Okay, I can’t start my own idle, baseless speculation and guesswork about this episode (some of which takes place with the Cylons on their own ships) without talking about one of the chief problems with season 3. So let me get that off my chest before I watch this ep tonight.
After the end of the occupation on New Caprica, Baltar on the baseship was a huge misstep, and the error was compounded weekly as they failed to see the problem that they’d created, which was similar (in my convoluted reasoning) to the “Eye of Sauron” situation in the Lord of the Rings movies. In the first movie, the eye is a big fiery circle of death. It only appears in brief, threatening flashes, or by dominating the entire screen with a shot so close and intimate that it could singe your eyebrows right off. But you never get more than a hint of the context around the eye, and so for the entire movie, it is an incredibly menacing and evocative image.
In the third movie, though, the eye is the functional equivalent of a searchlight from a crappy prison-break movie. It loses its menace entirely.
I don’t blame them for the choice in LotR. They needed to get across certain concepts integral to the plot, without which the details of the intricate journey of you-know-who to deliver you-know-what to you-know-where gets a little confused.
So, to make the bridge to Battlestar, I was a little worried in season 2 (the episode “Downloaded”) when the show started offering the Cylons’ perspectives on things. What’s particularly frightening about the Cylons, to me at least, is their seeming lack of understandable motivation for their actions. The movie Halloween is a classic horror flick largely thanks to the fact that the murderous impulses of Michael Myers have nothing more than the most superficial pseudopsychological explanations. He kills for no particular reason, and that makes my skin crawl.
“Downloaded” alleviated my fears largely because it stuck with the motivations of individual Cylons and passed over the decision making of the upper management types. When we finally hear about their decision to leave the humans alone, it’s episodes later, from Brother Cavil. The entire decision-making process was entirely obscured. We have no clues about how exactly Caprica Six and Boomer convinced the other five. It’s just a brief flash of their original, personal decision, and then it’s suddenly decided for the Cylon as a whole.
Similarly, consider Cavil releasing Tigh from his cell at the beginning of season 3. We have to put the pieces together to figure out the decision. We don’t see Cavil making up his mind - we see only the results of his decision, with Tigh being released and Cavil only later revealing the purpose of it by forcing Ellen to give up information about the resistance. The context of the actual decision is obscured.
Fast forward to Baltar in his new techno-bedroom with the glowing red lights in the wall. Oooo, sciencey! But previously we had Cylon Raiders and Baseships showing up and firing upon the humans without preamble or warning. Here we have… bickering. We get a good long look at how they make up their minds, and all of the menace of their mechanical decision-making suddenly disappears.
It’s like we’ve zoomed out to see how the giant eyeball of flames could easily be replaced by that gimmick search-light that your local sleazy car dealership uses when business is slow.
Listening to the commentaries, I get that Moore was trying to shake up the Cylons, to give them a little bit of depth by giving their more involved (and more human-like) squabbling. But it would’ve been far better to show us only the results of the squabbling instead of focusing on the squabbling itself. Imagine Baltar twiddling his thumbs in his cell, and then receiving seven different versions of a story from seven different models, each of which with a different perspective and each of which wanting something different from him.
This would’ve been much more mysterious, much creepier, and ultimately more effective. He would’ve always had to ask himself “Are these skinjobs frakkin’ with me, or what?” He would not have known, at first, who to trust. Instead of that mystery, though, we get a view of things that’s far too clear. We get far too much context. A little bit of fog would’ve gone a long way.
Particularly upsetting, along this line of thinking, was their decision to actually show Athena return to the baseship to get Hera. If we as the audience had not seen her perspective, if she had just suddenly appeared again on Galactica with the child (and Caprica Six!) out of nowhere before the sun went nova, Helo (and the others) might’ve really had a question of whether this was their Sharon come back from the other side. As it was, she just shows up, and everyone just assumes she’s the right version. I didn’t get that at all.
A blessed relief to me in the final days of season 3 was that the Cylons had returned to firing on the Colonials on sight and without warning. But now that we’re returning to the basestar for tonight’s episode, I’m getting a little bit nervous again.
I mean, from the preview, it looks like there’ll be plenty of tasty space violence. But I’m just a touch worried.
And idle speculation: So a hybrid baby “cured” the president’s cancer, at least temporarily. So… if a Hera infusion doesn’t work because she’s too old, does Tyrol take the personal risk of pointing out there’s another hybrid baby in the fleet?
… nah, prolly not.
