BSG Season 4 Discussion [Spoilers]

[Zeke]

Okay, I've put this off long enough. I was planning to start a new BSG thread when I made the big 5MBSG update I've been working on, but dammit, the show is too good right now -- we should get some talk going while we can.

So hey, how 'bout that BSG? Has it been great this season or what? I only caught up recently (just in time for the return from hiatus), so I benefited from watching Season 4.0 in close succession, but man, the show is really firing on all cylinders -- I haven't enjoyed it this much since S1. And that should mean something coming from me, 'cause you guys know what a BSG skeptic I am.

Last time we had a thread going, S3 had just ended, and the identities of four Cylons had been revealed. We were all pretty blindsided by that; IJD said he felt "a bit betrayed", and that sums up quite a few reactions I read. IJD was particularly upset about Tyrol, who until then had been the show's everyman character -- the O'Brien, if you will. I was equally frustrated, but not so much about Tyrol (who had been wearing on me somewhat through overuse) as about Tigh, who's my favourite character by far. More than once in the first three seasons, I considered him the only sane man on the ship. Now, all of a sudden, these two profoundly human characters were Cylons. (So were Anders and Tory, but that came off not as a big twist but just as giving them something to do.) Surely this would change everything we loved about them.

And it did. But damn, has it ever been great television. S4 has made it clear that these four characters were perfectly chosen. None of the major characters are free of some attachment to one or more of them. Three of them were deeply invested in not being Cylons and now had the rug pulled out from under them -- and Tory was the real masterstroke, because we had no investment in her, letting the writers take a dark turn with her character. Tell four random people they're not really humans but something more powerful, and at least one is bound to like the idea.

The main weakness of this season so far has been the time crunch at the end of the first half. That last episode could easily have been two, if not three. We should have seen so much more of the characters' reactions to finding out their friends were Cylons. We needed to see the Cylon characters make it much, much more clear that they had never known what they were. (Some people in the later episodes still seem unaware of that.) We needed the full range of reactions from Adama and others who were close to these people -- anger, frustration, finally sympathy when they realized what their friends had been through. And we just didn't have time. I understand that the writer's strike had a lot to do with this, but I can still lament it.

Anyway, then we get the Cylon alliance and the discovery of Earth in ruins. I don't know why anyone thought Moore wouldn't do this -- he's in love with being "darker and grittier" than Star Trek, so he wasn't about to go for the Voyager ending. (And Earth was intact in Galactica 1980, a mistake nobody wants to repeat.) I'm much more intrigued by the further revelation this season that Earth was a planet of Cylons. And Ellen Tigh was one too? There's no way they're not going somewhere with that; they wouldn't blow the final Cylon on someone who's already dead unless she's coming back in some way. (My money's on her having something to do with Starbuck's "resurrection".) I still don't believe the Cylons ever had a plan, but I'll now buy that the writers have had one for a while -- pending the last few episodes, of course.

As for the last couple of weeks... wow, that was meaty stuff. The Gaeta thing has been a long time coming; Baltar shattered his idealism, and since then it's just been one hit after another. If you haven't watched the "Face of the Enemy" webisodes yet, be sure to do so. Self-congratulatory "look at us we've got gay people" aside, it's important setup that makes Gaeta's actions more understandable, and it finally reveals what Baltar whispered to him in S3.

A few short takes:

• Really coulda done without Tigh/Six. Eww.
• One thing I really missed in S3 was Baltar "in control". We've seen him pathetic too much. He's most fun to watch when he's got his act together -- confident, in charge, the smartest guy in the room and arrogant enough to tell you so. We finally got that back in parts of S4 with his cult. I really look forward to seeing how his story ends -- he's the only character where I don't have a clue what they'll do.
• I can actually stand Lee this year. I'm not sure why -- he's definitely not being any less obnoxious. Hope we'll see his reaction to what Zarek has done, 'cause he bears a lot of the responsibility for that guy's rise to power.
• Everybody catch that door marked 1701D in the third episode?

So, who else has been watching?

[Wowbagger]

I actually don't care for Galactica really at all. Never have (except during its really quite good third season) and probably never will.

But even I have to admit that the two parter we just saw was very well-written. Was suprised that the grenade was a flash-bang and not a frag as was implied by part one, but, hey, now my main men Adama and Tigh aren't dead.

I've been hearing people whine about Ellen being the final Cylon. It seems to me that, with all the hype that went into it, there was no way that The Fifth could pay off unless it was, say, (my personal bet) President Roslin. That wouldn't have worked for the show, and Ellen makes good sense, so stop whining about the lost sense of awe and revelation and focus on the characters--'cause that's what this show is really about.

I predicted Dee's suicide way back in Season One. She was the only really decent and hopeful human being on the show. No way would RDM let that kind of person survive his show. Disappointing.

