Rating: **1/2
Written by: Anne Cofell Saunders
Directed By: Michael Rymer
In the original Battlestar Galactica, when her sister ship Pegasus shows up, it is at a thoroughly dramatic moment. Galactica is under a climactic Cylon assault, swarmed from all sides, hanging dead and burning in space, all of it personally overseen by Count Baltar. I can remember John Colicos' gleeful taunts as if they were yesterday: "Goodbye, Galactica….You're finished, Adama!" Then one of the centurions tries to interrupt to tell him something and is irritably rebuked. But the centurion won't be silenced: "Sir, what about the other battlestar?" Baltar looks at the "toaster" askance and starts to say, "What 'other battlestar'?" when he notices….another battlestar - on a collision course with Baltar's raider. "Move, get us out of here, you fool!" Baltar cries, "It's coming right for us!"
Lloyd Bridge's Commander Cain knew how to make an entrance. And that's not the only point of departure between Classic BG and Ron Moore's version. But we'll get to that soon enough.
In "Pegasus," the "last battlestar" and her "ragtag, fugitive fleet" are sailing quietly along when the CAP detects the approach of a huge vessel. Naturally, and logically, Adama thinks it's a Cylon basestar and goes to red alert. After a few minutes of largely pointless but inevitable suspense, Gaida announces that he's detecting a Colonial transponder signal from the sensor contact. Dumbstruck, Apollo takes his squadron to reconnoiter and finds the real, honest-to-goodness, top-of-the-line battlestar Pegasus in all her glory.
Everybody on the Galactica rejoices wildly and unabashedly, as you might imagine. There are other survivors after all. After "months on the run with little to show for it but casualties and deteriorating conditions," they finally get to add to that census number in President Roslin's office. And not just that, but also a more than doubling of their military resources as well. Most of all is the precious knowledge after all the disaster and loss and heartache that they're not alone anymore.
That, as it turns out, is the apex of Galactican morale. For the bare fact of finding another battlestar (or, rather, it finding them) cannot resist the details that inevitably arise from getting acquainted. And that brings some unpleasant surprises.
The new and improved Commander Cain is a two-fold departure. In the original Cain was subordinate to Adama; here Admiral Cain is Adama's superior officer to whom he graciously, and not without some initial relief, relinquishes military command of the fleet. The other departure? This Cain is a woman (Michelle Forbes), which really doesn't matter in the characterization or story line, though it was more by her voice than her appearance or name that I finally figured out that this was Ro Laren from Star Trek: The Next Generation minus the Bajoran makeup and plus much longer hair and, if I'm any judge, about twenty or thirty extra pounds. Methinks Ms. Forbes has had a bun or two in the oven since she defected to the Maquis.
One thing Forbes' Cain does have in common with Bridges' is an aggressive posture against the Cylons. Her attitude is as Adama's was back in the pilot - she's having her own private little war with the "toasters," only in her case she didn't have a bunch of civilians to nursemaid or civilian authority to answer to. But she is entirely without the original Cain's bravado. Maybe it's just the respective actors in question, but Bridges really made you believe that he wanted to take out that Cylon base on Gamoray, and that if Adama joined him in the assault, they could whip the entire Cylon Empire. Forbes' version….I dunno. She just seems too subdued throughout the ep. Even as the viewer learns more and more about the really bad things happening on the Pegasus, and the not-unexpected changes that accompany a change of command start being made, I just never really bought that Helena Cain was really the driving force behind them. Michelle Forbes did not, in other words, sell her character's underlying malevolence, at least to me. It wouldn't have required Shatnerian scenery-chewing; just a barely discernable tightness, a repressed but detectable undercurrent of menace; a "less is more" aura of evil, or the feeling of someone gone horribly wrong. A commander otherwise perfectly normal who, thrown into unimaginable circumstances of apocalypse and unchallenged dominance, succumbs to all-too-human fallibilities and morphs into Captain Bligh of the stars, and yet is able to rationalize it to herself as necessary given the extreme circumstances.
That's what I needed to see; that isn't what we got.
Maybe the idea was that the knowledge that something on the Pegasus wasn't quite right would seep into the Galacticans' collective consciousness from Cain's subordinates. That certainly seemed the case with Colonel Tigh's XO counterpart, Jack Fisk. They sit down together over what turns out to be their favorite mutual past-time - getting hammered - and Fisk starts letting slip anecdotes of some of the extreme actions Admiral Cain has taken, up to an including summary executions of "insubordinate" officers on the bridge in front of the whole crew. Like she was setting an example for anybody else who thought to question her about anything.
Then Fisk started laughing, like he'd just been pulling Tigh's leg. Except that Tigh didn't look like he thought Fisk was kidding. And Fisk didn't look like he was kidding, either. He looked haunted. It was like he had to confide in somebody, hadn't had any confidantes until now, but still wanted plausible deniability just in case.
