Rating: ***
Written by: David Weddle & Bradley Thompson
Directed By: Jeff Woolnough
Two weeks ago I asked, “Do you realize there hasn't been so much as a peep from the Cylons in a full month (our time, not Galactica time)?” Well, in all honesty, there wasn’t a peep from them this week, either. But that’s what made this episode unique, because this week it was the humans who did the “peeping.”
Putting aside the windy philosophizing of “Flesh and Bone” and the slapstick nonsense of “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” “Hand of God” brings us back to a basic, meat & potatoes jeopardy premise: the fleet is just about out of tylium, the energy-dense substance that fuels its FTL (i.e. warp) drives. Without a replenishment soon, the fleet will be unable to jump any further, and may as well be blooded and gutted for butchering at the Cylons’ convenience.
Every available Raptor is sent out to search every solar system within jump range for tylium. But there’s no luck. Apparently there is simply no tylium to be found. Until, naturally, Boomer’s Raptor finds some. Well, not just some, but an entire asteroid full of it, enough to last the fleet several years.
There’s just one little caveat: the asteroid is crawling with Cylons.
At the ensuing command strategizing powwow, Tigh and Apollo are writing off Boomer’s find, since it’s obvious that the Galactica can’t take on an entire Cylon base. It’d be suicide. Then Adama blows them all away by declaring that that is exactly what they’re going to do.
Bold? Daring? Nope; just common sense. If they do nothing, they run out of tylium and become sitting ducks for an inevitable Cylon coup d’ grace. If they try to take the base, they may – or, realistically, will – all perish, and the fleet along with them. But there’s at least a chance they can succeed, and that chance is worth taking, especially when the alternative gives them no chance at all.
It figures that a hardboiled, hardheaded realist like Adama would choose this course of action. And not just because he’s the lead character, either.
This decision leads to some interesting character development arcs among the lead cast members.
Take Starbuck, for instance. She’s working diligently and furiously to rehab her blown-out knee (injured in “You Can’t Go Home Again”), and with the added incentive of this make-or-break mission, she becomes a wild woman. She’s so determined that she will not accept no for an answer, even from Adama himself.
Emblematically, the Commander doesn’t seek to match her intensity. Rather, he gives her an eminently practical illustration by piling on additional weights to the leglifting machine on which she’s working out equal to the number of “g’s” she’d need to pull in an evasive maneuver. With each additional barbell, her leg starts to tremble; finally, it collapses. And Adama quietly remarks, “That’s only three g’s.” As in three out of six.
Clearly, Starbuck can’t fly. And for her, that’s agony, because she’s a born control freak. She’s the best pilot in the fleet, she knows it, everybody else knows it, and she has the CF’s nervous certitude that if she’s not there in the cockpit leading the charge, the mission will go kerflooey.
It’s an attitude that makes Apollo feel immensely reassured, since in Starbuck’s incapacity the CAG is pressed into the lead pilot’s role. And he needs an immense amount of reassuring (Starbuck to Apollo: “Don’t frak it up!” Apollo, in reply: “Humina, humina, humina…”
We really haven’t heard much from Apollo since YCGHA. Not that I’ve missed the simpering little punk, you understand. But here he’s placed in a compelling set of circumstances. He’s not in Starbuck’s class as a pilot, but he’s the best pilot available. He doesn’t have her confidence or bravado, but he is the Commander’s son. And just as in his still-new role as the CAG, he’s now thrust into a situation he doesn’t really want and for which he doesn’t feel ready, but he has to go through with it anyway. And to succeed he has to put all these distractions and self-doubts aside and focus on the task at hand. Or, you know, they’ll all die. But other than that, he feels no pressure at all.
