Stuck Between the Cylons and a Hard Place

So, it’s a new season of Battlestar Galactica. After Veronica Mars, this is the show that I recommend to people who are in search of good television. While some may argue that the show has lost some of it’s science fiction roots, with conversations of Raptors, Vipers, and Raiders (spaceships, not sports teams) morphing into one large melodramatic interstellar soap opera. I am not one of those that is complaining. If BSG doesn’t have enough sci-fi for you, then you will probably find a comic book or video game to satisfy your need. As long as Battlestar Galactica continues to give us a great story and interesting characters, I am going to stick around. Juding by the first couple of episodes that aired as part of a two-hour premiere on Friday night, I think a lot of people will be sticking around for the rest of Season 3.Since I know a lot of people are still catching up with the series, I am going to try and throw in some reminders of past plot details and I’ll start with a quick reminder of how we left things back in March. President Roslin tried to rig the election, but then decided against it, giving the presidency to Gaius Baltar. It is Baltar who inadvertently helped the Cylons lower the human defenses, and he is still plagued by memories of the Cylons woman he loved, known as Model 6. Baltar also gave a nuclear weapon to a copy of Model 6 named Gina who had been tortured by members of the Battlestar Pegasus.

Gina set off this weapon, which not only killed a great number of the fleet, but also left a weapons signature that enabled the rest of the Cylons to find the human colonies, who had decided to give up their mythic quest for “Earth” and settle on the planet they call New Caprica. It took the Cylons a year to find New Caprica, but once they did, they came in full force. This time around, they didn’t want to destroy humans, but to create a new society. President Baltar surrendered, and now New Caprica is run by a bunch of Cylons.

Now, I don’t like to read the podcasts and I didn’t watch any of the webisodes featured on SciFi that were supposed to help bridge the four months that have passed since we last had an updated, so feel free to correct me if I am wrong. Watching some of the webisodes might have helped make sense of all the scenes that I was seeing at the beginning. Somebody in prison. Somebody having sex, somebody lighting a candle, somebody connecting a battery, and somebody holding a raptor toy.

The person having sex was Ellen Tigh, but the person in prison was her husband Colonel Tigh. President Roslin is the one lighting candles and praying, and none other than commander William Adama is playing with the Raptor toy. Oh, and Chief Tyrel and Anders are playing with the battery. I could probably go into more detail, but I was so distracted by all of the stupid chanting during the opening sequence that I think I lost my concentration.

So, let’s start out with Colonel Tigh. He has been in prison and it looks like it really hasn’t been that fun. I mean, prison is never fun, but it appears that he is missing an eyeball, which is really not fun. Cylon Cavil, played by Dean Stockwell, is sent in to mess with him, but he must realize that if Tigh didn’t talk after having his eye removed, there is not much more you can remove to see if he will say something. He is released, and once he’s on the outside, Ellen is there to meet him, hopefully after she showered in some antibiotics.

Ellen is very happy to see him, and I know you are all thinking “What a dumb bitch!” and “How can she sleep with another man while her husband was in prison and then act like nothing happened?” First of all, you should never complain when Ellen Tigh is in a sex scene! She’s old, obviously has some miles on her, but still has those MILF-y good looks. Then again, this sex scene was with Cavil and nobody wants to see Dean Stockwell naked. And if she isn’t cheating, she is having sex with her husband, and nobody wants to see him naked either. OK, forget what I said. Let’s hope that Ellen Tigh is never in a sex scene ever again.

Anyway, I mentioned that Ellen was in bed with Cavil, who promised to release her husband if she had sex with him. She feels dirty for doing it, but I guess you can’t blame her. In any case, her husband is glad to see her when he gets out.

Next, we should update on Tyrel and Anders. Before the occupation, Tyrel was a labor union leader making lots of demands, and as a former officer on Galactica, he is now sort of the head of the resistance. He and Anders are busy setting off a bomb to kill a bunch of Cylons. Hey, I know it’s good to fight back in the name of freedom and such, but since Cylons effectively come back alive, I have always seen these bombings as a waste. It’s like going to Comic-Con and saying you are going to rid the place of geeks. For every geek you beat up and send back to their parents, four more are ready to take their place. For every table of Stratego that you knock over, two more tables are set up for Risk. It’s just a vicious cycle.

