Rating: ***
Written by: David Weddle & Bradley Thompson
Directed by: Michael Rymer
"Valley of Darkness" continues the fallout from the cataclysmic events of "Kobol's Last Gleaming." Though those events, as I wrote back in March, strained the bounds of credulity, the aftermath here and in last week's "Scattered" are providing some intermittently compelling drama. The new big picture has yet to fully take recognizable form; neither Boomer makes an appearance this time, Adama is still in Sickbay, in a coma and clinging to life by weakening fingers, and Roslin is still in the clink. But as with most status quo-shattering watersheds, it is the lesser and more immediate crises that occupy our heroes' attention.
And those crises are stepping on each others' heels in their machine-gun rapidity.
No sooner does the Galactica rendezvous with the fleet than the ship starts experiencing widespread power shutdowns, a parting gift of the Cylon virus that was somehow wirelessly transmitted into the last battlestar's temporarily networked computers. And no sooner does the power go out than the returning Viper pilots, incongruously backslapping each other with self-congratulatory bravado, run head-on into the Cylon centurions that kamikazed their way aboard at the end of the hour a week ago. The end product is not pretty - a messily dismembered pilot and his comrades fleeing the opposite direction in pell-mell terror.
Speculation runs rampant among the bridge crew as to what the Cylons are trying to do, but Colonel Tigh isn't in any doubt about their intentions. He tells his people flat out what those centurions are up to: getting to environmental control to vent all the atmosphere, killing every human aboard, then turning the Galactica's guns on the fleet. Game, set, match.
This does suggest that the Cylons "have a plan," at least for this particular situation. But it is still too dependent upon human stupidity for my taste. Just as it was never really clear why Galactica had to jump back into Kobolian space to calculate where the fleet jumped to when they already had those coordinates, so here it is at least somewhat curious why the Cylons would employ not-exactly-inconspicuous centurions in a boarding strategy when they've been able to slip their human doppelgangers in and out of the fleet and its huge flagship at will. Couldn't the Doral clone who blew himself up in "Litmus" have accomplished this mission a whole lot easier? Heck, that's the mission that the Cylons should have assigned to Boomer instead of shooting Adama; why kill the human military leader when you can kill everybody aboard, and then the rest of surviving humanity, in one swift blow?
If the Cylons should have thought of that, our heroes don't have the time for such ponderations. Seeing the power outage and the commotions, Apollo - thrown back in the brig with President Roslin and Special Assistant Billy by Colonel Tigh after leading the Viper mission to hold off the Cylons until they could locate the fleet and jump - persuades the guards to let them out so that he can get into the fight and the civilians can be taken to Sickbay, which is supposedly the safest place on the ship.
These two groups become an unwitting pincer movement that manages to get around the surviving centurions and beat them to environmental control. Unwitting not just because they aren't aware of each other's progress, but because Roslin's group, intent on reaching Sickbay, keeps finding its way blocked either by centurions or jammed bulkhead doors. This keeps lengthening their alternative route and ends up bringing them to the same point for which Apollo's squad heads deliberately on Tigh's orders.
It's a mark of the direness of the situation that Tigh doesn't even raise an eyebrow at Apollo's "jailbreak." Spit & polish hardass that he is, he knows that Apollo and Roslin can be taken back into custody later provided they’re still alive to be reincarcerated.
The Billy-Dualla proto-romance gets some passing, and not implausible, attention. Just as the presidential errand boy looked to be finally moving things along late last season, their budding whatever became a casualty of the blowup between their bosses. Early in the ep Billy tries to stir the embers, only to receive an accusation from his squeeze about being an accessory to Roslin's "high crimes and misdemeanors." Later, during Roslin's party's meandering search for Sickbay, they come upon crew quarters whose grisly contents make it obvious that the Cylons have already been there. In one of the closets they find none other than Dualla, in shock and possibly suffering from a concussion (evidenced by a head wound). Billy can't exactly claim to be her rescuer, but in the climactic showdown he does expose himself - rather stupidly, since he was exposing everybody else with him, including Roslin - to the centurions in order to try and save Dualla.
That action doesn't much help that group, but it does slow down the Cylons just enough for Apollo's marines to finally pick off the last of the centurions and save the ship.
