Rating: **1/2
Written by: Anne Cofell Saunders
Teleplay by: Michael Rymer
Directed By: Michael Rymer
One thing I didn’t directly address in my “Pegasus” review that I might as well address here (since that’ll make this review a more-or-less continuation of that one, not unlike the respective episodes themselves) is the conflict of the main plot between Admiral Cain and Commander Adama. Oh, I analyzed various aspects of it and discussed them at length, but at its core their friction feels…well, forced. I had that feeling throughout “Pegasus,” which was reinforced by Michelle Forbes’ underselling of Cain’s ruthless villainy. I just didn’t see why there would be a clash so severe that within a day of their mutual discovery, the last two battlestars (as far as we know…) would be trying to destroy each other. A case, as it were, of the plot demanding a gimmick that no dramatic explanation was adequate to prop up.
Although Forbes did a better job of fleshing out Admiral Cain’s “Captain Bligh” persona this week, the central conflict premise met the end that was almost inevitable. At least the writers didn’t try to fight it.
Put yourself in Starbuck’s cockpit. She’s, in effect, stolen the Blackbird stealth fighter to carry out the planned recon mission of the Cylon fleet on her own unauthorized initiative, gotten not only into the Cylon fleet but inside the mysterious ship that its two basestars are protecting, and gotten stunning photographs that reveal what it is and what purpose it serves. Then she jumps back to the colonial fleet right as the Viper squadrons from the Galactica and Pegasus are closing on each other. She takes one look at this fiasco in the making and says what any of us would say in her position: “What the frak is going on?!?”
The battlestars and their respective pilots, for their part, don’t recognize Kara’s ship (because it’s, you know, a stealth fighter), automatically assume it’s a Cylon, and join forces with the intent of blowing her out of the stars.
Seeing an even bigger fiasco in the making, Kara quickly transmits her intelligence photos to the battlestars, causing both Cain and Adama to, you should pardon the expression, crap their pants. Only now do the two senior officers call off their mutual attacks and agree to an uneasy truce for the time being in favor of taking out this mysterious Cylon vessel, which close-up shots show resembles a flying Cylon clone warehouse.
Said truce is formalized aboard Colonial One after Adama cannily refuses Cain’s order to report to her aboard the Pegasus, where she doubtless would have had him shot. With President Roslin serving as a glorified mediator, Cain agrees to hold off on executing Tyrol and Helo until after the planned attack on the Cylons. But she doesn’t hold back in voicing her blunt opinions, expressing derisive amazement that Roslin and Adama have survived for as long as they have despite failing to take the extreme survival measures she has. She also makes a vehement and, quite honestly, convincing case that she is entirely within her legal rights to put Tyrol and Helo to death. The murder charge seems a bit of a stretch since the two men weren’t trying to kill Lieutenant Thorne or even injure him. His death was a pure accident, rising no higher than manslaughter at best. But the treason charge is harder to dispute, since Helo and Tyrol were defending a Cylon prisoner against a Colonial officer. I don’t know if they have anti-torture regulations in the remaining Colonial fleet, although at this stage of the game I doubt they’d be enforced much if at all anyway, but in lieu of such a restriction the facts pretty much speak for themselves.
After Cain stalks out, Roslin sits wearily down next to Adama, who remained, with one brief exception, silent during the entire scene to that point. And then the president says the last thing in the world I would ever have expected: “Bill, you’re going to have to kill her.” Adama gives her the sort of askance look you’d expect if he’d just seen a daggit dancing through the room in a pink tutu. This is the same woman who counseled running away from the Cylons instead of fighting them. The same woman against whom Adama, not that long ago, launched a military coup d’ tat. Now, out of the clear blue, she urges Adama to not just commit mutiny, but assassination as well.
Or, in other words, what Adama had just been ready to do mere minutes before.
Was anybody else confused at this point? Maybe Adama had had a little time to cool down, and he had won his imprisoned men a reprieve, but how is it that he was asking Roslin, “When did you become so bloody-minded?” Why did he even have to? And doesn’t it figure that she was right on the money again?
If Laura Roslin has one talent above all others, it is the ability to read people and be hardheadedly realistic about what she reads. I guess that’s one of the effects of knowing you have only a matter of days to live. She could tell from Cain’s demeanor and rhetoric that this woman would not respect her civilian authority nor pay heed to Adama’s experience, particularly after the latter attacked Cain’s ship. The admiral had allowed her insipient megalomania to run wild under the rationalizing cover of “the need to survive” at all costs, and if that meant destroying the Galactica and its fleet, she would do it. The president discerned all of this and concluded that Adama had to get Cain first. And he, polishing his halo to the hilt without committing one way or the other, departed himself with the remark about the world “really having gone mad.”
Thus are the two COs put once again on a collision course, only a much more subtle one that, if you can suspend your sense of disbelief, does provide a goodly share of suspense. I just wasn’t able to make that suspension.
