Rating: **1/2
Written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle
Directed by Michael Nankin
Maybe this is just my natural pedantia bleeding through again, but if this episode is entitled “Flight of the Phoenix,” would somebody tell me what the “Phoenix” is? There were only three categories of flying things that I saw in this particular hour: Vipers, Cylon raiders, and Chief Tyrol’s new ship. And he called it the Blackbird.
Could it be a metaphorical reference? Like to the morale of the Galactica crew, which is in the crapper at the beginning and then ends up making a rousing comeback at the end?
And make no mistake, when I say their morale was in the crapper, I’m being an optimist. People are irritable, snapping at each other, quick-tempered. When a leftover Cylon virus starts manifesting itself throughout the battlestar’s systems, including blowing out Lieutenant Gaida’s CIC control board, Colonel Tigh barks at him to “fix it.” Gaida, realizing as Tigh obviously does not all that will be involved in “fixing it” and how long it will take, tells the Colonel that it will take weeks to get to the bottom of the problem, much less effect reliable repairs. Tigh snaps that it has to be repaired immediately. Gaida, ordinarily mild-mannered to a fault, erupts that “IT CAN’T FRAKKING BE DONE!” or words to that effect.
Okay, Tigh is always this way, which is why his surname only lacks a “t” at the end to perfectly peg him. But nobody else is. At least not until this episode.
To me this morale problem seemed of two different bents. On the one hand it felt forced. As if this story skipped about four or five episodes ahead in the storyline queue. After all, the fleet had just gone through the whole Kobol/military coup/civil war/martial law/Adama shot/found the way to Earth/didn’t find the way to Earth/reunion trauma. “Home” was only two weeks ago, and then everybody was rejoicing and “reunited, and it felt so good.” Now it’s only a fortnight later and they’re all ready to hang themselves and save the Cylons the trouble?
I suppose you could say that the Kobol saga was so riveting that people in the fleet gave little or no thought to the bigger picture, which is an apt illustration of the old line about things never being so bad that they can’t get worse. And when conditions rise again to the level of “bad,” that’s when you realize the difference between things getting better and life being good again, or even worth living. But it just seems like it would have taken longer for most people, to say nothing of the Galactica crew, to realize that.
On the other hand, perhaps this question has to be looked at in the larger picture of the series itself. It has been months now since the destruction of the Colonies. Tom Zarek observed way back in “Colonial Day” that people were still clinging to their old jobs and old lifestyles, about an economy with no money, lawyers with no clients, businessmen with no businesses. As though this emergency situation was just going to be only “temporarily indefinite,” rather than being, in fact, permanent. Even the hope of finding Earth is little more than a question mark, since they have no idea if the civilization they find – assuming there is one – will be technologically advanced enough to resist or defeat the Cylons.
In the meantime, Adama pretty much nails it: “months on the run with little to show for it but casualties and deteriorating conditions.” When no distracting sideshows are going on, the reality of life settles in. And if that life sucks, morale is going to deteriorate right along with it.
That segues to the other aspect of this angle that didn’t quite sit well with me – it seems, well, old. We’ve already had several eps – “33”,” “Water,” and “The Hand of God” come to mind – that touched on being on the run, under constant threat of attack, taking casualties, and deteriorating conditions. I suppose that the very nature of the series’ premise guarantees that undercurrent will always be present, but it just struck me as overkill to build an entire episode around a concept that is more or less guaranteed never to get short shrift (as, for example, it always did on Voyager).
Of course, matters are even worse for some characters. And as has become a valuable hallmark of the new BG, it is character development and focus that can always be counted upon to bail out a less than scintillating core plot.
Take Chief Tyrol for instance. His confusion and mourning over “his” Boomer is not going away, and the presence aboard ship of her “twin,” and her romantic attachment to Helo, is much of the reason why. As a result, the normally cheerful, easy-going CPO is an emotional wreck and an absolute bear to be around. Figure in that everybody above him, particularly pilots, are riding him and his crew to perform miracles, and it doesn’t take a seer to figure out what’s coming.
