BSG - The Ties That Bind

SO SAY WE ALL. AGAIN. Seventeen to go.

BTW, um, still SPOILERS. If you haven't seen the eps, this is not the place to be looking. Go get the DVDs and then watch the last three eps on Sci-Fi.com. We'll wait.

A pretty great episode. I'm hoping that this will be more like season 1 and something will come of this and not like season 3 where nothing would. (It's not a Lee story. Those evaporate faster than Ambrosia in vacuum.) It's been four days and I have to admit I'm still a little numb.

Cut to the chase: Go back and watch the miniseries where Wild Bill runs into his wayward deck crew who are sneaking about wanting to give him a retirement present. They are all dead.

Prosna died in the first attack on Galactica when EyesTigh had to vent the air to keep the fuel tanks from exploding.










Socinus died on Kobol. (Way to go, Crashdown.)











And now Cally. Very sad. (I didn't know her maiden name was Henderson.) I always liked Cally. A lot of people wondered at her marrying The Chief right after he broke her jaw. If he had been AWAKE when he did it I'd have been in that camp. (Now why anyone would marry STARBUCK is another matter...) I liked the two of them together. They felt a lot more solid and real than he and Boomer. One of my favorite moments in s3 was when Apollo asked Tyrol if he ever though about Boomer and he said "no", drank his drink, and walked away with a look of "viper pilots is DUMB". Other than being a toaster the Chief is a stand-up guy. Which is why he needs to tell people he's a toaster. Especially now.

She Who Is My Wife is impossible to write TV for. She knew what Cally was going to do the moment she grabbed Tyrol's keys. Then she knew what Tory was going to do the moment she got the baby. I'm fast but not that fast. (But I figured out The Prestige about an hour before she did.)

Alright, Saul. TELL PEOPLE. Tell Wild Bill. Let HIM figure it out. Galen? Your wife is dead. Why? Because one of you toasters is a might touchy about your secret and is getting into "the sensations". TELL PEOPLE. I'll hate all of you fraking skin jobs, I swear I will. Helo will no longer be my BSG punching bag. iTigh should know better. If you'd asked him a year ago to lay down his life for the fleet he'd have done it without blinking his eye. He tried to, more than once (no, not the blinking). And Athena is not only still free, still trusted, but she's off on a super-secret mission with Starbuck. Get some balance, people.

If it comes out that Tory killed Cally, and if it doesn't change Tyrol's mind BIG TIME, I give up. (I won't of course. I watched Black Market and still came back.) I want this to be the tipping point. If it turns out to be Tory vs. iTigh and Tyrol, bring it. Mind you, they did a great job of making it very possible that no-one except Tory will ever know. Cally was crazy and suicidal. I'm ok with that too, actually. (Let's just waltz past the idea that Tyrol's key wasn't on the inside of the airlock and that Tory now seems to know her way around a battlestar better than iTigh or the Chief.)

Oh, if you're going to drop an in-joke like "Weapons locker 1701-D", don't do it when the nerds are supposed to be caught in unbelievably high dramatic tension. It's distracting.

You know, I NEVER liked Tory. I used to just hate her because she replaced Billy.

Every decision made by any half-way responsible person in this fleet should begin and end with "There are 40,000 people left in the entire universe and we are being pursued by an implacable foe that will stop at nothing less than our destruction." Anything past that is details.

Which brings us to Lee and President Bush- er, Rosilyn. I had a moment of hope that Bush Derangement Syndrome had left the show for a while. No such luck. I have to admit that Laura's directive (or whatever they called it) is totally in character. Never let another Baltar trial happen. Ever. Mind you, Tom Zarek didn't want to have the trial to begin with. I LOVE seeing her and Lee knock heads though. I want to see a scene with just the two of them where they have out everything that's happened since Kobol. I want to see how much they used to adore each other.

The problem I have is that all of the rest of the Quorum and the Press (weren't they all supposed to get JOBS after Dirty Hands? And what did THEY do on New Cap?) seem totally agog at the idea of paranoia and security. FORTY THOUSAND PEOPLE LEFT. Someone snuck a NUCLEAR WEAPON onto Cloud Nine a year or so ago, remember? (Gee, THAT guy ought to go on trial.) "But what will our society turn into?" You know what? Worry about that when there are eighty thousand people left. (And why isn't anyone having babies?) This is frontier life. Go listen to Representative Adama's speech again from last season. I'd like to see how ANYONE is accepting that Roslin is President again. The only way that can be pulled off is if she is liked and trusted. (And she's a PRESIDENT, so how can THAT be?) Otherwise she just kind of waltzed in and got appointed. Again. And was Lee just appointed to 1/12th of the legislature? Because the man who argued Gaius Baltar free sure wasn't just elected. So I would think that the power structures in a rag-tag fleet such as this would be more... Fluid. So Laura resorting to legal subterfuge would be pointless and impossible to enforce.

Going off on THAT tangent: I'd like to see what the rest of the ragtag looks like. So far there have been no riots (unless they run out of food or martial law is declared, even then it seems pretty calm). People seem to be getting along pretty well for having been crammed into tiny spaceships for several years with only a short break outside for disease, starvation, and cylon occupation. So, all things considered, these people seem to be GOOD. It's not a fleet of Kara Thrace's. (Oh, sorry.) It seems pretty clear that the Galactica doesn't have marines scattered around the fleet keeping order by force. Of course, we never SEE these people. We only see the selfish and the stupid. I'd like to see more about how these people have adapted. What THEY think of their leaders. Maybe Laura's got a second honeymoon for having brought them through Caprica. Even more so for Admiral Adama. But how seriously do they take their "elected" government? 40,000 people. Some of us have worked for COMPANIES bigger than this. I can't imagine that the same government set up to manage twelve PLANETS would be as effective on this scale. Certainly not more effective. I just think that this "fourteen layers deep" legal intrigue with Laura's directive seems like overkill. Everyone in the fleet is at most only 39,999 people from the president (approximately).

Gotta say, I loved Wild Bill reading Airlock one of her trashy Raymond Chandler (IN SPACE) novels. Very sweet. Then we had the big chewing out scene about WB sending Starbuck off. I'd love to see this divide grow. She Who Is My Wife would hate that. She's the biggest Laura / Adama 'shipper out there. (Don't even get her started on Lee and Kara.) But I want to either see them have to argue to a consensus about something, or go back to something more like first season where they had to dance around each other a bit, because neither could run the fleet without the other. And I'd TOTALLY love to see the Laura was right all along. Right now she says "JUMP!" and Bill growls "whatever" and then he does it. But it's not boring and not out of character, so cool deal.

Speaking of our wayward babes, out on the less-than-rag-tag expedition ship Demetrius, Starbuck is going crazier. I don't like her. Let's just be clear on this. I have no reason to like her anymore. (But I still love iTigh. Funny, eh?) I think her crew is awesome though. What a crowd. Good grief! Can Felix get anymore bitter? Obama would be saying "Dude, lighten UP! It's not SO bad!" Who's the "unknown guy"? Should I recognize him? And if not, shouldn't he be wearing a red shirt? Or are they just going to kill Seelix to keep us guessing? HEY! Where's Hera?!? (And where's ADxA?)

And the Cylons are at war. WOW. So, did they kill off ALL of the Sixes and Eight's except for the ones on the Big G? THAT would be wild. So how long until they unbox the Three's?

A Baltar Free ep. Interesting.

I have NO idea where this is going. In a better world, RDM would. But it's great so far.

Boom boom boom.