BSG 4.06 Faith
I was hoping that last week’s episode might turn out to be the Surprise to this week’s Innocence and boy howdy did that work out. Show! You’re back! Although it’s really bigger than a simple two-parter effect. Everything’s been spiraling apart since the season began, societies and individuals both. The tentative connections of this episode, cylon-human, president-people, the characters showing their best sides rather than their worst feel earned and real because things have been so bad for so long.
In that light if the mutiny was overdue to the point of predictability what happened afterwards was anything but. Sam was the initial wild card and might well have precipitated another internecine bloodbath but for Kara. Kara turning on a dime, dropping the special destiny for the fallen comrade, bringing them all to their senses including herself.
Alliance might seem the obvious thing but I really like how fragile the attempt at truce was, how easily derailed by the past. Things are definitely working when just as the camera swings to Natalie you know what she’s going to have to do but not how. The Six are a Freudian model, Eros the flipside of Thanatos. The Eight seem more child-like always looking for someone to lead them, even Boomer switching from Caprica to Cavil. I wonder what made Athena grow up, I suppose she was thrust into a situation where she had to.
As well as pacing this episode the show also got its sense of rhythm back balancing the rollercoaster of the basestar plot with Laura’s much calmer storyline beautifully. The way Mary McDonell’s voice rose as she started to talk about her mother’s death, throat too tight holding back tears. The ending with her and Adama but still the hint of the bright new future leaving behind not just the dying leader but many too damaged to follow, the Gaetas and the Callys, the nameless bitter Six.
Last week Galen giving his hand to Gaius felt like an orphan gesture which was re-united with its family this week. Lots of hands, Emily and Laura, Athena and the dying Eight. Sam comforting her did make me think of how the five seem to play a role in the normal resurrection process while the hybrid’s talk of harbinger and endings recalled what the first hybrid told Kendra Shaw:
Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse, the harbinger of death. They must not follow her...
The dream that began D’Anna’s obsession with seeing the Five had her cornered against a door labeled “End of line.” I often wondered if that whole quest was based on a misunderstanding. In her original encounter with prophecy Hera was the key not her own enlightenment.
Gaius’s radio sermons murmured along in the background like the babblings of the hybrid, he understands but does not comprehend? Having been Marx and Jesus now he seems to be Hamlet, which if it sticks doesn’t bode too well for his people.