GAH!, MUST…FIND…BRAIN…BLEACH!!!, thanks a LOT, carnivorousplant for reminding me, now I have to knock the rating down to 2.75
Ziggy says it’s the right thing to do after all 
I accept, sir. I and my Number Two shall meet you in… the airlock.
yeeeeessss. the airlock. 
oh hell.
Can I get back to you on this?
It would have been funny if she threw up since Cottle just told her she’d be nausuasfor another hour. Other than the stuff with Cally and the Cylon crisis this episode was crap. Was all of Natalie-Six’s faction and the sentient Centurions on one ship?
No, we see several Basestars jump in to the ambush site – and then only some of them break off to attack. Six tells Eight that they have to warn the other ships… and then the sucker Basestars are blown the Hell out of.
Let’s hope so.
It just struck me that Tori spared the child because it (You happy now, MacTech?) is a human Cylon hybrid. She killed Cally because she Knew Too Much.
like levdrakon.
Not really, when a Sci-Fi program adds children, especially “Magical Children” <shudder> it’s one step closer to Shark-Jumping-Time, I hated Wesley in TNG (a pity really, because Wil Wheaton is a genuinely funny guy, he hated Wes almost as much as the Wesley-haters…), the BorgBrats in Voyager, and He Who Shall Not Be Named in both TOS BSG and new BSG, thankfully, we haven’t seen hide, nor hair of “you know who” since Season 1
If TPTB can quickly and quietly move Hera and Nicky off to the archival backups, so much the better, any episode with either of them is not enjoyable to me at all, no kids in my Sci-Fi shows, thanks, at least not regulars in the cast
Kids+Sci-Fi=Shark Jump
You know, I actually like the political stuff - one of the things I really enjoy about this series is that it doesn’t just look at the “how do we keep the evil robots from killing us?” questions, but also the “how do we keep our society intact?” questions. I think those are, a lot of the time, the more interesting ones - even though they don’t lead to as much eye candy.
And ye gods, there was plenty of eye candy in this episode. Basestar-on-Basestar action, boo-yah!
What’s with Starbuck? She was all “I know how to get to earth.” and now she’s floundering around in space drawing ceiling murals. Was I the only one surprised at the star power on their ship? Hero, Anders, Sharon. I can’t see them taking too much more of Buck’s bizarre behavior. Her little monologue after the Ander’s fracking laid it on a little heavy with the “alien” references, a not too subtle attempt at luring us to think she’s the last Cylon?
Yeah I am not sure whether we are seeing a red herring or genuine foreshadowing - but it absolutely struck me that they were hitting us over the head with a hammer to think that … maybe we will see more of this all season each week a different character is set up.
For me the highlight of the episode is when Cavil sits with Six and Eight to hear their terms & the Toaster makes her say “please” to remove them and then the Centurion who was scrubbing the blood turns and gives a sly look over his shoulder before the cut away. Very subtle and neat and chilling.
Spaced!
I love it when people are thrown out of airlocks. Setting a show on a spaceship and not exposing somebody to hard vacuum is like setting a show on a ship and not drowning anybody.
Battlestar Galactica isn’t really science fiction. That’s one of the reasons it’s so good.
The premise of the show more or less necessitates children. A race of people is on the brink of winking out of existence; they should be trying to have babies. If anything, the show takes it a little easy on the fact that they’re on the precipice; you don’t really see as much material shortage as there would be, and frankly I think people would be going insane a lot more often. But to not have kids… well, that’d be stupid. 40,000 people, how could you NOT have kids?
That said, this wasn’t a strong episode. Not because there was too much of the kid, but because it was just a weak episode without a lot of plot movement. Of four major plotlines we followed, two were of little interest (Colonial politics and Callie’s fate) one was bizarre and impossible to believe (Starbuck’s mission - why in Christ’s name did they send the CAG, the senior officer of the watch, the best Raptor pilot, and several key Viper pilots? Why?) and the one that was REALLY important and interesting, the Cylon civil war, didn’t get enough screen time.
