Rating: **1/2
Written by: Ronald D. Moore
Directed By: Michael Rymer
"33" is a unique and sublimely simply episodic concept. It must have begun in a production meeting when Ron Moore posed the following hypothetical: "Suppose that the Cylons showed up thirty-three minutes after the fleet's first jump. So the fleet jumps again. And then, thirty-three minutes after that, the Cylons show up again. And so on, and so on, and so on. How would the crew of the Galactica react? How would they cope? How long would it take before they started making mistakes? And how long would it be until they were finally worn down to the point where the Cylons could finally run them down and destroy them?"
Of course, this concept is not without flaws. For obvious instance, why thirty-three minutes?
Moore pre-empted this question in his blog post about this ep.
The truth is, there's no real answer. It's just a random number that felt right when I came up with the idea that our people were under continuous, relentless attack since the end of the pilot. I wanted it to be a short interval, just long enough for them to grab a bite to eat, jump in the shower and maybe try to catch a catnap before dragging themselves back to their duty stations and begin the whole tedious, terrifying ordeal all over again.
Well, yes, we understand that, Mr. Moore, but, well, why thirty-three minutes?
…I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could've come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would've made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier's nonsense drive signature needed fifteen minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another ten minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama? How does explaining that 33 minute interval help our understanding of Laura's terrible moment of decision, or bring us to any greater knowledge of Dualla's search for her missing family and friends, or yield insight into Baltar's morally shattered psyche?
Okay, let me expand upon the question.
You're right - providing a "technobabble" explanation for the Cylons' metronomic attack intervals wouldn't have added anything to the drama. But you appear not to have considered that there could be explanations for "Why thirty-three minutes?" that don't derive from technology. What was the Cylons' strategy? Were they just playing with the humans, like a cat bats around a mouse before eating it? Were they testing the humans' endurance to see how long they could keep up the frenetic pace? What was the point of launching two hundred thirty-eight consecutive ambushes that all fell several seconds short of success? The Cylons' pursuit of the human survivors may well take decades, but given the totality of their attack on the Colonies, why would they be so laconic about finishing off the few that got away?
I can already see a recurring theme arising in my analysis of this series. The absence of elaboration on Cylon motivations is quickly becoming a huge hole into which the whole kit & kaboodle could slide. And Number Six's elliptical circumlocutions aren't going to plug it, hot tub scenes or no hot tub scenes.
My apologies. This is reading like a blog post instead of an episodic review. But the points made above needed to be made, and I suspect this won't be the last time I'll be making them.
Besides, there's not a whole lot of plot to analyze, because "33" is the whole point of the story.
All the characters are exhausted. All the characters are ragged. All the characters are staggering (though Colonel Tigh may have another reason for that…). And, unfortunately for Mr. Moore's hopes for his can't-miss idea, we don't gain very much character insight from any of it, other than that tired people have no energy, big black bags under their eyes, and start making mistakes.
There is a show-stealing scene in the hanger deck between Starbuck and Apollo. The CAG tells her to take her stimulants (can't be falling asleep in the cockpit, after all), and the hotshot pilot refuses. What follows is a royal ass-chewing (no, not THAT kind - geez, get your mind out of the gutter…). The odd thing about it is the direction of the invective, as Starbuck snaps at Captain Beaver Cleaver's weak-ass "I want to be your friend" command style. She gets right up in his face and tells him everything he should be telling her, at the top of her lungs.
Or, in other words, she shows him what she would be like if she were the CAG.
Then she takes her meds and salutes.
I don't know if Apollo learned anything about command from the encounter, but Starbuck certainly looked like she was having fun. As, come to think of it, she just about always does. Perhaps the rest of them could take a lesson from her. At least until she gets killed, or attrition raises her to Apollo's responsibilities. Maybe she's living it up while she still can. "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," and all that.
Let's see, anything else? Well, Adama and Tigh both had decent beards going, until Adama shaved his off. Of course, with Ed Olmos' face, it was difficult to tell the difference.
Over on Colonial One, President Roslin keeps a sad vigil, symbolized by a number on a whiteboard. The number represented the total remaining human population per the ad hoc census taken over the previous five days of the fleet jumping for its life ever thirty-three minutes. When her dorky little aide provides her with a downward correction, it takes the number under fifty thousand.
This seems to have a profound emotional impact on the President. One that might not appear all that significant to an outside observer, but does make sense when you understand the psychology of numbers and of her particular situation.
We all have a tendency to "round up" when discussing numbers. It is deliberate inaccuracy, sometimes even fudging, but most of us are more comfortable with "fuzzy math" in the course of ordinary conversation as opposed to clinical, knife-edge precision.
But how much more so for President Roslin. Even over the course of a few days she'd become emotionally invested in that magic "fifty thousand" plateau. This is how far humanity has fallen, and finally the decline has stabilized. To see it fall again just reinforces the deep-seeded feeling of futility and doom.
