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.

Shows I love: awaiting Battlestar Galactica
posted 1-16-2009 - 7:27 pm

In less than an hour, Battlestar Galactica returns after months of absence. Its fans have been alternately hopeful, pissed, confused, exasperated, and excited. Same here, but I've been mostly pissed -- at the lousy ending of the last episode that aired, at the fact that the timeline was so drastically condensed in the last 15 minutes of that episode, and that it was done in such a not-at-all credible, nonsensical fashion.

I'll get to more about that later, perhaps after I've seen the new episode of this final half-season. For now, let me indulge in what has preoccupied most fans for months: the identity of the final secret Cylon. That will be revealed in tonight's episode anyway, so the wait is nearly ended by now.

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?