Baby on Board

Now THAT’S what I’m talking about! It only took a couple of months, but we finally had an episode of Battlestar Galactica that was original, exciting, and left us wanting more. Ever since the series has started, it threw us a lot of questions and most of the time gave us some interesting answers to those questions. Recently, the answers we have received are for questions that we really could care less about. All right, maybe there were some of you who really cared who Apollo was sleeping with each week, and were dying to know which one of Starbuck’s demons was going to force her to question authority, but I still kind of give a shit about Cylons. You may have heard of them, they are trying to make the human race extinct. We’ve been told that they have a plan, and this week we learned a little bit more about what they were doing.We all know that when a Cylon dies, its mind is transferred into another body. If they are too far away from the Cylon home world, they must use a resurrection ship or they will just die like anybody else. The Colonial Fleet was able to destroy the resurrection ship, and it has really changed the nature of the battle with the Cylons. As important as resurrection is, we have no idea how this happens. The Six that travels through Dr. Baltar’s mind has told us some things, and Sharon has told us a few things, but for the most part, it is still a mystery. While Cylon culture is still mostly a mystery to us, at least we have some idea about what goes on with the resurrection.

It’s hard to describe Cylon society. We have no idea what they want to do, but we know that human beings for the most part weren’t part of the plan. Therefore, they needed a way to kill most of the human population. What better way than to seduce somebody that could give them access to the defense systems of the Fleet and use that knowledge against them. That person is Dr. Baltar, and the woman who seduced him, Six, is a Cylon. The Six that Gaius knows only appears in his imagination, and he fell so very deeply in love with her, the fact that she isn’t human and her race wants to destroy his has no effect on the ways she can influence him.

But what about Six? How did she handle it? The last we saw of her, she was shielding Baltar from the blast, but when she wakes up she is in a tub of goo. I am not sure why it is but resurrection always requires some sort of liquid. I’m not complaining because it also requires nudity, but the Cylons shackle the newly resurrected bodies down until they figure out what happened. Waking up in a new body is a shock. Six knew her mission, but when she sees all the people around her, including a copy of herself staring down at her, it is enough to make you get up and scream. This is exactly what happens to Six, but as she is looking around, a very familiar face comforts her. Gaius Baltar!

HOLY.

SHIT.

Baltar is a Cylon?! Wow, that explains a lot doesn’t it? Well, it would explain a lot if it were true. Gaius does appear to her, but he is not a Cylon. Six is the only one who can see him, so we see that she is having hallucinations about HIM. And he’s giving out the advice to her just like she would do for him back on Galactica. Baltar tells her that the people around her would not like knowing that she cares about him so much. Even though practically the first words out of her mouth were to ask about Baltar, she pretends she just wanted to know if he was alive because he would be a good source of information.

Six is not our only famous Cylon of course. We also have Sharon Valeri. On Galactica, she had so much trouble thinking about perhaps being a Cylon that she tried to kill herself. And although she had enough independent thought to help Galactica in Cylon battles, she was still with it enough to carry out one last mission – kill Commander William Adama. Her mission failed because he didn’t die, and she was later killed by a jealous (or vengeful, depending on how you look at it) Cally. When Sharon came back, she really had trouble dealing with the resurrection. Living with Cylons was her worst fear, and now she realizes that is what she’ll have to do with the rest of her life.

I’ve typed about a page and have been able to recap about the first five minutes of the show. Why? That’s because the first five minutes were the best of 2006. Now I will warn that the rest of the episode is sort of like the soap operas involving the human characters we loathe so much, but because it is dealing with the Cylons and we know so little about them, the drama doesn’t seem at all gratuitous. I, for one, welcome as much of it as possible.

Interesting thing about all of those planets that the Cylons destroyed. They started rebuilding them again, or at least they started rebuilding Caprica. Because she helped so much with the invasion, Six is a regular celebrity on Caprica, even though she is supposed to be like every other model Six out there. People come up to her and say what an honor it is to shake her hand. How the Cylons know the difference between one copy of the next will always be a mystery it seems, because they all look the same to me. And that gets me to thinking, you know that whoever designed the Humanoid Cylons had to be a guy because all of the women are hot and the men are all average. Therefore, he never had to feel insecure about making Cylons that were better than him. Also, whoever invented the Cylon resurrection process was also a guy, because during resurrection, Cylons flashback through their lives, and we get so see their greatest hits, including some of the sex scenes. Again, I’m not complaining here, just wanted to point that out.

Like I said, Six, or Caprica-Six, as they like to call her and so shall we, is having some trouble adjusting but our favorite Cylon the Warrior Princess, D’Anna Biers is trying to make it easier, and she even asks Caprica-Six for some help. It turns out that Galactica-Sharon, that would be the one who shot Adama, is having a hard time with her re-integration into Cylon society. D’Anna Biers, or Caprica-D’Anna since there is another D’Anna among the fleet wants Caprica-Six to help Galactica-Sharon adjust, believing that the two of them shared a lot in common.

