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BSG 3.20 - "Crossroads Part 2"
I am really at a loss as to what to say about this episode. Like last year's finale, so much of how I feel about what happened in this episode is going to depend on where these developments go. I don't have much of a reaction to the big picture, which is wide-open-ended, but I do have thoughts about some of the pieces.
The Trial of Gaius Baltar
I'm glad the prosecution finally called Gaeta to the stand, and found it terribly interesting that he was willing to lie to secure a conviction. Baltar has a history of being framed for things he did, and the last time that happened, Gaeta, younger and filled with admiration for Baltar, proved his innocence. It was a technical innocence then, because Baltar didn't sabotage the defense mainframe himself, merely allowed it to be sabotaged by being weak and susceptible to flattery. It's a technical innocence now, because Baltar did protest before signing the death order, but he did enable the occupation, and more importantly, he was the leader; he gladly accepted the power and the rewards of leadership when things were going well for the fleet, but refuses to take any responsibility for the failures of his regime once things went badly. Perhaps the trial's greatest failure was not that he wasn't convicted, but that he was able to elude that responsibility permanently.
I continued to find many of the mechanics of the trial unconvincing, and have given that part of it up as a lost cause. I wish the writers had drawn a clearer relationship between Laura's personal need to make Baltar suffer for his crimes and the prosecution's approach, shown her leaning harder for what turned out to be a losing strategy, because it still feels far too much like a bad and transparent setup for the not guilty verdict to me. In particular, calling Tigh as a witness still makes no sense on a practical level, and seeing the personal vendetta Tigh, Laura, and Gaeta shared overtly color the prosecution would have closed the circle with Lee's big speech about how a lot of people collaborated with the Cylons, and a lot of people were willing to abandon the colonists to the occupation, and they're trying to lay it all at the feet of one man. They weren't trying to lay it all at Baltar's feet, though, not at first. They had an entire episode called "Collaborators" that focused on punishing the people who had been most active in helping the Cylons, and Tigh was on the tribunal. They had over fifty people on their list. Laura was the one who shut the secret tribunals down; she did it for the right reason, because it was extralegal and run by people who were lashing out at others in their pain, and it feeds into her distorted focus on punishing Baltar as time goes on, but it was her decision to institute a general amnesty, and it shouldn't have been an uncontroversial decision. We saw Gaeta being reintegrated into his old place, but Gaeta had helped the resistance; I wouldn't expect other known collaborators to have been seamlessly welcomed back into the fleet. Lee's speech applied directly to Laura and Tigh and Gaeta; how much it applied to anyone else is an unknown.
Still, it was perfectly Baltar of Baltar, in his self-absorption and focus on self-preservation, to have been thinking entirely of the verdict, and to expect his legal team to help him after their job was done, and to discover that he'd been freed to live among people who actively despise him. Not guilty is not the same as innocent, and his lawyers argued successfully that the prosection hadn't proved his guilt, but that's not the same as demonstrating his worthiness to rejoin the human race. (Although apparently he has a secret underground of groupies who will take care of him.)
The Final Five?
Probably not, but the possibility is there. It's not so much that people are seeing and hearing things--some of them have been doing that for quite a while--as that the boundaries at the edges of those visions are blurring and melting together. Laura saw clues to the path to Earth when she was taking chamalla; now, in her more conventional chemotherapy treatments, she's sharing visions with Cylons, with Six and Athena and Hera, all of them focused, for a myriad of reasons, on the child and the unknown future she represents for all of them. Six showed Baltar the opera house on Kobol, on the planet where they found the constellation map to Earth. They all see the opera house again at the latest landmark, and Laura senses something right before the power goes out, and Kara appears--or someone wearing Kara's face, speaking with Kara's voice, but far more sure and serene than Kara has ever been up until the moment she flew into that storm and disappeared--to Lee, who got in a viper and headed out to the fight even though it was no longer his place to do so, and met her alone. It's an impossibility for Kara to be there in that viper--she's dead, her ship blew apart--but she's always been the bringer of clues to their path, the one who fetched the arrow, the one who gave Adama the Aurora figurine to remember her by.
