Because it is something they’ll notice. The “someone’s going to lose an eye” thing wasn’t subtle - it was very clear that Baltar, for example, wasn’t supposed to know the first thing about using a gun.
Fingers on triggers.
Baltar’s fumbling wasn’t the part that really bothered me…it was the other things…like the fingers on triggers and pointing at each other and such. My reaction was very much…JESUS CHRIST DON’T FRAKKIN DO THAT! (Yes, screamed with fear and anger).
But it could be that people are more gun safety aware than I assume.
It was obvious from the scene where they had their food stolen that these women had no clue about using a gun. They pulled the guns and showed them to their assailants rather than pointing them at their assailants.
It shows perfectly well that they are all clueless. From the look in Paula’s eyes, I got the impression that she was going to go start a war.
Yes, and the scene with Carprica where he says “…why do I need to say the words…I feel it, I feel it…” was excellent. Gave me chills.
This ep was very meh. To me nothing really happened, it was just too soap opera-ish. I really do not like them turning Adama into Tighe’s drinking buddy, it makes me squirm for some reason to see Adama all slurry.
Since less than a handful of eps remain I have higher hopes for the coming month. PTB, please don’t let us down!!!
I like the idea that Ellen is intelligent and competent, and more well-rounded than her human incarnation led us to believe, but that her emotions take over and she goes loopy around Saul. However, I think they overshot “interesting complexity” and went all the way to “multiple personality disorder” here. There wasn’t much to connect the Ellen we met on the basestar with the manipulative . . . yes, cunt is the correct word . . . in this episode.
Also, we needed about one tenth of the footage of Bill mooning about belowdecks. WE GET IT already.
However, Michael Hogan is just dynamite. He made me cry. I love the character and I love the actor. Did anyone for a second doubt he’d stay with the fleet? “Well, I don’t remember agreeing to it, so frak that!” Hell yeah!
And, pitch perfect delivery from Roslin on “You shouldn’t worry about Boomer.” 
Anyone think it’s significant that Anders showed brain activity around the time Liam died? Or did they just resort to a Convenient Miscarriage?
Did anybody watch through till the production company credit thingy? It was awesome - “Where’s my paycheck? . . . Gracias.”
How the frak could Baltar, Adama, and Roslin think the best, “all human” way to reimpose civil order would be to let everyone have bigger guns? How about using some of those Space Marines who are always just standing around as a police force, huh? Maybe preventing riots between the Sons of Whoeverthefrak and Baltar’s Single Moms’ Army would be a good thing for preserving civilization, huh?
I have a sinking feeling we’re not going to find out how Boomer found the fleet. Nobody even asked her. Time for some hard fanwanking - there’s a new continuity problem to replace the model numbering one.
A well-done bit of acting from Kate Vernon there. Also a nice touch showing the photos of dead Cylons on the Bulletin Board of Honor.
Agreed. It would have been better to barter for weapons with food and, er, “trade” from some dissatisfied former mutineers. Perhaps there would be black market traffic in firearms from marines killed in the mutiny.
Have they jumped away from our solar system yet? If not, then I don’t think it would be that hard to find them, since Ellen knows the way to Earth now.
It struck me as juvenile to the point of babyish that these grown people still equate getting someone pregnant with loving them. “When a man and a woman love each other very much…” When Ellen was going on about how Saul must love Caprica more because he got her pregnant, there wasn’t enough :rolleyes: in the world for it. Please. He thought you were dead, Ellen, and he moved on. It’s not a contest about who he loves more. I can understand the 7 Cylons being hung up on it, since they are, in a sense, a very young race with some really immature ideas, but Ellen Tigh? Ought to know better.
Okay, that has to be it, davidw. The fleet did jump away from Earth in the webisodes, after a false alarm from the DRADIS, but jumped back. They’re still there, apparently, for old times’ sake, and will be until Battlestar Rolling Stone finishes gathering its moss.
I’m still confused about the timeline, though - Saul killed Ellen, what, 18 months ago. Was she simply in the pattern buffer after that until John realized he needed her to re-resurrect resurrection, or did she simply do bad play scenes with him all that time? We can pinpoint her own decanting as being after the nuking of the Hub. But either John took all that time to figure out what he could do, or she and Boomer were gallivanting through the universe in that Raptor for a year and a half. The Raptor had been lost “over a year ago”, fwiw.
You’re never too old to be juvenile.
They had a lot to accomplish this episode. No wonder it didn’t all work.
Ellen reappeared last week with that strong passive aggressive sniping at Cavil, but her assumption of moral clarity was a characterization light years away from the frakked up person we knew. So they drop her back into the fleet, into the middle of a sordid love triangle she had no idea existed, and they use her all-too-understandable shock from this new situation to trigger all that old rage and pettiness and backbiting, to drive home the point that this really is the same person. But it doesn’t quite work, because the narrative needs of last week’s info dump worked directly against the reestablishment of Ellen’s darker nature. Thankfully, Tigh manages to save the day yet again with another powerful performance. I’m coming to think the writers could turn the Colonel into a somnambulant transvestite with a fetish for fine cheese, and Michael Hogan would still find a way to land it forcefully and convincingly.
