Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, and also, civilian life

[no-absolutes.livejournal.com]

non-spoiler review of "Resurrection Ship": aaaaaaaauuuuuggghhh!
spoiler-filled review under the cut.




they're going to kill each other! holy crap! i know they're not actually going to kill each other, but damn. Roslin is so serious about this. she's staring death in the face and now she's making the kind of decisions that are really stressing the meaning of her relationship with Adama for the whole fleet. that's a lot to handle. the question of who her successor would be is a pretty important one, right now. but i'm hopeful that we'll get lots of action in the meantime because the next episode has to play out things that have already been set in motion, and this isn't one of them.
btw, why is Kara so badass? why? and i didn't know the Blackbird had an FTL drive. did they crib that from the Cylon raider, or what? i'm confused, i haven't watched the episodes from the first half of the season in a while.
it freaks me out that Starbuck bonded so readily with Cain without being clued in to the shady, no-holds-barred side of the Admiral. i mean, it doesn't exactly look like Starbuck is the kind of officer Cain really puts at her side, she seems to prefer the obedient type to the type who'll take matters into her own hands. while it looks like that's Cain's own style, it looks even more like she reserves that kind of initiative for herself. so either she thinks she has Starbuck in check, which is quite impossible, or Starbuck really is unique, which says a lot for her character.

something i wonder about-- didn't any of the Galactica crew know any of the Pegasus crew from before the Cylon attack? and doesn't anyone in the (admittedly, diminished) civilian population know anyone on the Pegasus? does anyone but me find it hard to believe that everyone's family, everyone's friends and colleagues from all 12 colonies is gone besides the people who are already together on the ships we know about, and the reemergence of the Pegasus didn't change anything? take the situation with Ellen Tigh, for instance (whose role looks, to me to have been sublimated into Roslin in this episode). i never like it and i think it's bad for an ongoing series when the characters' social worlds are entirely self-contained.
i do see how the revelations about Cain scrapping the civilians the Pegasus came across make this less likely. at the same time, i think even the tiny addition of a few conscripted civilians to the Pegasus crew makes it more likely that, say, those people might want to see who among the 40-odd thousand survivors might be someone from whom they got separated after the attack. i get that the show focuses on the military-- hence the incredible impending hotness of the next episode about which the civilian fleet could give a rat's ass and probably knows nothing-- but there are always people posted to different places throughout their careers who know each other from civilian life or from training together.
all that aside. this was spectacular. Ron Moore has an edge on this kind of thing. it wouldn't play in any other genre, and i don't think there's anything on TV layering on the action better. if there is, i think i might explode.

Comments

[archaica.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but in the real navy/military, crews get rotated all the time .... even commanding officers get replaced every couple years or so. It's not like Star Trek, where the same captain has a starship for 20 years or so.

[no-absolutes.livejournal.com]

yeah, that's something. Cain is as singular in the fleet as Starbuck. she probably went through much of the same coming up and there's no reason to believe Starbuck wouldn't go as far as she would to get her way, if she were an Admiral. but she's a pilot. i wonder where Cain came from?

[garybaldy.livejournal.com]

In the NAVY, the captain of an aircraft carrier Had to be a flight officer. Things go more smoother for the CAG if he works with someone who understands what pilots need. But i don't believe the same is required of an admiral

I imagine Commander Adama would have a flight back ground. But i'm not sure about Cain

[residentgeek.livejournal.com]

Replacing Roslin - isn't Baltar still the VP? If so, then legally he would replace her until the election, which they're supposed to have pretty soon. Of course, there are lots of people who would want the job, including Tom Zarek. Not that I particularly want Roslin to not be around anymore, but I'd hate for the writers to pull a miracle cure out of their ass and ruin the believability of the show.

[no-absolutes.livejournal.com]

same here-- i want Roslin to stick around. but she's got like, a couple episodes left. fortunately, since Pegasus, those eps have been one day at a time, which means her "weeks, a month at the outside" could last the rest of the season. Baltar as VP is such an underutilized plot thread. if &when he became president of the colonies, that would be a great dramatic place. but Roslin carries a huge part of the show, so i doubt she'll be going anywhere-- i'd rather she'd stay than go, even if she's a Cylon. but wouldn't Baltar know that?

[residentgeek.livejournal.com]

If they stretch the timeline right, she could be around until the end of the season, and have her big death scene right at the end. In fact, that would probably be a good thing, because then you could start the third season fresh (so to speak).

Baltar didn't seem to know that D'Anna Biers was a cylon, so I don't think he's got built in cylon radar. And Six probably only lets him in on it when it suits her. So Roslin could still be a cylon and Baltar not know it just because Six wants to see his reaction. Or something :o)