It was probably the worst episode of BSG ever aired, IMHO. Of course, it’s Episode 60 or so, and everyone gets to have a bad day. That makes it 95% likely next week’s episode will be fantastic, since almost all of them are.
I’m pretty sure it all happens on the pods on the side of the ship, and the basic premise is that you have two major levels; the landing pad, which is on top, and the hangar, which is below the pad. The ship lands and then is carried down to the hanger on an elevator. The Viper launch tubes are part of the hangar bay; they just roll the Viper in, close the door, and shoot it out. Raptors are lifted back up, I think, to the landing area, and launch from there. So for a Raptor,
The obvious question is why they didn’t come up with a more space-efficient way of having the Vipers come back to the ship than devoting a huge landing area to them.
None of that statement makes sense.
I knew when Cavil was being so nice and reasonable, it was his way of saying, “You’re about to die.”
I also don’t understand the makeup of the Demetrius crew. I saw a couple of Vipers docked on the outside of the ship, but no Raptor. There’s nothing for most of the crew to do.
I think they have fun with the fact that they can say “frack” as much as they want, and anybody trying to censor it would look like an idiot. (Though Starbuck screaming “Bend me over and frack me like a fracking dagget!” might have been a bit much.)
Too bad we didn’t get to hear more about crime on the mean streets of Caprica City.
I’m going to go against the crowd and say I think this was a strong episode, even if it was lacking in action or major plot revelations. This episode seems to be carrying on the exposition from the previous episodes of this season - all setup with a big payoff to come.
The Cylon civil war has officially begun with repurcussions to come.
The political plot this week was necessary to show that all has not been forgiven between Laura and Lee. Lee is continuing the story line established at the end of last season when he found his idealism and Tom Zareck is taking advantage of the situation. Roslyn is desperately trying to make sure her last days have meaning - remember Adama’s speech from last week - that she is on the verge of a dictatorship so she can push through anything she wants to without the need to go through the Quorum or courts as they currently stand - she has too much to do and too little time to do it in. Since the audience knows Roslyn I think we might tend to think her actions are justified so Lee is serving as the moral anchor both to Roslyn and to us. I think it’s possible we’ll soon see a sort of civil war in the colonial fleet (undoubtedly aided by the five) similar to what is happening in the cylon fleet and the writers are trying to establish attitudes and behaviours now so it won’t seem out of character when it happens.
Cally being killed by Tori was important for two reasons. First - even though Cally was popular in the beginning - she was on most viewers last nerve. It was a nice end to her character. Second, the final five characters are changing. I never would have expected Tory capable of murder but with her realization she is a Cylon is coming a re-emergence of her true Cylon character. We can assume the same is true for the others as well.
Did anybody else notice how close the Cylons are to Earth? Go to this weeks episode at SciFi.Com/Battlestar and click on this weeks episode. Go to 28:31 and look at the constellation (my favorite hence the reason I immediately noticed it) in the background. It’s framed so perfectly that I don’t think it’s a coincidence.
By tis line of reasoning, we can hope to see the rugrats be written out of the story, too. 
The problem with Cally is that her entire existence as a character has centered around the child ever since the kid was born. We didn’t seen her on the screen in the entire third season without her tending that screaming brat, or complaining to Tyrol that he isn’t around the screaming brat enough. Tyrol, on the other hand, got to be a big hero as a resistance leader against the Cylon occupation, and then got to be a big hero finding the Temple of Five on the algae planet, and then got to be a big hero in the union fighting for the little man, and then got to be a big anti-hero as one of the final five Cylons.
Unlike Cally, he has never been primarily defined by having a kid – he’s always had other stuff he can do.
