Rating: ***
Written by: David Weddle & Bradley Thompson
Directed By: Sergio Michael Rymer
Perhaps the oddest part is that the Boomer clones let her go, and let the nuke destroy their ship. Or maybe it’s that, having apparently decided to go with her human side after all, she suddenly pulls out her sidearm and blows two holes in Adama’s chest right after he congratulates her on accomplishing her mission. Almost as if that was a separate program that was on a timer and kicked in unconsciously. Judging by her dazed, bewildered expression after she’s tackled to the bridge deck, that may indeed end up being the case.
Is a basestar for the life of the human military commander a bargain for the Cylons? Perhaps – if they have another ambush waiting in the wings.
~ ~ ~
Nice little bit 'o prescience I mustered four months ago, huh?
Sure enough, Boomer almost immediately becomes as shocked and distraught as the rest of the Galactica's bridge crew, wondering what could possibly have happened. Because, of course, from her perspective she was accepting Adama's congratulations, then the next thing she knew she was on the floor and Adama was lying mortally wounded. Just like she blanked out back in "Water" when she planted the explosives that ruptured the ship's water tanks and then found new water reserves on a nearby planet but was blinded to the scanner results. She appears to have been programmed to not only believe she's human but to be a human partisan as well, with her Cylon overrides kicking in only for as long as necessary to carry out their purposes.
And, equally as sure enough, no sooner do the EMTs arrive to take Commander Adama to Sickbay than another Cylon basestar pops in out of nowhere to attack the fleet right when it's most vulnerable.
This just isn't Colonel Tigh's day.
That's one of the primary focuses of "Scattered." Through a series of periodic flashbacks as he faces one jam after another, we learn how Tigh has always taken comfort in Adama's shadow, how Tigh brought Adama back to the service and how Adama later saved Tigh's tempermental ass from being cashiered out of it. Tigh is not just like Will Riker in being conflicted between accepting a captaincy and remaining XO to a captain he vastly respects; he has no command ambitions whatsoever. He doesn't want to be in charge, never has, never will. Now he's stuck with it at a time of maximum crisis and peril.
But it isn't just the Cylons. He's also got the aftermath of Adama's coup de 'tat to deal with, including ordering Captain Apollo's arrest for his mutiny against that of his father. No doubt one piece of emotional satisfaction in this vast, stormy sea of a situation, but still not an unmixed one, since with Starbuck AWOL Apollo is also his best available pilot, not to mention the CAG, an unignorable fact that quickly forces Tigh's hand.
In the meantime, Tigh orders the fleet to make an emergency FTL jump to pre-arranged emergency coordinates to escape the Cylon ambush. The jump is successful except for one niggling little detail: Lieutenant Gaeda fails to update the rest of the fleet with the new coordinates, so when the Galactica makes its jump, it finds itself all by its lonesome.
You might be asking yourselves why Gaeda didn't have the previous coordinates on file, even written down on a piece of paper on a clipboard, so that they could just make another jump and rendezvous with the fleet. You'd think you'd know better than to overthink a plot-driven story. Point out that gaping hole and you rob the ep of its principle jeopardy premise, the last battlestar's daring jump back into the Cylon ambush with networked computers - ordinarily a flat no-no given Cylon hacking abilities, but necessary here to sniff out the fleet's location before the Cylon basestar can obliterate them. Also Gaeda's redemption premise, since he does the IT work.
And, of course, there is the other niggling little detail that the fleet's only doctor is, well, with the fleet and not aboard the Galactica, and without him Adama will croak.
Tigh is absolutely vehement in laying down to the crew that this is still Adama's ship and they're still his crew and he'll do things Adama's way until Adama returns to duty. Except that networking the computers together and leaping knowingly back into a Cylon ambush is something that Adama would never have done. Or maybe he would have. The greater point is that Tigh, faced with just the sort of conundrum that every CO is paid to take on, made his gut decision and pulled it off. He faced his Kobayashi Maru and lived to tell the tale. Doesn't mean he'll be angling for "the old man's" job, or that he'll start looking younger than "the old man," for that matter, but it does suggest that he's gotten past a crisis of confidence that he'd never had to confront before, and will be a better man and officer for it.
Still, when this particular crisis is over, I'd bet on him retreating to his quarters and getting standing down/falling up hammered.