There was another essential narrative stepping stone, though, and that was reminding the audience of the necessity of love to make a Cylon union work. At first they play this somewhat subtle, with Caprica having baby pains at the same moment that Tigh and Ellen get it on. But even with the tension building to the key scene, where Ellen forces Tigh to choose the Galactica over his son, we don’t have a good idea of what the stakes are until after the scene plays out. Once Ellen realizes her mistake, they manage to beat it into our heads with sledgehammers that love is a requirement for Cylons to procreate. The key scene, where Tigh makes his choice, works better on a second viewing (kind of like the terribly insufficient exposition in “The Passage” can be forgiven if you walk into the episode already knowing the situation). But the constant reminders of the cruelness of Ellen’s manipulation are still timed wrong. These show up after the moment has already passed.
It might’ve been much more convincing to have Ellen quite consciously know that her actions would murder the child, instead of making her guilty of unintentional involuntary manslaughter, as it turned out to be. But that would’ve been a tough sell in context, too black a mark to put against her after her calm moralistic sermons just a week before.
And the writers problems don’t even end there. Finally, they needed to set up some more dominoes with Baltar and his harem in this episode. But they had practically no time to spend on it, and there is no discernible purpose whatsoever to their actions. What, are the civilians going to start having gunfights in the passageways? It just isn’t clear at all where they’re heading with this, or why. That’s one of those situations where we need to wait for the pieces to fall to figure out why the set up is this way, but it’s always frustrating when the set up isn’t handled with any persuasive rationales.
Still, even with its obvious problems, there was a lot to like in this episode. Like Tigh. And then when Tigh showed up again. And that final scene with Tigh.
There’s been a big stink though, since the first season, about how the skinjobs are physically incapable of reproducing without love. It’s why they sent Athena after Helo in the first place, to see if she could make him love her, and if that would make it possible for her to get pregnant.
In Ellen’s mind, Tigh was physically incapable of getting her pregnant because he didn’t love her, even if he thought he did, and Caprica’s pregnancy says that he loves her more than he ever loved Ellen.
Now yes, Ellen’s being an immature twat, but it’s not just based on some kind of morality play about where babies come from. This is a (yet to be disproven) fact of Cylon biology.
Curse you, Hellestal! Beaten by two minutes. 
They haven’t been able to have any pregnancies as I understand it; it is probably more significant to them than just getting knocked up. “The future of the Cylon race” and all that stuff. 
Curse you both!
The thing about Cylon babies needing love to be conceived is a much-held belief of the Cylons. That does NOT mean that’s why Ellen and Tigh couldn’t conceive, nor is it a measure of how much he loves Ellen and Caprica, and who he loves more. That was just juvenile bitchiness ala Ellen. Also, I guess the baby daddy has to maintain the massive love required at all times or the baby dies? Really? I think they are ascribing mythical reasons to things that maybe aren’t as mystical as they think they are.
I guess I’m kind of in shock at the ignominious end to the much heralded Caprica/Tigh baby. I really thought that kid was, as Roslin said, “important.” Maybe he was insofar as he proves that the pure Cylon path is not going to work. It’s hybrids or bust.
It bugged me that Tyrol wanted to leave the fleet. I just can’t see him doing that. I was sure he was going to want to stay. It was pure plot contrivance to have him say otherwise, so the vote would be split with Ellen as deciding vote. What, was going to leave in the middle of fixing Galactica? I can’t imagine that he would.
The previews were cut off on my DVR, and I haven’t headed over to SciFi to watch them, but next week better deal with two things: Starbuck, and the reunion between Boomer and Tyrol. If it does, I will be happy. This week felt a bit overwrought and petty to me, even though the loss of the baby was a big deal, with so few eps left in the season. Unless the Baltar Manson Family thing is going to be somehow very significant to the end of the show, that all was not very interesting to me.
IIRC this has actually been a plot point for a while. I can’t remember which episode, but it was stated that the Cylons have been trying for a while to procreate successfully, and it was theorized that it wasn’t working because they were missing the element of human love. I agree it seems kind of cheesy but it’s continuity from previous episodes.
All other things considered, I really liked this one. Finally the characters give us some human emotion. I mean we’ve already seen them do anger, vengeance, domination, retaliation, and basic love entanglements, but those are things expected from wartime leaders. In this week’s episodes we really get a deeper sense of who people are.
Yes, I remember the plot point. BUT the fact that Tigh and Ellen couldn’t conceive does NOT mean that he didn’t love her, nor that he loves Caprica more. It just doesn’t mean that. She’s making it mean that out of jealousy and hurt. In fact, Mo Ryan and Alan Sepinwall asked Jane Espenson about this, and she said:
Reading this confirmed my view that Ellen was just being a bitch, and her statements about who Tigh loved more were not coming from some factual assertion about Cylon conception, but from her own emotional fuckedness.
Oh yeah. Definitely she was just using it to torment Saul and drive a wedge between him and Caprica. I don’t think Ellen really cared what happened to anybody in this episode or whether the rest of the Cylons stayed with the fleet. She was just out to reassert her relationship with, and control over, Saul. And I don’t believe for a second she didn’t realize she may have been jeopardizing the baby by putting the mother in distress.