Before the occupation, Anders was married to Kara “Starbuck” Thrace. So what happened to her? The Cylon we know as Leoben Conoy was looking for her as soon as the Cylons landed on New Caprica. He apparently wanted to take her to be his wife, but Kara did not want to become a Stepford Wife. Although Leoben wants her to pretend like they are a happy family, he doesn’t even trust her with a knife to cut her own food, and with good reason. By the way, I bet this guy is glad that he never had to go through childhood. Leoben is so close to lesbian that even the people getting swirlies in the locker room would come out, confident that they could boost their self esteem with a few well-placed Martina Navritilova and women’s softball team jokes.

As soon as Kara finds a moment, she pulls out some kind of makeshift shiv, and then stabs him in the neck, then stabs him in the chest a couple of times for good measure. Talk about a way to die! And Starbuck went back to her dinner like nothing happened. I thought that she would at least try to run away, but she just went about finishing her meal. Perhaps she was in a slight hurry, because she didn’t bother washing her hands, something you should do before every meal, even if you don’t have Cylon blood all over you.

Obviously there have been some major problems with the Cylon government. Well, technically Baltar is still in power, but the Quorum of 12 that are his advisors are now Cylons instead of humans. Frustrated with their progress, one of the Cylon Cabil models says that they should just execute Baltar to show the people they mean business, but the Cylon we know as Aaron Doral reminds them that Baltar is so hated that the people would probably celebrate that action.

Luckily for Baltar, he still has an ace up his sleeve, in the form of Caprica-Six. It was her, along with Galactica-Sharon “Boomer” Valeri, who convinced the Cylons that God would want them to live in peace with the humans. Cavil believes that they should use fear, a suggests that perhaps a few public executions are in order, but the rest decide that’s not a great idea. What is with this guy? I think he has been watching too much Conan the Barbarian because all he can talk about is crushing the enemy, seeing them driven before everybody, and hearing the lamentations of the women.

One thing that has been helping the insurgency is that they have been receiving intelligence from an inside source. They don’t know the source, but whenever he gives them the signal, they find a new piece of information. And by “them”, I mean the insurgency leaders, Anders, Tyrel, and Tigh. This is the first time they have seen Tigh since he was in detention. They see his eye patch, but before they can ask, he says “They ripped out my eye ball and then showed it to me”. I know it’s difficult, but it’s times like these when you need to be positive. At least they didn’t rip off his nuts and then feed them to him.

The latest piece of information has to do with the planned New Caprica Police Academy graduation. The New Caprica Police are humans that have been recruited by the Cylons to take care of security. It is hoped that by putting humans on patrol, they will trust the Cylons more. It never occurred to the Cylons that these people might be viewed as traitors.

Their source gave them information on the security plans, and the insurgency wants to take this as an opportunity to take out Gaius Baltar, who they consider a traitor. This attack would cross a line that the insurgency has stayed away from so far, because they knew that there would be many civilian casualties to go along with any Cylon dead. To quote Tigh, he said there are no boundaries for the Cylons, so there can be no boundaries for the humans.

By now, many of you were probably wondering where the hell the Colonial Fleet was doing all this time. When all of the Cylons jumped in, they managed to get away undetected, but were they just going to float around and do nothing? Well, not quite. It appears that Admiral William Adama still plans on doing something, because he still has his Vipers running training missions. Unfortunately, they all kind of suck. They all look about as comfortable as Jerry Falwell in the Hustler store.

While William Adama thinks that there is a lot of work to be done, his son Lee “Apollo” Adama, who commands the other Battlestar in the fleet, Pegasus wonders what the hell is going on. He has never had a great relationship with his father, and so it’s no surprise to hear Commander Adama call Lee soft, mentally and physically. They have been preparing for a fight for four months, and Lee can only complain that things are getting hard. Before Apollo can finish, his father tells him to get his fat off out of his quarters and that is exactly what he does.

When Lee goes back to Pegasus, he is with his wife, the very delectable Anastasia Dualla. He complains about his father calling him soft, and says that is not true, but you only need to take one look at him to see that he is delusional. I mean, he’s not quite sumo wrestler size, I think he is rapidly losing the view of his toes when he is standing up. I laughed last year when they showed Commander Adama with his porno moustache and Lee became all fat, but now it’s just kind of gross. Dualla, who married a hunk who was a daring soldier, tells her husband that he is soft, and that he’s lost his confidence. He is so preoccupied with trying to avoid becoming just like his father that he forgot that he was a soldier as well.