Even this triumph isn't a comprehensive one. Adama is still in ICU, President of Vice Gaius Baltar and his party are still marooned on the surface of Kobol, and Starbuck is still coming to grips with multiple Boomers and Helo's having knocked up one of them.
Apparently the "child" that Number Six shows Baltar in another of his daydream/delusions really is a baby, or at least something that has a hand that looks like it could have come from a baby. She tells him that he's the father and she's the mother. And after the moment of rapture that passed over his furtive features in "Kobol's Last Gleaming," here he starts getting weirded out again, a feeling that is only reinforced when he awakens from his "vision" as the rest of his party retreats out of the valley they're in toward the wooded hillsides which will presumably provide better cover against Cylon pursuers.
The remainder of this track centers around a wounded man who needs medication that happens to be in the second medkit that conveniently gets left behind in their previous valley location. Crashdown, in command and feeling less comfortable with it than Colonel Tigh was aboard the Galactica, fingerpoints one of Chief Tyrol's men and orders him, as punishment, to go back alone and retrieve the medkit.
Tyrol, who as we recall from the pilot, is highly protective (and, at times, too protective) of the people under his command, quietly, respectfully, but firmly confronts Crashdown about this decision, and suggests that he and Callie accompany his man on this retrieval mission. Crashdown, to his credit, doesn't tighten up or get defensive, but accepts the advice as intended and acquiesces.
This was a well-played scene. Tyrol didn’t get indignant or insubordinate and didn't come at Crashdown like an enemy. Also he was willing to volunteer himself, embodying the command principle of not being willing to order others to do something that he wasn't willing to do himself.
The irony was that Tyrol's man ended up getting killed anyway (riddled by bullets, which is just too big a low-tech anachronism to ignore, IMO), dying in the Chief's arms, which may raise fresh tension between him and Crashdown, assuming the firefight in which they find themselves with these as yet unidentified attackers allows the time for it.
There's even less movement in the Starbuck/Helo/Boomer angle back on "Cylon-occupied Caprica," where Lieutenant Thrace again pulls her sidearm on Boomer, Helo again intervenes, and this time Boomer uses the ensuing argument to slip out of the museum and abscond with Kara's captured Cylon fighter, which I guess has been reconfiscated by its original owners. And we still don't know whether the "arrow of Apollo" is some mystical wand-like whatsis or just surplus from the Caprican Archery Society. Will Starbuck let Helo put a bun in her oven as compensation for (1) such incompetence and (2) letting his cybersqueeze get away from him?
Well, heck, she bedded Baltar, didn't she?
Perhaps the most gripping and emblematic scene of "Scattered" is the confrontation between Colonel Tigh and Boomer. It was another notch in the growing belt of what might be called BG's "reality-based writing." As you watch it unfold you can literally see yourself in each character's shoes and understand their motivations so well that overt dialogue is almost unnecessary.
Why did Tigh go in there? Simple - he wanted to know why Boomer had shot Adama. Not just in an intellectual sense, or even from a military tactical standpoint, but as Bill Adama's best friend and closest confidante, whom she had placed in an apparent no-win situation for which he was doomed to blame himself.
Boomer was in ironically similar desperate straits. Her worst nightmare wasn't confirmed on the Cylon basestar she destroyed, but on the deck of the Galactica's bridge after she'd unwittingly pulled the trigger. She'd tried to commit suicide to avert that nightmare coming true but was prevented by her programming from doing it. She now realizes that she is a tool of the enemy, a helpless Cylon weapon that she cannot stop or destroy.
When Tigh walks in, Boomer has the fatalistic look of a death row inmate denied his final reprieve from the governor, or a trapped animal unable to gnaw itself free. She honestly asks Tigh how Adama is, which he takes as unconscionable effrontry for which he punches her repeatedly in the very same jaw in which she shot herself several days earlier. Unable to fight back and not wanting to, hoping that she can provoke him into doing for her what she cannot do for herself, she taunts him to "finish it." This not being the response he either anticipated or wanted, or perhaps just being his hardass contrarian self, he withdraws instead, leaving her to weep in despair on the floor of her cell.
One thing you can say for these characters: they're real, and the consequences of their actions do not evaporate back into the ether at the end of the hour.
Well, okay, we know Adama isn't gonna die and Starbuck will be rescued or escape from Caprica. But besides that.
Next: The funny-looking new Cylon vessel that they thought they'd shot down (even though it kamikazied into one of the launch bays) produces a very unpleasant surprise.
No comments:
Post a Comment