Shows I love: Battlestar Galactica season 5, so far
posted 1-31-2009 - 4:37 pm

So: Felix Gaeda has deteriorated into a bad guy. He's not the fifth Cylon, Ellen Tigh is; but he is a mutineer and a traitor, demoralized by having come this far for nothing and blaming everything on the Cylons, including rebel Cylons. And this requires a lot of rationalization, but there's a lot of that going around now in the fleet as morale descends into near nothing and order into chaos.

I'm wondering, on this morning after the third episode, why neither Tigh nor Adama anticipates the rebels tossing in a grenade once they crack the door and isn't in place to immediately toss it right back, where it could explode on the other side. I was thinking about that even as it happened. They did have just enough time to prepare, after all. But I digress.

I love the way Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell have evolved their characters' natures and relationship over time. They're finally comfortable in their bickering way and can finish each other's thoughts and sentences but rarely need to, now that they're so tight. How fitting that he pushes her onto the escaping transport while remaining himself: the captain gong down with his ship, if need be, but not ready to surrender it or himself just yet. These must be the roles of Olmos's and McDonnell's lives, and they play them that way. Excellent.

Not that anybody else is a slouch.

The writers take us deeper into the mental and ethical devolution of the remaining humans in the fleet. All are shocked by the dead planet they think is Earth, as are the rebel Cylons; some individuals recover faster than others. D'anna's resignation and Dualla's quiet suicide are both stunning, then immediately comprehensible: each in her way has simply given up, won't play anaymore. What a kick that Starbuck ends up so much stronger, even in her confusion, than Leoben; we didn't see that coming, but it's a nice touch. And how satisfying that smug Leoben is finally feeling fearful and completely out of control.

And yet, I'm still pissed off by how suddenly and quickly they made their way to 'Earth' in the last episode of season 4. It simply wasn't believable, in so many ways. To clarify, a few things need to be straightened out here:

a. The Cylons are indeed vulnerable to at least some kinds of radiation, or have all the viewers simply forgotten what happened to the first Leoben we met on Ragnarok Station? This means D'anna is probably choosing a miserable death by remaining on the dead planet, if the radiation sickness of the first Leoben we met is any indication.

b. We know only that the 13th colony found this planet that has approximately the right night sky, and they called it Earth (perhaps because names from the 12 constellations were already used by the first 12 colonies?). Note, however, that all these planets are named 'colonies' — which implies that humanity originated somewhere else on the first Earth, but that doesn't mean the planet that was the 13th colony was the Earth on which all of humanity began: it IS still referred to as a colony. Besides, it's far enough away from the 12 that the sky above the 12 is WAY different. Which leads me to my next point:

c. The stars that form the skies over our own planet are generally so much further away than we realize — being nowhere near the same part of the Orion spur of this spiral arm of the Milky Way — that you could travel a considerable distance (i.e, for tens of years, even at light speed) before the sky began to look even a little different. This is the main reason I didn't buy that hurry-up travel from skies that look absolutely nothing like ours in the last episode of season 4.0 all the way to our section of the Orion spur. That's just scientifically impossible.

If they could travel that distance that fast, why hadn't the skies begun to look more recognizeable long before then, so that the fleet had some clue they were going in the right direction? Just how many months or years were supposed to have gone by at the end of that last season 4.0 episode?? And how would Adama, et al. have been able to hold together that fragile alliance with the rebel Cylons for that many more months, until they reached Earth? Highly unlikely. Sorry, but NOTHING that Eick and Moore can come up with could explain that with any believability. This is what happens when people who write science fiction are scientifically illiterate (and they think others are, too).

d. Given that nothing in that episode or the first one of this season indicates that the trip to 'Earth' — once Starbuck's Viper indicates a direction — is more than a few days to weeks, at that point, it's clearly not the original Earth: it's not possible for the jumps to be THAT big and the sky to change so rapidly, given the distances involved between the stars in those 12 constellations and our Earth. Some of the stars in Orion alone are 1,300 light years away: that's 1,300 years of traveling at light speed. You can't have the slow travel, even with jumps, that this program had for 3-1/2 seasons, then suddenly have them covering such enormous distances.

More than likely, the stars above the 'Earth' where the 13th tribe used to live are only approximately what they should be, not entirely so — and the dead planet our survivors found wasn't the 13th colony but the first, or at least was settled much earlier than the other 12 colonies. It would have been, because of the similarity of the skies, a stepping stone to the others as colonization spread out from our solar system, and perhaps not even the first such stepping stone. There may have been other, closer, less populated colonies in between, even colonies that failed or were temporary as humans made their migration away from this solar system.

