Tag: galactica

The Battlestar Galactica review has slowed down lately, thanks in part to a wedding and all its accompanying visitors and houseguests.

But it’s also because I knew this episode was coming. Tight Me Up, Tigh Me Down is by far the worst episode of the first season, and one of the worst episodes of the entire series. While Galactica is seldom perfect, this is one of the few episodes that is outright bad.

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Torture is a funny thing.

Most people would probably agree that torture is bad. But in fiction, as with other forms of violence, torture takes on a certain air of respectability. When the good guy has captured the bad guy, and the audience knows the bad guy is really the bad guy, is it really so awful to torture him a little bit? There’s no danger of ambiguity in Flesh & Bone: Leoben is a Cylon and everyone knows it, because Adama killed a Leoben model in the miniseries; it’s not like Starbuck is interrogating someone who’s merely suspected of being a Cylon.

And unlike even the scummiest of villains on 24, Leoben isn’t human. So really, what’s the harm in beating the crap out him while trying to find out where he hid a bomb? Is one Cylon life more valuable than hundreds or thousands of innocent humans? “Of course not”, you’d say.

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Last episode, Number Six did a pretty good Bruce Banner impersonation, warning Baltar that he wouldn’t like her when she’s angry. In Six Degrees, she makes good on that threat: After Baltar makes fun of the Cylon god a few too many times, the Six in his head disappears, only to be replaced by a real-life Six, who claims to have evidence of Baltar’s treason.

We can pause, for a moment, to recognize one of the funniest scenes in the entire series: Baltar arrives in Galactica’s command centre to find his fantasy woman standing among the crew. Except she’s not imaginary at all, and Baltar’s discovery of this fact plays out like a Marx Brothers routine. There aren’t a lot of funny scenes in Battlestar Galactica, but I suspect most of them involve James Callis.

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Why only 12 Cylon models?

If you can make robots that pass for human beings, why limit yourself to 12? Wouldn’t it be easier to conquer and/or destroy humanity if you had 50, or 100?

But okay, let’s say you only get 12, for reasons I have yet to hear but may be totally plausible. Five Cylons are super secret and special, so you’ve got seven. But why do they have to be identical? They all have the same shape, same hair, same face, often the same clothes. Tricia Helfer changes her hairstyle and puts on glasses a couple of times, but that’s the extent of Cylon diversity.

Why don’t they have a Fat Doral? Or Bearded Leoben? Or even Boomer With Slightly Shorter Hair? Even if you’re stuck with a basic genetic template, surely, in the future, there are a variety of options for cosmetic enhancement?

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Act of Contrition and You Can’t Go Home Again are two halves of a story, so we’ll knock them both off here.

Why would anyone think making Starbuck a teacher is a good idea? Yes, she’s the best fighter pilot in the universe, but she’s also undisciplined, insubordinate, and possibly crazy. While there’s no question she knows how to fly a Viper, her true awesomeness lies in her instincts and reflexes. Having Kara Thrace teach pilots how to fly is a bit like the Billy Bishop Flying School.  Surely there’s another pilot – Apollo or Boomer, if you need a main cast member – who could handle at basic training.

But let’s overlook that plot point, as we have overlooked several plot points and will need to overlook even bigger ones to come. We can even explain it by suggesting that Adama wanted to teach Starbuck some responsibility, that he needed her to be more than just an awesome pilot/sniper/interrogator/strategist. We can even overlook Starbuck’s occasionally excessive awesomeness, since she’s such a fuckup whenever she’s not blowing shit up or punching people in the face.

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Hey, look! It’s Richard Hatch!

(no, not that one)

Battlestar Galactica is a remake, as we all know. It’s natural to want to pay homage to the original, but that sort of thing runs the risk of getting silly. Using the original theme music during a newscast was wonderful, but cameos from the “original” Cylons in Razor were gratuitous.

So where does Richard Hatch fit in? He was one of the stars of the original series. I suppose the instinct might have been to cast him as a veteran fighter pilot, but Galactica went the other way: Tom Zarek was a terrorist – or a political freedom fighter, depending on your perspective.

Well, there’s not a lot of perspective involved. Zarek is, for the first couple seasons, a sinister semi-terrorist, always plotting some way to seize power.  He gets more interesting later on, but for now, they may as well have given him a handlebar mustache.

That said, Hatch did the best he could with the role. Zarek may be almost-kind-of-evil, but he always appears intelligent and reasonably charismatic. If he weren’t clearly set up as an opponent for Roslin and Adama, the “freedom fighter” angle might be easier to accept. As it stands, the prison setting in Bastille Day makes him look more like Hannibal Lecter than George Washington.

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The Cylon Sleeper Agent didn’t get a whole lot of use on Battlestar Galactica. Most of the Cylons, when caught, confessed to being Cylons, and then went about being evil, fleshy toasters.

But then there’s Boomer, who doesn’t know she’s a Cylon, even while she’s carrying out evil Cylon plots. She wakes up alone, soaking wet, with a bag full of explosives next to her. When Galactica’s water tank blows up, she doesn’t know what to think – she wouldn’t do it, obviously, but it certainly looks like she did.

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Battlestar Galactica? Really?

You’re going to revive a 1970s  sci-fi series that was a flaccid attempt to emulate the success of Star Wars, replete with soap opera performances and 1970s fashion?

That, in itself, calls for scepticism.

But to the surprise of many, Battlestar Galactica: The Miniseries kicked ass.

Surely, though, that creativity and quality wasn’t sustainable on an ongoing basis, right? It’s one thing to produce six hours of miniseries, but an ongoing series?

The creators of Battlestar Galactica must have been aware that the debut of the ongoing series would generate as much, if not more, scepticism than the miniseries. So they responded with 33, an exceptional “pilot” episode, and one of the strongest episodes of the entire series.

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