"Do you believe in miracles?"
Adama's answer to that question is a short, decisive, "No." It's the rational answer, the right answer for a man of his responsibilities, who must make decisions in this physical world. Miracles require a leap of faith, and leaps into the unknown are frightening. This episode centered around three miracles, and on what people do when they are confronted with the inexplicable.
Kara Returns
The show's forays into the mystical have always made me a little nervous, because I like the clash between human and Cylon theology, the seemingly circular nature of the religious cycle, the way it ties into the history of the colonies and of man and Cylon, but I want them to maintain a boundary, to keep the show grounded in the physically real. So far, most of the mysticism has centered on people's beliefs, has served as a motivation, and the people themselves have made choices, based on those beliefs, that brought prophecies to life, found the Arrow of Apollo and the star chamber on Kobol and the Eye of Jupiter.
So I think it potentially a very interesting choice to not only bring Kara back, to have her reappear in the midst of a battle far from where she was thought killed, but to do so in a way that provides some very specific physical evidence. Her viper is new; genetically, she is Kara Thrace; Baltar's Cylon detector says she's human. They have these physical pieces of information, but they don't tell them anything useful.
(Tigh brings up that the Cylon detector doesn't work, because it failed to detect Boomer. As far as he knows, he's right, but we know that it did work, that Baltar just gave her false results. asta77 played devil's advocate that Tigh could have been tested later and now knows his results are false, but I don't think so; there wasn't much time between Boomer's test and her shooting of Adama, and nobody was talking about rolling out the test for widespread use after that. This raises the question of why they bothered testing Kara here at all, but I do think the test results are real. Among other things, Kara being a Cylon would be too pat, too easy.)
So her reappearance is a miracle, inexplicable. Welcoming her back requires a leap of faith. And that's where I found myself not really getting Laura in this episode, which may be less of a function of the actual episode and more a function of the fact that I haven't gotten past the end of Season 1 in my rewatch yet. Adama's caution, his hesitance to believe in something that seems too good to be true, I can understand; but Laura has already made a huge leap of faith with Kara, and been right to do so. The path to Earth that Laura insists on following in this very episode is one that Kara showed to her on Kobol. Kara is her miracle girl. Maybe my brain is eliding over something significant in Season 3; I can certainly buy Laura having become embittered on New Caprica, and being reflexively paranoid of Cylon infiltration in ways she wasn't before. She changed down on that planet. Maybe she really has lost her capacity for faith. But it struck me that if anybody would believe that Kara might be a divinely-inspired signpost to Earth, it would be Laura.
I literally don't know what to think of the end, because I also had a hard time getting a bead on Kara in the episode; I think the writers were trying to convey her initial certainty, her slowly creeping doubt, and her decision to confront Laura was certainly characteristic in its impulsiveness--and maybe reflects her belief that Laura believed in her before, and should again--but I don't think all the dots got connected there.
The Cylons Abandon the Battle
Nobody really believes Kara about the music in her head--it does sound crazy--but Lee raises the interesting question of whether it actually matters if she's a Cylon. He's poking around the edges of the giant, Athena-shaped elephant that sits in the corner of the Galactica crew room: you love the person; the person is your sister or lover or daughter or friend, and maybe even the mother or father of your children. The fleet has already made judgments about who deserves inclusion in the human community, with the trials of the collaborators, with Baltar's trial, with his shunning; they've accepted Athena as one of them. It's not as big a jump as it seems. I really liked the parallels between Lee and Anders in the way they approached the problem, because while Anders is coming at it from a more self-interested angle, he also knows something Lee doesn't: what it's like to discover that you're a Cylon and to continue to get up, have breakfast, talk with your friends, do your job, and have nothing change. To still be the same person. He and his fellow-Cylons are so on edge precisely because nothing that they are aware of has changed, and they fear some hidden programming that will make them do something that they, consciously, would never agree to.