Back on New Caprica, Tyrel and Tigh are still debating the suicide attack. Once again, Tyrel thinks that they are crossing the line, but Tigh says that the person dying is a soldier and he has sent plenty of people on one-way missions. I would take Tyrel’s side, and not just because I think suicide bombing is deplorable. But again, the Cylons will come back, and the only people they are going to kill are other humans. Yes, one of those humans is Baltar, but is killing him going to make things any better? The Cylons can always replace him with a new puppet, so I sort of think it’s personal for Tigh. Of course, if I had my eye ripped out and shown to me, I might think differently, but Blathar’s death doesn’t necessarily mean that things will suddenly become great for the colonies.

For Tigh, his only goal is to cause as much confusion as he can on the ground so Galactica can come and save everybody. The plan was to have a Raptor from Galactica jump to New Caprica, which conveniently is in the middle of a nebula, making it easier to hide their position from the Cylon base ships, and wait for a signal from the ground. The people on the ground have been sending signals for months, but nobody has responded. Part of it is because the Cylons are jamming their signal, but some people think that they have simply been abandoned, including Anders, who was sort of abandoned once on the old Caprica, so he wouldn’t be surprised if it happened again.

Tigh doesn’t want to believe that because the contingency plan was to have that Raptor there, and he knew that Raptor was out there. And eventually, they did find it. Tyrel’s magical source gave him some information on what channels were better to send transmissions, and they finally made contact with the Raptor. The response? They will make contact every twelve hours, and to prepare for command authority. The best part of the message was the end: We’re coming for you.

Contact with Galactica was a welcome bit of news, but it still didn’t change their strategy. Tigh was going to go on with the suicide bombing, but told Tyrel that if his source said Baltar wasn’t going to be there, he would call off the attack. Of course, moments earlier, we saw Baltar announce that he would not be at the ceremony because of security risks. The contact, which we found out was Gaeta, ran to give his signal and relay the message, but it was too late.

Part of the reason why Tigh was so at ease with his decision to go through with the attack was the soldier that was chosen was so very determined to go on the mission. He had lost his wife to the Cylons, and he wanted to get them back. Now personally, I think it would be better to recruit people into the New Caprica police force and use them to get information on the Cylons. Or, if you’re ruthless, find out who is on the force and then threaten their families if they don’t help the insurgency, but I guess that doesn’t make enough of a statement.

The suicide bomber does make his statement. He goes to the graduation ceremony, and blows himself up just as they were congratulating him for helping form a new era of cooperating among humans and Cylons.

Well, the Cylons got the statement. Thirty-three of the recruits were dead, and the police were going to walk around ski masks on. The fact that these ski masks make them look more like death squads than security forces was apparently lost on the Cylons. You know what else doesn’t help? Ordering these new security forces to go out at night and take prisoners and bring them back for “questioning”.

Roslin was one of the people taken into custody, and it was Baltar that came in to talk to her. He wanted her to release a statement that she condemns these killings, and she does, but there is no way she is going to do anything to help Baltar. Saying desperate people take desperate measures, she refuses to talk and Baltar lets her go.

Tyrel came home from one of his meetings to find his baby crying and his wife gone. Yes, Cally was on the list of people the New Caprica Police were ordered to bring in. The next day he met with Gaeta about what happened, and asked him for help. I thought this was strange because Tyrel said he didn’t know who his source was. After Gaeta tells him he will try and see what he can do, Tyrel runs into Jammer.

Jammer is actually one of the secret police, but since they wear masks, nobody really knows. He is bothered by what he is doing, but he is in over his head. He thought that he could help by putting security back into the hands of humans, but didn’t know what he was going to be forced to do. Jammer didn’t actually say any of this was happening to him, but instead used hypotheticals so he wouldn’t have to admit anything.

Tyrel is still pissed and says that when the time comes, people like Gaeta will be strung up and people like him and Jammer will be making the knots. Now I have to believe that Tyrel didn’t know that Gaeta was his source, because Gaeta has obviously helped the insurgency a lot more than Jammer ever has. Oh, and by the way, if any of you hear that I am starting an insurgency or even just joined a group of people who travel around and beat up communists, could you send me a reminder to make sure that my leader isn’t as fucking gullible as Tyrel? Even though he’s never heard of Brooklyn, and it might not even exist, I am sure he’s probably already bought a bridge there.

