In this post we'll look at the second hour of the Galactica finale, Daybreak (summary here: Act 1 to Act 5).
The hour opens with flashbacks to Caprica before the Fall illustrating why Caprica deserved to fall (the Tigh/Ellen/Adama club scene; ick).
Across town, Kara is having dinner with Lee and Zak,and Roslin is becoming . . . uh . . . involved with one of her former students.
We get small moments of illumination into these characters, but . . . none are as interesting as the already resolved flashback story involving Baltar and his father.
Speaking of Baltar, meanwhile back in the future, Baltar's cult is preparing to leave Galactica, and expecting him to go with it, but Head Six appears and tells Baltar to trust God's plan.
END OF ACT 1
Act 2 begins with a really great moment with Doc Cottle, Roslin, and that other doctor or nurse lady (never been sure her precise medical role). Very nice closure to the Cottle-Roslin relationship when she tells him not to spoil his image but to light a cigarette and grumble.
Meanwhile, everyone else is getting ready for the forthcoming assault on the cylon Colony to get Hera back.
Since Lee and his father are staying on Galactica, they need a replacement president and a replacement admiral for the fleet. Hoshi (more plausibly) gets the latter job, and Romo Lampkin (very implausibly) gets the former job.
I really didn't like this. I understand the creators' attraction to the character of Romo Lampkin. The actor provides a fascinatingly edgy and humorous performance to the role, and he's in some way supposed to be a cipher for Ron Moore (that's where his name–Romo–comes from), though I don't see that. But I think that the producers got a crush on this character and overused him, looking for any excuse to bring him back.
After he tried to kill Lee in a previous appearance (a decision very poorly supported in the story in question), he proved himself too unstable to be a plausible president (the man was having hallucinations about his dead cat that he was carrying around in his handbag, remember?).
Fortunately, we don't have to watch Romo-as-president very much.
Then as Hoshi and Romo are departing, Baltar decides to stay on Galactica and do something truly selfless for the first time in his life. Good for him!
Some centurions and skin jobs march across the hangar deck in front of human troops, and it's . . .
ACT 3
Final preparations are made for the coming battle, including a check-in of all stations, which gives us some nice moments (I particularly liked the doctor/nurse/whatever lady's explanation to Roslin about triaging the soon-to-be-incoming casualties and using a magic marker to make an X on the foreheads of those too wounded to be saved; don't know if the show's producers are aware of the biblical symbolism of an X–or old-style Tau–on the forehead or not).
Adama gives a last pre-battle pep talk and then we . . . .JUMP!
. . . into an above-average CGI space battle.
There's only so much you can do with CGI space battles, especially on a cable (!) television budget, but they did a really good job with this one. Nice stuff! In fact, the nebular/accretion disk imagery in this episode is some of the most interesting eye-candy of the series.
Despite that, I like the conflict inside the Colony even more.
First, Adama orders Galactica to flank speed, which in this context means that Galactica is going to ram the Colony and use its bow to poke a hole in it.
Yes!
In a genre that normally has battles being decided by ships firing blobs of colored light at each other, I love seeing a brute-force solution!
Then colonials start rappelling out of the bow, and centurions start pouring out, and the battle inside the Colony begins.
I have to say that this is one of my absolute favorite moments in the whole history of Galactica. I love the fact that the final battle involves humans, skin jobs, and centurions all fighting on the same side. The theme of former enemies becoming co-belligerents really resonates for me (like when after 9/11 former Soviet republics allowed the U.S. access to airspace and bases for the invasion of Afghanistan; wow, what a moment in history that was, after decades of pointing nuclear weapons at each other).
It's one thing when you have skin jobs flying raiders alongside viper pilots, but it's another thing when you have centurions fighting alongside human assault troops.
I loved the ultra low-tech friend-or-foe recognition system used for the centurions!
And watching the centurions wail on each other was great!
So I really liked this.
Meanwhile, out in space, Racetrack and Skulls are trying to stay alive in the accretion disk and go weapons hot (get their nukes read to fire) and are immediately killed by a space rock that shatters their cabin and their helmets.
