The best a Cylon can get
I saw Battlestar Galactica: Razor a couple weeks ago, but it aired last night and finally people are talking about it, and a friend of mine asked me what I thought. I thought it was okay. Had its moments.
"Sean--that's all you got?!?!"
Yeah, that's pretty much all I got. It wasn't the most inspiring thing in the world, for good or ill. If it were just a regular episode I'd just shrug my shoulders and say "let's see what happens next week." But I'll try:
* One thing that bothers me is that they didn't show any physical affection at all between the Pegasus Six and Cain. I thought that was a cop-out. Not just because I want to watch sex scenes between Tricia Helfer and Michelle Forbes, though I do, and often, but because every other couple (Tory and Anders for gods' sakes!) gets their steamy slap'n'tickle sessions on camera for all to see. Why not the Gina and the Admiral? To paraphrase Law & Order, is it because they're lesbians? You'd think after all the flack the show is taken for not having any gay characters, when they finally did introduce them they'd go the whole hog with 'em. Especially because they're women and not guys, which makes the whole thing easier to swallow for the hoi polloi.
* I loved the old-school Cylons. I want more! (And I never watched the old show.)
* My other big beef is that we never get a real reason for Cain to be such a fascist hardass. The attack happens and boom, she's shooting her XO in the head for not sending troops on a futile suicide run. If the idea is that she was always a nut and the Cylon attack just took off the handcuffs, that should have been better articulated.
* That flashback seems like something Adama should have brought up earlier, huh? This was the same pitfall I thought they narrowly avoided with the whole "Adama triggered the first post-ceasefire hostilities with they Cylons" story because they tied in his guilt about losing his friend Bulldog and that made his silence feasible. No such excuse here.
* I get impatient with fiction drawing out things we've already figured out long ago, it's obviously a pet peeve of mine lately, but for real, were we not supposed to know that Kendra fired the first shots against the unarmed civilians?
* Still, it's Battlestar Galactica and therefore better than 90% of anything else you could watch. Kendra was a cool character and well-acted. (Her bad skin was sexy!) Adama's flashback and Kendra's confrontation with the hybrid were good and creepy. Watching the Pegaus's descent into collective madness was depressing and frightening. Lee, Kara, and Bill are still endlessly compelling.
In closing, it's a goddamn crime that we have to wait until February April for more epsiodes of this show, and until god knows when for the end of the series.
![[rss]](/images/rss.gif "ATF RSS Feeds"){kind=small}
Comments (6)
So there's an American colony, a Canadian colony, a British colony, and now an Australian colony. No French?
Posted by Jim Treacher | November 25, 2007 12:24 PM
After all, they've spent the whole time running...
Posted by Jim Treacher | November 25, 2007 1:47 PM
I love that you came back an hour and a half later to add the punchline.
Posted by Sean | November 25, 2007 5:56 PM
It takes me a while!
Posted by Jim Treacher | November 25, 2007 8:30 PM
And we get to see the results in real-time. Advantage: blogosphere!
Posted by Sean | November 25, 2007 8:41 PM
I just saw it last night. I thought better of it than you did, but I had your same concerns, especially about the Adama flashback.
I figure it was a long time ago, and he didn't realize at the time that they were doing anything other than torturing/experimenting on humans, certainly not creating human looking Cylons, and he didn't quite connect that experience to the human looking Cylons turning up 40 years later until the events of this episode jogged his memory.
I was also kinda disappointed in how they portrayed Cain. Just going by the Pegasus trilogy, the message seemed that she did very horrible, questionable things, but I came out of that initial trilogy with amibigous thoughts on what to make of her. I obviously disagreed with her actions, at the same time as allowing that she and her crew probably underwent severely more horrific events than the Galactica fleet, and I guess hoping there was more guilt and hand wringing on her part for the questionably necessary evils she felt she had to do. It seemed she had a side of the story that, maybe wouldn't entirely exonerate her, but at least made her actions understandble.
But after Razor, she comes across as much more monstrous, much less sympathetic or complex. No, she didn't question or feel guilty at all about what she was doing, and it actually seemed she was doing alot of it b/c she was pissed off at Gina. Her depiction in Razor made her alot less complex and empathetic, no matter how many scenes they put in of Adama and Lee discussing her actions and giving her a slight pass.
Posted by Charles R | November 27, 2007 9:00 AM