In a very nice and well-played scene, Adama finds Apollo off by himself on the flight deck, brooding (and doubtless wallowing in those aforementioned self-doubts). He sits down next to his son and they chat for a bit. Adama doesn’t give him a pep talk – that isn’t his style anyway, and he knows Apollo would resent it – but he offers him an item to take on the mission that earns a quizzical look from the CAG: a lighter. But it isn’t just any lighter – it belonged to his grampa, Adama’s dad. Every time he had a big case to try, Gramps would take the lighter with him as a sort of combustible rabbit’s foot. And, so Adama claimed, Gramps never lost a case when he had the lighter with him.
The message was clear: Adama’s dad passed the lighter (engraved, BTW) to him, and he was entrusting it to his own son, not so much as a good luck charm but as a vote of confidence that he believed Apollo would succeed and come back in one piece. Both as a “guy thing” and in keeping with their particular father-son relationship, which has only recently seen healing begin after years of estrangement, this was probably the only mode in which the underlying sentiments could have been exchanged. But Apollo, to his credit, accepts them as intended without giving voice to them, which both men doubtlessly preferred, for their own respective reasons.
The scene is perfectly capped off as Adama is departing, when he tells Apollo that if he doesn’t bring back the lighter, he’ll “kick his ass.” And you know that he’d do it, too.
Still, there’s the matter of actually planning the assault on the asteroid. And that’s where Starbuck proves herself an invaluable asset.
Before her input, Adama, Tigh, and Apollo have come up with a textbook plan that Starbuck instantly dismisses on the straightforward grounds that “because it’s textbook, it won’t work.” This is what Adama wanted, and why he sought out her input; she thinks “outside the box” by her very nature. It’s what makes her such a brilliant pilot, and also what strips all of the “by-the-book” Colonel Tigh’s gears.
What I loved about this strategizing scene is that we didn’t get all of Starbuck’s alternative plan, but it was written in such a way that we thought we had. She suggests using three evacuated fleet transport ships as decoys to lure away the base’s raider compliment, paving the way for a Viper assault from the opposite direction. So we go forward thinking that’s going to be the plan of attack.
What they most need to know, however, is just exactly where to hit the base in order to destroy it without either the indiscriminate fallout of a nuclear attack or igniting the entire asteroid itself. And that’s where Dr. Baltar comes in.
Baltar is still new to the “ins and outs” of monotheism. Number Six has doubtless been virtual-humping him constantly in order to keep his naturally inquisitive genius from thinking too much about all that she’s not telling him about the Cylon god, and whatever bases that didn’t cover would be accounted for by his still fresh fear of her after almost going to the gallows (or the Kobolian equivalent) in “Six Degrees of Separation”. Now he’s put into another tough spot: as what passes for the fleet’s resident (and only) “Cylon expert,” he is asked to identify the key weak spot/target on the asteroid base, without which the mission cannot succeed and everybody will die.
And you thought Apollo was enduring pressure.
Baltar appeals plaintively (and pathetically) to Number Six, who only replies with another urge to “trust God.” Suddenly all hesitation leaves him, and he confidently points to a particular building on the recon picture of the base. Except that, as he subsequently confesses to his Cylon paramour, he had, and still has, no idea where the key weak spot/target is; he just pointed at random and acted like he knew what he was doing. Which, actually, is not all the implausible, since that’s pretty much what he’s been doing ever since the Cylon holocaust anyway. You’d think he’d be used to it by now. Other than, you know, being buggered to death in his mind’s eye by a Victoria’s Secret model. That I don’t think any man could get used to.
Consequently, when the attack begins, all these threads tie together in the same room: Apollo, leading the attack and heard over a commlink; Starbuck, helplessly following the unfolding of her plan instead of carrying it out personally (Adama’s confiding that he had to make the same transition himself was a nice touch); and Baltar, once again pissing himself over the potential End of Everything being blamed on him. President Roslin was also there; more on her in a jiffy.
At first everything goes according to plan. The three empty transports jump in near the base, and fifty raiders are sent toward them. Starbuck’s trainee pilots are sent in behind the raiders, only to have the Cylons turn tail and crush them against another wing of raiders that comes in behind them. Both wings – the base’s entire compliment, apparently - proceed on toward the Galactica. Needless to say, this wasn’t part of the plan.
