A few years ago, there was a short-lived animated series on MTV and Teletoon called Clone High. One of the running gags of the show was having each episode be a ‘Very Special’ episode. In opening teaser for episode 10, “Litter Kills: Litterally” we were promised that one of the clones would die. During the tease, the announcer said, “This is not some cheap-ass stunt where we lamely introduce a new character just to kill him off” while the screen flashed pictures of the main characters, whilst also adding in pictures of a brand new clone. Throughout the first act of the episode, the new guy, Ponce de Leon, is in just about every scene and it’s made clear that he’s a big part of the other clones’ lives and has been for quite some time. I was thinking about that episode a lot while watching this week’s Battlestar Galactica.
Until “The Woman King”, we’ve never seen Doctor Roberts (come to think of it, I vaguely recall them establishing Doc Cottle as the fleet’s sole doctor at some point in season one or two) and yet he was an apparently vital component of life aboard the Galactica. Roberts was a close friend of Colonel Tigh, a valued member of the resistance back on New Caprica, preferable to Doc Cottle when a regular cast member becomes ill and more. They really gave a hard sell on Roberts and the whole thing just came off as phony.
I also thought Doc Cottle lying to Helo seemed a bit out of character. Sure Cottle gave excuses for why he lied, but if he was going to check Willie’s blood in a few hours, why give Helo fake (expected) blood test results right away instead of telling him to check back in a few hours? Granted, it is possible that Cottle decided to do the test only after Helo’s freaking out on him, but it doesn’t seem like something Cottle would lie about (especially considering he probably already feels guilty over what happened with the whole Hera situation).
There was nothing wrong with the core story of “The Woman King”, it even had a different perspective on a rather clichéd story. It’s pretty common to see a storyline about hardcore religious fundamentalists refusing medical treatment for themselves or their children because they’re too bloody stupid. It was nice to see that, when it came down to it, most of the Sagittarons (or at least the ones we were introduced to) chose survival over religious beliefs (even though that didn’t work out so well for them). In the end it wasn’t even a story about the Sagittarons but Roberts and his penchant for killing said Sagittarons. It just wasn’t a meaty enough story to fill an entire episode.
If the story had been changed so that Roberts had only just arrived on Galactica (transferring over from one of the civilian ships) and made him seem less central to everything that happens on Galactica, it would have helped the story a great deal (maybe he could still be an old friend of Tigh’s, but other than that nobody would really know him and he would not be the first choice of medical treatment for everyone). Even with that change though, I don’t think the plot would work as the only story arc of an episode. If it had been accompanied by a B-plot (or better yet, been the B-plot to another story’s A-plot), then it could have been a hell of a lot better (this would also allow you to cut a lot of the meaningless elements from the story, like Hera’s visit to the Doctor). It’s too bad this was also the first time we had a Helo episode that wasn’t directly centered around the Cylons in some way.
Of the little bit of non-Roberts related developments we had this week, it was nice to see the return of Halluco-Baltar. Of course, we still have no idea what Halluco-Baltar’s agenda is, or what, if anything, his connection is to Halluco-Six. Presumably both are coming from the same source, but I doubt we’ll be getting an answer on that anytime in the near future.
Oddly enough, we didn’t see anything of Gauis Baltar himself this week. Given the way the last episode ended, I was kind of expecting to see a lot more happening with his upcoming trial, but I guess that is being saved for later in the season (if the preview is any indication, it certainly won’t be a major factor next week). The only two things that happened this week related to the trial (Sharon telling Caprica she should help convict Baltar for his crimes and Zarek telling Roslin the trial is a bad idea) seemed to be there pretty much just to remind us that Gauis has been promised a trial, and that it will be happening at some point in the future.
Next week, Tyrol and Cally spend lots of time trapped inside an airlock. Hopefully it’ll be more exciting than it sounds.
