Cable for One – Battlestar Galactica – Episode 3-1

After many months of waiting, and a handful of webisodes to whet our appetite, season three of Battlestar Galactica is finally underway.

I was pretty impressed with the two-hour premiere this week. The conflict between Tigh and Roslin over what is and isn’t permissible in the rebellion against the Cylons really highlighted the struggle between doing what is ‘right’ and what is ‘necessary’. It’s a question with no easy answers and, knowing BSG, I fully expect this to remain a murky issue.

It’s nice to see the conflict of morality extends to the Cylons as well. Though most of the Cylons seem to more in favor of the kill (or at least control) humans policy, they all seem to have very different views of the hows and whys. The Cylons are becoming more and more human all the time. In a side note, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out just how awesome Dean Stockwell was in his roles this week.

It was pretty shocking to see how months of captivity, locked up with a captor who cannot be killed (or even angered, it seems), has really changed Starbuck. Outside the brief spark we saw when Starbuck killed her captor (for the fifth time apparently), Starbuck seemed almost completely lifeless. The introduction of her supposed child does seem to be changing that but I’m guessing it will turn out that this child has nothing to do with Starbuck. The Cylons seem to really cherish the idea of having human/Cylon hybrid children and it seems unlikely that they would leave such a hybrid (which would quite possibly be the first success they know of) unsupervised with Starbuck (given her behavior in captivity). The accident seemed awfully convenient as well, only further my suspicions that things are not as they seem.

The story on the Galactica was pretty interesting as well but Lee’s puffy face (which I assume is the result of make-up, considering how bad it looks) made to watch any scene involving Lee without laughing at least a couple times.

The development of a friendship between Galactica Sharon and Adama was somewhat unexpected but it felt very natural nonetheless. I suspect there may be some strain on Sharon’s friendship with Adama (and her loyalty to the humans in general) once she finds out about her baby and its not actually being dead.

I did have a bit of a quibble with the way the ended the episode. I was hoping (though not really expecting) Roslin would be handily executed but I discounted that as an option with the way the episode ended (if they were going to kill her, we’d have seen her get shot as opposed to it being implied, off-screen). Still any suspense that may have remained on that front is pretty much ruined by the fact that a very much alive and well Roslin features in the preview for next week’s episode.

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