BSG 3.04: Bombs and babies

[hazelk]

Two posts in one day. Could be something in the water.


The Innocence to Part I’s Surprise, this certainly felt like all the set up was justified. The big set piece fused its Dunkirk scenario with a bracing dose of calvalry coming to the rescue, viscerally demonstrating why some things are classics. I believed Adama père hadn’t factored in two extra basestars. I cheered when Adama fils turned up just before the ship went down. I momentarily pondered the possibility of the two of them playing death-wish death-match, briefly considered the parallels between Lee’s strategy and the earlier small-scale suicide-bombing of the Resistance, appreciated the nod to the notion of the captain going down with his ship and was much relieved when common sense won out over military sentiment.

As is often the case the real interest lay a little left field of the big action. Ellen Tigh took her final medicine from her husband’s hands without one grain of sugar and left the series with more grace than could have been imagined possible from her failed French farce beginnings. In retrospect, and for this one moment, her passion for Saul seemed strangely pure, uncontaminated by the petty distractions of humanity, family, God or country. A lethal great white shark of an emotion but compelling to finally recognise. Also, and uniquely perhaps, quite without a trace of sublimated feelings for Papa Adama ::cough::Apollo/Dee:: cough:: It will certainly be a relief to be done with the fat make-up soon. Aliens are easy to fake but obesity, being more familiar, just vindicates the de Niro approach.

Another person who can probably never go home is Baltar, nevertheless managing some measure of redemption for brutal self-assessment. I wonder if Cylon-Xena’s fear that humans allowed to be free would someday return to perpetuate the cycle of vengeance was being addressed when she herself turned from the bomb to take the baby. So now the humans believe Hera genuinely dead, which should prove very interesting when Sharon confronts them with their original lie. Poor Sharon, the truth always one step ahead of her.

Starbuck escapes, still enough herself to insist on a madcap scheme to rescue her own baby, then lose her, just as Sharon did, to a lie. It’s interesting that this was one Kara was so ready to believe and I suspect it’s not over. It may seem that Lebonen’s much vaunted prescience has turned out to be no more than an obsession with manipulating events to prove himself correct but it would be more interesting if he were merely being premature and this faked fulfilment of prophecy foreshadows real events yet to come. They do have Kara’s ovary.

Comments

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

I agree, Ellen's exit was quite graceful. Who would have guessed that she did love her husband back when we saw her first? Saul looked like a fool then.

But that season and that episode did justice to the pairing and to the character of Ellen.

[aycheb.livejournal.com]

God yes, I'm still weeping just thinking about it.

I loved the point you made in your journal about the alcoholism, very apt. I did get the impression that Ellen knew what was in the cup when she said she could "do with a drink," she seemed close enough to have at least an idea what Sam and her husband were talking about. I also thought the death by poisin had a ritual aspect to it as if it were one of the standard execution methods like hemlock in Ancient Greece. But being a big softie at heart I probably just like the idea that she took the matter out of his hands for him in the end.

[frenchani.livejournal.com]

It crossed my mind too, that she knew and wanted to do it herself, and I also thought of Socrates drinking the hemlock!