more pain, more issues
BSG 4.7 The Road Less Travelled (good grief, the titles have become Cliché Central)
Maybe it was my bad for not realising they’d given Kara her own crew on the former sewage ship (that seemed magically transformed into a more military vessel), but we definitely were not given an indication before now that Athena was on board. (My response to her being there is: really? Even if they are understaffed, what about Hera?) And, frustratingly, she was only there to give voice to the rising mutter of mutiny because Kara was acting obsessively, and Athena could put more pressure on Helo trying to be a good XO even though Kara was giving him no help with her actions, because she was his missus. They really didn’t do much with her POV of the big revelation that Callum Keith Rennie’s Cylon AKA He Has A Name (and not just any one of them, but the one who saw visions and had all the history with Kara) was in a ship that had just happened to drift into the bit of space Kara was all for scouring in the hope of finding their way back to Earth.
Kara still had nothing much to go on, as she couldn’t ‘hear’ what she’d heard previously
The show was more interested in Sam being the jealous husband Kara occasionally deigned to sleep with over the Cylon who was obsessed with his wife, who seemed to be humouring him, with an added layer of Sam being One of the Five. Given He Has A Name is meant to have some visionary abilities, they could have had him sense Sam’s real nature, but no, it was mainly just aggro all round.
I admit, I had forgotten to track who’s side his number were on in the civil war, so I don’t know for sure if he’s lying, but I don’t much care because his character makes little more sense than any other by this point, and I keep flashing back to the first encounter between him and Kara and wishing the writers had known then what they were going to come up with later and it might all make more sense. He didn’t have a clue what had happened to Kara since ‘he’ ‘helped’ her dive into the nebula, get to Earth and change, and sure, he called her an Angel, as Six has described herself, and was proposing a human-anti- raider lobotomy!Cylon alliance (if the others have survived), which tied into what was going on in the other plot of this ep, but it’s all held toether by very cheap sticky tape.
Also, Kara is probably right to trust him as a means to get to Earth, but she had given her crew every reason to mutiny against her. And if we have to go one more round of Kara faces her childhood demons, which I daresay we will, I will complain through most of it.
The other Galactica-based plotline irritated me less. Tori is still a less interesting Six - she’s jumped to absolving herself awfully quickly, which gives me no reason to sympathise with her.
I liked the recurrence of Baltar recording himself to get his new message out there and…he earned that final hand clasp from Tyrol by admitting he had been presumptious over Callie (which he so had) and facing some of what he’d done and being (relatively) humble.
I still think that he was responding to Tori’s claim that he hadn’t reeled in anyone important yet, and so glomped on Tyrol, although what is Tyrol’s status now? Random maintenance guy?
Tyrol had shaved his hair off in solidarity with Roslin.
Sorry, Tyrol had shaved his hair off to express his grief over Callie and secret existential crisis. (Or maybe the actor jst wanted to, I dunno.)
He had gone as far as talking to the Doc and doubting that Cally had killed herself, mildly unnerving Tori. Only Tori and Tigh knew about the existential crisis, otherwise his behaviour looked like a grieving widower, and the referencing of Cally’s past views on Baltar and Galen’s own complicated feelings towards the man spoke of some continuity (too little, too late?) While Mickey liked Baltar’s voice, snerk. And of course, though Tyrol was focusing on forgiveness and past wrongdoing, that’s two secret Cylons Baltar is influencing as he talks about the one God.
The actors are doing their best, but their performances can’t hide the fact that we’ve seen a lot of these characters (Kara, Tyrol, Helo) in these states before or the plot-holes.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/461858.html.
Maybe it was my bad for not realising they’d given Kara her own crew on the former sewage ship (that seemed magically transformed into a more military vessel), but we definitely were not given an indication before now that Athena was on board. (My response to her being there is: really? Even if they are understaffed, what about Hera?) And, frustratingly, she was only there to give voice to the rising mutter of mutiny because Kara was acting obsessively, and Athena could put more pressure on Helo trying to be a good XO even though Kara was giving him no help with her actions, because she was his missus. They really didn’t do much with her POV of the big revelation that Callum Keith Rennie’s Cylon AKA He Has A Name (and not just any one of them, but the one who saw visions and had all the history with Kara) was in a ship that had just happened to drift into the bit of space Kara was all for scouring in the hope of finding their way back to Earth.
Kara still had nothing much to go on, as she couldn’t ‘hear’ what she’d heard previously
The show was more interested in Sam being the jealous husband Kara occasionally deigned to sleep with over the Cylon who was obsessed with his wife, who seemed to be humouring him, with an added layer of Sam being One of the Five. Given He Has A Name is meant to have some visionary abilities, they could have had him sense Sam’s real nature, but no, it was mainly just aggro all round.
I admit, I had forgotten to track who’s side his number were on in the civil war, so I don’t know for sure if he’s lying, but I don’t much care because his character makes little more sense than any other by this point, and I keep flashing back to the first encounter between him and Kara and wishing the writers had known then what they were going to come up with later and it might all make more sense. He didn’t have a clue what had happened to Kara since ‘he’ ‘helped’ her dive into the nebula, get to Earth and change, and sure, he called her an Angel, as Six has described herself, and was proposing a human-anti- raider lobotomy!Cylon alliance (if the others have survived), which tied into what was going on in the other plot of this ep, but it’s all held toether by very cheap sticky tape.
Also, Kara is probably right to trust him as a means to get to Earth, but she had given her crew every reason to mutiny against her. And if we have to go one more round of Kara faces her childhood demons, which I daresay we will, I will complain through most of it.
The other Galactica-based plotline irritated me less. Tori is still a less interesting Six - she’s jumped to absolving herself awfully quickly, which gives me no reason to sympathise with her.
I liked the recurrence of Baltar recording himself to get his new message out there and…he earned that final hand clasp from Tyrol by admitting he had been presumptious over Callie (which he so had) and facing some of what he’d done and being (relatively) humble.
I still think that he was responding to Tori’s claim that he hadn’t reeled in anyone important yet, and so glomped on Tyrol, although what is Tyrol’s status now? Random maintenance guy?
Tyrol had shaved his hair off in solidarity with Roslin.
Sorry, Tyrol had shaved his hair off to express his grief over Callie and secret existential crisis. (Or maybe the actor jst wanted to, I dunno.)
He had gone as far as talking to the Doc and doubting that Cally had killed herself, mildly unnerving Tori. Only Tori and Tigh knew about the existential crisis, otherwise his behaviour looked like a grieving widower, and the referencing of Cally’s past views on Baltar and Galen’s own complicated feelings towards the man spoke of some continuity (too little, too late?) While Mickey liked Baltar’s voice, snerk. And of course, though Tyrol was focusing on forgiveness and past wrongdoing, that’s two secret Cylons Baltar is influencing as he talks about the one God.
The actors are doing their best, but their performances can’t hide the fact that we’ve seen a lot of these characters (Kara, Tyrol, Helo) in these states before or the plot-holes.
This entry was originally posted at https://shallowness.dreamwidth.org/461858.html.