Down in the Pegasus brig, as Vice President Baltar eventually discovers, is Cain's deepest, darkest secret: her own "Cylon" prisoner, a doppelganger of Number Six named Gina. But while Gina may have once looked like Number Six, she doesn't any more. She looks like Farrah Fawcett's character in The Burning Bed. Every torture and abuse that can be inflicted upon a woman without being fatal looks like it's been inflicted on her. We're never actually given specifics, but not a whole lot of imagination is required to see what's been done to her, physically and psychologically.
Or maybe that's just an artifact of her programming. That's doubtless what Lieutenant Thorne, Cain's "interrogator," would doubtless say.
Seeing a duplicate of his own virtual squeeze has a salutary and sobering effect on Baltar. And perhaps it's not all that difficult to see why. For as long as he's known Number Six, she's been strong, dominant, and in control. She's cajoled him, seduced him, manipulated him, and bullied him. She's even laughed at him. But he has never seen her vulnerable. Seeing the battered lump that is Gina turns his "interrogation" into a crystalizing event for his perpetually confused and shifting feelings. For the first time, he realizes that he genuinely loves Number Six, and resolves to do everything possible to rescue her "sister" from her fate.
In mirror contrast, Lieutenant Thorne pays Galactica's resident Cylon prisoner, Boomer v. 2.0, a visit and we get a glimpse of what he's been doing to Gina. And given what that glimpse telegraphed - anal rape for starters, by the looks of it - it's merciful beyond description that Tyrol and Helo did their run-in when they did.
Yes, the two guys who were beating the crap out of each other just a week earlier join forces to come to the aid of the…well, "woman" they….well, Tyrol never loved this Sharon, but…oh, hell, you know what I mean. Thorne also had no difficulty understanding their meaning, until in the scuffle he got thrown headfirst into the bulkhead, fracturing his skull and killing him.
Which brings us full circle back to the unconvincing Admiral Cain and her undersold dictator persona. She wastes no time in convening a court martial (of one), finding both men guilty of murder and sentencing them to immediate death - all before Adama is even informed of what happened. Not that he was really entitled to be informed, though he damn well thought he should, if not for strictly military reasons.
Adama's mindset was frankly curious throughout the hour. As I alluded to above, he seemed to be of two minds about the discovery that he was now outranked. On the one hand, he did seem relieved to give up the burden of overall command, and, being a creature of duty he would have yielded it in any case. But on the other side of his psyche his discomfort at being back in a command structure larger than his one ship - something to which he'd grown both accustomed and comfortable - was also visible. Kind of like your boss going on vacation for a week, your getting to relax a bit - and maybe a little too much - and then having him/her return and having to snap back to attention.
After sharing (Cylon) holocaust stories and comparing notes on the two battlestars' respective battles, Admiral Cain is not diplomatic in her criticism of the ragged laxity of Adama's command. And there's not a whole lot Adama can say in his own defense. From a strictly military standpoint Galactica IS "loose as a goose." That's what happens when you cease seeing your crew as your crew and start looking upon them as your "family."
Heck, Starbuck is a "rampant discipline problem" all by herself (yes, that is deliberate foreshadowing).
What does finally move Adama off the duty schnied is Cain reneging on her initial promise not to interfere with his running of the Galactica. In quick succession she removes Apollo as Galactica CAG and reassigns him, a number of his other pilots, including Starbuck, to the Pegasus, where in a briefing on Cain's planned assault on the Cylon fleet that has been shadowing Galactica (and itself been shadowed by the Pegasus), she cuts off Pegasus CAG Cole "Stinger" Taylor in her trademark blunt fashion and tells him to send her to reconnoiter in the new Blackbird stealth Viper. For her efforts Stinger pulls her from the mission, which only frees her up to grab the Blackbird and carry out the mission anyway at Apollo's urging.
It is in this atmosphere of burgeoning mistrust and hostility that Adama learns of Tyrol's and Helo's imminent executions. And he has what is to me a baffling reaction: he launches all his Vipers to attack the Pegasus. Cain, naturally, reciprocates, and gets on the horn to demand what the hell Adama thinks he's doing. The Commander growls back, "I'm getting back my men."
Maybe it's just my insufferably practical mind, but this never has made sense to me. Attacking Cain's ship wouldn't get back Tyrol and Helo; indeed, Cain's custody of them guaranteed her the upper hand by definition. Moreover, it is unlikely that the obsolete Galactica would get the better of a fight with the larger, newer, more powerful Pegasus. And if it somehow did, that just makes it more likely that Adama's "men" would be killed in the process.
But aside from that, here we once again see Adama's personal loyalty to his people, both collectively and individually, blatantly interfering with his command judgment. His mission is to protect humanity's meager survivors from the Cylons until they can find Earth or some other planet on which to settle. Yet here, as so many times before, he is ready to throw all of that away for the lives of two people and a difference of opinion.
So, as the episode closes with Viper squadrons from the Pegasus and Galactica closing on each other, we are forced to wonder whether, if Admiral Cain is Captain Bligh, Commander Adama isn't a fairly good approximation of Captain Ahab himself.
Next: a six-month pause until the confrontation resumes. Hope the Viper jockeys brought along pee cups.
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