Rating: *
Written by: Jeff Vlaming
Directed By: Edward James Olmos
“What the hell….?” – former Seattle SuperSonics coach George Karl
That was my essential reaction to “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down.”
Here’s the bare-bones synopsis:
President Roslin's fears that Commander Adama is a Cylon are stoked when she learns he's making secret wireless calls to other ships. Then, to make things worse, a single Cylon raider appears near the Galactica and begins acting strangely after being damaged in battle.
When Adama returns to the ship with Tigh's wife, Ellen, an earthy temptress and irrepressible flirt who claims to have been in a coma since their civilization was destroyed, Roslin's suspicions increase. She orders Baltar to screen both Ellen and Adama with his newly completed Cylon-detector.
Meanwhile, Colonel Tigh and the rest of the crew watch warily and gather data as the wounded Cylon raider jumps in and out of space.
On Caprica, the Cylon overseers fear that the Cylon Sharon is developing a strange feeling toward Helo — love.
I’m reminded of Jamahl Epsicokhan’s summation of the Voyager episode “Threshold”:
"Threshold" is one of the all-time worst episodes of Star Trek ever filmed, as far as I'm concerned. It's an absurd, technobabble disaster that practically deserves to be put up for scrutiny just so it can be torn apart. Non-Trekkers are bound to have a field day with it. If I were a person who had never seen Star Trek before and had the unfortunate experience of tuning into "Threshold," I would probably never tune into Star Trek again.
Substitute “Battlestar Galactica” for “Star Trek” and “sex-drenched” for “technobabble” and you have TMUTMD in a nutshell.
This is the kind of episode that makes you wonder how so many people could be involved in producing it and not one ever clear his/her throat and even whisper, “What in the hell are we doing?” Having watched Trek from its very inception, and spent the past decade writing reviews of both it and X-Files, I guess I shouldn't be surprised that abominations like this occasionally make it all the way through the production tract, to plop out gracelessly on our TV screens. But every time it happens, I still groan and shake my head anew.
Given the recent storyline trends, perhaps a stinker was inevitable. All the downside vulnerabilities were ripening, after all; maybe it’s a good thing that they were all loaded into one episode. Except, of course, that there’s absolutely no guarantee that the trends will not continue. If that’s the case, I fear for the long-term future of this series.
Take the “Roslin suspects Adama is a Cylon” angle. When Leobin tauntingly whispered that nonsense in the President’s ear last week, she gave no indication that she believed him for a second. That was when she ordered him to be blown out the airlock, as a matter of fact. Yet here, we see Leobin’s claim wheedling into her thinking. And when Adama starts engaging in a series of furtive communications and intra-fleet jaunts, she actually starts suspecting that Adama might be a Cylon agent.
Even by itself this is a horrible idea and shows the limits of the whole “the Cylons look like us now” gambit. As Adama himself quipped to Roslin at the end of “Flesh and Bone,” “If I’m a Cylon, we’re all screwed.” Which is precisely why that idea could never work, and why it should not even be teased, even in a slurpstick disaster like this installment.
What makes it worse is the reason Adama was sneaking around, which I still can’t figure out.
Adama is on another jaunt (to the Rising Star) when a single Cylon raider shows up. The raider is damaged and starts acting funny. Soon thereafter Adama returns to the Galactica, whereupon he deflects Colonel Tigh's understandable questions as to where the devil he’d disappeared to by producing Tigh's estranged (or perhaps that should be “strange”) wife, Ellen.
Tigh, having believed his wife lost in the Cylon holocaust, is initially overjoyed to have her back. They both vow to each other to “start over.” The question “start over from what?” is not long in being answered.
Ellen Tigh, we quickly see, is a lush and a slut. She’ll drink anything you set in front of her and hump any man that can’t get away. How she ended up married to a buttoned-down, spit & polish martinet like Saul Tigh is as big a mystery as where Earth is; or maybe it isn't, since we know that he’s as big a lush as she is.
This is the explanation advanced by Adama for keeping Ellen’s presence close to the vest. Knowing that he needed a first officer that wasn't climbing into a bottle every night, he feared letting Tigh know that his wife was alive and well until he was sure he knew whether or not to let him know.
