Rating: ***
Written by David Eick & Ron Moore
Directed by Sergio Gezzan & Jeff Woolnough
I guess the promos for "Home" from last week pretty much telegraphed where Starbuck, Helo, and the "other" Boomer were going after they left Caprica. Also, the last Starbuck knew the fleet was at or near Kobol, and the "arrow of Apollo" needed to be taken there ultimately anyway, so where else would she have gone?
Interestingly, when Kara and her party arive, she doesn't appear to be all that shocked or even surprised that the Galactica isn't present, although perhaps Lee Adama's visceral reaction to Boomer's entrance overwhelmed those thoughts. But there was quite a bit going on before this tumultuous reunion.
It seems that a significant portion of the third or so of the fleet that followed President Roslin back to Kobol is starting to have second thoughts about their impulsive action. They're fretting that they're not equipped to go down to the surface and find the temple of Athena; that they don't even know where it is or how to find it; that Starbuck hasn't returned with the arrow yet (though, of course, that doubt is soon assuaged); and that the Galactica could jump in at any moment and arrest them all, or, as one of the more paranoid worrywarts exclaims, "blow them out of space."
I was disappointed personally that, aside from a handful of "toasters" on the surface, there were no Cylons to be found. What happened to the basestar that was hanging over Kobol and almost destroyed the Galactica back in "Scattered"? If it was waiting in ambush for the humans to obligingly return then, why wasn't it still there since up until "Fragged" there were still humans on the surface of the planet below? It's not as if that same basestar pursued the last battlestar and popped in right on top of the other two thirds of the fleet. So where did it go?
The candid answer is that if the basestar had still been in orbit, it would have immediately obliterated Roslin and her entire convoy, and the series would have functionally ended right then and there. All of which means that the narrative should have provided a plausible explanation to plug this rather yawning plot hole.
Roslin, recognizing that this "buyer's remorse" is not only pointless but also dangerous to her newly regained political control, puts an end to it and refocuses deliberations on what they came back to Kobol to do: find the temple of Athena.
It helps her equally newfound aura as a religious icon that just as she is confidently declaring that Lieutenant Thrace will return with the arrow of Apollo, Lieutenant Thrace returns with the arrow of Apollo. Had Mr. Meier, Tom Zarek's lieutanant, had his way, however, Lieutenant Thrace and the arrow of Apollo would have been vaporized, a not very subtle foreshadowing of where the real intra-rebel conflict lay.
We haven't really seen much of Mr. Zarek's thoughts on these recent, unprecedented events. Apollo contacted him because he had no one else to turn to who could provide them with the "services" Roslin needed. Bottom line: they were now political insurgents and they needed an old hand at the trade to bail them out.
The irony wasn't lost on Mr. Zarek. That much was clear even before this episode. But as we see in a revealing scene between him and Mr. Meier, Zarek is still far more the calculating schemer than the reckless zealot. He may be a "terrorist" but he's no jihadist. Indeed, he doesn't believe any of this "religious crap" any more than Commander Adama does. But, as he puts it, he does believe "in the power of myth." He knows that Laura Roslin is the reason that he now has (in his mind) a fleet of his own, and that protecting her and cultivating her status as a neoMoses - for the time being at least - is very much in his interest.
The question for him and his "security chief" is how do they ultimately replace Roslin and Meier's counterpart, Captain Apollo? After all, the very factor that has gotten them this far - Roslin's religious icon status - is also the biggest obstacle to the realization of their end objective.
Logic would suggest that they try to arrange an "accident" for the president and her military adviser - really, the entire landing party - so that Zarek and Meier can return to the Astral Queen and announce that all the others were killed in a Cylon ambush, but not before discovering that there is no "temple of Athena" and that the "arrow of Apollo" was a fraud. Bury Roslin posthumously and exploit the people's feelings of betrayal before they get the idea to go crawling back to Adama.