Now THAT would be scientifically possible, even logical, and astronomically correct. The writers' "magic" jump from wherever they were when Starbuck's Viper suddenly found a heading to the dead planet that was the 13th colony simply is wrong and very annoying in the writers' underrating the intelligence of their audience. And impossible. No wonder I’m pissed off by that episode: asking me to suspend a bit of disbelief is far different than expecting me to be suddenly stupid and suspend all reasonable thought.

The only thing I can figure is that Moore and Eick were so intent on finishing up this series in five seasons and moving on to other projects (sorry, Sanctuary is ridiculously bad; I feel awful for Amanda Tapping) that they threw this stupid maguffin at us in the form of this suddenly short trip to ‘Earth' and expect us to swallow it whole, without serious questions. Guess again, boys. Or maybe it just took a science-literate woman who likes the series instead of a fanboy to pose the question and expose the fraud, chapter and verse. Gotcha, dudes.

e. We know from interviews Moore has given to others that it is fair to consider the dead planet of the 13th colony to be the home of a colony of human-looking Cylons. He never says whether the entire planet was populated only with Cylons, but clearly, there were a lot more of them there than there ever were in the 13 colonies. And at least one, Ellen, knew about the possibility of a reboot into a new body. And when in the flashback she tells Saul not to worry because of the reboot, he doesn't seem entirely surprised by the notion. So he may have known or suspected then, and she merely reminded him. We don't know how many other hybrid Cylons of that time and place also knew about the reboot capability.

f. As George Santayana said, those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it — but that doesn't mean that all the details play out in the same way, merely that the same overall basic lessons have to be relearned no matter how much the society has changed in the meantime. As a parallel, you could say that by descending into a service-only economy, the U.S. has failed to learn from the Roman Empire, which was severely weakened because it relied too much on others making and supplying what Romans once made for themselves — which made the empire very vulnerable to protracted assault and defeat by outsiders. So this doesn't have to be an episode-by-episode repeat of human and Cylon history in the 13 colonies that runs like an endless loop, merely a failure to learn and remember the lessons as the details change over time. But none of that tells you what happened to the original Earth, on which humanity began long before there were Cylons.

g. How stupid was it that nobody in the fleet thought to look first for radio or other transmissions before they sent down flyers to the dead planet they assumed was our Earth? Why didn't they look for communications satellites or some other sign of civilized life? And why did the episode gloss over the entry into that solar system, with no mention of how many planets there were or were not in that system? We don’t even know that that ‘Earth’ has a moon above it. Perhaps because mentioning fewer than 8 or 9 planets in the system or no moon above would be a BIG tipoff that this wasn't the original Earth, merely a place that the colonists called 'Earth' in honor of the homeworld humanity had departed SO long ago that nobody remembered where it really was.

That implies thousands of years have passed since travelers left the homeworld. And it doesn't exclude the possibility that humans also expanded in other directions to colonize other planets. The homeworld might still be empty, with its resources exhausted and unable to support several billion occupants, but it need not be radioactive, merely abandoned for other worlds lying in many directions away from the originating planet. So there could still be other flourishing human colonies many light years beyond the original Earth — colonies that survive, thrive, and remember homeworld Earth but have forgotten about early colonists who went in another direction to settle elsewhere. And it would take much longer than the series has left for the humans and hybrid Cylons in the fleet to ever get there, folks.

What a kick in the head that would be. And it would open up the possibility of a new chain of stories explaining how and why humans first left Earth and how many attempts they made (and failed at) to establish colonies further and further away from the homeworld.

Does this give you enough to think about, folks?

BTW, isn't there anybody besides me who was glad that Starbuck came alive and really kissed Lee to within an inch of his life as they were running to save the admiral? That gal lives large and eats trouble for breakfast; GOD, but I love her character! She's got a new lease on life just as everyone else is succumbing to the insanity; but then, Starbuck copes with insanity much better than most. She’s firing on all engines now. And Dirk Benedict can go hang: Kara Thrace’s Starbuck has it all over his version. And always will. Go, girl!

I've loved the way Katee Sackhoff has inhabited the character of Starbuck throughout the mini-series and four seasons of the series. A crazy person may be a problem in a sane world, if only because a warrior like Starbuck would likely find peace and stability boring, but a crazy person in an even more insane universe is probably the sanest and most savvy person in it. And that may be why Starbuck is always at her best under duress, when things look their worst and danger is immediate.

Damn, I'm going to miss her when she's gone. But we still have her for a few weeks more, thank heavens. We do need something to distract us form the oncoming depression; the 1930s had Fred and Ginger dancing and screwball comedy. Maybe we need Starbuck kicking Cylon ass. Wheeeeeee! I'm all for it.