And in this episode, when we finally see a slightly larger slice of Cally’s life, we learn she’s become something of a druggie. And why? Again, because she’s a mommy. We don’t see her on the deck, we don’t see her interaction with other knuckle-draggers on the crew, we don’t see any possible tension between her and them because she’s sleeping with the boss. It’s all mommy all the time, and that makes her an intolerably boring character.
So they decide in favor of spacing her instead of salvaging her. Okay, fine, whatever. But she deserved a better send off than being doomed to spend the last of the life in a drug-induced hysteria about the same old shit. If they’d provided just one or two slices of her life that weren’t dependant on her status as a maker of babies, that might’ve gone a long way.
As it stood, though, this episode had all the negative traits that we’d come to expect from single episode arcs. And the moments that were devoted to the broader plot (Starbuck et al on the sewage ship, Apollo in the government) didn’t provide any hint of where they’re headed. I don’t mind open plot arcs as they long as something happens.
Still, some good moments. Cally shooting like a bullet out that Viper bay is an image that’ll stick with me. Some of y’all seem to have forgotten that Roslin is a fan of trashy murder mysteries, but that craggy old sweetheart Adama remembered, which made for a touching scene. And everything with the Cylons was awesome.
So not the worst episode, but far from the best. It was especially disappointing, though, 'cause I thought that most of the mistakes could’ve been patched pretty easily. But hell, what do I know?
I think I know what you’re trying to say, but this is an offensive statement. You don’t get to summarily redefine a genre you normally dislike in order to exclude any works you take a shine to. The best SF has always been the stuff that focuses more on people than on technology. BSG is just one more example of that, but it’s not the only example, and it doesn’t magically lose the genre label just because it happens to be good.
Adama sure let Starbuck have a lot of his senior staff talent, didn’t he? Helo, his CAG; Gaeta, his tech wizard; Athena, his top Raptor pilot; two possibly-useful Viper pilots in Selix and Anders … who’s left to run Galactica? Did I also happen to see and hear a redshirt pilot among them as well? Having 2 Cylons aboard, one of whom they even know about, has future plot-point possibilities.
And the pilots on Demetrius will have to put on spacesuits to get into their Vipers. Won’t be easy.
I don’t see what else Moore could have done with Callie at this point, either. It’s better she end it this way.
Tory seems to be gradually embracing her Cylonity, by behavior if not by loyalty. That may have evolved from the self-hatred phase that let her git nekkid with Baltar. I think we’re going to see that character get more interesting.
Do we know for sure that there are other meatbag copies on the Colony planets, so that Cavil’s coup won’t actually destroy entire models?
Where’d the Six who kicks Adama’s ass in the previews come from? Is it our old friend Shelley Godfrey, back from cold storage somewhere?
Commentary: The fact that character-centrism is rare in SF does not mean that a character-centric show cannot be SF. This is both, and the character development is what makes it a great one.
How’s this for an endgame:
The Cylon civil war continues to escalate. Meanwhile, tensions in the human fleet grow until they start killing each other.
After an increasingly desperate search, Starbuck finds Earth. Only instead of the Earth we know, or an enlightened Star Trekky garden planet, they find a ruined, post-nuclear war world descended into barbarism. The human fleet jumps into the solar system, with the Cylons hot on their heels. Both sides see the ruin that the Earth has become, recognize the futility and universality of violence, make peace and sing “Kumbaya” while setting out to rebuild the Earth.
“Kumbaya” optional.
Baltar’s Six is still on Galactica in the brig. Roslyn spoke with her in the first episode this season about Starbuck being a Cylon.
Yah, I noticed that, too. I think the only way they could make that work, given that they might need to launch vipers in a hurry, is that they always have someone sitting in the birds. Even when they aren’t flying, pilots probably draw lots or whatever to decide who’s going to spend the next eight-hour shift sitting in a Viper, waiting for the launch order. Seems like that’s how they’d have to do it, right? Unless there are other Vipers we didn’t see, docked to airlocks in a more sensible way, and the ones we saw are just backup/reserve Vipers.