In one scene he pronounces Apollo’s Viper as unsalvageable just as Apollo happens to walk up. This isn’t what Apollo wants to hear, and he tells Tyrol that no, that Viper needs to be fixed, up and running because he needs it for the next CAP. Tyrol blows his stack in frustration, and Apollo, to his credit, recognizes the situation and proximate cause of the Chief’s outburst and backs off.
In another, Helo, who is more than a little confused himself, seeks Tyrol out since the Chief is the only other human being who could possibly understand his feelings. Certainly he has been getting ostracized by his fellow pilots, who are creeped out at his romantic liaison with a Cylon to which he remains committed.
This proves to be a really bad idea, as in his volatile emotional state Tyrol looks upon Helo as more of a rival than a confidante, as though despite both Sharons being Cylons he somehow “stole” Boomer from him. It isn’t true, or even remotely rational, but that’s how messed up Tyrol’s mind is.
Still, the Chief hasn’t quite lost all his marbles. He doesn’t physically attack Helo, his superior officer, directly; rather, he takes the time to provoke him first by getting in Helo’s face and telling him that, “I’m just glad that freak in its belly isn’t mine.”
The provocation works. Helo shoves Tyrol away, and that’s all the Chief needs. He launches himself at the lieutenant, who even then isn’t nearly as provoked as Tyrol wanted and tries to keep the CPO at arm’s length until he tires himself out. But Tyrol proves to be more determined than that, and finally gets Helo pinned to the floor and is about to cave in his skull with a wrench when, for whatever reason – a fraying cord of sanity holding instead of letting go – he stops.
It’s after that near disaster (which will come into major play a week from now) that the Chief starts building his Blackbird.
Initially he invites his deck crew to help him, but they all blow him off. That just gets his back up and he decides he’ll do it all himself. Apollo craps on his project as well, and of course Colonel Tigh thinks it’s a waste of time and resources and should have a stop put to it at once. But Adama disagrees. The Commander, who ironically should be feeling the low morale pressure more than anybody, is the only one who can see that Tyrol’s pet project is not only good for his own peace of mind, but can become a symbol for the entire crew if he is allowed to finish it and succeeds.
The episode’s jeopardy premise is pretty much a rehash of “Valley of Darkness” and just about any installment of classic BG. As alluded to above, a what-we-would-call “Trojan Horse” virus – and what Dr. Baltar calls a Cylon “logic bomb” – a leftover of the weeks-ago cyberassault, suddenly activates and starts taking control of one ship’s system after another. Adama and Tigh fear, and Gaida and Baltar eventually confirm, that it will cripple the battlestar and leave it wide open to a massive Cylon attack.
Something about this just did not make sense to me. The only thing the “logic bomb” does that would truly be useful to such an assault is send out a powerful homing signal, which presumably was designed to reveal the fleet’s coordinates to Cylon forces. Apart from that its other effects would seem to be unnecessary. Given the resources the Cylons can throw at the Galactica, why would they need to cripple the human warship from within? To minimize losses? Hell, they let the first Sharon avatar blow up an entire basestar full of her “sisters” back in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming” If that was part of their “plan,” why would a few extra splashed raiders matter?
For that matter, that “Cylons have a plan” gimmick is also a suspense drainer. You have to assume that the “toasters” can take the humans any time they want but aren’t in order to…well, whatever their plan is – study them, use them as an unwitting guide to find Earth and destroy it as well – and as such aren’t really going to dust them all yet.
And, sure enough, they don’t. Oh, of course, we know that will never happen apart from a time paradox angle like Voyager’s “Deadlock.” How it was avoided here is far more interesting as it pertains to that plan than it is to how the humans manage to stumble upon it.
