BSG Watch: All Your Baseship Are Belong to Us

I liked the Baltar part of the storyline more than the Demetrious part, actually, since I thought it showed Baltar's growth. There's no way that President Baltar (or Science Guy Baltar) goes into Tyrol's quarters by himself. His first effort to reach out to Tyrol was for the masses; his second effort was for Tyrol. It does actually seem like he's gained some wisdom - all it took were the deaths of billions.

As for the Demetrious plot, all that was missing was a rant about strawberries. You'd think that whoever put Starbuck back together again would've included some more leadership training as they were polishing her reconstructed Viper.

The Demetrious plot was necessary, but I've always found Baltar to be the most compelling figure in the show, and perhaps, actually the most human of the human characters on the show, so I quite enjoyed the Baltar half of this episode.

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Because the Raider scanned Anders, no?

I was torn on the Demetrius storyline. The march toward inevitable mutiny was frustrating because we could see it coming a mile away, and I was frustrated by what happened while seeing clearly why it did. This show has a remarkable tendency to get me to take positions I never thought I would take. For example, the thing that I find most problematic about the military structure in general is how people become tools, pawns in whatever game the higher-ups are playing, and people just follow orders without room for critical engagement or personal morals. So, normally I would be totally on the side of the mutineers, because, what the heck? Jumping around in space, following orders they don't agree with, just because some Admiral who isn't even there told them to. Sounds like a good enough reason for mutiny to me. On the other hand, what the frak, dude? I mean, the whole point of the mission was to help Starbuck follow the voices in her head. Weren't they warned beforehand that this is more of a "feeling" situation than a "thinking" one? Don't they know how to follow a damn order? Good grief.

I guess The Leoben Situation was the last straw. That guy is so manipulatiive of Starbuck, but I did think that he was being sincere in his desire to work together. I REALLY like the bits of foreshadowing about possible rifts between the human-looking cylons and the centurions that mirrors the past rift between humans and cylons. I love that the Cylons are splitting into factions, realizing that groupthink has its limitations and downsides, and engaging in a strange war where distinctions between life and death are less clear. its like theirs is just another utopian experiment gone awry, another system that fails to make/leave room for individualism and change. They tried racial cleansing, wiping out their oppressors to pave the way for a clean new universe for themselves. But then there came guilt, the bittersweet cognitive dissonance of sentient machines contemplating the meaning of life and realizing the great wrong they had done - they were changed by their experiences in a way they had not expected, forcing them to re-evaluate how they saw themselves. So the splintering began - between those who believed they had a moral responsibility to their former oppressors (because of their "humanity") and those who thought they could take a hard-line approach (because of their "machinity"). Real humans, believing themselves superior beings made in God's image, have encountered this same dilemma - were we created to be stewards, to protect and uplift, or did God create us so that we could rule, to dominate? Then they tried a program of "re-education" on Caprica, keeping humans on virtual leashes as they tried to bring peace with a gun. Misguided, futile hope that crashed the dreams of a better, more unified future yet again. How many times have we (RL humans) been at that point before? And then the internal divisions reaching a breaking point and they lose even the pretension of being able to function as a unit, and turn inward on themselves, changing the entire cold-war, us-them dichotomy into something else entirely, forcing the humans to re-evaluate their idea of the war itself. I'm not sure I've got a point, just reflecting on how much I love this show, and how awesome Sci Fi is - as a medium - for discussions and allegories about things that are relevant to current times.

I've been thinking about what the Hybrid said in Razor about Kara - that she is going to bring about the end of the human race. This kinda stands in stark contrast with the indications that she might be a savior, showing the way to earth. I've concluded that both might be true, in that Kara might be one of the humans who leads the way to humans and cylons living and breeding together - the "children of god" that Six likes to talk about being the new generation of beings. So, she shows them the way to the future, and in order for them to move forward with existence the "race" of humans ceases to exist - to be replaced by something new. That's my favorite theory at the moment.

Did y'all see this article on the Last Supper Image? I don't remember if this was brought up recently or not, I found a link to it a week or so ago at scyfyportal.com. Some dude(s) went all Da Vinci Code on the BSG Last Supper picture and thinks he has sussed out some hidden meanings:

http://www.spacewesterns.com/articles/60/

I'm not quite sure why the previews for next week's episode don't follow the preview of the episode that comes right before it starts i.e.

::Cue drumming and frenetic music, frantic snapshots of explosions, Tigh yelling, Starbuck screaming, Six being all Sixy, stop!::

Those always made me want to watch more BSG. In contrast to the next week previews, which might as well just go ahead and air the whole next episode instead of showing the crucial moments.

The Hail of (Centurion) Bullets

1. Job Interviews: Noticeably absent this week were Adama and Roslin continuing their "In the Mood for Love" sexual tension, the pre-requisite Lee being righteous, and Dee being beautifully useless. Seems every week, some of the cast is missing in action. Are the actors taking some time off to interview for their next roles?

