Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica
posted 4-19-2008 - 10:04 pm

 
WELL. Only three episodes into the new season, and Battlestar Galactica has gotten even stranger than usual.

Everyone and everything seems to be unraveling in its own way. The four newly revealed human-looking Cylons, aka 'skin jobs', the relationships among the key Galactica players, and, interestingly, even the Cylons themsevles are comping apart. As convoluted as things already are, they manage to get even more complicated. Curiouser and curiouser, said Alice. This is indeed a human diaspora through the looking glass.

At the end of last season, four of the five remaining skin-job Cylons were revealed to be key Galactica players — Tigh, Tyrol, Torie, and Sam — who are in critical positions attached to other key Galactica players. They're all stunned by the realization that they're been secret Cylons all their lives and have pledged to each other to collectively keep the secret; but that's getting increasingly harder to do. Even more shocking is the return of the presumed-dead Starbuck, whose fighter plane exploded as it spiraled down into the atmosphere of a gas giant and who claims to have been to Earth. No one is more stunned than she is to learn that she's been gone for two months, not the mere hours that it appeared to her. As glad as some are to see her, they all suspect she's a Cylon — how else could she have cheated death?

Even Starbuck herself, at one point, wonders whether she's an unwitting Cylon, given that she has no clue how she survived or how her fighter came back in pristine condition, or where the exact location of Earth is. She only knows that she's been there and is dead positive she can lead them back there. But with every jump the fleet takes further away from where they found her, the more her sense of how to find Earth fades and the crazier that makes her. That gets her thrown into the brig.

Poor Starbuck. She's obsessed, she looks paranoid, she screams, she cries, she's back to insulting people, and she's willing to die to prove her point. Would a Cylon do that? Tigh remarks to the other three skin jobs that Starbuck is more like herself than she ever was and is therefore doubtful as a candidate for the last unknown Cylon. Adama and President Roslin can't afford to believe her, but Adama can't quite bring himself to disbelieve her, either, and that bothers him. He wants to believe. He's acutely aware of the risks either way.

Lee Adama, on the other hand, does believe. He's the only one who has no doubts. At the moment of her return when she steps from her fighter to the flight deck, Lee simply walks up and throws his arms around Starbuck, hanging on wordlessly, to their mutual relief. To him, she is still the brilliant, infuriating, endearing Kara Thrace he fell in love with, and he's unabashedly happy to have her back. It's evident to anyone with eyes how lost they have been without each other and how happy to be reunited.

But she's still married, whereas he's divorced since she left, and she soon falls out of Lee's arms on the deck and into Sam's, if only to keep up appearances. In front of all those people, a stunned, self-conscious Sam hugs her back fiercely; he has reasons of his own to keep up appearances and, like everyone else, doesn't know what to make of his resurrected wife's return. When she doubts herself later, he says it doesn't matter whether or not she's a Cylon because she's still the same person and he loves her anyway. She retorts that he's more generous than she is, because if she thought he was a Cylon, she'd shoot him right between the eyes. Was he responding to her self-doubt as a husband, trying to deny his own reality as a Cylon, or trying to draw her out as a possible fellow Cylon by saying that? Doesn't matter — true to her contrarian nature, Starbuck has gotten in his face again and given him pause.

Sam, the former pyramid player turned pilot and now former widower of the wild, crazy and off-kilter Starbuck, wants nothing to do with the other three skin jobs and keeps a low profile. But he's still as much a member of the fleet as is Tigh, to whom he answers. Starbuck's return from the dead derails him even further, as she's clearly not the woman he thought he knew before. Moreover, as his wife she's closer to him than the others and harder to hide the truth from if she's not distracted. Even worse, now that Sam has volunteered for Starbuck's secret mission and there's no turning back, Starbuck has no problem using him for sex to distract herself from her own obsessions, while pointedly reminding Sam that their marriage is and always has been a sham. All this, while Starbuck mystifies and continues to alienate everyone else who's volunteered for her mission, including Geda, Athena-Sharon and Helo.

Col. Tigh keeps up a good front before Starbuck, but he's a lot more unsettled than he looks. As one who's been Admiral Adama's best friend forever almost as far back as their entry into the service, he's now having hallucinations in CIC of shooting the Old Man himself. That terrifies him. At the moment his own existence as a Cylon was revealed to him, Tigh took the stoic route and decided to stick to the human fleet and to Adama to the bitter end: "No matter what else I am, this is who I choose to be."

Easier said than done; still lingering in the back of Tigh's mind is the torture the Cylons put him through on New Caprica, and the fact that he killed his own wife because she betrayed resistance secrets to the Cylons in order to get him released. Now he turns out to be the very thing he hates most. Tigh is a ticking time bomb, and we wonder how long it will be before he explodes or hits the bottle again.

Adama and son are momentarily at peace with each other, but Lee has left the service for a position in civilian government. His relationship with Roslin, which has been friendly since the start of the war, isn't as secure as he thinks it is. Like a good politician, she says all the right things when Lee takes up his office; but it's hard to tell whether she's being deliberately cool to him or just trying to get through a tough agenda in an authoritarian manner.

Still, Roslin may be nursing a grudge against Lee for getting Baltar acquitted of war crimes at the end of last season. It's the shady, less-than-credible Tom Zarek who suggests this to Lee. Zarek undoubtedly has his own reasons for doing so and thereby possibly separating Lee from Roslin politically, but that's still unknown. Lee, however, doesn't know whom to believe. He continues to do what he considers the right thing, albeit that's been shaded now by Zarek's assertions, yet he soon finds himself politically isolated and feeling adrift (yes, he's been Zarek's tool, predictably). It begins to look like Lee may become part of the opposition now, yet for the moment, he and Roslin are both without allies, whereas Zarek's partisans, if he has any, are still lurking the background.