Sorry, that’s the best summation I can come up with. Without his wife Tigh was struggling with his alcholism; reunited with her he was staggering through the corridors, bottle in hand, at one point poised to eat out Ellen’s nether parts right in the hallway. If Adama was concerned about what disclosing his wife’s status to Tigh would do to him, it wouldn't seem that keeping her existence under wraps served any discernable purpose.
In the context of the story, that is. As a plot device, its purpose was to feed President Roslin’s scatterbrained paranoia. And caught in the middle of that was Dr. Baltar.
Baltar, as we discovered last week, has actually perfected a Cylon detection procedure. Or at least that’s what he claimed. With him, you can never be entirely sure; more on that in a moment.
Roslin gets on the blower to Baltar and orders him to test Commander Adama first. She also has a thinly-veiled confrontation with Adama where she “strongly recommends” that Adama be first in line for screening. The Galactica CO spars with her a little, suggesting that she should go first since she outranks him, but doesn't seriously argue against the idea.
However, when the Commander produces Ellen Tigh, he gets on the blower to Baltar and orders him to screen her immediately. Which conflicts with the order he got from Roslin to test Adama.
In the meantime, Tigh invites Adama, Apollo, and Roslin to an “intimate” dinner party to celebrate Ellen’s return. This is where we see Ellen’s “irrepressible flirtiness” on most garish display, and where I wished I could have gouged out my eyes with hot fireplace pokers. The terms “wince-inducing” and “toe-curling” don’t begin to describe this scene. I was actually at a dinner party like this once, seated next to someone else’s wife who got standing up/falling down hammered and became, shall we say, a great deal less inhibited. But even she didn’t run her bare foot up my inseam, as Ellen did to Apollo under the table. I was half expecting her to slide right out of her chair, crawl underneath the table, pull down Apollo’s dress uniform trousers, and start gobbling him on the spot. And probably reach over and start jerking off Adama for good measure, if only to temporarily straighten out the ubiquitous crags in his face.
Somehow ol’ Saul missed all of this sitcom merriment. Maybe it was because he was also drunk as a skunk, and maybe it was because he really did want to “start over.” But a short while later, when, in the aforementioned face-buried-in-her-crotch-in-the-corridor scene, Ellen propositions a passing crewman for a ménage a toi, it finally dawns on the XO that nothing’s changed, and that sometimes you can’t start over again.
Except he doesn’t want to believe it, and is consequently willing to believe almost anything else. Which makes him as gullible as Roslin appears to be.
Consequently, when they all end up in Baltar’s lab, all hell breaks loose. Roslin demands to know why Baltar hasn’t screened Adama. Adama demands to know why Baltar hasn’t screened Ellen. Roslin demands to know why Adama countermanded her order in order to have Ellen screened first. Adama demands to know what Roslin is insinuating. Roslin tells him. Adama explodes at her spying on him on his own ship. Then Ellen lets fly that Adama tried to make it with her when she was in her coma. Now Tigh erupts, gets in Adama’s face, and exclaims, “Maybe you ARE a Cylon!”
Ugh. Ick. Please, somebody stop it. This exchange was almost as bad as the dinner party scene. It’s like they all regressed to a junior high level emotional state. How bad was it? Dr. Baltar was the adult voice of reason. You know, the man whom Starbuck caught wanking himself in the lab to Number Six’s tender virtual ministrations.
To top off the infuriating cavalcade of idiocy, after Baltar pronounced Mrs. Tigh to be human, Number Six asked him what the result really was, and, grinning wickedly, he replied, “I’ll never tell.”
Well, that’s just great. Apparently both the raging “Anybody could be a Cylon” paranoia and the Baltar/”Is the Cylon detector real?” riffs are to remain open-ended far past the point of parody, which if it hadn't been before was definitely crossed in this ep. Only place to ride them from here is straight into the ground.
On the bright side, the Boomer avatar on Caprica might be falling in love, and the Number Six avatar might be getting jealous. Can you say “Cylon catfight”?
Thank the Lords of Kobol the Cylons return next week.
Next: “When fuel supplies dwindle, the fleet must make a daring attack on a Cylon-controlled tylium mine
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