Resistance

[thepouncer.livejournal.com]

And they all fall down. Events have been progressing, inexorably, from the discovery of Kobol at the end of last season. That drove President Roslin’s quest to find the Arrow of Apollo, subverting Starbuck to her cause. For this blow to his pride and emotions, Commander Adama was determined to remove Roslin from office. His son Lee’s loyalty to the Articles of Colonization wouldn’t allow the lawful President to be overthrown. And thus onward to the Vice President’s loss on Kobol, Boomer shooting Adama, Lee in the brig alongside Roslin, and the woefully unprepared Col. Tigh in command of the fleet.

Splintering the Fleet

Tigh’s decisions became worse and worse: over the past few episodes we’ve seen his reliance on alcohol, his inability to comprehend the myriad details of his new position, his rising stress levels. After his declaration of marshal law, after Roslin’s revelation of her cancer and the role it plays in her belief that the Sacred Scrolls of the Colonial religion will lead them to Earth, the fleet is sundered. Some captains refuse to transfer supplies, some promise other types of civil disobedience. This is a crisis, pure and simple. The only way the remnants of humanity will survive is if they are together, rallied behind their cause. Tigh’s actions shattered the fragile consensus and he doesn’t know what to do to mend the fault. His initial urge, to gather the rebel captains together and explain his thinking, is shot down by his toxic wife Ellen.

I knew, back when she was first introduced, that Ellen Tigh was trouble personified. And her behavior since Kobol’s Last Gleaming has born that prediction out. She’s manipulated her husband at every turn, attempting to position him at the apex of the Colonial hierarchy, but it’s a position he rejects. Tigh doesn’t want to lead, knows he isn’t cut out for it, and everything he does only makes the situation worse. He allows Ellen’s blandishment to sway him and tells the rebellious captains that they better do what he says, or else. And when they don’t fall in line, Tigh must follow through on his threats, but he does it in a half-assed manner telling Lt. Gaeta to draft pilots and deck officers if necessary. “Whatever it takes” leads to a massacre.

And here we see Adama’s concern, stated all the way back when the survivors first left the Colonies, that his soldiers would come to see the people as the enemy, come true. Tigh sends unprepared, untrained personnel to subdue the restless ships, but he doesn’t follow the first rule of military action. Any armed force lives and dies on its organization, its planning – all essential to achieving its objective. Instead, Tigh sent pilots with no ground combat or crowd control experience, and he reaped his bitter harvest. Unarmed civilians shot dead by Marines in riot gear. Doc Cottle tells it like it is, in the aftermath: “What did you expect, genius? You put a pilot in charge of crowd control.”

Waiting No Longer

The fallout will be huge, and the fleet will splinter even more. None of the survivors is prepared for the new roles they must play, but some adapt better than others. Roslin, for instance, may not have wanted to be President at first but had no choice. And she knows she cannot afford to sit in the brig any longer. She sees her people crumbling around her; the “travesty” of the massacre compels her to act, because she can forecast their future: divided and picked off by the Cylons.

Her favored pilot, Captain Adama, may have supported her originally because of principles, but he too can see that Tigh’s leadership is disastrous. And thus they plot and scheme to get Roslin off Galactica and into the fleet. I loved how the guard’s faith in Roslin’s divine favor paid off here – it was totally believable that he would support her escape attempt. The conspiracy extends to other, more integral, military personnel as well. Dualla had seen Tigh’s meltdowns with her own eyes, and helped contact Zarek and arrange for flight clearance. Even Lt. Gaeta, that by-the-book stickler, was willing to look the other way. Personal loyalties weave a tangled mess on this show, and I love every second.

I adore Roslin. Once again, her manner in dealing with others is direct and no-nonsense. She asks for Apollo’s support and collapses in relief when he grants it. Then she works on drawing in other people necessary to make their plan work. She asks Doc Cottle’s help with the unvarnished truth and her “lousy” sales pitch does the job. Then, when faced with an armed sentry on her way to the hanger bay, Roslin calls on their shared duty to uphold the Articles of Colonization and the guard lets her pass.

The enemy of my enemy is my friend, indeed. Apollo thought of Tom Zarek when he needed someone to aid their escape. Roslin will need to keep moving, and I loved that Lee told her that Zarek was the only one with enough “shady friends” to keep them ahead of searchers.

Family Loyalty

Before departing Galactica, Lee visits his sedated father one last time. That he felt the need to say goodbye, that he told his father this wasn’t about them, even knowing his father probably couldn’t hear him, made me want to cry. Lee does love his father, despite all their difficulties.