Admiral Adama, meanwhile, has had a hard time replacing Lee. Again. The Old Man pushes to keep his troops in order, but it's tough. His relationship with Roslin is messy and under duress. She's dying for sure this time and knows it, is physically weakened by her treatment even as she tries to keep a strong hand on the government, and she and the admiral fight repeatedly over Starbuck. Roslin adamantly refuses to heed a word Kara says or risk the future of the fleet on Kara's ravings, whereas Adama is tired of distrusting everything and everyone. He can't ignore the possibility that Starbuck is telling the truth, either, so he gives his star pilot one opportunity to prove her case.

In the process, Adama drags Roslin into keeping that confidential. It's a secret the president then has to keep from the press and other members of the government, and she resents that. It complicates her already complicated relationship with Adama, who's letting her stay on Galactica so that he can keep a closer eye on her and take care of her, and she can be closer to the infirmary. They may be testy with each other at any given moment and annoyingly accurate in their bitter barbs, but he still reads aloud to her while she's getting her chemo, and he lets her use his quarters to catch up on her paperwork. They're under each other's skin in more ways than one. If there's more to it than that, we can't tell; they're being discreet. But we suspect there is.

This gives Tori, the president's aide, more reasons to hang out on Galactica. She has as unstable a sense of self as the rest but by the third episode is beginning to allow for other, more amoral possibilities and choices. We knew early on that Tori had an opportunistic streak when she suggested to Roslin before New Caprica that the election could be rigged in Roslin's favor. Now Tori is persuaded by Col. Tigh to get closer to the thoroughly discredited Dr. Baltar, a man whose own life has deteriorated into an absurdist play after his acquittal.

Tori balks at first, prompting Tigh to concede that she doesn't have to sleep with the guy, just seduce him enough to find out if he's a Cylon or if he realizes who else might be one — like Starbuck, for instance. Yet shag Baltar she does, to her own surprise, and Tori's not sorry about it afterwards. She even admits to Chief Tyrol in the third episode that she has new feelings and sensations that might be worth exploring — and, with a knowing look and less than casual touch, suggests the same to him. Just at the moment that his wife, Callie, catches the two of them together in a bar. Callie assumes the worst.

Tyrol is having his own meltdown. He no longer has a sense of himself, doesn't know who he is or what he should do about it, is angry with the universe for having made him live a lie, and is afraid to think about where his loyalties really lay. Overwork is getting to him, though he buries himself in it, and so is his colicky son, who can't seem to stop screaming. Meanwhile, he and Callie can't seem to stop arguing. She wants him to be home more often, stop being on call all the time, and pitch in more with the child care; but after being lit into by Callie, he storms out instead.

While Tyrol's meltdown is slowly coming to a boil, Callie's is much further ahead: she's depressed, she can't sleep, she can't seem to quiet the baby for more than a few minutes at a time, and there's no one else to help out other than the absent Tyrol. It might as well be raging post-partum depression time, many months late. Callie's hooked on pills that make her restless and paranoid, and everything in her life seems to be going to hell. Even without the Cylons — whom she loathes with a vengeance — at the moment she catches Tyrol and Tori in the bar, Callie is Medea on steroids. And then after secretly tracking him to a meeting, she learns that her own husband is a skin job. It's enough to push her to the edge. And to bring out a new nasty streak in Tori.

Back in the Cylon fleet, the other skin jobs are unraveling into factions. The most recent trouble began when all the Cylon fighters suddenly pulled out of a dogfight after one of them recognized the newly outed Sam as a fellow Cylon and abandoned pursuit, leaving both the Cylons and the human fleet astonished. The Sixes, Sharons, and Leobens protested wildly when the Cavil in charge then decided to gut any independence and self-awareness from the now sentient fighters and render them 'tools' again. A vote is demanded, which is expected to end in stalemate: each member of a Cylon model line usually votes with its other members as a bloc, which would make the vote evenly split (the D'anna line, you'll recall, was locked into cold storage because she killed herself once too often while seeking to learn the identity of the final five). This time, however, the principal Brother Cavil has a majority — a swing vote from Boomer, the 'original' Sharon from Galactica, who has fallen in with him. Unlike the minority, who claim a destiny set by a Cylon god, Cavil and his allies admit that they are godless, soulless machines. The reprogramming begins.

Horrified by what they consider an unspeakable crime against the fighters, the Sixes, Sharons and Leobens plot their revenge: they remove the intelligence inhibitors from the metal centurions, aka 'toasters.' The lead Six, a decidedly un-Six-like brunette, gives Cavil prime and his allies one last chance to stop the reprogramming of the fighters, and they refuse. She then informs them of the new situation and lets the enraged centurions shoot Cavil and his three cohorts. Once reborn, they find changed circumstances, but this doesn't prevent them from taking countermeasures that split the entire Cylon fleet and throw it into chaos. Still, the damage has been done, and the Cavil faction worries about what the centurions will do next.

It seems toasters and skin jobs can be just as vengeful and divisive as the rest.

By the end of the episode, Admiral Adama is seen silently consoling a somber, bitter Tyrol in the latter's quarters. It's not clear whether or not Tyrol thinks Callie did a Medea: his son is not to be heard, nowhere to be seen. Is this another instance of a half-human, half-Cylon child being taken from its parent, or something else? We don't know.

In fact, we haven't a clue where any of the characters are headed. Talk about a cliff-hanger. And it's just the beginning of the season.

Damn, but I love this show!