Rating: **1/2
Written by Mark Verheiden
Directed by Robert Young
Now that the ragtag, fugitive fleet has been implausibly reunited, and the Roslin administration restored to power after Commander Adama's military coup, and the human diaspora is one big happy family again, what would be the thing you would most expect to happen next? That's right: the Extreme Media would go bananas!
That's the gist of "Final Cut," which opens with an ace Fleet News Service reporter, D'Anna Biers (Lucy Lawless), screening a homemade camcorder video of what is now known as the "Gideon Massacre," a reference to the botched attempt by Colonel Tigh to seize supplies from civilian vessels for the Galactica that the former had cut off to protest martial law. And it's explosive - riotous civilians in full outrage mode, jittery, trigger-happy soldiers closed in on all sides, followed by a cavalcade of weapons fire leaving four civilians dead and three times that many wounded. If this gets out, the detente between Roslin and Adama may become irrelevant as both may face a full-scale revolt.
Roslin, as is his shrewd want, decides that the best way to defuse this public relations firestorm in the making is to go limp. And not just flaccid, but completely prostrate: by offering none other than Ms. Biers herself "unlimited access" to the Galactica and its crew.
Surprisingly, Adama is in full agreement with this idea. Or almost - he warns Biers that if she or her cameraman do anything to endanger the security of his ship, he'll cut them off.
Thus begins forty minutes or so (counting commercial breaks) of cliches. Biers is only interested in digging up dirt, as is clearly illustrated early on when Dualla shows the pair the battlestar's CO2 scrubbers, and Biers sacrcastically tells her cameraman to "get a picture of that" and he snickers and walks on. She quickly hits a small jackpot by walking into the unisex pilots' lockerroom just as Apollo and a female pilot are getting out of the shower. Apollo is less than thrilled, while the female pilot moons the camera and throws in a playful ass-wiggle for good measure. Another female pilot, Louanne "Kat" Katraine, nearly gets into a fistfight with Chief Tyrol on the flight deck and later crashes her Viper on landing. Turns out she's strung out on stimulants she's been taking to keep her piloting edge, and even stay awake, under the near-impossible demands borne by the still undermanned air group.
Adama volunteers Tigh for a face-to-face interview, which causes him to almost crap his uniform on the bridge when the "old man" breaks the news. Adama tells him it'll be "good for him" to face his accusers and detractors instead of hiding from them. To me it sounded like another PR disaster in the making. End result? Biers poured them both drinks, then didn't touch hers while he guzzled down his like Ted Kennedy at a kegger, showing him to be the boozehound he is. Then he suddenly got angry and agitated and stormed out of the room. The whole thing couldn't have lasted five minutes.
Me 1, Adama 0.
Interspaced with the aforementioned cliches was another series of cliches as Tigh suddenly found himself stalked by a would-be killer. First there's the ominious threatening message on his bathroom mirror. Then there's the near-explosion on a Raptor just as he's boarding it. Finally he returns to his quarters and finds his wife, bound and gagged and terrified, not for herself but for ol' Saul as she knew the killer was lying in wait for him. Right on cue, the killer pistol-whips him. Turns out it's one of the marines Tigh sent to the Gideon who can't deal with the trauma, snapped, and is now intent on taking it out on the man who ordered him there.
Not much in the way of suspense - did you really think Tigh was going to be blown away? - but it did show the XO, for the first time in a long time, to still be in possession of a "full set," and gave him a good line - "That (the Gideon Massacre) was a mistake; this is a choice."
Expectedly, as Biers continues her documentarizing and interviews of Galactica's pilots and crew, her hardline anti-military attitude begins to soften as she sees all that they're up against on a daily basis, trying to protect humanity's meager survivors against an ongoing mortal threat from Cylon attacks that can strike at any moment. Which, of course, one does in the form of two raiders which are dispatched by Apollo, Starbuck & Co.
Biers does discover one other thing: Boomer #2. And Adama isn't long in getting wind of it, and confiscating that particular videotape. Biers almost taunts him that "if it gets out that you're harboring a Cylon, it could turn the whole fleet against you!" Why I'm not all that sure, since the existence of humanoid Cylon agents was publicly disclosed all the way back in last season's "Litmus," so if the military had captured one, I would think the public would approve of it. But in any case, a third of the fleet turned against him only days before, and the Commander healed the breach "just like that," so why would a fresh breach be any different?
The final version of the documentary reflects Biers's changed attitude and, while not quite reaching the level of a tribute, is far more balanced and generous than anybody expected.
The screening, however, isn't for Adama and Roslin, as the camera circles around to reveal Doral, Conoy, Boomer, Number Six, and...D'Anna Biers, who is the sixth Cylon humanoid "model" thus far revealed (Simon from "The Farm" being the other). They mention that the two raiders were sent to reconnoiter the status of Boomer #2's pregnancy, which almost self-terminates but is saved by Doc Cottle.
I take it this is part of the "plan" we keep hearing about, which suggests that the human diaspora was being preserved last season until the pregnant Boomer clone could be gotten to it, and is being preserved now in order to birth the hybrid child and see what happens next. Of course, this doesn't explain why the centurions boarded the last battlestar and tried to destroy it back in "Valley of Darkness". Indeed, I'm starting to suspect that these humanoid models are really a different lifeform altogether that encountered the Cylons and somehow took control of them.
Whatever. At least Lucy Lawless has a chance to be a series semi-regular in the way that her "Shannon McMahon" character never became on the X-Files.
Next: Another day, another crippling Cylon computer virus. Wasn't there a Colonial equivalent of McAfee?
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