Zarek and Meier get half the equation right - they decide to take out Lee. Which makes for a priceless expression of bemused irony when Apollo himself hands Zarek a gun and makes a toss-off remark about the importance of being able to defend oneself.
It's what Apollo nearly did earlier with his own sidearm - twice - that garnered this hour most of its three stars.
When we saw Starbuck, Helo, and the living Boomer lift off from Caprica last week, we knew there was a collision course between the latter and Apollo even before the promos for this week ran. The doppelganger of his father's assassin walking into the room and straight toward him? Sheesh, how would you have reacted?
As has become a trademark of this series, the writers and direction didn't scrimp on intensity. As soon as Boomer comes into view, everything slows down. The camera pans into a closeup of Lee's face as his eyes see what we just saw. And his features, even in slow-motion, transform almost instantly from relief and joy at being reunited with Kara to homocidal rage at the sight of his dad's would-be killer somehow resurrected.
Apollo snaps. He lunges at Boomer, grabs her by the throat, hurls her against a bulkhead and jams his gun against her temple. But, just as quickly, Starbuck intervenes, and Helo, who entered after Boomer, has his weapon pressed against the back of Lee's head. A classic Mexican standoff.
If it had ended there it would have been a powerful scene. But David Eick builds upon it through what President Roslin does next. She defuses the situation by offering a compromise - Apollo and Helo lower their sidearms, and Boomer will be "taken into custody for questioning."
The first part is carried out. But not the second - at first. As soon as her own guard has hold of Boomer, Roslin orders him to blow her out the nearest airlock. Starbuck is appalled, since though she knows Boomer is a Cylon, she did rescue Helo and herself from Caprica. And Apollo, after his initial ecstatic reunion with Kara (that was punctuated by a kiss that wasn't a tonsilectomy but was much more than a peck), is equally as appalled at Starbuck's concern for both a Cylon and the same model that tried to assassinate his dad - of which, of course, Starbuck was unaware.
But it's Boomer that shows the strongest instinct for self-preservation, as well as the same talent that Leobin Conoy displayed in last season's "Flesh & Bone" - telling his captors exactly what they want to hear. In this case, shrieking at Roslin as the guard is dragging her to the airlock that she knows how to find the temple of Athena.
And it works. Roslin doesn't trust Boomer, doesn't want to listen to her, but the practical reality is that she doesn't know where the temple of Athena is and, given that there are still centurions on the planet below, can't very well go galavanting around on the surface trying to find it. And as she said in the opening Act, she's committed.
Or ought to be.
A second Apollo-Boomer confrontation is the pretext for the resumption of A/S "shippering" which I am going to try and officially ignore, at least until such time as it becomes relevant to the storyline and in such a way as to not make me gag uncontrollably.
So, with all of this emotion, enmity, and intrigue swirling about, Roslin disembarks to the surface of Kobol with Elosha (the high priestess, for lack of a better term), Apollo, Starbuck, Zarek, Meier, Helo, and some "redshirts" in tow, and of course with Boomer leading the way.
The expedition is still up in the air at the mid-way point, but they did blunder into a Cylon ambush - to which, interestingly, Boomer directed them by telling Elosha to be on the lookout for headstones, one of which Elosha immediately finds, but which is booby-trapped. And from which Boomer also rescues them by darting over to a fallen human, picking up the Colonial equivalent of a bazooka, and blowing away the ambushing centurions, but not before Apollo tries to stop her, naturally thinking that she's going to turn the heavy ordnance upon him and his compatriots. He mutters to himself, "You've gotta be frakking kidding me," while Starbuck nods and says, "Not bad." Thus does another Boomer worm her way into human confidence.
Meanwhile, back at Adama's chunk of the fleet...well, let's just say that events conspire with the "old man's" own conscience to force his hand.
Let's trace this back, shall we? The fleet split because Colonel Tigh declared martial law; Colonel Tigh declared martial law due to the reaction of the fleet to Adama's military coup against President Roslin; and Adama carried out the military coup against President Roslin because of her suborning mutiny aboard the Galactica, which was in turn simply the outward manifestation of her betrayal of a confidence with which Adama should never have entrusted her: that his publicly declared objective of finding Earth was a blatant and witting fraud.
