Rating: **1/2
Written by: Tony Graphia
Directed By: Brad Turner
Do you realize there hasn't been so much as a peep from the Cylons in a full month (our time, not Galactica time)? After having to sit through all the quasi-Matrixesque religiophilosophical gobbledygook that filled up "Flesh and Bone," going back to space dog fights would be a refreshing change of pace.
The opening act begins in a dream sequence being experienced by President Roslin. She's walking through a dark forest in her nightie; as she comes around a tree she sees a male figure off in the middle distance (whom I at first took to be Apollo, leading me to groan that now we were going to get R/Ajr shipping instead of R/Asr, and of course I have no desire to see either one, even after having seen Mary McDonnell in a nightie) gesturing at her as if to warn her of something. The only word I could make out was "Cylon," and apparently she heard it as well, as she started running pell-mell through the ample flora. Suddenly a squad of armed soldiers is running after her, or perhaps just near her - the sequence doesn't make that very clear. What is clear is that the soldiers aren't Cylons, but look like Galactica security instead. As she comes around another tree, the man she saw earlier grabs her and puts a hand over her mouth. The squad of soldiers runs right by them, seemingly oblivious to the pair. The man removes his hand, steps back, narrows his eyes, and stares at her. Within seconds his body is lifted up and away as if suddenly caught in a wind tunnel; just as he disappears, suddenly he's standing next to her again and calls out her name.
This causes her to awaken with a start. As she's trying to gather her wits, news reaches her that a Cylon agent has been discovered aboard the Geminon Traveler matching the description of Leobin Conoy (Callum Keith Renny), the "man" the crew of the Galactica found on the Raknar Anchorage back in the pilot. As she soon discovers, Conoy bears a striking resemblance to the man she saw in her dream.
So…what explains this? Number Six (so she told her weak, hapless "genius" of a paramour) infiltrates Baltar's conscious mind via a computer chip she implanted (or, more likely, injected) into his head. Thus far we've never seen her enter his dreams (not the dry ones, anyway, though I don't imagine he has very many of those). But when would Conoy have been able to similarly implant or inject Roslin? Does this mean Cylon doppelgangers are telepathic? Or could it be that…naw, I'll hold off on that avenue of speculation until later.
Unnerved by this correlation of seemingly random events, Roslin decides that she wants Conoy interrogated. Adama reasonably and sensibly objects, pointing out from his own experience with this "model" that questioning him will be pointless because he'll just pump the air full of smirking double-talk with just enough truth mixed in to make distinguishing useful information from the BS a hopeless task.
Ordinarily Roslin would probably have deferred to Adama's judgment - capturing a Cylon prisoner would seem to fall under military jurisdiction - but she's desperate to find out what the connection is to her dream, a motivation that she (probably) wisely keeps to herself, and orders the interrogation to be carried out.
Since no Vulcans were available, Adama has to select the most tough-minded member of his crew to conduct Conoy's "debriefing." No door prize if you guessed that his pick would be Starbuck, who hasn't been used much since "You Can't Go Home Again" and has grown tired of crawling around inside the (literal) guts of her captured Cylon fighter. Besides, in vaguely Kirkesque fashion she's figured out how everything works, rendering Chief Tyrol a useless appendage in the process (now that’s an ironic redundancy, isn't it?). Now it's time for her to have some "fun."
The balance of the ep, with the occasional exception, narrowed down to this…conversation. I'm not sure what else to call it; "battle of wits" doesn't seem to fit, and "interrogation" is so futile given that he'd never give her a straight answer, just as Adama warned. Battle of wills, perhaps? Yes, that works.
I wish I could say I found it riveting. There were moments when it looked as if the polemical tension might reach that level, but then the elliptical, contextless gibber-gabber would drag it back down again.
Conoy's opening gambit was to demand to know Starbuck's name. Now logic suggested to me that he already knew her name, just given her notoriety throughout the fleet, and she should have realized that and thus recognized his stubborn, parrot-like queries for the mind game tactic it was. Instead she fled the room, totally flustered. Not a good start.