In the end, Tigh’s awareness of that love, of Bill’s reaction if he were to order Lee’s death, stills his hand. “It was his son,” he tells his wife later. He’s made so many wrong steps, and pauses long enough to think this one through. Tigh allows the stolen Raptor to reach Cloud Nine, from whence Roslin and Apollo can disappear into the fleet. Ellen Tigh has a meltdown over the escape, but she and her husband can’t progress to violent makeup sex because Adama has woken! Yay! Although Bill tells Tigh that he won’t second guess his command decisions, I think this has more to do with Adama’s need to put the situation to rights then any real unconcern. He needs Tigh as a competent second, not a broken former commander. Still, since Bill’s first question is “What’s happening on my ship?” I expect that things will change real soon now, and that Adama will have a few private rages about Tigh’s actions while he was injured.

The Power of Love

Baltar knows that “love is a strange and wonderful thing,” and interacts with two of its strangest victims: Boomer and Tyrol. The Chief probably thought his return to Galactica from Kobol would bring safety, but instead he finds himself under suspicion of being a Cylon. Informed at long last of his former lover’s attack on Commander Adama, Tyrol is disbelieving. He denies all knowledge of Boomer’s Cylon nature, but the flicker of his eyes indicates that he did know something. He just couldn’t afford to admit it to himself. Anger and loathing erupt when he’s incarcerated with Sharon, who wants desperately to make amends. He refuses her advances, always, but we see the power of her love when Baltar implements his ruse.

Baltar faces his own difficulties – he passed Lt. Valerii with his Cylon detector, so Tigh knows that it didn’t work. To prevent the truth from coming to light – that Baltar lied, that Baltar’s affair with a Cylon facilitated their attack, that he still has a blond Amazon (whose anti-“Toaster” stance made me giggle) directing his actions – Baltar needs to scurry and swerve and deflect suspicion. By threatening Tyrol with death, Baltar manages to elicit the information that there are eight Cylons hidden in the fleet from Boomer. The question I have is how reliable her information is. Baltar’s inquisition was based on the assumption that Boomer would know, somewhere deep inside her. That eight Cylons add together with the four human types we’ve seen thus far (Six, Boomer, Doral, Leoben) to make twelve, would seem to indicate that Six’s initial fact about twelve Cylon models doesn’t include Centurions or Raiders or Basestars or that unnamed transport ship from Valley of Darkness. But can we trust Boomer to have told the truth? Or will another witch hunt against the innocent result?

Another kind of love acts on Cally. On Kobol, she and the Chief banded together to survive and she’s outraged at his imprisonment. First she tries to get Baltar’s help, intimating that the Chief’s silence is needed on the matter of Crashdown’s death. Lies tie them together just like Tyrol was tied to Socinus when the crewman lied to protect his Chief’s affair with Boomer. Baltar won’t cave, and Cally’s anger later erupts at the crewman building a new cage for Tyrol. The crewman tells her it’s all Boomer’s fault, and thus we get the reenactment of Jack Ruby shooting Lee Harvey Oswald. I knew, the moment I saw the jeering crowd, that Boomer wouldn’t make it. That it was Cally surprised me at first, but reflection showed the sense of her progression to murder. Cylons killed her family and friends, drove her into space, and then tried to assassinate her remote commander. That Boomer’s relationship with Tyrol made him a target of suspicion could not be borne. And thus we get another echo of John F. Kennedy’s assassination, following Roslin’s swearing in as President in the miniseries.

Red Dawn Caprica

Back on Caprica, Starbuck and Helo are trying to figure out where they are. Their exchange over map reading and navigation and driving, along with their quick actions when they discern a threat, demonstrates their friendship. They’ve known each other long enough to have developed a short-hand method of communication. And their ambushers turn out to be the Caprica Buccaneers, a Pyramid team who were in the mountains at the time of the Cylon attack. I’ve seen, in my quick skim of post-episode reaction, some disbelief that these sports guys could turn themselves into a resistance force. But Starbuck’s question about number of fouls in a playoff game called the classic Cold War film Red Dawn to my mind, so I’m willing to go with it.

In Red Dawn, a high school football team eludes a Soviet invasion and transform their hunting guns into weapons against the occupation. At one point, an American pilot is shot down in the area. The kids (calling themselves “Wolverines” after their high school mascot) find him but are suspicious that he’s really a Russian. They ask him the capital of Texas (which he gets wrong, by the way) to prove his American status. So Starbuck and Ander’s exchange over number of fouls made me giggle, and her later remark that 53 are a bunch more likely to be able to steal a ship and reunite with the Fleet made me happy – I can’t wait to see it happen. That she and Anders view a Pyramid match as foreplay makes it that much better.

Blood to Blood

Blood to blood, human wounding suspected Cylon, human killing known Cylon for revenge. Tangled loyalties, splintered factions, betrayal and love. I love this show.