Still, I'm more interested in the show than usual. Looking forward to seeing how it ends.

Also, congratulations on not being dead.

[Derek]

BSG has never really been my cup of tea either, but I've been watching it. My friend at work who I talk to about all things scifi and who has loved BSG a lot in the past doesn't think too much of this current arc, but one of his complaints was over lack of space battles, so feel free to discount his opinion.

Anyway, my main thing that I agree with Zeke on is that I don't think anybody really seems to get how much the Four had absolutely no clue they were Cylons. There seems to be very little understanding there. I kinda see how that could happen for some people, but the universal lack of understanding is confusing.

[Quinalla]

I have always enjoyed this show, not that it is perfect by any means, but it really stretches and for the most part has respect for its audience's intelligence and attention which I appreciate. They also managed to land a huge pool of good actors/actresses which is great.

I have been digging this season so far, this last episode was a crazy info-dump, but it was done in a way that made a lot of sense with Ellen and at least a tradeoff with Sam (info for getting a bullet in the brain) so while it may not make intellectual sense (how likely is it that a bullet would just happen to do what it did), the emotional sense was there. I loved the Cavil/Ellen/Boomer scenes, the Sam scenes while well acted and lots of information, weren't as good and definitely felt more like an info-dump. I need to watch it again though to make sure I have everything straight!

The mutiny episodes were neat in how they brought back just about every minor character ever to add a lot more feeling to the mutiny instead of it just being a bunch of nameless people following Gaeta/Zarek. The mutiny side was pretty heavily stacked with scum though.

I agree that the crunch of stuff that was in the last episode of the first half was unfortunate and yes it should have been at least two episodes. Though having the final 4 Cylon stuff get lost in the Earth stuff and then resurface along with general Cylon hate for the mutiny worked well I thought, but still, definitely missed some nice character moments.

I did catch the 1701D door gotta love it.

For the normal people not getting that the 4 didn't know they were Cylons, I think more of them get it then don't, they just don't care and want someone to spew hate at even if it makes no sense. Or they know what the final 4 are saying, but don't believe them. Or they remember Boomer. I dunno, that's just the vibe I get from it, but I could be wrong.

I am really looking forward to how they resolve the outstanding points (The Opera House visions/Hera, Starbuck, Cavil catching up to the fleet (I assume this will happen, not spoiled), Baltar's Head/Chip Six, etc.) and how they end it. I am definitely not expecting a happy ending, though maybe a mostly sad/tragic with a little bit of happiness/hope.

[Zeke]

4x15 - "No Exit"

Well, that was... new. My suspicion that the writers might have a plan after all has been sorta not quite halfway confirmed, ish. I still think the Final Five idea goes back no farther than Season 3, and the choices of the Five even less far. They would have planted so many more hints if they'd known these particular characters were Cylons. But no, these five don't have something in common that we hadn't picked up on; they were just planted randomly in the population.

And the explanation we get this episode isn't perfect. In particular, the "lost" number 7 reeks of backpedaling -- first they chose 8 as Boomer's number, then at some point they decided the five models we hadn't seen were special and (among other things) didn't have numbers, and only later did it occur to them that this meant there were at least eight numbers for only seven models. Some are speculating that the now-thirteen models have something to do with the 13 tribes of Kobol, but now that we know the models have such radically different origins, there's no reason they should add up to anything.

All that said... just by giving the backstory at all, this episode did something huge that I wasn't sure would get done. The answers were never going to be perfect. But they work. We now know why there are two kinds of humanoid Cylon, why the Final Five didn't remember anything, how Tigh in particular was around before the Cylons had human models, what happened to Earth, why the Cylons struck again. We even know why Cavil took such disproportionate action against D'Anna last year.

We can fight over the answers, and we will -- but Moore could have just never shown his hand. The lesson of Chris Carter is that being coy works. He got away with it for much longer. Shows like Lost have made dangling weirdness their stock in trade. And hell, much as I love ENT, it still annoys me that we never found out who the Evil Future Guy was. Moore deserves some credit for finally putting his money where his mouth has been all this time.

All that said, this infodump definitely creates a ton of questions and plotholes, some of which I'll be posting about next.

[Zeke]

So. Problems with "No Exit"...

