Wasn’t his mother at least slightly attractive? She must have lived close enough to Baltar for them both to arrive at the Viper at about the same time. In the same neighborhood, maybe…
Well, frak me, that’s probably true. And Boxy’s father was in the fleet, so he probably knew Ellen, too.
Boxey’s father was the Armistice Officer from the miniseries.
There is a certain resemblance, the vacant stare, gaping mouth, waxen complexion…
This awful excuse of an episode clearly demonstrates the horrific messes that arise when you begin a long story-arc drama ***before you’ve outlined the entire story arc in advance! ***:smack:
I’d complained about this in an earlier thread, but another poster insisted that this “make it up as you go along” technique is better than the planned-out story arc of, say, Babylon Five. His argument was not without merit, but the downside of such an approach is far more harmful than the small benefits associated with the other strategy. As I see it, this ep and a few other recent eps present a stinging critique of that seat-of-the-pants approach.
In my opinion, Ellen had always been the least sympathetic, least respectable and least creditable character in the series (worse than Cavil, in my eyes), and her death brought me as much boundless joy as when Steven Seagal’s character died very early on in the film Executive Decision.
But since the producers and writers had never considered Ellen to be a Cylon at all until very late in the game, their retroactively deciding that she was the final Cylon was simply not very tenable. And now we’re forced to suspend our disbelief and accept that this dull-witted, extremely vindictive drunken whore is actually the super-genius mother of her race!
If they’d had Ellen carry the far more appropriate and respect-worthy personality she demonstrated after rezzing while aboard the base ship back with her to Galactica, that would have been easier to swallow. But stupidly, the producers/writers killed off *that *personality and returned Ellen to the dull-witted, extremely vindictive drunken whore she had been previously. What the?
One more (admittedly niggling) point: Now that the producers/writers have hearkened back to BSG TOS as a major plot element, does no one recall that humanoids – whether metal or flesh – did not invent Cylons in the first place? That they were created by a race of reptilians instead?
Oh what a web we start weaving when we tell a story-arc drama before fully conceiving!
OK, there’s no denying I deserve to be fully prosecuted for that. I’ll come along quietly…
Ask him if he’s alive, then kiss him on the mouth to be sure.
5 episodes left and they use one of them on All My Cylons???
At least the Baltar subplot was funny.
Come on RDM! I want mythology, story resolution and space for the remaining episodes.
As for the origin of the name “Cylon”, consider this: Cylon of Athens. Interesting tie-in with the Colonials’ Greco-Roman belief system, yes?
Nah, I don’t think that’s the problem at all. First of all, the make-it-up-as-you-go approach (or whatever RDM has been doing) has worked exceptionally well over all. I have a feeling he won’t let us down with the finale, and even with this episode–in fact, even of the rest of the episodes suck ass–the average quality of the show has been extremely high.
Secondly, I don’t think it would have mattered if they plotted it in advance. Maybe they could have brought a few subtle sparks of genius to Ellen’s earlier characterization, but they would always have made the final Cylon someone least expected. And Ellen . . . well, we all have our opinions, but I think Ellen’s been a great character, this episode excepted.
Rather than RDM, who’s produced the show almost flawlessly, it’s very tempting to place the blame on Espenson, the scriptwriter, but I’m not even sure that’s right. There are lots of great moments and great lines. The dialog is good, and the characters are mostly believable. I found it very true and human that Ellen would revert back to her old habits (even if they had been habits of an implanted personality) in the presence of Saul. The problem is that the show didn’t sell the audience on the transition: there was no visible struggle, too little recognition on the part of Ellen that she was becoming her own worst self; it was too sudden and abrupt. But that’s part of the overall problem of pacing throughout the episode: repetitive, ponderous scenes of Adama looking at the hull; the lack of any real tension over the decision whether to abandon Galactica–or over anything in the episode, in fact; the uneven tone of the episode, moving from humor to (attempted) drama with no real sense of appropriateness. Those are all editing problems. The fact that scenes explaining Baltar’s offer policing the citizens and Adama’s acceptance were filmed and then cut gives proof positive. There was a potentially good episode hiding in that mess. It was killed in the editing room.
Ellen Tigh embodies the message the show has delivered over and over: that you can be a great leader, a genius, a good-hearted person, you can mean well, and have all the right goals, yet still be a colossal fuck up at the very same time.
I didn’t get “implanted history” from Cavil’s exposition last week: I got “implanted history and memory.” This isn’t Dollhouse – the people are fundamentally the same, it’s just that they’ve been unplugged from their real lives and plugged into fake ones. At least that’s what I took away from the explanation.
I don’t think there are “all those” Marines now. The mutiny had a not-insignificant body count; we saw characters maneuvering around many corpses in the corridors. Remove from the ranks everybody who was killed, as well as everybody whose rededication to their oaths was disbelieved by Adama, and you’re looking at a seriously depleted skeleton crew. After the mutiny, Adama’s going to prioritize deployment of Marine guards at critical points: engine room, weapons lockers, CIC, the hangar deck. If there’s anybody left over, they guard communications arrays, damage control, auxiliary fire control. If there’s anybody left over after that, they go to the refugee rooms to hand out food. There was a throwaway mention in this episode of the possibility of bringing over some clanking Centurions to help with security. That means critical positions are barely covered by available staff. No wonder the Sons of Ares could operate with impunity.
That said, the episode was definitely a muddle. It was paced weirdly, spending too much time on navel-gazing (or girder-gazing), and not enough time in other areas. I can see how and why Tyrol would have made the choice he did (the previously summarized “okay, yeah, whatever” mindset, where he’s detached from anything that matters and is just coasting along until a new mission presents itself), but I would have liked to see that more clearly. Ditto, a clearer transition for Ellen from “I understand a lot more now” to “but I’m still a manipulative shrew.”
