BSG 4.04 Escape Velocity
I think I may really like this season but it’s disorientating. Last season, at least for the first four episodes, it was pretty easy to figure out what was going on. There was the occupation and its funhouse mirror representation of Iraq/Vichy/Empire where the Cylons were both us and not US but it was ultimately a fairly straightforward heroic narrative and the calvary did come. Although the joy of that coming tended to elide over the possibility that the Occupation was something these people brought upon themselves. They chose to settle there with Baltar after all.
It’s much harder to see what the current story is about because the enemy is not external. Without that unifying force I thought at first there was no unifying theme to the stories, no society just individuals with their personal crises to deal with. I thought it was a soap but now I think I was wrong. It was easy to identify the problems being faced by the leads. Roslin, Kara, Baltar, the final foursome but what I missed was that everyone was in crisis, not just the leads but also the Callys. Everyone’s world is disintegrating, the old gods failing, the new ones unknown quantities, whole societies eating their own tails. Civil war amongst the Cylons, civil unrest on Galactica, the Age of Decadence, fin de siecle, end of the line.
The old gods are fighting back but in a cyclical system which is old and which is new? Adama and Roslin, Lee and the Quorum, they’re opposed to each other but all in their own minds defending the old order, democracy, the colonial way. Tyrol tells Bill that he won’t make an angel of someone who wasn’t and he’s talking about Cally/Carol Ann but also about the way we were, the life he settled for, knuckle-dragger with knuckle-dragger. “The rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate” Boomer was an officer.
Who is this new God who loves us just the way we are, who believes we all work on the pain-pleasure principle and fashioned the Cylons to follow the same logic like psychologist's rats in a trap? Pain gives you clarity? On Baltar’s evidence it gets you to believe in any old bollocks. Love your perfect, perfect self and all will be forgiven. Didn’t these people have an Altamont?
Reading around responses to the episode seem split between people taking all the declarations as gospel and complaining that it’s showing not telling and the more cynical seeing Lee’s reaction to Baltar’s sermon as the true voice of the writers. I didn’t like Lee much last week, he had a little too much of Bamber’s public school assurance that his voice would automatically be acknowledged but this week we’re good. If anything I think the key scene was of Anders watching Kara, possibly the only instance in the last two episodes of someone looking outward instead of inward at themselves.