• First we have the huge coincidence. Anders gets shot, magically restoring his memories (good aim!), while at the same time, Ellen is escaping from Cavil. I'm not sure why they even bothered with the Anders storyline when Ellen was just going to bring the same information to the fleet next week. It makes for a more varied if confusing story, but it's too contrived to be worth it... and it's a "Rapture" ripoff too. I like Anders, but he's no Ben Sisko.
• No, wait. That's not even the biggest coincidence. The biggest one is that Earth and the Colonies had exactly the same kind of man-machine war, with the Colonies' war breaking out right before the Final Five's thousand-year journey ended. Why did Earth's Cylons even have to build their own robots? Did Kobol just skip that in-between step, go straight from no robots at all to near-perfect androids?
• And what happened to the Twelve Tribes, anyway? Kobol had this amazing technology; how was it lost? And why was the course of re-evolution so similar that the Final Five could understand Colonial Cylon tech?
• Probably the most obvious contrivance: how did the Final Four survive the apocalypse? Ellen's easy*, she was extracted by Cavil in the confusion and then shipped back later to mess with Tigh, but why the others? We know now that they would have downloaded on Cavil's baseship if they'd been killed; he wasn't trying to spare them. Is it really just random chance that they all made it?
• We know now for sure that Tigh and probably Ellen were installed in the Colonies way earlier than Tyrol, Anders, and Tory. How come?
• So the Final Five invented or reinvented resurrection tech (I don't like that term much, but the show's using it). That surely means they were scientists or engineers, with maybe a psychologist or two to handle consciousness issues. So why is Tyrol apparently the only one who had any interest in his old career? Wherever you stand on nature vs. nurture, nature plays some role.
• Okay, the Five survived nukeage by downloading. Their new bodies must have been somewhere safe. Why didn't they just go wherever that was instead of dying? And did they even try to save anyone else?
• Obviously the robots won the war for Earth. Where'd they go?
• As I said, I like Anders fine. But I'm ticked at him now because he's the latest to imply that "we", so to speak, brought the Cylon war on ourselves. The show is determined to ram this completely wrong moral down our throats. The Five were coming to warn us to treat our robots better? How 'bout warning us to dismantle the damn things? And hmm, what real event was that Cylon apocalypse supposed to remind us of again? (Actually, the apocalypse should be harder to blame on us now that we know it was all a tantrum by Cavil.)
• Oh yeah, Cavil. That's a big problem. In one episode, BSG has gone from a somewhat complicated** human/machine war to a single supervillain wrecking everyone's day. The war is now solely Cavil's doing -- he reprogrammed the other models to share his resentment. (Kind of a half-assed job he did, too. What was to stop him from eliminating that pesky monotheism he didn't believe in?) This is deeply unsatisfying. I've loved Dean Stockwell's acting since Quantum Leap, but Cavil is just not a compelling enough character to be the one true Big Bad. The war is much more interesting without an Imperious Leader to blame it all on.
• You're probably expecting Ellen's total personality change to be on this list. Actually, I liked that. It's one more reminder that Tigh and Ellen bring out the worst in each other. We've seen Tigh's best, but never Ellen's until now. I have more of an issue with her having been on Cavil's ship all this time and Boomer having been aware of her. I don't remember perfectly, but there must be at least a couple of Boomer scenes that'll be iffy now.

Anyway, those are my thoughts. Anyone else?

* Ba-dum chh.
** I say "somewhat" because I don't really buy what the show sells here. When you genocide our civilization, you are the bad guys, period. It's a crime on a scale that overwhelms any grievances you could possibly have had against us. And we're not even talking descendants here -- you're the same individual Cylons who planned and executed the apocalypse. If some of you feel bad now, that's great. Go somewhere new; make something of yourselves. And never, ever darken our doorstep again, because only God can forgive what you've done.

[Zeke]

Well, today's our last chance to speculate before the series ends. I have reasonably high hopes for the finale, but at this point it's just not possible for all the ongoing questions to be answered satisfactorily. The one I'm most afraid will fall by the wayside is the Six in Baltar's head. They've been dangling this one since the mini, and I've long suspected the writers have never had any idea what her deal is -- or cared. She's just a good source of weirdness and plot devices. Every so often they play with it (Six's inner Baltar, head-Six being able to move Baltar physically, and so on), but they never come close to giving an answer. The mysteries that were so intriguing in S1 -- her apparent manipulation of events in "33", the Shelley Godfrey mess -- are now irritating to even think about because they were simply ignored. I'll eat my words if proven wrong, but the best I'm expecting at this point is a mystical/metaphorical explanation that doesn't really explain anything. Answering all the questions about Baltar's Six would take half the finale.

I do think we'll get a good answer about Starbuck. They've built that up heavily. Looks like I was wrong about Ellen being involved in her return, but at the very least, Kara is surely in a Cylon body now. (Say, does Baltar still have his Cylon detector? By the end of S1 he had a working one that detected Boomer, but since he kept that to himself, the fleet thinks it didn't work.) I finally saw Razor the other day, and I think there's something important about the "on the wings of an angel" thing. We'll just have to see; I doubt the truth behind Kara's return will be something we've had enough clues to figure out.