Adama figures, not unreasonably, that Boomer #2 is their only hope of stopping this “logic bomb.” Helo is sent to the brig with Gaida’s printout of the virus and all the script from the infected systems. Sharon takes one glance at it and exclaims, “I have to talk to Commander Adama!” When Helo asks why, she says exactly, almost word for word, what Baltar and Gaida said on the bridge – that the virus was taking over the ship’s systems and would cripple the battlestar in prelude to a massive Cylon attack. So Adama comes to the brig and Sharon tells him what Baltar and Gaida said on the bridge – that the virus was taking over the ship’s systems and would cripple the battlestar in prelude to a massive Cylon attack. So Boomer is brought to the bridge just as events start to unfold as Baltar and Gaida said on the bridge –the virus takes over the ship’s systems and cripples the battlestar in prelude to a massive Cylon attack, which jumps into their space right on schedule and….
….just sits there. Adama launchs all Vipers – all being, what, a couple dozen of them? – and they fly out, stop, and sit there slack-jawed staring at a Cylon force at least ten times as large. What on, well, Earth, were they waiting for? Apparently, for the “logic bomb” to finish its work – which would make a massive Cylon attack completely unnecessary. Or the massive Cylon attack made the logic bomb unnecessary. Unless the plan called for seeing if Boomer #2 would save the humans’ day.
Which, of course, she does. Borrowing Dualla’s pocketknife, Sharon slices open her hand and plugs herself into Galactica’s compter system, downloads the “logic bomb” into herself, allowing Gaida to wipe the harddrives and reload from the most recent backup, and transmits the virus out into the attacking Cylon ships, crippling them instead. The Viper pilots proceed to have themselves a “turkey shoot,” and all live happily ever after. Or until morale goes down the pooper again, which at this rate can probably be measured in hours.
Even during this climax the characterizations from Adama and especially Tigh were incoherent. The XO kept accusing Boomer of “setting them up,” as though the “logic bomb” hadn’t already crippled them – what the devil else did Tigh think she could be doing that would make their situation worse than it was already? And Adama, not to be outdone in the idiocy department, drew his sidearm and pointed it straight at her head, as if to coerce her into doing…what? Save the ship? She already agreed to that. That was the only chance they had.
That’s another thing that mystified me. Such a to-do was made of Adama’s agonizing decision of whether to put the fate of the fleet in Sharon’s hands. He even has a heartfelt scene with President Roslin where he seeks her advice on what he should do. But what other choice was there? Baltar and Gaida had already said that there was nothing they could do to counteract the virus short of wiping and restoring, and that would be irrelevant to the fleet’s bleak prospects of surviving an all-out Cylon attack. Boomer #2 offered at least the possibility that she could pull something out of her “toaster bag ‘o tricks” to somehow turn things around. Even if Adama didn’t trust her – and he didn’t – a one in a million chance is better than none at all.
As implausibly low as crew morale was at the start of the hour, at the end it is eyeroll-inducingly high. Has their basic situation changed? Aren’t they still “on the run with little to show for it but mounting casualties and deteriorating conditions”? Maybe they didn’t lose anybody this time, but unless the Sharon avatar saved a copy of that “logic bomb” for future use, the ragtag fugitive fleet is still as vulnerable as it ever was. A much more even keel is definitely needed for these people, and it’s up to Commander Adama to impose it before they all crack up completely.
The final scene unveiling Chief Tyrol’s Blackbird stealth fighter is a nice cap to the only part of the story that really worked. And Helo suggesting the carbon composite “skin” and Tyrol naming the ship “Laura” in honor of Roslin – who found out from Doc Cottle that she’s down to a month to live at the most – were nice touches. I’m sure the Blackbird will come in handy as the series rolls along.
I just hope that, from a creative standpoint, it isn’t running out of steam only two seasons into its run.
Next: New Galactica, new Pegasus – and this isn’t your father’s Pegasus – or should I say your mother’s?
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