As Caprica-Six goes to visit Galactica-Sharon, who is a model Eight by the way, Baltar drops into her head and tells her the real reason why Caprica-D’Anna needs some help with Galactica-Sharon is that if she doesn’t fall in line, they will have to box her. What is boxing you say? Well if your society had guaranteed resurrection, think of the type of craziness it would cause. If the only consequence of any of your stupid actions was to wake up in a new body, would you do what other people told you? Didn’t think so, and neither would I. Cylons have invented a way to keep people in line, and to squash dissent, as it were, and that’s called boxing. They put your Cylon memories in a, uh, box, and then you never resurrect. Kind of sucks, doesn’t it? How ironic is it that the Gaius on Galactica is chastising the president for making us more like Cylons, just as his friend on Caprica is learning just how inhuman the Cylons can be.

Not that it is much a surprise, but Sharon has a much nicer apartment than Starbuck. They want her to move out of her old apartment, but she doesn’t want to. Even though all of her memories are fake and she can’t stand that they are fake, she does know that all of her friendships were real. If she can just hold onto those memories, maybe she’ll be able to get through it. If only they would stop with all of this war hero shit, she could live in peace, and sending over another war hero is not helping things at all.

Immediately, Caprica-Six tries to work on Galactica-Sharon. The way she was able to work on Battlestar-Gaius’ mind in body and spirit was to use Baltar’s fear and/or wonder about his spirituality (not to mention his interest sex), but Galactica-Sharon didn’t care about God’s plan. Her problem wasn’t necessarily that she was a Cylon. She hurt a lot of people that she loved, and the fact she did that only to help Cylons kill humans really bothered her. Clearly, Caprica-Six needed to find a different way to reach her, and she decided to mention Baltar, and how much she loved him. If Galactica-Sharon knew how much she loved humans, maybe it would be easier for her to relate to Caprica-Six. It’s worth a try, so Caprica-Six starts talking about Gaius and his beautiful house, and what she did to get over him knowing that they will never be together again after he died in the blast.

When Caprica-Six mentioned Gaius to Galactica-Sharon, it really startled the former pilot. There had always been speculation as to who the traitor was among the humans that let the Cylons break the defenses, and Galactica-Sharon was surprised to learn it was Baltar. I would think that she would have had some clue because Baltar supposedly ran the Cylon test on her and supposedly discovered that she wasn’t a Cylon. The fact that she woke up as a resurrected Cylon should have tipped her off that Baltar might have some ulterior motives. But while Galactica-Sharon wrapped her head around that, Caprica-Six was trying to deal with the fact that her beloved Gaius was still alive. Oh, and he’s not just alive, he’s the Vice President.

It’s about this time when we all figured out that something was “a tad askew”. If Three wanted Six to talk to Eight to help with Eight’s problems, Three had to know that Eight would tell Six that Six’s beloved had survived, but if Three sent Six to help Eight, but Eight ended up messing with Six’s head, what was Three up to? And why can’t these fucking Cylons come up with names? I like this episode, but having to write another couple of sentences like that is going to kill me. Anyway, Caprica-Six and Galactica-Sharon decided to discuss the situation over lunch, and if I was a betting man, I would say the two of them were going to have blast, and that’s not just speculation. Some of the human survivors, including our boy Anders, the professional athlete that Starbuck swoons over.

The humans call the humanoid Cylons “skinjobs”, which might be about the least appealing job out there, after rim and blow. You have to give us humans credit. We may have been completely decimated, but we aren’t afraid to kill off as many Cylon bastards as possible. Unfortunately, the strategy is kind of hopeless to begin with because they are just going to be resurrected. To me, it sort of seems like a waste of resources. So what if the Cylons can feel pain? If anything, if they keep dying from terrorist attacks, they will just re-nuke the place and start over again. It’s not like they are going to get old waiting for the radiation to go away.

Still, Anders believes that it is a good strategy, and he believes in it so much, he sticks around to make sure that the bomb goes off properly. Why you ask? Because the timing mechanism on the bomb is a cigarette, and if the cigarette falls or stops burning, it won’t go off. I just don’t get the logic in this. If you have to wait for the cigarette to burn, why not just detonate the thing yourself? Sure you may die, but if you are planning on destroying the cafe above the garage where you are waiting for the bomb to detonate, you must have a death wish anyway. As it turns out, a centurion ended up crashing the party. He notices the bomb, but Anders is able to distract him long enough for the bomb to explode.

Following the explosion most of the people in the cafe died, but that didn’t include Caprica-Six, Galactica-Sharon, or the model Three that was manipulating the two of them. As Caprica-Six and Galactica-Sharon got to talking, model Three interrupted them, and instead of talking about how they figured out that model Three was screwing with them, they decided to lie and say that Galactica-Sharon decided to move out. Three was so excited that she said that they should all go upstairs and help Galactica-Sharon right away. To make a long story short, all of them were in the staircase when the bomb went off, which appeared to save them all, which is a good thing because Sharon had a baby!