A lot of people have been saying the finale will be depressing, everyone will die, and so on. Uh-uh. This will NOT be a downer ending -- you can take it to the bank. Ron Moore loves being dark, but even more than that, he loves being loved. A bleak show that ends bleak can be artsy, it can even be brilliant, but what it can't be is a rewarding experience for viewers. It leaves a bad taste. If Moore ends with a note of hope instead, he'll get the best of both worlds -- four years of critical acclaim for the show's gritty realism, then a happy fandom that'll follow him anywhere. (Also, the Hybrid telling Kara she would "lead the human race to its end" is all the guarantee we need that no such thing will happen. When a prophecy is a major plot point in sci-fi, you can be sure it'll turn out to mean something the characters don't expect.)

That said, there will definitely be some deaths. In fact, there's no character whose survival I'd put money on; nothing is "edgier" than an unexpected death. (Ask Joss.) I have a feeling about some characters, though. Here are my death picks:

• Roslin. Since the human race won't die, she will, to make it bittersweet. And frankly, she'd damn well better die at this point -- they've dragged it out beyond endurance.
• Helo. In an interview, the actor said he successfully argued for his character's ending to be changed. Of course, it could have been changed from death to survival, but I have a funny feeling it went the other way.
• Tyrol. He'll change his mind and come on the mission -- no matter how bitter he is now, he's just too good a man to abandon his friends. He'll die for his trouble, but heroically.
• Boomer or Athena, but not both. Probably Boomer; her arc has been destructive while Athena's has been redemptive.
• Ellen, for the Final Five's sins. Cavil won't find it as satisfying as he expects. Tigh will mourn, but he has Caprica-Six now (for some damn reason) and I'm not even totally convinced the baby really died.
• Anders. Hope I'm wrong, but he seems too far gone at this point, and it would clear the way for Lee and Kara to get together.
• Racetrack. That's how we'll know the show is really over.

I can go either way on Adama. When Galactica is destroyed, he may well go down with it. But it's too depressing if he and Roslin both die, and after all, Lee can only take over one of their jobs. Tigh and Kara will both live -- they've suffered enough. Lee is too Mary Sue to die. Baltar is too Baltar to die. I think Cavil will actually survive, but he'll lose the war, of course.

A few miscellaneous thoughts:

• One more reason it won't be a downer ending: absolutely nobody would watch Caprica. Why bother? It's all apocalypsed in 50 years anyway. No, they'll do a happy ending, and almost nobody will watch Caprica.
• I have a pet theory that Hera is evil and behind everything. If that happens, I officially called it.
• The "ship falling apart" plotline irritates me. If they were gonna do this, they should have planted the seeds earlier; instead, we've got everything on the ship breaking at once because Tyrol noticed. (Way to Chief there, Chief. You and Adama should've been talking about this from day one.) And the Cylon gunk turned out to be a shaggy dog story; it only bought a few more jumps. Ironically, Voyager was going to do something like this as a running theme in S7 and did lay the groundwork in episodes like "Nightingale", but wound up not coming back to it.
• On a related note, way to blow up the stupid Pegasus last year, Lee. A second battlestar in better shape might come in slightly handy right now. If he'd told his dad about the big heroic rescue he was considering, they could've switched battlestars first.
• I'm guessing the "end" of the human race that the prophecy refers to is the end of its independent existence, i.e. human and Cylon will have no choice but to come together. This fits a theme that's been prominent this season. Second guess: the humans will discover they're all Cylons (or die and come back as such). Oh, you laughed the first time I said it, but that was before Bob Dylan. No theory is too stupid now.
• They're leaving the civilian fleet and Cottle behind to go on this mission, and I would like to let it be known that if the Cylons take this opportunity to blow them all to hell, I will cheer. Lampkin has his moments, but the rest have always been a pack of petty whiners, lowlifes, rioters, and journalists. Humanity would've been better off with just the Galactica crew, several of whom are halfway likable.
• Know how they talked about the finale being extra-long and made it sound like the extra time might be divided up among the last few weeks? How they were considering various options? And it's turned out to be a completely normal two-hour finale? It's as if BSG decided to give me one last perfect example of how the show pretends to be original and revolutionary, then just isn't. (But still gets the credit, of course.)

Anyone else have some pre-finale thoughts?

[Chancellor Valium]

Originally Posted by Zeke

Well, today's our last chance to speculate before the series ends. I have reasonably high hopes for the finale, but at this point it's just not possible for all the ongoing questions to be answered satisfactorily. The one I'm most afraid will fall by the wayside is the Six in Baltar's head.

I have no idea if it'll be cleared-up in-show, but I saw one of those clips-n-c- interviews things, and Moore confirmed that she is what she claims to be. On the other hand, Callis seemed to think she was a chip.