Roslin’s suspicions are confirmed when, in another mutual drinking binge, Colonel Tigh learns from Colonel Fisk that the Pegasus actually did have its own civilian fleet once upon a time, but Admiral Cain handled things a bit differently from Roslin and Adama. Instead of shepherding them away from the destroyed Colonies toward a place of refuge elsewhere in the galaxy, Cain stripped her civilian ships of every useable resource, including people with needed skills. Any who refused to cooperate were executed, along with their entire families. The civilian ships were then abandoned, presumably to be slaughtered by the Cylons at their leisure.
This is enough to convince Adama that Roslin is right.
Meanwhile, the spit & polish admiral is gaining confidence in the last two Galacticans you would ever have suspected she would: Starbuck and Baltar.
Whatever else can be said about Helena Cain, she is a commander who appreciates results and does not tolerate failure. Her CAG, Captain “Stinger” Taylor, let Starbuck abscond with the Blackbird and Apollo text-message her right under his nose, and Starbuck pulled off single-handedly what his entire squadron couldn’t have – reconnoiter the mysterious Cylon ship right up her tailpipe. Summoning Starbuck to her office, Cain informs her that she is now her new CAG. The two women also discover a shared burning passion to return to the Colonies and re-conquer them from the Cylons.
This encounter creates more than a few mixed feelings for Kara. Being loyal to Adama, her surrogate father figure, Cain becomes almost the mother she never had. Here is a frakking admiral who actually appreciates her bold initiative-taking and badass attitude – almost as if Cain had been like her on her way up the ranks. It forges in her mind a bond with the admiral almost against her conscious will. Kara knows that Cain is the enemy, but she finds herself developing a grudging loyalty to her despite that. While at the same time she also sees enough of herself in the admiral to be dismayed at what Cain has become.
It makes for a hangover-inducing case of double-mindedness that, of course, is quickly brought to a head.
What Helena Cain is not, it quickly becomes obvious, is any more impervious to Baltar’s BS than anybody on the Galactica. He uses his repore with Number Six clone Gina to coax from her the remaining poop on the Cylon vessel. It is what they call a “resurrection ship.” Given the distance they’ve traveled from the Cylon homeworld (wherever that is) the humanoid models can’t “download” their consciousnesses into new bodies back there. So they constructed the aforementioned “flying clone warehouse” as a portable means of facilitating that function.
The mission becomes crystal clear: destroy the resurrection ship and death for the Cylons becomes real and final. The original twelve models will be reduced to twelve souls. And once one of them is gone, they’re gone for good.
It’s an irresistible goal for both Cain and Adama, and the planning for the assault goes forward at all possible speed. But not without respective secret wrinkles on adjoining but eventually colliding tracks.
After the joint strategy session, Cain returns with her XO to the Pegasus. While en route she arrives at a decision and issues instructions to Colonel Fisk: he and a squad of marines will be sent to the Galactica bridge under some plausible premise. After the attack on the Cylon fleet has been successful, she will contact him and order him to “execute Plan Orange.” That will be the signal for Fisk to “terminate Adama’s command, starting with Adama.”
In case you weren’t clear as to the meaning, Fisk and his men would mow down every officer on the Galactica’s bridge, after which she would staff the battlestar with her own people, jettison the civilian fleet, and resume hunting Cylons.
Meanwhile, at that very moment, Adama is giving Starbuck a very similar set of instructions, to wit: she is to return to the Pegasus after the attack has succeeded, and when he contacts her and says the word “downfall,” she is to shoot Admiral Cain in the head.
These respective plots are inter-spliced with each other to drive home the collision-course parallel angle. But it’s the expressions of Fisk (who is already haunted by the things Cain has made him do already) and Starbuck (who is having her loyalties to Adama and Cain pitted against each other), who look at their respective COs as Adama looked at Roslin earlier – like they’d lost their minds – that really sell it. They are two people made the involuntary pawns of people they have heretofore trusted now engaged in an act of mass insanity. And they have neither any way out nor any knowledge of the other plot. The only solution lies in the hands of Cain and Adama and whatever fraying cords of sanity hold instead of snapping.
There’s not much else to tell, other than how Admiral Cain ends up with a gun pointed in her face.
The wheels of the attack on the Cylon “resurrection ship” roll forward, along with the post-attack attacks that are to follow. Starbuck asks Apollo to accompany her to the Pegasus bridge to watch her back while she does the deed for his dad. I’m not sure what that would have accomplished other than to get both of them killed, but as a plot device it provided an opening for Adama’s conscience to be revived.
Sure enough, now-Lieutenant Adama comes to see Commander Adama about his mission for now-Captain Thrace. Being the level-headed fellow that he is, #1 son asks his pop, in so many words, if he’s lost his frakking mind. And Pop, being the poker-face that he is, maintains a resolute outer façade that does a mediocre at best job of concealing the restimulated moral conflict beneath.
After Apollo departs, Adama does something that would never have occurred to Admiral Cain: he summons Boomer v. 2.0 and uses her for a moral sounding board.
The Galactica CO asks the comely Cylon one basic question: Why do the Cylons hate humans? Sharon’s basic answer? Because humanity’s irredeemable moral failings, individually and collectively, make them undeserving of continued life. And the Cylons see themselves as the instrument of divine judgment.