This scene was vividly reminiscent of DS9's "The Siege of AR-558." There were the same elements of sacrifice, heroism, futility, and desperation. And while there were only a couple of centurions as opposed to a horde of Jem'Haddar, the strategic situation faced by Apollo and his impromptu squad was considerably more dire than what confronted Captain Sisko and his Starfleet crew. The latter were defending an important outpost, while the former were the last line of defense against the very extinction of their people. It was a "This Is It" moment; right there in that corridor was where it was all going to hit the fan, one way or the other.
Topping that off was the neat little plot contrivance that these centurions were armored, meaning that the human defenders had to take out their heads to kill them. And between the five of them they had six armor-piercing rounds, so they each would get but one shot, and Apollo (natch) two. So, of course, Apollo got the last one as it was flying through the air toward him. Making him a hero for the second time in the space of a few hours.
Did I mention this still wasn't Colonel Tigh's day?
Not much happens in the other two story tracks. After Helo's Boomer escapes in Starbuck's Cylon raider ("Bitch stole my ride" was a classic line I can't believe I neglected to appreciate last week), the stranded pair trudge over to Kara's old apartment, where she turns on her dad's favorite classical piano music (battery-powered boom box, dontcha know), lights up a stogie, almost jams the "Arrow of Apollo" up her ass, and takes a load off. Meanwhile Helo, clueless at having been fooled by the Sharon avatar, and not knowing what to say after Starbuck chewed him out for his stupidity, stays wisely quiet. Later they go to the garage, climb into a Hummer, and drive away.
If you were confused about where this "Meanwhile, on Cylon-occupied Caprica" thread was going last season, now you have to be completely confused.
Meanwhile, back on neutral Kobol, the mini-loop of retrieving life-saving medication for the wounded man named Socinus is closed in questionable fashion.
Chief Tyrol is still shell-shocked at the loss of his man last week (who, to briefly review, was blamed by Crashdown for leaving the spare medkit behind and sent to retrieve it as punishment) and is, along with Callie, still pinned down by whomever was firing at them (presumably Cylons, but we, and they, don't know that for sure). Callie rallies Tyrol by loudly calling him a "motherfrakker," which, as you might expect in a high-stress situation, breaks them both up into uncontrollable laughter.
Tyrol needed the tension-breaker, because when he and Callie finally get back to the others, he's told by the medic that it's too late, and Socinus isn't going to make it.
Compared to this, Tigh is having a kegger. At least in a microcosmic sense. Everything the Chief has done over the preceding few hours has now not only come to naught, but cost him the life of one of his people. And it's Crashdown that is primarily responsible for putting them in that situation.
That would be the tempting rationalization. Heck, it's probably what Crashdown would have thought in Tyrol's place. But once again Tyrol proves himself to be command material by rising above such pettiness. If anything, he overcompensates by blaming himself, since he went along on the retrieval detail precisely to enhance the chances of all three coming back alive.
Crashdown, to his credit, keeps his mouth shut.
The part that discomfited me was Tyrol euthanizing Socinus, all the while telling him soothing lies while he slipped away. This was depicted as a great act of deep compassion, and while the dialogue threw in the additional rationalization that he was going to die anyway and agonizingly, the fact still remains that in the end, it was Tyrol that killed him, “mercifully” or not, not his wounds.
It's morality only Jack Kervorkian could have appreciated. Standing in for Jack the Dripper would have been Vice President Baltar, if he hadn't been undergoing more brainwashing from Number Six, this time a dream in which a Galactica rescue team led by Adama himself finds Baltar and his "baby." Adama asks to hold the child, then walks away with it and drowns it in a nearby river. That causes Baltar to "awaken" into his induced Number Six delusion, where he finds himself in the same woods in which they've been hiding, only with skulls littering the ground. She breathily propagandizes about this being humanity's fate at its own hands because of man's "evil" nature - a rather audacious thing for a Cylon to say - and prophesies that Baltar will be the only human who makes it to Earth.
Oh, boy, I don't like the philosophical direction that angle appears to be headed.
I did like the final scene at Adama's bedside between Apollo and Tigh. The colonel informs the captain that he's to return to the brig and that he's "not fit to wear that uniform." Apollo, not really caring about anything at that moment other than his dad's survival, quietly replies that no, he isn't fit to wear the uniform, and perhaps he never was. "But then," he says looking at Tigh, "Neither are you. And whether either of us continues to do so will be up to him to decide."
After Apollo departs, Tigh mutters to himself, "Thank the gods I never had kids."
Colonel, you have no idea....
Next: Will Baltar turn on his fellow castaways? And Tom Zerik reaps the whirlwind of martial law.
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