What it all gets back to is that Adama broke one of his own cardinal rules: he trusted a politician. And, generally speaking, all politicians are skunks. Way back in the beginning of this odyssey, I wrote:
President Roslin, to her credit, knows Adama is full of crap and lets him know it afterwards, but acknowledges the rationale behind it. But she correctly observes that when, sooner or later, people find out that he was shoveling with both hands about the legendary “thirteenth colony,” they’ll “never forgive you.”
She knew whereof she spoke, and Adama should have grasped the inevitability she expressed and its implications for him. When it served her purposes, President Roslin herself let that cat out of the bag, and it ignited all the consequences she herself predicted - and which, when the time came, she exploited to devastating effect.
That's ultimately why Adama throws in the towel and decides to go crawling back to Roslin. Though practical matters also propel him in that direction. The ships, and accompanying resources and capabilities, that Adama has lost are irreplacable. Ditto the pilots, particularly Apollo and Starbuck. The CO appoints as CAG a lieutenant named George "Catman" Birch who is greener than Kermit the Frog but has the character trait of which Adama is most desirous: loyalty. Tigh is skeptical of the choice and lets the "old man" know about it loud & clear. And events soon back up the XO, as in a pilot training exercise Birch loses track of who is where and ends up sending two Vipers on a collision course that nearly gets one of them killed, and also botches a standard ship-to-ship refueling operation.
The bottom line is that the fleet - and the human diaspora - can't survive divided, and Adama's hands are far from clean in that division. Unfortunately, that wasn't what was sold as his primary motivation.
What was got bludgeoned home in a quiet, almost philosophical scene between the Commander and Petty Officer Dualla, who was pressed into this role because frankly the twistings and turnings of the plot left few other suitable cast members available. Adama is painting a model of a clipper ship, of all things, and pontificating on the nature of betrayal, and how it "squeezes out" every emotion except rage. Dualla ventures a counter-opinion that nobody had had the cajones to mention up until now - namely, the aforementioned deception about Earth and how he had "broken his promise." This pisses Adama off, probably because he knows it's true. But what breaks him down is Dualla's impassioned plea that "parents have been separated from their children" in the splitting of the fleet - which, of course, hits the raw nerve of Apollo's defection at Roslin's side.
We've seen Adama set aside his pride before and bow to the demands of reality. He was set to have his own private little war with the Cylons back in the pilot, a war that wouldn't have lasted very long, but came to realize the folly of that obsession and heeded President Roslin's advice to "run away and live to fight another day." But we've also seen maudlin sentimentality seriously impair his command judgment, as in "You Can't Go Home Again" when he told Apollo that if it had been him lost on a barren planet's surface instead of Starbuck, they would have never left until they found him, implying that he'd sacrifice the entire fleet for the sake of his own son. The scene with Dualla makes it overtly clear that it is the latter Adama that is depicted here, not the former, as well, come to think of it, as his recurring theme of the Galactica crew being "a family" and his "loving" every crew member. That is simply not a tenable command mindset. The reality is that the survival of humanity is in Adama's hands, and that demands that he have a functioning degree of emotional detachment if he is to maximize the chances of that survival. Or, as the Vulcans put it, "The needs of the many outweight the needs of the few - or the one." It is for the needs of the many that the fleet needs to be reunited, but Adama is doing it mainly for the needs of the one - himself.
Maybe his survival isn't an entirely unmixed blessing after all.
With the heretofore parallel story tracks merging, Part II - at least one would think - ought to bring this story arc to a dramatic, if necessarily predictable, conclusion. Unfortunately, if one thought that, one would have been wrong.
President Roslin's party is still slogging along on the Road to Athena's Temple. Roslin herself is even more rumpled, miserable, and loopy in the wake of High Priestess Elosha's death. Apollo is still appalled at Helo's love for the Boomer avatar despite his knowing what "she" is. And Meier, Tom Zarek's "henchman," is still urging his boss to off Apollo and carry out a coup d' tat of their own.
