once everyone’s badges started going black. Who care’s if this “condemns” a few ships to be left behind. Oh, we can’t leave even a single ship undefended. The Cylons might get 'em! Bullshit. Leave your FTL drive spooled up and jump the second Cylons show up. You do have emergency jump coordinates ready, don’t you? Don’t you? You had emergency jump coordinates ready when you’d been sitting around New Caprica for a whole year. Remember that? Remember when the whole fleet still in orbit jumped away as soon as the Cylons arrived?
It must be he’s just being nice because she’s dying. Which flies in the face of the colder harder Adama we were supposed to have gotten last episode (did I call that or what. If It’s a character driven show, try making your characters consistent. Adama, quit it with the speeches if they don’t mean anything. At least when Captain Janeway lectured us it meant something). She should have been reprimanded for disobeying orders and endangering lives.
Adama didn’t know about her past and he didn’t care. Nor should he have. People lie to join the military all the time and especially in a time of war, you’re judged by your actions and the character you display in the service, not so much on who you used to be.
Starbuck was kind of a wench. First, she makes Kat feel like shit of lying to get in the military causing her to go do something stupid that gets herself killed, then gives her sleeping pills to finish the job. Damn Starbuck, you really want that “best pilot in the fleet” mug back, don’t you?
This whole algae processing thing is just insulting. I have this image in my head of all these ships getting to the planet, swooping down into the atmosphere and plunging themselves in the water to fill their algae processing tanks.
Does each ship have its own algae collecting and processing equipment? Is that why you had to bring each ship there? Or only a couple ships can do this, but you had to bring the whole fleet anyway 'cause heaven forbid you leave the fleet behind. Instead, we’ll bring the whole fleet through this horribly dangerous area then we have to bring them back out of this horribly dangerous area.
And these people can make all the booze they need but they can’t grow more uncontaminated algae?
Wait, huh? Jump coordinates have to be periodically re-calculated. Gaeta told us that, back when the Galactica misjumped and lost the fleet. Crap. Stop making me think about this stuff! It’s been too long since there’s been a sex scene that didn’t involve Jesus Baltar, that’s the problem: my brain needs candy so you lot can’t make it think.
Anyway, the algae (“almost pure protein” umm… yum?) was going to be harvested by the marines. Who’re sick, because of radiation poisoning, or eating the last sheet of paper, or something. Where you’d think they’d just get Zarek’s convicts to do the job, since that was what they agreed to. But you’d also think that if the fleet was getting by on eating paper, they could have fed them all for years on all those little cut-off corners that must be lying around someplace.
The irritating thing is, there’s no reason this had to suck. As I was watching, I kept thinking: wrong choice; bad choice; misstep. But none of them really affected the overall flow of the episode, and with a few nips and tucks at the script stage, this could have been made into a pretty decent installment. And like any episode of BSG, there are some really great moments sprinkled throughout that make the show worth sitting through (best example: when they lose the first ship, and Tigh says “that was the first jump,” and Adama says with matter-of-fact grimness, “yes it was” - serious chills).
Were I given a chance to rewrite the episode, here’s how I would have fixed it:
Instead of dumbing down the technobabble at the beginning, I would have increased its complexity significantly, to the point that Roslin recognizes she can’t follow the rationale and cuts it short, trusting the experts. You get two bonuses by doing this: it feels more plausible, and you get through it much more quickly without having to belabor the irrelevant details.
I wouldn’t have tried to tell the story from Kat’s perspective. The moment where Starbuck sees Kat and that guy up on the catwalk was one of the stronger in the show; let the whole plot be from that point of view. We already know Starbuck, and better yet, we know she has it in for Kat. Because of that, we don’t have to have the ridiculous “human smuggling / maybe helping the Cylons / traitor” thing; that Kat is pretending to be someone else would be enough for Starbuck to go after her, and makes it more about Starbuck as a character and the relationship between her and Kat, and not the details of the backstory. Starbuck may be one of the heroes, but we all know she isn’t screwed together entirely right, and it’s entirely plausible that she’d go after Kat for a relatively minor transgression, especially one that centers on trust and identity. And possibly best of all, this helps overcome the narrative speed bump of suddenly delving into a secondary character’s backstory and finding all this baggage about which we never had any prior indication, because the point of view is Starbuck’s, for whom we have an existing dramatic throughline.
Before the mission, let Kat confess to Adama. The old man is understandably displeased, but he doesn’t react as strongly as Starbuck, who is angry and confused that Adama doesn’t revoke Kat’s flight status on the spot, or whatever. Besides clarity in the plot, there’s a bigger advantage: conflict between Adama and Starbuck, two main characters, which is a much better driver for the show than conflict between main characters and secondaries.
Dump the bit with Kat switching the radiation badge. It’s obvious, and it’s telegraphed so early and so strongly that we can see it coming from far, far away. It adds nothing to the story. You can have Kat in the Raptor at the end staring at her badge in horror as it goes completely black, and she keeps looking for her lost ship anyway (see next point), but more than that is unnecessary.
The ending would be the biggest change, but imagine this:
As in the show, Kat loses her ship and stays behind. However, again, we’re not with her point of view as much; we’re primarily with Apollo and Starbuck as they yell at her over the radio to get with the program. Then, after the jump to safety, we sit watching DRADIS, as in the show, waiting for Kat to reappear. But here’s the thing: she doesn’t. Long silence stretches into uncertainty and then cold realization. She stayed behind, trying to do her job, but she fails and neither she nor her civilian ship returns.
And then Adama makes the conscious decision to elevate her to the status of hero, posthumously, and in absentia. She went above and beyond, risking herself for her mission, and died doing it. He’s on a character path right now that shows he will do what is necessary, and what is “right” in a larger sense, for pragmatic reasons of survival, even if he has to compromise personal relationships and quash comparatively minor moral qualms to do so. (The last time he had a major moral objection, he prevented Roslin from stealing the election, which turned out to be a mistake.) Dismissing and disregarding Kat’s identity theft (and overlooking the fact that, in this alternate version, she failed at her mission), and deliberately choosing to bestow sainthood on her anyway for the practical benefit of the logistically and emotionally battered fleet, is so much more what BSG is about (or was, or at least should be) than following a by-the-numbers cliched story of a flawed person being redeemed by heroic success at the cost of noble self-sacrifice.
Am I wrong? Wouldn’t that have been a BSG episode we could all get behind?
Warning: Moore makes some really gross noises with nose debris.
In explaining the premise of the episode he explains why he made some of the decisions that annoyed some of us.
Watch out for the snot suckin’ though.
I quite liked the episode as it stood. And I think your version seriously violates the established structure of BSG by allowing a sacrifice to be meaningless.
I can’t think of an example we’ve seen where a character has made a major sacrifice to accomplish something, and has failed. I don’t think that’s a story that Moore would want to tell.
I listened to the podcast today. I don’t feel like I learned anything. “The story on screen is almost exactly what was in the script.” Really? Yikes. I though Jane Espenson was better than that.
We learned they wanted to show the “rag tag fleet” in a storm at sea.
To make it convincing, someone must die.
The story was built around those things, rather than those things being part of the story.
He wants lights inside the space helmet so we can see the actor’s faces despite the fact that they would blind real pilots.
Moore just wants to tell a story rather than write good science fiction.
