Battlestar Galactica—Somebody To Watch Over Me

We’re back! A hello to our loyal fans who all but gave up on us during our “hiatus” as well as a welcome to some of our Facebook friends who are checking out FanBoyWonder for the first time.

Our blogging muscle is still weak from inactivity so we’ll be shooting from the hip during this review, but for your reading pleasure, here’s some of our thoughts on Friday’s Battlestar Galactica with our recap of the final episodes so far to come before this coming Friday—three episodes and counting until The End.



The Upshot from Sci-Fi Channel: Kara/Starbuck (Katie Sackhoff) tries to reconcile her identity with her grisly find on “Earth” (quotes are ours) while the Cylons aboard Galactica want to charge Boomer (Grace Park) with treason.

Boomer, Boomer, Boomer—you are a bad, bad girl. Who knew? Well at least you aren’t conflicted anymore and you’ve chosen a side.

We have to admit that we were pretty faked out by this little crazy eight. We had been hoping that Chief Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) would have stayed the frak away from her, having long since moved on but his having discovered his true Cylon nature was a game changer. Understandable but disappointing nonetheless.

It was especially hard to watch Tyrol beg President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) for her life and to see her coldly rebuff him. We’re not sure how we feel about the whole Cylon projection thing—a little too “virtual reality” for our taste and that little sci-fi chestnut had been overdone long ago.

We have some trouble with Helo (Tahmoh Penikett) making the beast with two backs with Boomer impersonating Athena (also Grace Park) and with him not being able to tell it was NOT his wife. Worse, little Hera didn’t know Boomer wasn’t her mommy when it had been established previously that Hera can tell mommy from all of the other Number Eights?????

So Boomer makes good on her escape jumping away—the wake from the FTL jump to Galactica was like someone with broken ribs getting a jab in just the wrong place.

Only later does Tyrol realized that he had unwittingly helped to kidnap Hera—talk about a gut punch. Galen, the girl’s nothing but trouble. Wake the frak up already!!!

Meanwhile, poor Galactica—the old girl has really taken a beating over the years and now it seems to be all catching up.

There’s an old Indiana Jones quote that we are quite fond of repeating around our birthday each year—“It ain’t the years, it’s the mileage.” Unfortunately for the old bucket, BSG-75 is running long on both.

The aging and scarred battlestar is the perfect metaphor for the condition of the rag-tag fugitive fleet—all 39,556 souls (Apparently we’re now counting Cylons among the fleet, hence the boosted head count.).

The entire fleet received a collective gut punch when they found “Earth” and it was a long dead, radioactive wasteland. (We don’t think that was really Earth but we’ll find out for sure in just three more episodes.) They went all in and came up empty.

The mutiny was just the most obvious result but there are signs everywhere that everyone in the fleet is just going through the motions. They’ve lost hope.

It’s contrary to human nature to just give up or to simply lie down and die, so they keep going but it’s a half assed attempt at best. Little by little, they let things slide, too overwhelmed or tired or worn down to do anything more than what’s in front of them, acting on instinct with no reason to believe that tomorrow will be any better than yesterday—indeed they expect it to be worse.

With no one is this more true than our girl Starbuck. The Lords of Kobol must be angry and vengeful gods the way they have kicked poor Kara around like a hacky sack.

So it’s small wonder when Kara is like a moth to the flame when she encounters the Piano Man at Joe’s bar. We seemed to figure out early on that Piano Man was real only in Kara’s head (like Imaginary Six or Imaginary Baltar) but we didn’t make the connect until late that he was her long, lost daddy.

Plus he seems to have composed the Watchtower song—at least the melody—that switched on the Final Five Cylons. Could Starbuck’s dad be Daniel—the missing and presumed destroyed seventh Cylon? If so, this would make Kara, like Hera, a half-and-half?

We feel cheated that we only more questions than answers but we can’t wait to find out more.

So say we all!

Post Script: Just as we were about to post we just remembered the funniest bit of the show—Starbuck’s prize of the last tube of “Feldercarb” toothpaste in the universe. We almost fell off the couch laughing at this little nugget of original BSG trivia popping up like that. Feldercarb indeed!