It’s been a while since I have updated the Starbuck situation, but if you remember, I had wondered why she didn’t run away after she killed her captor. Well, I had part of my answer when he showed up in his apartment again. Of course! He came back to life, and from what we hear, this wasn’t the first time. It actually happened five times before. Could you imagine killing your husband and having him come back ever time? It must do something to your emotional state. I mean, imagine poor Lorena Bobbit if she chopped off John Wayne’s junk and each time he came back and starred in another bad porno movie?

Oh, and PS, if you NEVER want to see a picture of John Wayne Bobbit’s severed penis from his court case, make sure to never search for “Lorena Bobbit” on Google, and click on the WikiPedia entry. Seriously. You have been warned. I am not responsible for any emotional trauma or carpet cleaning bills after you’ve seen that photo. If I could get an eye transplant like in Minority Report, I would do it right away because clearly my eyes are going to be scarred for life. No really. Don’t go there, I think I killed like five puppies with my screams.

What was that? You thought this was a Battlestar Galactica recap and not an early 90s pop culture flashback Well then, back to Kara! She has been trying to do this, but this guy is really patient. He goes to sleep in his bedroom, and Kara runs upstairs. Now we see what is going on. The apartment is really just a cell, and nobody can hear her scream.

Personally, I find it tough to figure out why this guy wants Starbuck so bad. Granted, she is fairly good looking, but has he taken a look at the Cylon women? Six, Eight, and Three are all pretty hot. Who cares if your neighbor is having sex with the same model, at least they have different brains. How soon we forget. The reason why Cylons are so hot to get with their human counterparts is because the human Cylons cannot reproduce. At first, they thought it was because they didn’t know how to love, and they tried many ways to fix it, including harvesting human women to serve as incubators.

As you may remember, Kara herself was saved from one of those baby farms, but not before they had time to do some surgery on her. We always wondered what happened to her, but now we know. The next time we see Leoben, he has a young girl with him. He tells Kara that this is her daughter. When she was in the hospital, they harvested her eggs, mixed it with his, well, whatever comes out of a Cylon when he’s enjoying himself, and now they have a daughter Casey.

When Adama heard that the Raptors had made contact, he got everybody together to come up with a plan. The plan was to evacuate, but all of the ships on the ground were missing launch keys. Getting those launch keys would be difficult, but had to be the focus of whatever effort was going to be made.

Admiral Adama decides that he is going to put some boots on the ground, but when people find out whom, some wonder if he has gone crazy. The moment Apollo hears what is going on, he takes a trip to see his father right away.

You see, Adama decided that he was going to send Sharon Valeri to the New Caprica. Sharon Valeri is a Cylon. Yes, she is a Cylon that fell in love with “Helo” Agathon and has helped the new fleet on numerous occasions, but one of her copies also attempted to kill Admiral Adama back when he was just a Commander. It’s strange, but Sharon has become BFF with Adama, and apparently they talk all the time now. He even talks to her about his problems with Lee.

Lee sees his father and tries to talk some sense into him. The purpose of the fleet is to protect the human race, and to Lee, that means that they should try and protect the 2000 or so people that were able to escape from New Caprica. He admits that he lost sight of what their purpose was and admits that he was soft, but argues that going back to New Caprica and coming out with a loss means their will be no more humanity to save.

Commander Adama is confident in his plan. Sharon is able to sneak past the Cylon Centurions because the Centurions have been programmed not to disobey any Humano-cylon and weren’t given the ability to tell the difference between any of them. Irony of ironies, the current Cylons don’t want their own robots to rebel. He tells Lee to take Pegasus and protect the fleet, but he is going to go back and set his people free.

Returning once more to Caprica, things are getting even more heated. Roslin is talking to Tigh about the suicide bombings. They are going from strategic places to almost indiscriminate death. There are those that would say you could make an argument to take out the police academy because those people chose to side with the enemy, but Tigh was talking about blowing up places like the market place, once again to make a point. He started going on and on about how they were evil men in the garden of paradise and once again his only job was to distract the Cylons enough so Adama could get them the hell out of there.