2. Tory: Clearly this a society that does not appreciate the art of criminal forensic investigation. My feeling here is that Tory will wind up telling Chief that she offed Callie, just as he is coming to terms with it, forcing him to, in turn, space Tory, which will lead to rather uncomfortable questions here. What is it with Baltar and Skinjob sex? I guess he's had quite the practice.

3. Anders: You gotta feel for the guy. His only tie to humanity seems to be Starbuck and what a tenuous tie it is. He knows he can't tell her about him being a skinjob without being absolutely sure that she is one as well and is cognizant of it. Starbuck is always liable to put a bullet into her ex-mate if she ever found out. As for the raider scanning him and figuring out the truth and Leoben still remaining clueless, this may have something to do with an earlier explanation of the Raiders, in which they were described almost as pets or animals rather than any full fledged thinking Cylon. Sometimes animals instinctively know the truth about a person, before the people around them do. Yeah, I know it's not really an explanation.

4. Athena: Funny that the full fledged Cylon is this suspicious of a maybe-Cylon. Athena had that neat trick before where she plugged herself into the computer to wipe out the Cylon logic bomb. No way to hook S-Buck up to a comp and find out?

5. Leoben: Never a resurrection ship in range when you need one. Freaky oracle-like as always. Him and Starbuck are perfect for each other. This is a hook-up waiting to happen.

6. Baltar: Yep, still confused about this. We'll see.

No deep thoughts this week. This episode was yet more BSG foreplay.

@ Shara

I agree. The hybrid's words, while seemingly unequivocally ominious, may also have a double meaning. Apparently, the Razor Hybrid's speech was supposed to be much longer, but was cut. Somebody was kind enough to quote the extended speech from the DVD extras.

"At last they’ve come for me. I feel their lives, their destinies spilling out before me. The denial of the one true path, played out on a world not their own, will end soon enough. Soon there will be four, glorious in awakening. Struggling with the knowledge of their true selves. The pain of revelation bringing new clarity. And in the midst of confusion, he will find her, enemies brought together by impossible longing, enemies now joined as one. The way forward, at once unthinkable, yet inevitable. And the fifth still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering. I can see them all. The seven now six self-described machines, machines who believe themselves without sin. But in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know enmity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many and then they will join the promised land, gathered on the wings of an Angel. Not an end, but a beginning. Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her. As my own existence comes to a close only to begin anew in ways uncertain. All this has happened before and will happen again..."

Your interpretation of the Hybrid's words are certainly possible. The only thing that bothers is me is his words about S-buck being the herald of the apocalypse and harbinger of death - both which could be metaphorical if talking about the end of the society and the beginning of a new human/cylon society - but then the hybrid goes on to say that "they must not follow her," implying that S-buck is at best a false prophet and at worse, knowingly leading the humans to their demise. This is of course predicated on the fact that the Hybrid wants what we (humans) want. If humanity were to follow S-buck, would it be to the detriment of the Cylons? or to the Humans? And does the hybrid care about humanity?

The hybrid's final remarks about "all this has happened before and will happen again," is actually a pretty good statement on humanity's inability to learn from its mistakes. Everyone agrees that there is wisdom in the words "those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it," but at the same time, what is human history if not one long rerun of past mistakes? What prompted those mistakes - our fundamentally flawed nature - has not changed one bit over the thousands of years of human history. We just now have technology on our side that enables us to make the same mistakes on an even greater scale and affect even more people.

The Hybrid's speech is interesting because it sheds light on the setting as well.

Personal opinion: BSG is set in our own far future. That would explain the names and the Greek gods.

My interpretation of the scene between Anders & the Raider was that Anders somehow sent out a transmission to the raider that told it to break off. I don't think the raider actually saw who it was in the cockpit, I think it just received the transmission and then forwarded it to all the other raiders. When Six is relating the event to Cavil I believe she makes reference to a signal or something. It may have been similar to what Athena did in Season 2 when she jacked into the Galactica's computer through her veins and sent out a signal to disable an incoming raider fleet. I think Anders subconsciously accessed the same kind of ability.

Also, remember that Earth is the 13th colony. We are descended from them. So it makes sense that what we consider Greek mythology came from them. That would be the premise anyways. This is not like Star Wars where there just happens to be a random empire of humans out there with no relation to Earth. Earth and the Twelve Colonies share a common past. How exactly they are going to interrelate the history of the Twelve Colonies with what we know of history on Earth remains to be seen.

I've become more and more irritated with the show's pacing as this season has worn on. I'm getting to the point where I want the show to go away so that my hopes for it will not continue to be dashed by the reality of it. Gone is the goodwill it earned from season one. Gone is the forgiveness I gave for New Caprica after BSG ftl'd into the atmosphere. Someone somewhere should have sat the BSGers down and said you can have as many concurrent storylines as you want but one of them must always involve action and Vipers. The past two episodes have been Soap Opera of the lowest sort. Blech.