Going in to this week’s episode my expectations were pretty low. Last week’s episode was really bad, and then the preview for “A Day in the Life” made it seem like the whole episode was going to just be about the Tyrol and Cally being trapped in an airlock; it wasn’t exactly a recipe for success. And yet, despite my initial skepticism, “A Day in the Life” actually turned out to be a solid episode. It wasn’t the best episode we’ve ever seen, and, in the grand scheme of the show, it wasn’t one that is ever going to be seen as particularly important, but it was good.
While watching the episode, I realized that part of the reason the episode was working well was that, with the plethora of deaths so far in season three (Ellen Tigh, Kat, sort of the Threes), Battlestar Galactica has become a show where anyone can die. Or at least one where any minor character can die. If it had been say, Starbuck and Apollo trapped in that airlock, there wouldn’t have been the least bit of doubt as to whether or not they would make it out alive. But, given that Tyrol and Cally are relatively minor characters, and have no heavy involvement in any of the major story arcs right now, they are expendable so there was some doubt as to whether or not they would survive.
Things were really looking bad for them when their rescue was attempted with twenty minutes left in the episode. Normally in a situation like that, the final rescue happens a little closer to the end of the episode. An early rescue usually means either A) something will go wrong and the crew will have to come up with a new plan, or B) the rescue will be botched in some way, resulting in the death of one or more of the people who were supposed to be rescued (people often die with lots of time left in the episode so time can be devoted to reaction/funereal scenes/etc). And seeing as the rescue plan involved ejecting Cally and the Chief into space, there really wasn’t a way for them to have a second rescue attempt. Once you’re throwing people into the vacuum of space, you don’t exactly have time for a second rescue attempt later.
Speaking of people ending up on the wrong side of the hull, I bet the Chief has a whole new appreciation for his time with the Circle. Granted, he never really seemed comfortable with it to begin with, and less so after the whole Gaeta incident, but now that he’s had a first-hand taste of the fun of being airlocked, one imagines he’ll feel even less proud of the time he spent throwing people out of airlocks.
The one reason why this wasn’t a ‘Chief and Cally are likely to die’ episode is that it was actually an Admiral Adama episode. Most of the time, if you’re going to kill off a couple semi-important characters, you make them the central focus of the episode. The real reason they had to go through all that was partly to patch up their own marriage, but mostly so Adama could see the Chief tell Cally about how they were going to find a way to balance their lives with their duty. I’m sure Cally’s glad she gets to spend days or weeks in a big tube just to underline the importance of balance to Adama.
And it looks like Baltar wasn’t the first person to enjoy some hallucofantasies. Though, Bill Adama’s do seem to be much more in his own head as opposed to having some sort of connection to some other mysterious entity. It was still kind of weird seeing him holding conversations with someone who wasn’t really there though. Especially when it was his ex-wife, his dead ex-wife.
Adama’s dead ex-wife was quite the charmer though, wasn’t she? She never really came off too well in Adama’s imagination to begin with, and then we found out from Lee that she spent a lot of time abusing the kids after Adama left (it’s never made clear whether it was emotional abuse or physical abuse, but Lee didn’t seem to hold a lot of affection for the woman, in either case) which makes her an even more sympathetic character. We never really get to see a lot of the woman that would show us why Bill fell in love with her in the first place, but that wasn’t really what the episode was about.
I liked the scenes this week between Bill and Lee. I less liked the scenes between Bill and Laura. The scenes themselves were fine (I really liked the little callback to Bill’s never loan a book speech for so very long ago), I just don’t really like where they are headed. While Roslin has dialed down the crazy, religious fundamentalist part of her character this season, I’m still not a huge fan. Plus, as Adama alluded, it really wouldn’t be a good idea for the two most powerful people in the fleet to have a relationship. It would complicate things for the two of them to get together, and the situation would be even more complicated should the relationship come to a bad end. It’s not like they can just avoid each other if things go badly. Of all the people in the fleet, they represent probably the worst possible pairing, just because of the positions they occupy. If they want to hook up after Adama retires or Roslin is no longer president, that’s fine, but right now it would be a bad, bad idea.
That’s all until next week when we get to relive the battle for miner’s rights around the turn of the 20th century, but in space!