When we add in her inherent feeling of responsibility for and to all of them that any true leader couldn't help but harbor, we begin to understand just how much of a gut punch every single vanished digit becomes.
We also begin to understand what a cross was her decision to order the destruction of the Olympic Carrier.
In the same way, knowing Dr. Baltar as we now do, we can understand why his feelings about this sacrifice were dramatically different.
On the two hundred thirty-eighth FTL jump, one civilian ship gets left behind - the aforementioned Olympic Carrier. After this jump, the Cylons don't make their usual appearance thirty-three minutes later. Once again, the crew experiences a pyrrhic triumph - they now perhaps finally have some breathing room, but they've lost a large ship with a fortieth of their remaining population - over thirteen hundred people.
How does this affect Baltar? In an earlier scene, while Baltar is trying to catnap and is plagued by Number Six-directed expositional wet dreams, President Roslin's dorky aide (I forget the character's name, I think I'll just call him "Dorky Aide" from now on) informs her that another scientist is urgently requesting to meet with her because he has information on a "traitor in the President's inner circle."
Baltar, as you might expect, panics. He's not a traitor; he's just a weak, pathetic wretch who got manipulated by the enemy into unwittingly opening the door to the annihilation of his race. But he knows that such rationalizations won't help him if others, much less the President of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol, find out about his facilitating role in the holocaust.
Number Six, naturally, knows all this since she's inside his head. And this, naturally, is why he will never be rid of her, because his weakness, and thus vulnerability to her manipulations, is bottomless, the only way to make her go away would be to have the Cylon implant removed, and the only way to have the Cylon implant removed would be to reveal its existence to his companions, which would reveal his culpability in bringing about their civilization's destruction. And once that happened, they'd more likely execute him than save him.
That's what Baltar thinks, anyway. And it's a line of reasoning that Number Six wastes no opportunity to encourage and reinforce.
The quasi-metaphysical angle pops up again when she argues (I’m still not used to the specter of a scantily-clad, incendiarily hot supermodel preacher - makes me wonder if the blinding irony of it is supposed to be a poke at "red"-staters) that the stool pigeon aboard the Olympic Carrier is God's punishment of Baltar for his sins. Now God knows Baltar has a multitude of sins of which to repent, but regrettably, Number Six never specifies what she means by the word "sins." Baltar, of course, being the quintessential "blue"-stater (as well as stereotypical "scientist"), reflexively blasphemes by denying the existence of "God or gods." This does not sit well with his Cylon superbabe.
The curious part is that the emergence of this personal threat to Baltar, its disappearance when the Olympic Carrier is left behind, its reemergence when the Olympic Carrier reappears, and his "salvation" with its subsequent destruction, are all linked in the dialogue to Baltar's reactions to Number Six's "proselytizing." The latter development comes when Baltar all but screams out to her, "I repent!"
But did he? Of just what exactly did he repent? And was his repentance sincere? For that matter, to what "God" is Number Six referring? Is she referring to a deity in human culture reverence for Whom was part of their original programming? Could the Cylons have attacked because of a perception that their creators had fallen away from the faith and merited judgment for that collective betrayal? Or is she referring to what will emerge as this series' counterpart to Imperious Leader (much like the V TV series ended up doing)?
More questions that need to be answered. I don't demand that all the beans be spilled this early, but the process of revelation does need to be established before too much longer, or it will be difficult not to lose interest.
As mentioned above, the Olympic Carrier rejoins the fleet, but soon breaks off all communication with Galactica. As I was watching, the first thought I had was "Cylon Trojan horse," and a split second later Adama reached the same conclusion. I don't know if that means I have good command instincts or that Adama has a rudimentary grasp of the obvious. Think about it - the ship that got left behind in the most recent Cylon ambush now reappears not half an hour later? What conclusion would you draw?
The die becomes even more cast when sensors pick up a radiological signature from the liner, indicating the presence of nuclear warheads aboard that presumably had not been present previously. At that point the decision becomes a no-brainer - the Olympic Carrier must be destroyed.
Of course, just because it's an obvious decision doesn't make it an easy one. Most likely all the humans aboard were massacred by the Cylons - a conclusion seemingly reinforced when Apollo and Starbuck peer inside the windows of the vessel and don't see anybody within view - but short of boarding her, they can't know for sure that that's the case. Consequently, when Adama orders them to open fire, Apollo and Starbuck know that they may be slaughtering hundreds of their own people. Adama and Roslin know it as well. And even the knowledge that, if that is the case, it's still a matter of "The needs of the many outweighing the needs of the few," doesn't make it any less bitter to knowingly do a piece of the Cylons' dirty work for them.
That's what sets this incident apart from the abandonment of the sublight vessels in "Armageddon." But I suppose the lesson it teaches is that agonizing life or death decisions don't get any easier with repetition. Which should provide an idea of the hellishness of the journey that lies before them.
Next: After a commercial break, humanity and the crew of the Galactica obey their thirst.
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