Except that it was. The now-ignored transports suddenly open like tin cans to reveal another wing of Vipers, led to Apollo, which go after the now-undefended base.
In other words, it wasn’t the transports that served as the decoy, it was the Galactica. Starbuck’s innovation was to sweeten the bait; in football, it would be called a “play action pass.”
I so much appreciated that this part of the battle plan was not disclosed prior to this climactic payoff. On Voyager or Enterprise it would have been telegraphed, probably in the opening act, and the audience beaten over the head with it throughout the ep; here, handled properly, it was a great swerve both to the viewers and to President Roslin, who, impressively, remained cool as a cucumber throughout, but appreciated the close-to-the-vest secrecy (in case any other “Cylon agents” overheard it, doubtless, a possibility that was mercifully left out of the dialogue for a change), asking with a wry grin when Adama had planned to let her in on it.
Still, it fell to Apollo to get inside the base and blow up the specific building Baltar had handpicked – which, of course, he did, in hair-raising fashion, though even that was played by Jamie Bamber in such a way that you could tell he was flying by the seat of his pants, and that that was a new experience for him. This contrasted with a new-found confidence and bravado afterward in his triumphant return to the Galactica, complete with celebratory “you da man!” and cigar from Starbuck (whose elation one could also appreciate, since it had much more of a “big picture” aspect to it), lit with his grandpa’s lighter, which he tosses, symbolically, to his dad. If that scene seemed to borrow heavily from Jeff Goldblum’s Steve Levinson character at the end of Independence Day, that’s because it did. But it worked there, and I think it worked even better here.
Know how you can tell? You were pumping your fist even though you knew that there was no way they weren’t going to win the battle and get the tylium. When a story with an obvious conclusion is still sufficiently interesting that you don’t spend the balance of the hour counting the minutes until the end, and the end itself has a wrinkle or two you didn't expect, you have yourself a winner.
As has become the trademark of the new Galactica, there were a couple of incidental angles presented. One was President Roslin’s hallucinations, the product of the chamalla she’s taking for her breast cancer. Apparently chamalla is the Kobolian equivalent of LSD, or “funny mushrooms”; as Elosha (the “high priestess” who administered her the oath of office in the pilot) tells it, chamalla is taken by their clergy to “experience visions” and reach “a higher plane of consciousness.” IOW, to get wasted. Kind of like a super-medical marijuana, I guess.
Elosha’s attention is riveted, though, by Roslin’s disclosure of the waking hallucination (as opposed to her apparently precognitive dreams, like the one in “Flesh and Bone”) she had at a presser at the start of the episode, where she saw snakes crawling all over the podium. This prompts the priestess/drug queen/whatever to tell Roslin that she is the fulfillment of a 3,600-year-old prophecy that appears to describe the current predicament.
Why was this inserted into the narrative? Probably for Number Six to complete the prophecy in her deceptively light, salacious banter with Baltar in the final scene; as Baltar’s ego is inflating over the idea of being “the hand of God,” she tells him the rest of the prophecy, which is that the fleet will encounter its greatest enemy at Kobol itself and meet a catastrophic end. Or something like that; ancient prophecies, as a rule, tend to be unavoidably vague, which is to be expected of prophets describing events far in the future in terms of their own contemporary understanding. But it does (perhaps) serve as a heads-up of what the season-ending cliffhanger might be. If so, count me in.
Also, “back on Cylon-occupied Caprica,” the other Boomer has discovered that she’s got Helo’s bun in the oven. How this is possible is a really good question. I could speculate, probably “precognitively,” but I’ve done too much of that on this ancillary arc. We’ll just have to see how it plays out.
Fortunately, the non-ancillary arcs are more than sufficient to keep me along for the ride.
Next: Just the escapist scifi fare politics-weary Americans want to see: a presidential campaign!
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