While this food for thought is digesting in Adama’s mental gut (an interesting little subtext was his staring at his chest scar indirectly inflicted by the first Boomer before her “sister” arrived in his ready room), the attack on the Cylon fleet begins. And, to be bluntly honest, it was a pure anti-climax - too much of one for my tastes. I mean, wouldn’t two basestars have been at least an even match for two battlestars? Wouldn’t the Galactica and/or the Pegasus have absorbed greater damage? Instead neither warship seems to incur a scratch, while the two Cylon dreadnoughts disintegrate spectacularly, and the resurrection ship is easily dispatched along with them. About the only battle-related jeopardy subplot is Apollo having the Blackbird shot out from underneath him and his floating along, with the capital ship clash right in front of him, while he slowly ran out of oxygen. But there was no chance that he’d be allowed to eat vacuum, so what was the point (other than to remove the stealth ship as a source of future plot contrivances)?
In any case, the ostensible main battle was, dramatically, just an undercard for the main event.
Frankly I don’t have the patience to try to recreate the mood of faux suspense in this review that the writers went for on-screen. It stood to reason that Adama wasn’t going to get blown away again for the second time in half a season, unless Cain’s marines were really lousy shots. And it had already been telegraphed that Adama would change his mind about having Starbuck blow Cain’s brains out. So neither happened.
Again, the highlight of the angle was Colonel Fisk and Starbuck respectively first almost drowning in the tension of what was expected of them (from their facial expressions and the sweat pouring off of both officers in torrents, it’s a wonder Cain, at least, didn’t start getting suspicious) and then nearly passing out with relief when the code words from their respective superior officers never came. But while I understood Adama’s rationale for sparing the admiral – “If I, as the leader of my people, can do something like this, maybe humanity doesn’t deserve to survive” – I cannot remotely fathom where Cain’s reticence came from.
Why did the admiral not give her XO the signal to take out Adama and his command staff? There’s not a hint of this thought process in the dialogue. In fact, Cain has a scene with Starbuck where she all but lectures her new CAG on the need to do whatever it takes to survive, and “never flinch” when the time comes to take drastic action. The scene is drenched with irony given what Adama has instructed Starbuck to do, but perhaps that distracts from what may have been going on beneath Cain’s words. I suppose you could reverse the observation I made about these two women above: that Cain also saw a lot of herself in Starbuck, felt a unique connection to her because of it, and was almost seeking absolution for her decisions of the previous six months from the person who would be most likely to understand.
That is, of course, pure speculation. As the moment of truth arrives and blessedly passes for Starbuck, there’s every reason to believe that Cain will tell Colonel Fisk to “activate Plan Orange.” And then, or perhaps a split-second before the admiral can get the command out over the ship-to-ship, a gunshot rings out and Cain pitches forward, dead, revealing Starbuck, smoking gun extended, behind her.
But no. Cain simply offers her congratulations to her XO and hangs up the phone. You could even say that she flinched. Which is most assuredly ironic, but not the slightest bit of a swerve, and even another anti-climax.
But the greatest anti-climax of the entire episode is that that choice had no bearing whatsoever on the admiral’s ultimate demise.
The mark of a good promo is if it can make the viewer jump to conclusions. The promo for the conclusion of “Resurrection Ship” showed Admiral Cain, a gun pointed in her face, snarling, “Frak you!” Given how part one ended, the natural conclusion was that the gunman (or gunwoman) was Starbuck. But au contraire, mon derriere, that possibility had just been eliminated. So who could it be? Tyrol? Helo? Adama? Roslin?
Try Gina. How did she escape her cell, much less get her hands on a sidearm? With Baltar’s assistance. Why did Baltar do such a thing? Because instead of the imaginational figment that has tormented him to the nebulous badlands of insanity for the past half-year, now he has a real flesh & blood version to really love, and who doesn’t have him over a perpetual barrel. His “relationship” with Number Six was always one of hormones and manipulation and scheming; maybe Gina was like that at one time, but she had all of that smirking arrogance beaten, raped, and tortured out of her. She is, as I observed earlier, vulnerable, as well as tangible, and that’s something with which Number Six could not compete. The scene where Baltar recites Six’s pyramid anecdote verbatim to Gina is emblematic of this romantic transference. It’s also noteworthy for being the first time in the series that the Colonial vice president didn’t look like he had the nervous complaint.
After the admiral’s anatomically impossible slur, Gina spits out a great retort - “Sorry, you’re not my type” – and pulls the trigger. And when she does, Cain…flinches. I guess that’s emblematic too.
Gina is said to have “disappeared,” but I doubt we’ve seen the last of her. It’s too interesting of a love triangle to abandon so quickly. As to other (at least potentially) romantic connections, President Roslin, looking like, well, death warmed over, presents Adama with a promotion to admiral on the grounds that that’s what you call an officer in command of more than one ship. He then kisses her tenderly on the lips, and as she’s helped out of the sitting room aboard Colonial One he quietly weeps at Laura’s obviously imminent demise.
Except that demise obviously won’t happen. Guess I shouldn’t have watched the promo for next week.
Next: an abortion and embryonic stem cell research metaphor all wrapped into one.
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