Spoilers for "Battlestar Galactica" just as soon as I take my anti-hallucinatory meds...So Baltar has a HeadSix, Caprica Six has a HeadBaltar, and now Adama has a HeadEx? Is this going to turn into some kind of commentary on the perils of too much time on-line, where , by the end of season four, every character is too busy chatting with their own imaginary to interact with the flesh-and-blood people around them?
The Adama story was a strange one, and already the second this season (after "Hero") to dwell on things that happened to Bill pre-genocide. I don't feel like the big story arcs have to advance every week, and I appreciate giving the characters some depth, but I don't want the standalone episodes to turn into "Lost," you know? The details of Adama's marriage to Lee's mom just doesn't interest me, no matter how much they tried to dress it up with fancy editing. Even the stuff about his relationship with Lee felt a little besides the point, as they've for the most part made their peace with each other. On the plus side, I won't ever complain about a chance to see Olmos and McDonnell enjoying each other's company in general, and Mary laughing in particular.
In the downstairs portion of our upstairs, downstairs format, I thought the Chief/Cally stuff worked fine as a disposable thriller (particularly the FX team's work on the explosive decompression rescue). The personal side, however, felt lacking.
Tyrol doesn't love Cally, has never loved her, seemingly married her out of guilt for beating her up and because with the settlement, it seemed the thing to do. Obviously, he's not happy tending to a crying infant right now, but it feels like the episode came up to the edge of the two of them acknowledging the fundamental truth of their marriage and then backed off. Maybe the writers felt they already had hit their Doomed Marriages quota for the season with the quadrangle, I don't know. Tyrol's speech at the end could have played as a man recognizing that he's stuck in a bad situation and trying to make the best of it, but instead it read as him getting a healthy dose of perspective and realizing how much he loves Cally, and I don't buy that. The actors have little chemistry; Tyrol and Seelix have more spark, and I forget who Seelix is whenever someone's not referring to her by name.
Also, what was that silly contrivance about the deck crew being so shorthanded? Wasn't a big deal made about how Galactica's been overstaffed ever since the Pegasus blew up? We've seen scenes of bunk overcrowding, of pilots trying to beg their way into the flight rotation, and yet somehow there aren't enough deckhands? The show established a long time ago that Cally was only using the military for the Caprican equivalent of the GI Bill, and would have mustered out a long time ago if not for the genocide. Even with Adama's recent hard-assedness, surely he could find enough compassion to let a new mom who doesn't want to be there get a discharge -- or, at least, an extended maternity leave -- since there's such a huge surplus of military personnel relative to the amount of available jobs.
If that was just a contrivance to put Chief and Cally in danger on the job together, it'd be one thing, but it feels symptomatic of a larger problem this season. One of the things I love about this show is how much it cares about its own internal logic and the consequences of what's happened earlier, and lately it feels like things happen not because that's how they should work in this world, but because it seemed like a cool idea in the writer's room. One week, Helo's mayor of the refugee village, the next he's back in the flight rotation making fun of Hotdog's veneral disease. One week, there are too many crewmembers and not enough space or work; a few weeks later, Chief and Cally are overworked. All the real booze has long since been used up and replaced with the Chief's still-brewed concoction, but Adama somehow has a bottle of the good stuff to toast his dead ex-wife each year. Tigh's sowing dissent and in an alcoholic death spiral, and then he's absolutely fine and reduced to minimal screen time.
Maybe my problem with the standalones of late is that in previous years, even if those self-contained hours weren't superb, I never felt like the show was losing its sense of direction, and right now I'm a little worried.
What did everybody else think?
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