Battlestar Galactica 4.13: "Sometimes a Great Notion"

[annathepiper]

Picoreview: mmm, GRIM!

Of course, it couldn't be anything BUT grim coming back from that last cliffhanger, now could it? But I gotta say, tonight's episode delivered the grim in spades, and we are definitely upholding the principle of not so much enjoying Battlestar as surviving Battlestar.

Welcome back, BSG. We missed you!


First up: Dee. Oh, honey. I certainly had my issues in the past with Dee and Lee as a couple, but oh man, what a way to go out. Sniff. And a general cry of AUGH to the writing staff for pushing the knife in just a little bit more for having her blow her brains out right after going out with Lee, too. AUGH.

Second up: Oof, the scene with Roslin burning her copy of the Pythian Prophecies. And her voice all high and strained as she told Bill not to touch her. AUGH.

Third: The look on Bill's face as Roslin told him to fuck off. He was still kind of holding it together at that point, but then Dee's shooting herself in the head sucker-punched him. Oh man, that raw agony in his face when he finds Lee there with her body. And oh Jesus, the scene where he goes to try to provoke Tigh into shooting HIM. AUGH.

Fourth: STARBUCK! Finding her OWN BODY! Extra bonus points for solarbird and spazzkat calling that very plot point about five minutes before it happened. Weird enough that she freaked Leoben out, not to mention the rest of us. I can hear the cry of "DA HELL?!" resounding all over Fandom tonight. Except from Dara. She was doing the I'm Right Dance as soon as the episode ended, now that we have conclusive on-screen proof that there are forces at work here besides the humans and the Cylons.

But don't worry, Kara. You're still my and Dara's crazy, crazy apocalypse harbinger of death TV girlfriend! <3

Which of course brings me around to the Cylon half of the show, and the ever so intriguing development that all of the dead bodies the landing teams were finding were Cylon. And that the Final Four¹ were all remembering having lived on Earth before. Which leads in turn to the 13th Tribe having been Cylon.

AND ELLEN AS THE LAST ONE! Not so much with the seeing that coming, either!

Paul was underwhelmed by that and proclaimed it anticlimactic. Dara on the other hand liked it and proclaimed it appropriately fucked up. Me, I'm leaning towards liking it, if nothing else because it does give poor Tigh a bit of a crumb of happiness, and it raises the interesting question of whether Ellen will be reborn at some point before the series ends.

And, well, yeah, appropriately fucked up as well. No wonder their relationship was so broken during the whole show. ;)

Nice start for the final run, y'all. Keep it coming!

¹ I still can't think "the Final Four" without thinking of Kentucky basketball.

Comments

[firni.livejournal.com]

P wants the writing staff to choke to death on a 23" chrome-plated Centurion... um... something.

[annathepiper]

*snerk!* They can't. They have to finish the show. ;)

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I do so like the grim, and I love this show.

Put me in the camp of liking that Ellen is the last cylon. I didn't think it could be one of the top four characters (Adama, Lee, Kara, Roslin), Baltar was pretty much already out of the picture, and the other options I was settling on (Gaeta, Dee--until she shot herself, maybe Zarek?) would have been less dramatic. Really, Tigh is one of the best characters on the show, and Ellen as a cylon just gives him so much more to play with.

[solarbird]

Zarek would have been pretty cool too. But I guess he's not.

I was rooting for Galactica itself really. ^_^

[wrog]

no more Blakes7 for j00!

[annathepiper]

Oh yeah, I'm still down with it, though I'm wondering at this point if anybody at all is going to pull out of this story with a happy ending. It'd be deliciously fucked up if Ellen resurrected and she and Tigh were the only couple still together and alive by the end of the show. ;)

Yeah, the more I think about it the more I'm good with the Ellen choice, assuming that we actually see some more of her. Otherwise it seems just a throwaway thing. You're right, though--none of the top characters would have been appropriate, and the second tier wouldn't have had much oomph to them dramatically.