Tigh, Tori, Anders and Tyrol keep hearing snatches of music, and end up facing each other around a square. Tyrol has always feared he was a Cylon; he took the lesson of Sharon to heart, he knew that up until the moment she shot Adama she hadn't known that about herself, and now he sees a switch going off in each of them. I love Tigh taking in the devastating possibility that they're all Cylons and answering it with what he knows about his own identity, that he's an officer in the Colonial Fleet, that that's who he's been and all he can continue to do is be that same person. But I also love that Tigh goes to stand by Adama, and Tori goes to stand by Roslin, and if the Cylons planned the perfect placement for sleeper agents, it would be the second-hand men of the leaders of the fleet.
I don't think Anders, Tori, Tigh, and Tyrol are Cylons. It's too neat, too pat, and it almost completely removes the possibility of future surprise Cylon reveals. But I'm at a loss to explain what's going on otherwise. There's some kind of connection between them; they're all hearing a signal, and they're hearing it at the crossroads. asta77 and I were wondering if the Cylons couldn't have somehow implanted something in them during the occupation--they were all on New Caprica--but I think Tigh's the only one who spent time in detention that we know of for sure, though Asta speculated that Anders might have gotten some kind of medical treatment from the Cylons at the beginning of the occupation to cure his black lung. And it's become clearer and clearer over time that the Six Baltar sees in his head, and the Baltar Caprica sees in hers, are not the products of some kind of physiological, technological interference; they know things beyond the range of what their hosts could know, even subconsciously, and they're steering Caprica and Baltar toward some unknown end. And if there's a connection between Anders, Tori, Tigh, and Tyrol, it's a connection they share with Laura and Caprica and Baltar and Lee, because in this place they've landed, they're all seeing their hallucinations come to life.
Bob Dylan Was Not from the Twelve Colonies
I was surprised by the musical choice at the end of the episode, because it is quite unlike the show to use either a cover or lyrics. Like many other parts of the episode, I'm still not sure what I think of it, though the way it set such a drastically different and new tone fit with the rest of the last few minutes, with the mysticism and the confusion, the encountering of something new and strange (as opposed to Season 1 and the very concrete and familiar assassination attempt on a beloved leader, or Season 2 and the circling back around to the beginning, to a Cylon re-invasion), and the way the episode pulled back and back and back to show the distances yet to be traveled, the tininess of all of them in the universe, their vulnerability to larger forces.
paraviondeux passed along an interesting link to Bear McCreary's blog entry on developing his version of the song.
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The Dresden Files - "The Other Dick"
After seeing what they aired last week, I'm eschewing numbering episodes of this show, because that was the original pilot and contradicts the rest of the show's canon massively and I can't imagine it was meant to be a real part of the season, as opposed to SciFi being determined to air every minute it paid for, by gum. I haven't been posting much about The Dresden Files because I don't feel particularly fannish about it, but I have been enjoying it. I like the atmosphere, I think they've done a good job of striking a balance between Harry's powers and the limitations under which he operates, his relationship with Murphy is nicely prickly and fraught with possibility if/when she finds out more about the world in which he lives, and after seeing the terrible original pilot, I am really appreciating the adaptations they made from the books (the original pilot was far more faithful, and it did not translate at all well).
And last night's episode was fun, though it was unbelievably bizarre to listen to Claudia Black doing an American accent, since I'm so used to her real one. I like that Harry admired the old detective for his ethics and his solidity, and I like that no matter how much of a hardass Liz was to him at first about his payments, he pretty much immediately recognized that she was alone in the world and had lost a good part of the foundation of her life when the old detective was killed, and that as much as they bickered ("Well, you're not a wizard at lying." Hee!), he never lost sight of what was driving her. And I especially liked that Liz was written as curious, maybe too curious, but capable of rescuing herself from corporeal danger, which she understood perfectly well; it was the supernatural she wasn't prepared for, and that's when Harry rode in to do the rescuing. Claudia Black and Paul Blackthorne had sparky rival-buddies-with-a-side-of-attraction chemistry, and she played the character with just the right amount of bravado and vulnerability, and they seem to have written an open enough ending that she could return at some point.
It looks like the episode is available at SciFi.com for the rest of the week if you missed it.
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I have been maintaining for some time that knitting is a hotbed of wank, and I think brynnmck and sdwolfpup started believing me after the last link I passed them, but y'all! It's true! Now I have proof. The only thing I see missing from that entry is the explosion that inevitably ensues when someone mentions "flesh-colored" yarn.
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As I stared sleeplessly at my ceiling at 2am last night, I thought to myself, "Self, this is why you do not drink a latte at 4pm." *does faceplant on keyboard*
