Battlestar Galactica Ep 6, 4.5 review: Deadlock

Cylons Sharon/Boomer Eight and Caprica Six

SPOILER ALERT Look away now.

Written by Buffy veteran Jane Espenson, Deadlock, Episode 6 of 10, brings Ellen Tigh back to Galactica’s crippled fleet, now carrying 39,556 surviving humans with no prospect of sanctuary.

Dead alcoholic Ellen was revealed in the first episode of the series to be the Mother of the 13th Cylon Tribe. Revived and tidied up in last week's episode, she had displayed the powerful side of her character when confronting Brother “Jon” Cavil (Cylon model Two) over his determination to wipe out the humans. She’s now delivered by one of the Boomers (Cylon model Eight) to the Galactica. With food running out and tempers high, the old ships aren’t the only things falling apart from wear and stress. As Gaius Baltar later observes, starving humans don’t make for a mutiny, they make a revolution.

But far from representing hope, this particular “revolution” is a venting mechanism for all the humans’ fears and frustrations and of course, the Cylon outsiders are the obvious scapegoats even though they are providing the stricken ships with superior technology to get them out of their current mess. Admiral Adama and President Roslin are at a loss what to do. It’s interesting that in this post-911 allegory, with its critique of the War on Terror, our sympathy is orientated towards the military and political leadership — representing stability, order among chaos — caught between the threat of imminent detection and obliteration by Brother Cavil’s Cylon army (al Qaeda, as some have suggested), and the humans on auto-destruct (civil unrest at home).

Despite a major personality and grooming make-over, the dipso maneater of old is still at Ellen’s core. She informs Admiral Bill Adama and his officers that Brother Cavil intends to rebuild the Resurrection Ship which recreates Cylons when they die and which our heroes had managed to destroy. But before her husband, Colonel Tigh (revealed previously as a reluctant Cylon), can tell her, “I made Caprica Six pregnant”, she’s shagging him on the table, his eyepatch and cares tossed to the stellar winds.

They've been doing this for thousands of years throughout their numerous reincarnations. So when Ellen does find out that there’s a Cylon baby on the way, instead of greeting this as an evolutionary marvel that will ensure the continuation of their species without the Resurrection ship, she gets jealous. Hmm, not so enlightened and omniscient, after all. As she reminds him and us, she and Tigh created Six all those thousands of years before. She eventually makes her peace with them.

Caprica Six yearns to be “pure and safe". Sensing danger, she and Boomer propose to the Cylons that they escape by taking the base ship. Tigh and Sam, still ill from a bullet wound to the head, oppose the move.

The tension takes its toll and Caprica Six loses the baby. With procreation no longer a viable alternative, the survival of the species will depend on the return of the Resurrection ship.

Ellen and Colonel Saul Tigh

The writers are still having fun with Gaius Baltar who is as slimy and self-preserving as ever. Providing a darkly comic commentary on the absurdities of ruddereless humanity under threat, his every selfish action is (mis)interpreted by his cult followers as being of supreme spiritual significance, reflecting life as it is and not as it should be, as well as chucking in an homage to Life of Brian.

This week Gaius has to find a way to scupper the female leader who emerged during his absence when he ran away to save himself, and whose qualities of smarts, courage and tactical thinking he recognises as a threat to his position as top dog among the airheads and losers who make up his troup of female acolytes.

Gaius rails against the Cylons, even though his phantom internal Six is back as his guiding light. He acquires superior weaponry, enabling his women to fight off a male cult that's been stealing their food, and regains his position as leader.

Elsewhere, in another reference to 911, our Cylons are sticking photos of dead loved ones and comrades onto a Ground Zero wall of rememberance on the Galactica; which is touching but separate from the ones the humans are using. Mourning is no healing process. It's one more marker in the gulf between two species who actually have so much in common.

Gaius Baltar

BSG Season 4.5 Episode 1 review: Sometimes A Great Notion
BSG Season 4.5 Episode 3 review: The Oath
List of Battlestar Galactica (reimagined series) episodes here
Screen Junkies' excellent and thorough BSG recap and flowchart!

Battlestar Galactica 4.5 Review: Ep 3 The Oath

SPOILER ALERT

Let us look through a glass darkly and imagine a world where this could happen.

You’re in a pressure cooker with disaster staring you in the face, your dreams dashed, no future, social meltdown. The foreigners in your midst who were once your friends, partners, workmates are now the enemy and have to be destroyed. It’s us or them.

Yup, that’s either us on Planet Earth 2009 or the 39,643 survivors of the human race in the Battlestar Galactica fleet who have started killing each other.

Just as a new era of brother and sisterhood promises to dawn rosily, wouldn’t you know it, fear-fuelled bigotry feeds the demagogues and triggers an uprising that may end in auto-extinction of the species. The four crew who have recently discovered they are the Final Cylons — Colonel Saul Tigh, Chief Galen Tyrol, Lt Sharon “Athena” Agathon, and Ensign Samuel Anders — find themselves personae non grata, and prevented from boarding the fleet’s ships without permission.

This is inconvenient as, with trillium fuel running out, Six has promised the fleet valuable FDL drives. The Quorum parliament is told to toe the line by Admiral Adama’s military leadership desperate for the superior Cylon technology.

Vice President Tom Zarek turns into Dennis Kearney and whips up anti-Cylon hatred into a militant uprising by the civilians and sections of the military led by Lt Felix Gaeta against the interlopers. He uses the “Will of the People” to justify murder and a power grab with the help of Gaeta, bitter about the loss of his leg, effectively rendered by CGI.

All before the opening credits.