Meanwhile, Adama is Kobol-bound in a Raptor, along with Special Assistant Billy, whom he brings along as a sort of peace offering to Roslin. Billy himself doesn't think Roslin will be happy to see him, but Adama, showing that he is not completely within political acumen, assures him otherwise with a disclosure that the president once told him that she thought Billy reminded her of the late President Adar. Overwhelmed by the honor, Billy replies, "I don't know what to say." To which Adama hilariously cracks, "Don't let it go to your head - Adar was a moron."
One cannot help but derive from that comment that he thinks very similarly of Roslin, but is doing what he has to do to put the fleet back together. I found that at least somewhat reassuring about the depiction of Adama's inner motivations and thoughts, since the weepy, soft & sloppy CO of the past couple of weeks since his recovery from the first Boomer's shooting was, IMHO, seriously eroding the character's credibility.
When Adama decided to smoke the peace pipe with Roslin, you knew that another head-on collision was coming just as was telegraphed the week before that when Boomer and her Colonial foundlings left "Cylon-occupied" Caprica for Kobol, where Apollo awaited. And while Adama reacted to Boomer #2 similarly to how his son did, the former differed quite a bit in the details without being any less spell-binding.
The confrontation begins when Roslin's party hears noises heralding the approach of somebody or something. Naturally they assume it's the Cylons, and everybody who is armed draws their weapons and aims for the same spot. Apollo, as it happens, is closest to that spot, and when he sticks his head around a tree trunk, he finds his dad, also armed, staring back at him with his usual stoic-but-intense expression.
I didn't mind the tearful-in-a-rugged-manly-sort-of-way embrace that followed, as it was in character and made sense in the story line. Apollo's defection, if you'll recall, came while Adama was still in a coma, so as far as the CAG knew, the Commander could have taken a turn for the worse and he'd have never known it; and Adama woke up to discover his son's defection as a consequence of his own prior actions in overthrowing President Roslin in the first place. I'm sure it was a vast relief for each of them to see the other and the acceptance in the eyes looking back at them.
But Adama's reaction to Boomer #2...ho, boy, that was, depending upon how you look at it, either indescribable period or merely in anything short of a torrent of words. I'll do my best to keep it at least somewhat concise.
Unlike his son, who snapped immediately, Adama gets this look on his face that is equal parts fear, hauntedness, and intense anger. Really, his expression was the answer to the question, "How would Ed Olmos look if he saw a ghost?" Because that's what Adama is thinking. You can almost hear him think it. He saw this "woman" on a slab in the Galactica morgue not a day or two earlier. At room temperature. Pushing up daisies. Tits-up. Colder than a flounder. Deceased. Dead for a ducat dead. Now another one just like her is standing there looking back at him. Not the same one that blew two holes in him, but her identical twin. And probably, he's also clearly thinking, in more ways than just the physical.
He doesn't say a word, and nobody else does either. Slowly he approaches Boomer, tilting his head almost quizically, his expression never changing. The scene draws out to surreal lengths.
Then, just as suddenly, Adama snaps. But, interestingly, he doesn't blow her Cylon head off; instead, he grabs Boomer around the throat and chokeslams her to the ground. Only he doesn't let go, like the Undertaker or Kane always do. He lands right on top of her, his face pressed against hers, and with a quiet intensity that was more gripping than any amount of high-decibel scenery-chewing could ever have been, gutterally intones, "I want you to die."
The shock of Adama's sudden physical attack only lasts a few seconds, and the others move to pull the Commander off of Boomer. The only thing that allows them to succeed, and Boomer #2 to survive, is that his rage and exertions apparently trigger stabbing pains in his chest (presumably in the place or places where he was recently cut open). And then Boomer #2 says something that made the hair on my neck stand on end: "And you ask why?"