Like a good soldier, Starbuck tried again. So Conoy gave her a potentially useful disclosure: he'd secreted a nuclear warhead "somewhere in the fleet," and it’s set to go off in eight hours. That was probably BS - back in "33" they didn't have any difficulty detecting the nuke aboard the Olympic Carrier - and Starbuck told him so. Unflappable, Conoy retorted that she would nevertheless be obligated by the chain of command to relay his claim to her superiors because, you guessed it, they couldn't afford to take any chances.
He was right, of course. Again.
Conoy 2, Starbuck 0.
By now Starbuck was starting to get pissed. In her mind the information-extraction imperative faded in favor of personal vendetta. Or, in other words, her ego was coming into play - just as her Cylon prisoner intended.
Since Conoy was directing the proceedings far more than she was, Starbuck decided to go with the flow, engaging his tiresome preference for drifting off into pedantic, nebulous, belittling debates about their respective points of view on theism. It actually reminded me of some online debates I myself have had on the subject. Problem is, I would never have described them as compelling drama.
It basically boiled down to Starbuck being a casual adherent to a sort of loose polytheism (the "Lords of Kobol") that had quasi-Catholic overtones (the two icons she keeps in her locker, rather like rosary beads or a statue of a canonized saint) versus Conoy's arrogant proclamation of New Age-ish pantheism in which everything is God, more or less. In Conoy's view, Cylons more, humans less.
I'm still scratching my head as to where artificially intelligent machines would have picked up such a zealous attachment to a religion at such odds with the dominant faith of their creators. Heck, I still can't figure out where these "human-in-every-way-except-in-the-throes-of-nut-busting-orgasm" humanoid "models" came from. I don't buy that they "evolved" in only the forty years since the end of the (first) Cylon-Human war. My guess is that when the Cylons took off for "parts unknown," they encountered an alien race that either conquered them or, more likely, they conquered and in some way "assimilated." This alien species, compatibly humanoid, had natural traits and/or skills (like telepathy) that the Cylons were able to incorporate into their own "collective," as well as their staunchly held concept of religion.
This theory is attractive not only in plausibly explaining how the Cylons could "go organic" so quickly, but in the story possibilities for depicting this alien race as an unpredictable third-party down the line. It would also help provide a context for the unending stream of impenetrable yammering that keeps pouring forth from every Cylon agent that doesn't do everybody the favor of blowing himself up instead.
As with pretty much every debate about religion, Starbuck and Conoy go round and round like a dog chasing its own tail. It reached its nadir for her when the Cylon claimed to be "god," triggering a gale of outraged laughter. Pressing the claim, he asked her if she didn't believe for one moment that he couldn't snap his handcuffs, overturn the table sitting between them, and rip her head right off her shoulders any time he wanted. She cooly replied that if he could, he would have done so already. So Conoy snaps his cuffs, overturns the table, grabs Starbuck by the throat and lifts her clear off the deck with one hand.
Then two guards rush in and drag Conoy away. Which shouldn't be possible given the physical capabilities he's just displayed. Unless, of course, he "let" them do so because it was part of his/god's/whatever's plan. For my part, I don't think I ever cared, but if I had, I would have stopped by this time.
Starbuck draws the same conclusion, and that's what begins her comeback.
First she turns Conoy's "evangelizing" back on him by forcing him to contemplate the nature of his existence using the vehicle of the guards beating the living crap out of him. Either he is or is not feeling the pain from this beating. If he isn't, then he really is just a fantastically advanced machine; if he is, but can turn off his equivalent of a nervous system, same conclusion; but if he is and can't turn off the pain, then he has a breaking point, just like the poor, weak, lost, misguided humans, and she'll find it, and he'll tell her what she wants to know.
Next she has the guards drag Conoy back into the room along with a large bucket of water. The table is gone. The debating is done. All there is is a choice: either Conoy tells her where he's hidden the nuke, or she will subject him to a form of water torture.
