After a break of a little over a month, Battlestar Galactica has returned for the second half of the third season, now with a shiny, new timeslot. The timeslot change is particularly notable for those of us living in Canada. For the first half of the season, an episode would air on Sci-Fi Friday night and then on Space (the Canadian equivalent of Sci-Fi) on Saturday night, meaning that we were approximately 24 hours behind; with this new schedule, the show airs Sundays at 10 PM Eastern in both countries, which means no more minor delays for me (in fact, thanks to Space’s tendency to end shows a few minutes early so as to have time for a 2 to 3 minute segment at the end of the hour, the Canadian airing ends up slightly ahead). As such, for the first time I’m writing about an episode the night it aired. Huzzah!
As for the episode itself, it was packed full of events, even if some of those events were kind of non-factors. Probably the biggest non-factor event was D’Anna’s vision of the final five cylons. She only really took a good look at one of the models before her vision ended, but she obviously recognized the individual. Presumably this means that it was someone we’ve already met, but seeing as the occupation of New Caprica, in conjunction with a few other meetings D’Anna has had (like when she was on Galactica), has given her the opportunity to meet almost every character on the show, that really tells us virtually nothing (if one goes back and checks, I suppose there may be a couple characters who were on the Pegasus or the Galactica during the occupation who D’Anna couldn’t have met, but not very many).
Having the Cylons decide to box the Threes (while possibly motivated by real life considerations) was an interesting development. Things have been getting more and more fractured in Cylon land and they seem to think that getting rid of the Threes (who have been biggest on the whole defying authority bit) well reunify everyone. Somehow putting dissenters into cold storage doesn’t seem like a warm and fuzzy long term solution to me.
Speaking of Cylons going against the system, how about that Boomer? She’s really been having a hard time with the whole constant rejection thing; and now she keeps running into Athena and getting more and more bitter. She’s pretty much never recovered from being rejected from her ‘family’ on Galactica and seeing as another Sharon model so readily accepted (both by Hera and Galactica (though, of course, Athena has been less accepted than Boomer perceives) isn’t doing her self-esteem any favours. That girl needs some anger management courses.
I’m curious to see how Caprica’s role on Galactica is going to play out. She came to them of her own free will, but I can’t see her following the Athena route and integrating herself into the crew. At the same time, she hasn’t actively done anything bad to them (that they know about anyway), so it’s not like the Boomer situation. Gauis is also on the Galactica now, so it’ll be interesting to see how she deals with him after the way he and D’Anna ditched her. At any rate, I can’t see things going any worse for her than they did for the last Six to end up a prisoner of the humans.
As for the humans, we’ve got Starbuck and the Chief both dealing with ‘religious’ issues. Starbuck with her seeming ability to portend future (or past) portends and Chief with his continuing newfound love for religion. Of course, Starbuck didn’t seem particularly pleased with the possibility of her ‘destiny’ while I’m half expecting to see the Chief slip into full-on ‘born again’ mode in the near future.
The only other noteworthy development was Lee asking his wife to go rescue Starbuck. Presumably he knew that sending random extras would just lead to dead extras and seeing as all the other characters were busy, he had no else to ask, but still, that takes some balls. I’m still not sure how things are going to play out between those four wacky kids, but the smart money is on things ending badly for everyone involved.
Despite feeling a bit ripped off by the ‘final five’ tease which really didn’t even give us a new hint to work with, I was pretty happy with this episode.