Not one of the show’s finer hours, but it got the job done. Onward.
But that’s not relevant to my complaint. In an insufficiently thought-out story-arc drama such as I consider BSG to be, any individual episode can be excellent – for that matter I imagine they all can be if examined in isolation – but the story arc as a whole will necessarily suffer. It can never be as compelling a story as one that had been thoughtfully planned in outline form in advance (note that I’ve never argued that such a story needed to be planned out in detail first).
What the viewer will necessarily see as a result of the seat-of-the-pants approach is the detritus of sub-story arcs that didn’t pan out well or even dead-ended, plot points in the arc that don’t meet up properly, and messy rationalizations & “re-re-imaginings” that have to be dumped out via excessive exposition. Exposition that may well seem desperate or even panicky.
As a case in point, consider the morass of ludicrous absurdities in The Phantom Menace (shudder!), featuring the 6 year-old spawn of a Virgin Mary who, even though he’s an uneducated slave, designs and constructs a diplomatic protocol android as a hobby project that he then proceeds to forget entirely about. For the that episode it was decided that his power with the Force was due to his blood being flooded with Force-generating metachlorians, a plot point that never saw another mention. Then there’s… No. I won’t go on. Point made, I hope.
That’s where we disagree. I am forced by experience and basic logic to contend that a planned-out multi-episodic story arc will come off better than one that isn’t well-planned. It would be like Beethoven improvising his Ninth Symphony on stage like Keith Jarrett, whose improvised piano recitals were truly wonderful but simply not in Beethoven’s league. It’s theoretically imaginable, but stupendously unlikely.
I’m standing by my earlier assessment that, after reading that Moore openly admitted that Ellen was so unimportant a character that no one had thought she’d ever be seen again after her death on New Caprica, let alone as the super-genius mother of her race, to the effect that: “With that lack of foresight in mind, the series now seems more like a Gygaxian role-playing game whose outcomes depend on rolling dice than an inspired and thoughtful work of art.”
The resulting story can be engaging and enjoyable, but the odds of it being truly beautiful are considerably against it.
Yes. Hence his connection with Six, since she was the last thing he saw before the Cylons blowed up Armistice Station.
Should’ve double-quoted in my last post…
You are basing your hypothesis on incorrect information. Ellen is the only one of the Final Five whom the writers had been considering as a Cylon from season one – Moore talks about it in several of his podcasts. This is also apparent in the is-she-or-isn’t-she plot from “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” back in season one.
And, not only is redeeming irredeemable characters one of the tropes of this show (Zarek, Boomer, Anders, Kelley; reversed for Gaeta, etc.), but Ellen’s spectacularly flawed personality fits exactly into one of the messages they’ve been giving us about the Cylons: they’re human, with all those human flaws, despite both the Cylons and Colonials attempting to deny it.
This really bothered me, too. When Ellen was revealed as the final cylon, I was surprised, and not in a good way. However, I felt the decision was vindicated during the last episode, when she resurrected and revealed herself to be a more interesting person than she had previously seemed. In fact, I thought it was a good example of how an actor can switch the sort of personality they’re projecting.
But the abrupt switch back to Old Ellen does not bode well; it makes me think that they either haven’t thought this out, or they’re not enforcing the plan on the writers. (And the same goes for Caprica Six’s baby – it seemed like the writers were just saying, “uh, never mind about the baby thing.”)
I also didn’t like the story line about Baltar’s cult arming themselves. It’s not so much that it’s an inherently bad idea, but with only a few episodes left, they need to be wrapping up story lines, not introducing new ones. This just seems like one more thing they’ll have to hastily resolve (or ignore) at the end of the series.
Amen.
As already pointed out, the problem with this episode was really in the way it was edited. As the writer of this episode, Jane Espenson, has said in an interview the intent was to essentially show a “family reunion” of the Final Five, and you know how such family reunions invariably turn out. Things start out nice, but eventually degenerate into bickering and squabbles. That was exactly what we saw in the episode. This was definitely not the most engaging episode after some very solid shows. In the preceding shows, as RLM has pointed out, they had a lot of material and had to cut a lot of scenes, but were still able to sustain the continuity in the stories. In “Deadlock” one had the opposite feeling – not enough material and the need to pad some time such as by showing Adm. Adama always checking on the ship’s repair. Finally I think that this was just one of those episodes that were done to save some production money (no new sets or CGI were used) so that the final few episodes can be spectacular. At least that’s my expectation.
Two new bits of CGI: The CAP, including both vipers and the heavy raider, going out to meet the incoming raptor; and the same CAP accompanying the raptor to its landing on Galactica.
Other than that, yeah, very light on post-production costs.
I have no problem with this general concept, but Ellen, in her pre-resurrection form, does not seem to be remotely capable of masterminding a new cylon race. In her resurrection episode, this problem seemed to be fixed by showing that her “real” self was more rational and capable than what we’d seen before; she was a bigger person. But now “Deadlock” seems to have muddied that, because she’s back to being a destructive, petty boozer.
I theorize that being back on Galactica, back with Saul, and suddenly thrown into a stressful personal situation, caused the “destructive, petty boozer” personality to come back to the forefront, at least temporarily. She likely realizes that, directly or indirectly, she’s the cause of Caprica 6’s miscarriage (and the dashing of hopes for the Cylons that they can reproduce biologically); perhaps that’ll cause her to snap out of it.