At first, Starbuck completely rejected her daughter, but then something happened. Kara couldn’t stand her running around and decided to go into another room so she wouldn’t have to hear the noise. Then she hears a loud thud. When she ran outside, Casey was on the steps, and she was bleeding from her head. Suddenly, Kara couldn’t hold back her motherly instincts any longer. They rushed Casey to the hospital and she stayed by her side, with Leoben next to her, until she woke up. When her daughter opened her eyes, Kara took Leoben’s hand. What the fuck? Would she really start to love this guy? I am not even sure her daughter is actually hers. It looked a little old when I first saw her, so I wondered if Casey was a Cylon. There would be no reason to create a Cylon child, but then again, these Cylons surprise us all the time, so anything is possible.

After the latest suicide bombing, the Cylon leaders decided that there would have to be drastic measures taken. How drastic? They wanted Baltar to sign off on the murder of hundreds of civilians to demonstrate their willingness to do whatever it takes. Baltar is used to agreeing with whatever they said, but this time was different. Even after they shot and killed Caprica-Six for protesting the order (she’ll wake up in a few days anyway), he still couldn’t bring himself to do it, even with a gun pointed at his head.

And then the visions came back.

When Baltar was on Galactica, the visions of Six used to pop into his head and tell him what to do. We could never tell if it was only his imagination, but it is ironic that the visions started when the person he thought was his lover from Caprica was dead. She told him that sometimes you have to do things you hate to survive another day, so Baltar signs it. I was hoping that they would shoot the pussy anyway, but alas, Baltar lives.

Things only get worse from there. While Tigh, Tyrel, and Anders are planning the rendezvous with Sharon and Galactica, Tigh’s wife comes back. She has just had sex with Cavil again, this time just for money. Cavil was really happy with Ellen’s technique, particularly “the swirl”, but told her that she would have to start giving him intelligence on the insurgency or she would put Saul back in jail, and she won’t want to see what he is missing the next time they see each other. Right before Tigh is to burn the plans for the landing, Ellen takes it and hides it. I always take notes when I do recaps, and my notes for this moment read “Oh that stupid bitch. Don’t do it! Oh fuck me.” Yeah, that pretty much sums it up.

Anders and his buddies meet up with Sharon, and some Centurions ambush them. Now would be a great time for her to test her theory on whether the Centurions will obey her or not, but we don’t get to see that much. Instead, we are about to find out what the Cylons were going to do with Baltar’s order.

The names on the list were everybody in detention and a few other people. That’s right, Cally and Roslin, and Roslin’s old friend Tom Zareck. It’s so funny that these two appeared to be mortal enemies, but when you get down to it, their differences were not that great. Zareck the Vice President, refused to work for the Cylons, and even told Roslin he wishes that she had been successful stealing the election.

From there, the rest is kind of grim. Jammer has a moment of conscience and decides to free Cally. He tells her to run and never look back. And what would she see if she did? A bunch of armed Centurions, a bunch of shots taken, and the massacre of many innocents.

I thought this was a pretty good episode. There were a lot of content warnings, but other than some louder than normal sex sounds; I didn’t think it was worse than a lot of stuff on TV. As for the content, it looks like the writers have made the Cylons evil again, with some exceptions of course. Last season, it seemed like the military was the biggest problem that the people had, but now the remnants of their military are their only hope.

There is always the question about the Cylons plan, and we had a nice little update on what is going on. I do have a little advice though. The Cylons would probably do a lot better if they built some fucking housing instead of making people sleep in tents all the time. But whatever. How many couples like Kara Thrace are out there? How many male counterparts does she have? We saw what we assumed is a massacre. Do they really think this is how to win us over, or do they just hope to create chaos and erode public support for the reconciliation cause?

As for the humans, I don’t know what to say. I wonder if Boomer was actually able to control the Centurions. Maybe they were able to save some of the people about to be massacred. I do know that we have set up a lot of interesting scenarios for what looks to be a very interesting season.

What did you think of this episode? Is Kara in love with Leoben? Will Anders and Boomer make it out alive? Will Galactica succeed in the evacuation? How long before Baltar stands up to the Cylons?

PS I know the previews were spoilery, so try not to mention them too much in the comments, but feel free to discuss it all in the forums.