Well, not Galactica-Sharon, but Sharon-Sharon, who is now on Galactica and, well, having a baby. Yes, it is a little early for the baby to be born, but those Cylons didn’t take enough time fabricating a decent uterus, so the baby is suffering from a detached placenta. Dr. Cottel does an emergency c-section, and the baby appears to be ok, but it has to be placed into intensive care (do all warships have pediatric ICU units?), and things are still touch and go. The premature baby also meant that Adama and Roslin were going to have to figure out what to do with the baby a lot earlier than they had planned. Sharon might be the nicest Cylon that they know, but she is still a Cylon, and they aren’t going to let her raise her baby. We are pretty sure they aren’t going to go the infanticide route, but Roslin, who hasn’t been making a lot of good decisions lately, realizes that if the Cylons put so much effort into creating the baby, it’s got to be a good thing for them, and a bad thing for the fleet.

Helo and Sharon show a lot of love for their daughter, who they named Hera, but Dr. Cottel warns them that the baby’s lungs aren’t developed and it is going to take a while before they know she is OK. Then, after a secret meeting with the President, Cottel announces that the baby has died. Immediately, Sharon believes that the baby was left to die and not given enough medical aid, and she blames the President and Admiral Adama for letting it happen. She gets taken into custody, and Helo releases the ashes out into space.

Roslin and Adama weren’t necessarily scared of the baby, but they were scared that perhaps some Cylon agents they did not yet know about would do something drastic. Still, they didn’t kill the baby, and they didn’t even tell Dr. Cottel to let the baby die if it had trouble breathing. No, instead they found somebody who recently lost a child, and handed the Cylon baby over for adoption. Nobody could know about the baby or the mother because of safety concerns, not even Helo. Needless to say, this brings up a lot of interesting scenarios. You would think they would want the Cylon baby close in order to study it, but they can’t keep it anywhere near the military because word would get out. We’ve already seen what extremists on both sides of the aisle are capable of, but you know it’s only a matter of time before people start asking questions.

So, was that enough of a nonsequitor for you? Well, let’s switch directions again, back to the main part of the shenanigans on Caprica. After the explosion, Galactica-Sharon and Three were OK, but Caprica-Six was severely injured. I don’t know, if I was a Cylon and I had some horrible injury, I would have wanted to be put out of my misery and placed in another body. Caprica-Six said she had already died once, and didn’t want to go through it again if she didn’t have to. There was another survivor of the blast. It was Anders, and he was buried under a pile of rubble. Since there are only twelve models of Cylons, it’s kind of easy to know when somebody doesn’t belong. Three recognizes that he was probably the one who set the bomb and wanted to execute him right there, but is convinced by her colleagues that they should save him for interrogation.

At this point, Six and Sharon had a choice to make. They knew that when they were found, Anders would be caught and tortured. Sharon found Starbuck’s dog tags on Anders, and once again, it made her remember all of the people that she used to love. As for Six, Gaius was really starting to get to her. She kept on saying that she loved him, but he said that she has not given her tangible proof. When Galactica-Gaius was seeking to prove his love for Six, he helped another Cylon, and Six couldn’t stand it. Now here is Gaius, and to prove her love, he wants her to help another human. Let your heart adrift and your soul will get caught she says, and that’s exactly what she does.

Anders made a move for Three’s gun, but Sharon intervened. Although they could hear the rescue team, Three didn’t want to take the chance to let Anders live, but as she was about to execute him with a gunshot, Caprica-Six managed to shake off her leg injury, pick up a huge stone, and smash it over Three’s head. When Three was down on the ground, she gave her another Smash just in case. Now, that is the sort of thing we were hoping would happen, but really, was not much more intelligent than when the humans were killing the Cylons. Three is going to wake up in a new body soon, and tell the rest of the Cylons what happened. Anders is able to get away, but if they were looking to avoid having their memories boxed and never to be heard from again, they were in for some harsh reality.

But let’s not forget, these are the Cylons, and Cylons have plans. Caprica-Six knows that they have about 36 hours before the Three that they killed comes back from the ether. If the two of them knew that it was wrong to kill people, then there are other Cylons that had to feel the same way. If they spoke the truth, they could help their people with a new beginning; there would be a new way to live in God’s love. I don’t know if Sharon believed it, but she sure as hell wasn’t going to help the Cylons. Baby on one side of the galaxy, insurrection in the other end; maybe the Cylons aren’t yet on that fast track to galactic domination that we were led to believe.

Although it took me a long time to get this recap out, I really loved this episode. One of the great twists about this latest incarnation of Galactica was the Cylons that looked like humans, but we never learned what makes these Cylons unique. We still don’t know what the plan is, but it looks like they have ideas beyond eradicating humans. As for Sharon and Helo’s baby, some may say that the adoption is a little bit of a copout, but I think it puts tension into the story, and the problem is between the humans and the Cylons, right where all the conflict should be. With only a few episodes left, it’s going to be interesting to see where this season ends up, which is the first time I have been able to say that all year.

What did you think of the episode? Will Caprica-Six and Galactica-Sharon be able to show the Cylons a new way? How long before Sharon and Helo find out about the baby?