Repeated dunkings, just like the sustained pummeling that preceded them, yield up what real-world interrogators learned a long time ago: physical torture is a largely ineffective means of extracting information, particularly from fanatics. And, in the midst of all that abuse, Conoy notes the other aspect of torture, which is the emotional toll it takes on the people doing the torturing.
By the time President Roslin shows up in person (perhaps to play the belated "good cop" and/or perhaps to try and directly ascertain Conoy's connection, if any, to her dream), it's Starbuck who has been worn down, so much so that she even offers up a prayer to her Kobolian idols for Conoy's soul. If, you know, he had one.
I appreciated that part of the character arc. We already knew that Kara Thrace was a big softie underneath that braggadocious persona. Here we saw that persona peeled away like an onion, one layer at a time.
What body-checked the main storyline into the ditch was Roslin's intervention at the end. After ignoring Adama's warning about the futility of interrogating Conoy and blowing off his recommendation that they space the Cylon immediately and putting the entire fleet at dire risk of Cylon attack (that never comes) by spreading it out in order to limit the damage from the nuke they should be easily able to detect but can't find, the President does a complete about-face and orders him blown out the airlock herself after he appears to mock her by embracing her and whispering in her ear that Adama is a Cylon.
As foreshadowed at the beginning, Conoy's exit from the ship looked exactly like the explosive recession she saw in her dream.
Starbuck looked shocked at this turn of events, or perhaps she was just confused. If the latter, she wasn't the only one.
Was there a point to this story? Perhaps as allegory or sermonette. Certainly there wasn't any impact on the characters or the mytharc. Either there wasn't a nuke (as Conoy also smugly “conceded” to Roslin) or he just hid it so well that they'll never find it before it does go off - or never think to look in the right place (e.g. Baltar's lab - remember when he requested a nuclear warhead for his "Cylon detector"?). Starbuck added another unpleasant experience to what is becoming a series of them. Roslin looks to be getting positively loopy. And, by my count, the Cylons are down to seven doppelgangers, assuming that the original figure of an even dozen Number Six gave Baltar wasn't also BS.
Speaking of Baltar, he's put in another compromising position by another of the Cylon agents aboard the Galactica, one Sharon "Boomer" Valerii.
Boomer wants Chief Tyrol back inside her. Well, I beg your pardon, but that's what it comes down to. Meanwhile, beneath her conscious motivations, Boomer's programming is driving her toward reestablishing the access to sensitive areas of the ship that she had before when Tyrol was regularly mounting her like a moosehead.
Along those lines, she gets the idea that if she can allay her fears about possibly being a Cylon, the doubts she imagines Tyrol to be harboring will also be laid to rest, and the two can resume nailing each other.
The tight spot for Baltar is, one would have thought, that there is no "Cylon detector," never was, never will be, and how will he explain this to someone desperate enough to not be willing to accept his delaying excuses? Instead, to his utter astonishment, the damn thing actually works. Or so it would appear; given the results it produced - that Boomer is, indeed, a Cylon - one could see an out in the line that "there are still bugs to work out, so don't draw any final conclusions from the results."
But that would be too honest and honorable. Besides, Baltar just hates confrontations. Particularly with Cylon women who might kill him and whom he cannot bed. So he tells her what she wants to hear - that she's "100% human."
Up to this point Dr. Baltar wasn't a traitor, but simply an incredibly weak, feckless patsy effortlessly manipulated by what he thought was an incendiary Victoria's Secret model
Here, though, he crossed that line. With Number Six in his ear (as opposed to his trousers), he made the conscious decision to cover up the presence of a Cylon sleeper agent who is a military pilot with security clearance.
What's that saying? "In for a penny, in for a pound." After putting the fear of, well, "god," into Baltar last week, Number Six is steadily reeling him in. Maybe it's just me, but this feels like it's building toward something significant. And the season finale is on the near horizon.
On the other hand, maybe the cliffhanger will be what china pattern Helo and the other Boomer register for as they portray their version of American Gothic.
Either that, or the question every BG fan is wondering: Tyrol or Helo - who has the bigger frakker?
Next: Can Roslin really be dumb enough to believe Adama is a Cylon? And will Colonel Tigh finally get laid?
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