In The Oath, Episode 3 of the final series, the pressure is piled on relentlessly as terror of Cylon sabotage become self-fulfilling. You can't miss the irony of the fact that the great destruction they seek to avoid is actually coming from themselves, rotting them from within as the humans lose their humanity and the Cylons gain theirs. Old ties are broken, lovers betrayed. Even ex-girlfriends can’t be trusted. Sam Anders is captured by Diana and her team of kidnappers, bashed up and thrown in the brig.

Athena and her daughter are seized and her human husband, Helo, brutally beaten. One mutineer tells Helo, “You backed the skin-job against your own kind” and threatens to rape his “sweet toaster wife”. For the next few minutes I was transfixed by the image of his big-brain stuck in my four-slice. Driving home that this is an assault on all that is precious and even The Family isn't safe, they are jailed along with Sam and Six.

A former comrade tells Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, "No-one knows what you are any more". Hey, I told you I identified with Starbuck.

On the Colonial One ship, civilians are tooling up. The old lefty call to arms “whose side are you on?” is now a reactionary rallying cry. Lee Adama, still in the civilian government, is isolated and concerned for his father. Zarek tells Lee, “Honour thy father and be true to your oath” can no longer work when stakes and passions are this high. They fear, not without reason, that Adama’s experiment in democracy is about to end, but the means by which they are challenging his rule is about to result in the fascism they are desperate to avoid.

Kara saves Lee Adama from a murderous rebel crew. But all five Cylons are now in danger.

Back in the brig, Six, pregnant with Tigh’s baby, observes that “the thought that the Cylon race can survive through natural procreation terrifies them”. Their world is so frakked that making love is making war.

On the Galactica, Gaeta’s rebel troops kill Adama’s staff on the bridge. Justifying his actions to a horrified Adama, Gaeta asks why has he worked so faithfully all these years only to take orders from a Cylon.

The fleet tears itself apart. Headless chickens come home to roost and run around shooting each other. Metaphors are mangled, that's how bad it gets. Who’ll retain their integrity? Who’ll panic? Who will abandon their humanity and give in to base instincts? Almost everyone who isn’t a Cylon or already in power, that's who. Is this what the makers of the series envisage? That faced with economic meltdown, environmental disaster on a shrinking planet, and everything else that comes with it, this is how we will respond? It's a gloomy warning we could do with heeding. But why change that habit of a couple of million years?

Gaius Baltar’s base instinct is to leave his adoring harem and run for cover. President Laura Roslin appeals to Baltar’s sense of self-preservation and gets his wireless communication. They both know they are frauds and this is their chance to atone. Bursts of music transmitted deep into the psyches of the entire crew, the same that heralded the revelation to the Final Five Cylons of their true identity, hold out the promise that everyone might eventually recognise their common humanity and stop frakking around. Huh! That'll be the day.

President Roslin broadcasts an appeal: Reject those traitors who would use your fear of the Cylons. She’s cut off before she can finish. Baltar calls Gaeta and reminds him of “our little secret” hidden away. Having forgotten what this is, I can only imagine Gaius has Felix's leg stowed away as some sort of pervy memento.

Tigh and Adama have overpowered their captors and joined forces with Kara and Tyrol. Tyrol arranges an escape craft, but escape to where? Claustrophobia mounts, danger closes in. Will President Roslin, Baltar, Lee, and Kara escape in the Raptor? Gaeta, fully aware of who’s likely to be on the craft, orders it to be destroyed. Tigh and Adama — Cylon and human — stay to fight side by side to the bitter end.

And there we must leave it until next week's exciting instalment of "It's Us, Really!"

BSG Season 4.5 Episode 1 review
BSG Season 4.5 Episode 6 review

Battlestar Galactica Season 4.5 Review: Frakk to the Future

Spoiler alert.

Now we know. It’s us in the future. The long-hoped-for return to their origins in ashes — a dead Mother Earth. Irradiated. Nuked two millennia back, its great cities felled. Nothing left to fall back on, just a dream of how it once was and will never be again. A bit like Iggy Pop in the Swiftcover sponsor commercials topping and tailing each segment.

“Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown and wrinkled lip and sneer of cold command tell that its sculptor well those passions read which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things, the hand that mock'd them and the heart that fed. Look upon my works, ye Mighty, and despair! Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare, the lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Someone had an advanced sense of symmetry when they stuck Iggy in there — hyper-appropriate or what?

So this was home and the Thirteenth Tribe was Cylon. Just how bad can it get?

For some the devastating news is liberating. But not in the way we expect. A Beloved Character bites the bullet and won’t be coming back.

Others will.

The last series of Battlestar Galactica began tonight (UK). Ten episodes taking us to the end of a cosmic ride in which the human race has been reduced to 39,751 souls lost in space, chased by a robotic nemesis bent on their extinction. But the enemy is ourselves: images of a shattered Gaza still vivid and merging with the myth of the Twelve Tribes of Israel scattered to the Colonies.

Starbuck, my favourite character, the one with whom I identify most, discovers the hard way that she’s a Cylon. Or is she? The Fifth Cylon is revealed.

All the Big Questions are rolled into a big ball and chucked at us in a kicker of an opening. Who are we? Where did we come from? What makes us human?

Dylan’s All Along The Watchtower is reprised for those who can hear. Let us not talk falsely now, the hour’s getting late.

Madam President as irritating as ever. She’s dying of cancer but she’s taking the knowledge and the Pythian Prophecy with her, burning her history, burning ours. Starbuck’s burning hers.

So many questions. And only nine episodes left.

BSG Season 4.5 Episode 3 review: The Oath
BSG Season 4.5 Episode 6 review: Deadlock





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