Harken back to the morgue scene I referred to earlier. There Adama, before breaking down in embarrassing sobs, asks the corpse of Boomer #1, "Why?" As in, "Why did you try to kill me?" Also, probably, "Why did you have to be a Cylon?" And, "Why is this all happening to us, and to me?" Call it a Nancy Kerrigan moment only with a bit more justification.
The answer, of course, is: "Because we (the Cylons) have a plan." It would have been a hoot if Boomer had actually said this, even if it would have completely pissed away the tautness and riveting tension of the scene.
The chilling part was that the first Boomer was already dead when Adama said this, and Roslin's part of the fleet had already flown the coop, so nobody in her Kobol landing party could possibly have overheard him. So how did Boomer #2 know about it?
This confrontation inevitably intertwined with Meier's scheming on Tom Zarek's behalf, which was heavily telegraphed on the episode's promos. Since it was pretty obvious that Adama wasn't going to get shot again, and it would have served no logical purpose to maim or kill off Apollo, or President Roslin for that matter, the question, in my mind, became how the assassination attempt was going to be thwarted. And I figured that meant who was going to shoot Boomer #2.
Oh, dopey me.
Sure, Grace Park is still in the credits and there's no indication that she's leaving the BG cast any time soon. And there's a bottomless supply of Boomers out there, at least in theory, although they may have all been placed on the basestar that Boomer #1 nuked for all we know. That gives the writers a great deal of flexibility in what they can do with the Boomer character that would ordinarily be impossible on an action-adventure TV series. Almost like a different version of Brannon Braga's infamous "reset button."
However, blowing away Boomer #2 would have squandered a great deal of character development over the past season-plus, as well as rendering pointless all the "meanwhile, back on Cylon-occupied Caprica" meanderings through which we had to sit baffledly. Even the gripping conundrum this choice would have forced upon Helo - kill the "woman" he loves and their "child" along with "her" or let "her" kill his Commanding Officer and his species' patriarch - wouldn't have been worth what the bigger storyarc would have lost as a result.
But it sure looked that way at first.
I've got to hand it to Meier. Even though his character was only featured in the past two or three weeks, Ron Moore & Co. successfully infused him with a depth that most regulars on Voyager and Enterprise never received from B&B in their combined eleven seasons.
With the reunion of and detente between Adama and Roslin, Zarek is resigned to his original plan: challenge Roslin in the next election. That, however, isn't good enough for Meier. He has always seen the recent turn of events as not a golden opportunity but the golden opportunity to usher in the Zarek era and boldly lead (or drag) humanity into his vision of utopia. And when he sees Zarek chickening out on the plan to mow down Apollo and maybe Roslin, blame it on the Cylons and seize power, he decides to take matters into his own hands.
I appreciated that the writers didn't take the simplistic path of turning Meier against Zarek, even for a polemical debate. Meier was an insurrectionist, yes, but not an anarchist or a mercenary; he believed in Tom Zarek and wanted to "see [him] get his due" even if it meant going behind his back to try and arrange it.
What a polemical scene might have brought out is something that was left merely implied: that Zarek, perhaps without realizing it, has gained a stake in the status quo. As a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, and the inevitable challenger to Roslin in the next election (assuming she lives that long - which she obviously will, no doubt by supernatural means of some sort...), Zarek has become part of the very establishment he has long criticized. When the fleet was fragmented and Galactica wasn't present, the notion of a coup was plausible, which is to say there was little downside for Zarek in PR terms. With the Adama-Roslin breach sealed, the risk to Zarek's ambitions, which can still be realized legitimately, became prohibitive. So he backed off.
Meier, of course, didn't. And his attempted arrangement was little short of brilliant, though that "little short" proved to be a fatal miscalculation.
