Because gloating never goes out of style, I’m going to start off by pointing out that right after “No Exit” aired and we found out there was another Cylon named Daniel, I said:
The 13th Cylon wasn’t Kara, but it will turn out that Daniel was Kara’s father.
By the end of the Episode That Forgot Not To Suck was over, I think it was more clear that they were heading in this direction, but I just want to gloat for a moment and say, “Called it early!” There’s not much else to say about the piano sequence, except they genuinely surprised me with the fact that it was all a hallucination of Kara’s. Since much of the rest of the episode relied so heavily on the Cylon projection ability (which is cool and has barely been explored), I have to maintain that Daniel is alive somewhere and was projecting himself on Kara’s mind for some reason. Maybe to warm her up to the realization that she’s half-Cylon. The return of the Head Six in the last episode will probably be relevant.
On the whole, the episode was really good, and went a long way to repairing the rift caused by sucking beyond belief last episode. I predict that they’re going to finish strong, though this show was remarkably slow for the run-up to the finale of the entire series. The Chief/Boomer thing was important, and it got real interesting as soon as Chief let Boomer escape, but it dragged out too long. We didn’t need drawn-out fantasies of domestic bliss to believe that Chief was vulnerable to Boomer—-I believed he’d let her out the second he went to visit her. Adding one fantasy would have been nice, but I wanted to see more Boomer doing evil shit and less Boomer fucking with Chief’s mind. The scene where Boomer fucked Helo in front of Athena was especially awesome. The fact that Cylon models are all identical twins of everyone else in their line was used to great effect early in the show, but it was sort of dropped. Even though there’s potential galore there, and they used it again well. One thing I think will happen is that the Boomer betrayal will firm up Chief’s loyalties to the fleet, leaving only Tory of the final five as untrustworthy.
That this was the plan from the beginning—-use Ellen to install Boomer back into their midst, where she could take Hera and run—-is pretty awesome. I didn’t see it coming, because Boomer’s shifted loyalties so often that I really did believe that she would yet again shift loyalties from Cavil to Ellen. I love a well-played double cross. Now I really have no idea where they’re going to take this. Each fleet now has one half-human/half-Cylon person, and somehow that’s going to become a big deal. But I’m not sure how. Does this mean they can both go their own ways? Or does it raise the stakes for a final blow-out?
Of course, the most important question of all is: How are they going to survive, blow-out or no? This episode made it very clear that the fleet is low of supplies like toothpaste and certainly food, and just as disturbingly, they have the smallest group of soldiers defending the fleet they’ve had this entire time. The mutiny drained them of soldiers, since all the mutineers had to be sent to the prison ship. Galactica now has a giant hole in her side, and the fleet can’t even jump around to look for new planets, because Galactica is so broken and battered. It’s tough to say right now if the ship being so battered will matter when it comes to the final fight with the Cavil loyalists, or if it’s just going to be a plot point to ratchet up tension before that happens. It’ll be interesting if the fleet’s best defense against Cylon attack, which is jumping away, is taken away from them.
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I really liked this episode. I thought the part at the beginning, showing Starbuck preparing for her duties, struggling to put one foot in front of the other, was awesome, and hearkened back to the beginning of the series. They are lost again, and where the hell are they going to go?
I also loved the “I’m not being diplomatic, you jackass, I said I liked it” line.
The question now is—clearly Cavil knows where they are, so why hasn’t he come to kill them yet? It must mean he has something even more sick and twisted in mind. Maybe pertaining to the “colony” that he mentioned to Ellen?