Kara's never been good at living in the gray; she likes her blacks and whites, and her experience of Cylon mimicry of human life--the parody of a home Leoben made with her on New Caprica--is uniquely horrifying. She doesn't think she can make the kind of leap Sam and Lee would make for her.
So what did the raider see when it scanned Anders? Or was it all a coincidence? The Cylons were winning, and then they pulled back; it was a miracle, and what actually happened might be less important than what the Galactica Cylons, scrabbling around in the dark for clues to the purpose of their existence, believe happened, and how that belief shapes their choices going forward.
The Sick Child Recovers
The recovery of the sick child might be coincidence, luck, a rallying of the immune system, but as is always the case with Gaius Baltar, the objective events pale in comparison to what's going on in his ego. It was disconcerting to see him to humbled, so ready to accept his own frailty and culpability. The man who has consistently been ready to trade the lives of thousands for his own comfort and safety offers himself up as a trade here, submits to a test of faith like Abraham on the Temple Mount. He makes the leap, one that's related to, but far more personally significant than, his guess in "The Hand of God." And he lands on his feet. Who knows if he actually cured the child; what matters is that everyone believes he did, including him, and that belief will cement his position as head of the creepy cult that lives in the surprisingly large "secret" storage area, and will cement in his own mind his divinely-endowed specialness, his common cause with the Cylon god.
Other things, at random:
Kara Returns
The show's forays into the mystical have always made me a little nervous, because I like the clash between human and Cylon theology, the seemingly circular nature of the religious cycle, the way it ties into the history of the colonies and of man and Cylon, but I want them to maintain a boundary, to keep the show grounded in the physically real. So far, most of the mysticism has centered on people's beliefs, has served as a motivation, and the people themselves have made choices, based on those beliefs, that brought prophecies to life, found the Arrow of Apollo and the star chamber on Kobol and the Eye of Jupiter.
So I think it potentially a very interesting choice to not only bring Kara back, to have her reappear in the midst of a battle far from where she was thought killed, but to do so in a way that provides some very specific physical evidence. Her viper is new; genetically, she is Kara Thrace; Baltar's Cylon detector says she's human. They have these physical pieces of information, but they don't tell them anything useful.
(Tigh brings up that the Cylon detector doesn't work, because it failed to detect Boomer. As far as he knows, he's right, but we know that it did work, that Baltar just gave her false results. asta77 played devil's advocate that Tigh could have been tested later and now knows his results are false, but I don't think so; there wasn't much time between Boomer's test and her shooting of Adama, and nobody was talking about rolling out the test for widespread use after that. This raises the question of why they bothered testing Kara here at all, but I do think the test results are real. Among other things, Kara being a Cylon would be too pat, too easy.)
So her reappearance is a miracle, inexplicable. Welcoming her back requires a leap of faith. And that's where I found myself not really getting Laura in this episode, which may be less of a function of the actual episode and more a function of the fact that I haven't gotten past the end of Season 1 in my rewatch yet. Adama's caution, his hesitance to believe in something that seems too good to be true, I can understand; but Laura has already made a huge leap of faith with Kara, and been right to do so. The path to Earth that Laura insists on following in this very episode is one that Kara showed to her on Kobol. Kara is her miracle girl. Maybe my brain is eliding over something significant in Season 3; I can certainly buy Laura having become embittered on New Caprica, and being reflexively paranoid of Cylon infiltration in ways she wasn't before. She changed down on that planet. Maybe she really has lost her capacity for faith. But it struck me that if anybody would believe that Kara might be a divinely-inspired signpost to Earth, it would be Laura.
I literally don't know what to think of the end, because I also had a hard time getting a bead on Kara in the episode; I think the writers were trying to convey her initial certainty, her slowly creeping doubt, and her decision to confront Laura was certainly characteristic in its impulsiveness--and maybe reflects her belief that Laura believed in her before, and should again--but I don't think all the dots got connected there.