Capitalizing on Adama's smackdown of Boomer #2, Meier approaches her from a sublimely shrewd angle by suggesting that there's no way that the humans will ever let her, much less her "baby" live. At best "mother" and "child" will be zoo specimens and lab rats. And in addition to Adama's attack, he informs her of how Boomer #1 was gunned down in cold "blood" and the gunwoman (Callie) was only given thirty days in the brig for "unauthorized use of a weapon." The psychology is simple but powerful: encourage Boomer's (assumed) instinct for self-preservation and channel it toward Meier's (and, in his mind, Zarek's) desired end - the permanent removal of Adama and Roslin.
OTOH, the plan did have at least one flaw - namely, all the witnesses to the crime, who certainly wouldn't let Meier live, since he was a direct participant. And if he and Boomer couldn't mow down everybody else, who were also all armed, it would be highly unlikely that Zarek could survive unscathed politically (assuming he survived physically), since Meier's connection to him was hardly a secret.
At any rate, the writers do manage to maintain a palpable level of suspense with a scene in which Boomer confides the doubts and fears Meier cultivated to Helo and tells him that she's going to have to "do what she has to do." Helo understandably blinks and says, "Whoa, wait a minute Sharon, what are you saying?" She then completely ducks his question by asking him if he loves her; he says yes. Then she asks him if he trusts her; he says yes, if with a bit less conviction. And when he starts to repeat his question, she stops him with a kiss and departs, leaving him with an expression of bewildered foreboding on his face.
Since this review is going on forever anyway (but is really in its home stretch, I promise), I should make brief mention of Chief Tyrol's encounter with Boomer #2, which is surreal in its own way. The Chief doesn't quite know what to say, and you can hardly blame him. This is the woman - well, not the same one, but you know - with whom he was passionately in love not so long ago, then estranged from, then found out she was a "toaster," and then died in his arms. And now here she is again, or at least her twin. And while it's not the same Boomer he knew, this one has all of the other's memories, as she earlier relates to Helo. She's never set foot on the Galactica but still remembers everything her counterpart ever did there - including, presumably, her death, even though she almost but doesn't quite deny it. And she knows all about Tyrol even though she's never met him. Needless to say, it completely creeps him out, even as he remains emotionally conflicted. Indeed, if there's a more lasting victim of the Boomer model's various and sundry actions than the Chief, I don't know who it is.
What added to the scene modestly but crucially was Helo's presence in the background. And again, the look on his face, like Adama's earlier, conveyed so much without words. You could almost see his empathy for Tyrol, the knowledge that he's climbed into the exact same boat the Chief fell out of, and perhaps wondering how, and how long it will be until, he falls out of it in turn.
In that sense, at least, Helo appears to be "lucky in love." When the moment of truth arrives for Meier and Boomer, they both draw their weapons, but before Meier can fire, his accomplice turns and shoots him through the heart instead. She then turns back to Adama, hands him her weapon (I don't know whether to call them "lasers" or "guns," so you'll have to tolerate the inexact redundancy) and announces that she isn't the other Boomer, operating under secret programming and hidden protocols of which she was not even dimly aware, but firmly knows what she is - a Cylon - and has consciously chosen to side with the humans.
Realistically, this begs the question. Boomer #2 may be fully aware of her Cylonness, but that doesn't logically indicate that she doesn't have her own hidden programming of which she isn't aware. Obviously if there is such a buried subroutine, this one isn't to shoot the "old man." But there's no way of telling what it is, or when it might activate. Hence the hindsighted irony of Meier's machinations: he failed to turn Boomer heel, but his warnings will almost certainly be realized. And though she's well aware of it, she's helping them anyway. For now, at least.
See what racking up another Boomer would have made us miss?
I would have boosted "Home"'s rating half a star but for the episode's climax, which was really, really weak.
Yes, the humans find the tomb of Athena. Yes, Starbuck makes a fool of herself by trying to open the stone door with the arrow of Apollo (at least she didn't break the damn thing). Leaving the others outside, Roslin, Adama, Apollo, and Starbuck enter the tomb to find not so much a tomb as a circular array of ruined statues. Twelve of them, to be precise, symbolizing the original twelve colonies. Why was the thirteenth - Earth - not also represented? Dunno yet. But when Adama finds the statue representing Saggitarius (the archer), he looks laconically over at Starbuck and quips, "I think this one's missing an arrow." Kara obliges with a great deal more reverence than I would ever have considered possible.
