Battlestar Galactica: Epiphanies (S2/E12)

by JASmius



Rating: **1/2

Written by: Joel Anderson Thompson
Directed By: Ron Hardy


Hey, do you realize that aside from any surviving Cylon humanoids secreted in the fleet, there is no more Cylon threat to the human diaspora? And do you realize what that means for the direction that plot lines are likely to take for the foreseeable future? It's not a pretty dramatic or storytelling sight if you ask me.

"Epiphanies" provided a foretaste of what the post-Cylon era is likely to offer: a hash of questionable actions lacking any plausible or compelling motivation.

The ep centers around President Roslin, whose breast cancer has finally brought her to death's door. She drifts in and out of delirium, during the "in" part of which she relives in flashbacks an incident where she went behind President Adar's back to settle a potential teachers' strike by essentially caving to the Colonial equivalent of the National Education Association. Adar is none too thrilled at this back-stabbing and punishes then-Secretary of Education Roslin on a level that asking for her resignation never could have: he kicks her out of his bed. Yes, Laura Roslin really was sleeping her way to the top. And the military thinks she's "just a schoolteacher." If they only knew.

What the above has to do with anything that takes place in the real world is anybody's guess. Well, okay, it supposedly influences how Roslin deals with the Cylon sympathizers once she’s cured by their starchild, although it doesn’t appear that she learned much from the earlier experience, other than that “presidents don’t have to explain themselves.” Which shows that she either hasn’t been president for very long, or she was channeling Barack Obama.

Another set of flashbacks proves a lot more relevant - glimpses Roslin got of Gaius Baltar playing tonsil-hockey with Caprica Six. I'd call them subconscious impulses only when she has them she's unconscious, and besides, she doesn't seem to recognize #6 as the Cylon agent that used Baltar to totally compromise Colonial defenses. All her conscious self seems to glean is that Baltar is a general and all-around scumbag, which she's pretty much always known. But then she used him as well to check-mate Tom Zarick back in "Colonial Day," so her hands aren't exactly clean of skull-duggery either.

When Roslin is awake she moans, groans, makes gurgling noises, and orders that the hybrid spawn of Helo and Boomer v. 2.0 be aborted.

Why, it's difficult to say. Oh, the dialogue does try to provide a reason - "peculiar properties" discovered by Doc Cottle in a fetal blood sample. I don't know if that means there was more than one, but only one was explicitly disclosed. And no gold stars for guessing that that "property" was the MacGuffin that would ultimately save President Roslin's life, thus turning her into a day-glo hypocrite of, dare I say, Baltarian proportions.

Near as I can tell the plot-related purpose of the aborted abortion angle was to generate artificial tension and conflict. Boomer v. 2.0 is understandably resistant, and Helo comes this close to mutinying over it. But it's Baltar, bulldozed by Imaginary Six, that manages to find the compromise that keeps the hybrid fetus - and the president - alive.

But for whose sake? Imaginary Six, as the designated Voice Of The Cylons, obviously believes there are other "peculiar properties" of a more sinister nature. Probably that's true, since the Cylon fleet that was shadowing Galactica is no more, so any long-term Cylon-related jeopardy premise has to center around the - what, "Cyman," "hulon"? But Baltar, as we all know, does nothing that isn't deeply rooted in the crassest self-interest. And in successfully using the hybrid to save Roslin, in his mind he's pulled off the perfect coup - giving all sides what they want and leaving all sides in indebted gratitude to him.

Imagine his surprise when he reads the letter Roslin left for him before her miraculously engineered recovery. A diplomatically phrased treatise that amounted to, "I know you're a scumbag, but you're the president now, so shape up, say your prayers, eat your vegetables, put it back in your pants and keep it there, and fly right."

Of course, Roslin wrote these words before Baltar saved her life. One would think that a man of his stupendous vanity would assume that this little gift would inspire her to a 180-degree change of heart, but that doesn't appear to even occur to the eerily Clintonian veep. Wounded ego wins out over steroidal conceit, prompting him to close the philosophical circle, only this time with his eyes wide open.

That's where the Cylon sympathizers come in.

Yes, Cylon sympathizers. As though lifted from our very own headlines, a cadre of toaster-symps suddenly blasts "above the radar" and demands that the Roslin administration sue for peace with the "man-made" mechanical menace that wiped out human civilization and came within the population of my hometown of committing complete genocide. If it wasn't for Cindy Sheehan, I'd have called Joel Anderson Thompson a fantasist with this stuff. I guess art really does imitate life.

Thus it is completely without surprise that this "peace" movement commits acts of terrorist violence against their own, topped by the attempted destruction of the fleet's only tylium refining ship, without which the battlestars and their civilian charges will quickly run out of fuel and be unable to produce any more.

There's a scene depicting a "meeting" between the Cy-symps' leader, Royan Jahee, and Admiral Adama that is very cathartic. To wit, Adama doesn't negotiate or even listen, but demands that Jahee disclose the names and locations of his seditionists, and when Jahee isn't forthcoming Adama grabs him around the throat and throttles him. On the one hand you think - or at least I did - that such a traitor isn't getting half of what he deserves. But on the other, as an interrogation technique strangulation leaves a lot to be desired.

Of course, the biggest traitor of all isn't in the Galactica's, brig, but sits a heartbeat away from the Big Chair on Colonial One. Oh, to be sure, Gaius Baltar was a sex-addicted patsy in the annihilation of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol. He's been trying to keep faux pas that hidden ever since for fear of what would happen to him if the truth ever got out (the trial run of which he's already harrowingly experienced). At one point he even tells Gina, Six's corporeal counterpart, that he will not be the instrument of mankind's final destruction.

Did I mention that Gina - whom Baltar liberated from the Pegasus brig last week - effortlessly infiltrated the toaster-symps' organization and has already virtually taken it over? And do I even have to explicitly state that, now back in her element, Gina is pretty much a carbon-copy of what Imaginary Six has been, minus the sexual manipulation?

Perhaps that omission is what creeped Baltar out so much. It was, as you'll recall, Gina's initial vulnerability that made her so appealing to him in the first place. Here was an actually bodily present version of Six, no figment of his fevered, guilt-ridden imagination, with whom he could have a romantic relationship on an even level. Romantic parity, as it were, absent the constant game-playing and occasional bullying that he's endured for the past six months.

Yet after rejecting the nookie the urge for which Gaius could suddenly no longer resist, Gina plies him with the same Sixian rap - to use his lofty status as Kobolian vice president to champion, if subtly for now, the Cylon agenda in the highest circles of humanity's power structure.

Unleavened by the pleasures of the flesh, treason becomes a lot less appealing, apparently. Until Gaius learns, to his naïve horror, what President Roslin really thinks of him.

Suddenly all steely-eyed resolve, Baltar takes bold, decisive action - by giving Gina the nuclear warhead he scammed from Adama last season. Yes, because his boss dissed him, the vice president of the Twelve Colonies of Kobol has provided his people's blood enemies with the means to destroy them - and him.

That's a helluva big seed to plant for later in this season or subsequent seasons. In the mean time, it's gag-inducingly insane, even for as big an egomaniac as Baltar. Here's hoping that we see his shifty, furtive nature reassert itself as he begins to realize the implications of this appalling fit of pique, and how they've thrown him from the frying pan he was in straight into the fire he's richly earned.

For now, I'm not buying it.


Next: The fleet has a black market - and masterminded by a black man, to boot. Is there no end to this wave of jaw-dropping revelations?