Amnesia

Fair warning: This does contain spoilers. While it’s usually my policy not to discuss plot elements in my reviews, there is just too much in Ron Moore’s creation that I need to digest!  

The updated Battlestar Galactica is like a lover you haven’t spoken to in awhile. You used to hang out together, discussing the vagaries of life and politics, making love, having fun and drowning in passion. Just when you’re hungering for more, confident that you’re about to take the ‘next step’ in your relationship, they suddenly disappear leaving you disappointed and hurt.

Finally, when the memories of your times together begin to fade and you’ve decided to move on, the familiar phone number flashes across your caller ID and your swept back up in the whirlwind.

This is exactly what happened last night only with one of my favorite TV shows. Sure, we had some ups and downs in our relationship over the years. Who doesn’t? For example, I didn’t care for BSG’s taste in music in the final episode of last season. “Along the Watchtower” by Jimmy Hendrix is a distinctly Terran song. By introducing popular Earthen culture into a show that for multiple seasons strove to avoid it, it felt strange and odd as if they were trying too hard to make a point, or felt their core audience was too stupid to understand coming implications. One of the main reasons I fell in love with the show, was their ability to make you think about hot topic issues without directly referencing them.

The most recent 2 hour special, “Battlestar Galactica - Razor” almost seemed to be something that tried to clean up an ever-growing mess. We follow the crew of the Battlestar Pegasus as we flip forward and back through time in what to first time viewers must have been utterly confusing. For those of you who don’t know, half way through the journey to find Earth, we learn that another ship survived the initial Cylon slaughter. After a few side plot lines, the Pegasus is ultimately destroyed when Commander Lee Adama sacrifices it to rescue people off of New Caprica.

In this most recent flashback, we meet Lt. Kendra Shaw, a drug addicted survivor of Admiral Cain’s legacy. I guess every Battlestar needs its own Starbuck. Having just been promoted to Commander of the Pegasus by his father, Lee Adama pegs the mouthy insubordinate for his XO, hoping to send a message that Cain’s influence is not lost under the new management.

Uh, what the frak?

We also find out how Gina (a number six) is captured aboard the Pegasus. While I originally thought she was brutally tortured because she was just a toaster, you learn that there was a very personal vendetta against the manipulating vixen. While the sexy bucket of bolts was secretly securing the ship’s computers for the enemy, she was concurrently bedding the Lady Cain. That model of Cylon certainly seems to get around! Aside from being a wood-inducing notion for most of the male population, it makes a lot of sense in how we see the Admiral progress throughout the 2 hours. We see the proud warrior progress from a militaristic yet notably human woman, into the very calculating machine she is hell bent on destroying.

In a pivotal scene, the Admiral commends Kendra Shaw after a fatal encounter with human refugees. Cain in a rather interesting interpretation of the biblical story, orders for the newly found ships to be raided for their parts, cargo and useful men and women, while the rest of the manifest is left to rot in the cold of space, utterly defenseless. Following orders to kill families of commandeered talent who resist transfer, the young soldier fires the first shot after the passengers rebel, killing 10 innocent fellow humans. 

Cain ultimately explains away the situation as a necessity, overcoming basic human morality for the survival of the species. Using the ultra-sharp razor knife as a metaphor, only then do you realize she is as cold and as calculating as the machine who is locked in her brig. There is no hope for Cain at that point, even though she insists her deeds are so that the human race can live.

In another plot line twist, we find out that during the first Cylon war, the older Adama crash landed in enemy territory and came upon the experimental labs that we’re lead to believe held the first hybrid model. It was very hard for me to swallow that a man of his intelligence couldn’t put together the facts of his unscheduled visit. When you see a lab filled with butchered human parts in various stages of bonding with machine parts, my first guess wouldn’t be that they were building some sort of super weapon. I’d be ripping off people’s faces to find the chrome beneath the skin, or at least be wary that it was even a possibility. It didn’t even seem to dawn on Adama that it was plausible until his first encounter with Leoben. Then, as if some huge light goes off in his head, he finally puts two and two together only after the damage has been done.

We also find out in one of the final scenes that atop everything Kendra Shaw had to endure under Cain, she had her own part to play in destiny. In another moment of, ‘doh, the nuke remote won’t start, we’ll have to manually detonate’ a wounded Major Shaw pulls a Bruce Willis in “Armageddon” and defies orders to leave Kara “Starbuck” Thrace to an honorable death. She instead learns in her final moments from the elderly hybrid that Kara should really be changing her call sign to ‘Harbinger of Death’, but ain’t it a pity that communications just happen to scrambled again before the base star goes boom. It seems that Kara Thrace will indeed lead the human race to their destruction. We even got to see some hints of this plotline in the trailer for the new season.

While I may sound harsh in my criticisms and hole poking, I did love the show. I stared at my lover across the table with eager eyes and wonder, as if he had never left. Ultimately ending the evening between the sheets, I caught my breath for the first time, only to realize that as quickly as he appeared, he was gone, promising to call me in another four months.

I’ll be waiting. Pathetic or not.