[wrog]

meanwhile I'm still trying to figure out how they can go from not being able to tell the difference between currently living Cylons and Humans except via the most technical labor-intensive/expensive procedures and only then with Brilliant Scientist Baltar overseeing things...

... to being able to immediately spot the difference in 2000-year-old bones?

[firni.livejournal.com]

Maybe it was the Cylons telling the difference and Baltar was just their mouthpiece?

[annathepiper]

It was specifically the Cylons who figured it out. That seemed clear to me in the context of the scene where that data is revealed.

[sianmink.livejournal.com]

cut the bones and count the rings?

Fuck if I know.

[annathepiper]

See the comment I just dropped to wrog, below. To be fair, it was the allied Cylons, not the actual Galactica crew, who ID'd the remains. So that didn't bug me at all.

[annathepiper]

Well, to be fair, it was specifically the allied Cylons who ID'd the bones, not the Galactica crew itself. (That was certainly what I came away with; it was some of the Cylons who made that reveal to Adama.) So that didn't bug me at all. I have no trouble buying that the Cylons can successfully ID their own remains.

How they got there is another question entirely. ;)

[wrog]

it's more a question of, if the differences are so subtle that it requires Brilliant Scientist to come up with a test that's actually reliable (which, to be fair, he accomplished, even if he never had occasion to let on that it actually worked, and which, to be fair, I never really bought in the first place [i.e., that the kinds of differences exhibited between "new" model Cylons and Humans could ever possibly be that subtle in the first place]...), how is anything discernible going to remain after 2000 years of weathering and decay?

[annathepiper]

That scene worked for me, actually--specifically because of the dramatic reversal of Bill being the one drunk off his ass, and Saul keeping it together.

But also because Adama needed to have his one explosive freak-out over a) ZOMG MY BEST FRIEND IS A CYLON?! and b) well, SHIT, Earth is a radioactive wasteland, what do we do now? He needed Tigh to smack some sense into him the way he did. Nobody else on the ship could have made him get his shit back together.

And oh my no Kara is specifically not a Cylon. She's clearly Something Else, and one presumes, in this form, an agent of whatever preternatural forces we've already seen at work in the show--one presumes either the power behind Ethereal!Six, or Ethereal!Baltar. Possibly both. This is underscored by Leoben actively freaking and running and bolting when Kara finds the crashed Viper and the body inside.

solarbird pointed out that Kara finding her own body echoes rather nicely back to the Count Iblis plot in Old!BSG--because there's a bit I didn't remember wherein even while Iblis is swaying the Fleet to his cause, Apollo finds his body in a crash site.

[avram]

Kara's clearly a Terminator.

[kairee.livejournal.com]

Talked a bit with a friend of mine tonight over RL RPGing. She has a certainty that while Ellen may be a Cylon, she is not "The Fifth". Something else is going on. I couldn't quite catch onto her reasons, not being such an avid follower of the plotlines.

[starsongky.livejournal.com]

Dee was a shocker, but it made sense in retrospect. She passed up the chance to be planetside again at New Caprica to stay on Pegasus, then Earth turns out to be crap too. With nothing left to live for, she chose to die happy.

And then President Lee, changing the official count ... OUCH!

Earth!Ellen sucks. I was rooting for Helo. That would've explained a lot about why the Cylons let him live on Caprica, toying with him instead of just shooting him. Full-Cylon Hera works too, they had to be able to breed once if there was a whole planet full of them. The flashbacks all looked like regular crowd scenes, not multiples of a few models.

[llachglin.livejournal.com]

I've had a hunch for a long time that the "Final Five" type cylons do not create multiple instances of themselves at the same time. One of my earlier ideas was that they were replicated somehow through human DNA, which could explain how they could remain hidden for hundreds or thousands of years with no sign or memory of their existence. But the fact that the earlier models look exactly the same suggests I've got the mechanism wrong. But whatever it is, I doubt it's the Resurrection-ship style replication.