The Cylons Abandon the Battle
Nobody really believes Kara about the music in her head--it does sound crazy--but Lee raises the interesting question of whether it actually matters if she's a Cylon. He's poking around the edges of the giant, Athena-shaped elephant that sits in the corner of the Galactica crew room: you love the person; the person is your sister or lover or daughter or friend, and maybe even the mother or father of your children. The fleet has already made judgments about who deserves inclusion in the human community, with the trials of the collaborators, with Baltar's trial, with his shunning; they've accepted Athena as one of them. It's not as big a jump as it seems. I really liked the parallels between Lee and Anders in the way they approached the problem, because while Anders is coming at it from a more self-interested angle, he also knows something Lee doesn't: what it's like to discover that you're a Cylon and to continue to get up, have breakfast, talk with your friends, do your job, and have nothing change. To still be the same person. He and his fellow-Cylons are so on edge precisely because nothing that they are aware of has changed, and they fear some hidden programming that will make them do something that they, consciously, would never agree to.
Kara's never been good at living in the gray; she likes her blacks and whites, and her experience of Cylon mimicry of human life--the parody of a home Leoben made with her on New Caprica--is uniquely horrifying. She doesn't think she can make the kind of leap Sam and Lee would make for her.
So what did the raider see when it scanned Anders? Or was it all a coincidence? The Cylons were winning, and then they pulled back; it was a miracle, and what actually happened might be less important than what the Galactica Cylons, scrabbling around in the dark for clues to the purpose of their existence, believe happened, and how that belief shapes their choices going forward.
The Sick Child Recovers
The recovery of the sick child might be coincidence, luck, a rallying of the immune system, but as is always the case with Gaius Baltar, the objective events pale in comparison to what's going on in his ego. It was disconcerting to see him to humbled, so ready to accept his own frailty and culpability. The man who has consistently been ready to trade the lives of thousands for his own comfort and safety offers himself up as a trade here, submits to a test of faith like Abraham on the Temple Mount. He makes the leap, one that's related to, but far more personally significant than, his guess in "The Hand of God." And he lands on his feet. Who knows if he actually cured the child; what matters is that everyone believes he did, including him, and that belief will cement his position as head of the creepy cult that lives in the surprisingly large "secret" storage area, and will cement in his own mind his divinely-endowed specialness, his common cause with the Cylon god.
Other things, at random:
- The battle at the beginning of the episode was stunning; I like how chaotic it was, and that we were partly seeing it from Anders' POV, that of someone new to combat, not quite prepared for the chaos. I'm always hyper-conscious of each death on the show, not just as a death but as a diminishing of the human future, and the destruction of the first ship, the loss of 600 souls in a flash and a bang, was an effective reminder of the stakes of the battle, of the fleet's fragility.
- The previouslies contained actual, previously aired footage! Hooray!
- Coming off the rewatch of Season 1, I'm finding Adama's deference to Roslin a little jarring, and hope it's a more natural development in Season 3 than I remember, rather than a product of the fact that they're sleeping together now, because the latter would be an uncharacteristically icky stereotype for the show to engage in.
- I loved Helo's cautious certainty in Kara, if not as a messenger from beyond, then at least as Kara. His family's part-Cylon; he gave up the attempt to draw distinctions a long time ago.
- The conversation between Adama and Lee was really densely packed, and besides Lee's ruminations on personhood, I liked the way both men relate to each other as people who care about Kara, that that's a bond between them that's part of their family relationship, even though they weren't overtly agreeing on much. It also felt like Adama, even though he hasn't given up on trying to persuade Lee back into the military, into his tradition and his life, seems to actually be listening to Lee and trying to make his arguments based on the things Lee says are important to him--making a contribution, fulfilling a duty to his society. Although I have no doubt that there will be backsliding, it felt like Adama was inching closer to letting go, seeing the differences between them and letting Lee find his own path.