Suddenly the tomb door rumbles shut, the screen goes dark, and then the quartet finds themselves in a grassy field under a starry night sky, surrounded by twelve monoliths. On each monolith is imprinted a zodiacal constellation, with the real constellation projected above it. How this points the way to Earth is a really good question at this point, and one that the other three aren't bashful in asking, when Starbuck has an epiphany: they're standing on Earth. Or some sort of simulation of it. Or perhaps they had a collective vision of it. The ending doesn't even try to suggest an explanation, which is just as well since it still didn't answer the question of what direction Earth is in with respect to Kobol, where they most definitely still are, at least bodily.
Finally Apollo recognizes a known astronomical object in one of the constellations - the Lagoon Nebula, which is real and, appropriately enough, can be found in the constellation Saggitarius. Also interestingly, Apollo refers to it by our own reference, and Adama by one of its Earth stellar catalog designations, "M8". Not a very likely scenario, but helpful, I suppose, in giving viewers some sort of reference point. Won't be of much help to our heroes, though, since while they know where the Lagoon Nebula is - Adama nebulously observes that it's "a long way from here" - and we know where the Lagoon Nebula is - some 5,200 light-years away - neither they nor we have the slightest clue about where Kobol and Earth are in relation to each other. The best we have is that since none of the four recognize the zodiacal constellations, it can safely be assumed that the two solar systems aren't just down the stellar block from each other. Beyond that we, and they, are as much in the dark as before.
Moreover, there is a huge logic flaw in this scenario: If the thirteenth tribe took off on its own in a completely different direction from the other twelve, how did they communicate this astronomical information back to Kobol and/or the Colonies? Did the thirteenth tribe depart centuries before their cousins and then send word, or a messenger, back? And if so, what significance could that have possibly had on the migration of the remaining dozen to the system they eventually found and colonized beyond giving them tribal names?
I hope the eventual fleshing out of this mytharc proves to be more intriguing than my speculations about it. Near as I can tell the only way to make it make sense also renders the resulting framework hopelessly arcane.
More to the point of "Home" and the storyarc it closes, the failure to discover "the path to Earth" (Maybe Earth is on the direct line from Kobol to the Lagoon Nebula since the latter is in the "archer" constellation? The dialogue never says...) makes the previous eight episodes (counting two-parters) utterly pointless. The whole storytelling engine going back to "Kobol's Last Gleaming" - the "genesis" if you will - was Roslin becoming convinced that she was a latter-day Moses leading her people to the "Promised Land" of Earth and needing the "arrow of Apollo" to "point the way to Earth." Every on-screen event since then has been in service to that core premise. And now, at the end, the best the writers can do is point the human diaspora to a nebula five thousand light-years away from their intended destination? Looks to me like Adama was right all along - it was just "religious crap."
But then I guess that fit hand-in-glove with the all-too easy reconciliation between him and Roslin, as well as papering over the cataclysmic recent events that should have made so neat, tidy, and painless a "they lived happily ever after" status quo-restoration impossible. I guess that means that when Ron Moore employs the Reset Button, he doesn't mess around.
Speaking of messing around, we saw Number Six (1) stark naked (damned chair....), (2) in an ensemble so casual I could have sworn it was somebody else, (3) mess with Baltar's mind anew by using reverse psychology, (4) goad him into getting a brainscan, which confirmed that there is no computer chip in his mind to which she is sending clandestine signals, (5) and, er, "reveal" that the "baby" she's been talking cryptically about is the one in Boomer #2's oven. Oh, yes, and she is the furtive, definitely non-crazy veep's guardian angel.
You know what? As long as she keeps getting naked, she can be Hillary Clinton for all I care.
Next: a week off, and then Lucy Lawless plays the Colonial Katie Couric
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