Meanwhile, back in the Colony, Simon is performing medical experiments on Hera, and Boomer has finally had enough. She snaps Simon's neck, takes the child, leaves, and it's . . .
ACT 4
The fighting continues, and when Cavil realizes that Hera is gone, he and a Simon and a Doral decide to go on the offensive and take the fight inside Galatica, where Caprica-Six and Baltar are coming to terms with their relationship.
Just as they do so, Head Six and Head Baltar appear to them to offer encouragement.
Favorite line: the simultaneous "You can see them?"
Cavil-loyal centurions break into the Galactica and the fight starts there, too.
Meanwhile, Boomer locates Athena's team and hands over Hera to them, saying she has made a choice (i.e., to do the right thing by Hera) and she thinks it's her last one. She says that she owed Adama, and Athena shoots her dead.
You'd think by saying that she owed Adama she would mean she owed him one because she shot him in the season 1 finale, but instead, as she's dying, we get a flashback to her early days on the Galactica (before the miniseries), in which Adama gave her another chance as a trainee pilot rather than washing her out of the program. She promised she'd pay him back one day when it counted, and he laughed and told her to do so.
Favorite dialog:
BOOMER: You should know that your Raptor has been destroyed. You can't go back that way.
ATHENA: Yeah well, that is not the plan–
STARBUCK: Can we not tell her the plan?
ATHENA: Right.
LOL! Love it! And I also love that this is a complex, multi-prong attack plan that has been thought out in significant detail, not just a shoot-'em-up.
The target (Hera) now secured, the teams start making their way back to Galactica as the battle continues to rage.
ACT 5
This is the act where the Opera House visions finally pay off.
That makes it an appropriate place to say a word about the overall finale. As I mentioned in the previous post, they needed to pay this stuff off, but because of the way they plotted this show, they'd really set themselves a task.
Unlike Babylon 5, they did not have a detailed map of what was going to happen from day one. Instead, like The X-Files, they had only a loose idea, and when the Opera House visions first started appearing–and the visions of the Final Five in the Opera House–they really didn't know what they meant. They were just dramatic and interesting.
When it came time for The X-Files to draw together and pay off its loose plot threads, it did so in a disastrous fashion. I was prepared to accept some rough edges in Galactica's handling of the Hera/Opera House/Final Five vision thread. As long as they did something with it that was half-way acceptable (in the way that the Mulder trial was not), I would be satisfied.
And I was basically satisfied.
As the assault team gets Hera back on board Galactica, they are attacked by centurions, and Helo is gravely wounded. (Athena is afraid to leave him lest he "bleed out"–a phrase I have only noticed as slang in recent years, obviously meaning "bleed to death," but I don't know when it first came into currency or where; gang slang? video game slang? mil slang? if anyone knows, I'd love to hear!)
Hera, terrified by the battle, flees from the place she's been put, and thus the characters start to recapitulate what we've seen in the Opera House visions: Athena and Roslin both desperately try to find and protect the child, only to have custody of the child taken by Caprica Six, who hands her to Baltar on the other side of a door (in reality, hatch) that closes, on the other side of which Six, Baltar, and Hera find themselves in the auditorium of the Opera House, with the Final Five standing on the balcony.
Okay, it works.
But it's a bit of a let down at the same time.
One of the problem with visions like this is that it's easy dramatically to make the prophecy seem Really Momentous and have the fulfillment seem Less Momentous.
I think that what happens here. The recapitulation thing is fine, but having it just being a chase through the corridors of Galactica with CIC representing the auditorium of the Opera House and its upper deck representing the balcony of the numinous Final Five makes it all seem a little small and mundane compared to what the prophetic visions seemed to portend.
I think Ron Moore found an acceptable basic solution to the Opera House visions, but I am left with the feeling that he could have done more if things had been thought through more carefully in advance. For example, having the vision not represent just a physical recapitulation that takes place in Galactica in the space of a few minutes, but something more metaphorical, stretched out over episodes, possibly, with Roslin and Athena both struggling to get and protect the child, only to have Caprica and Baltar get her and take her beyond their reach to–possibly literally–the Opera House on Kobol or some other mystical place.
To my mind, that would be a more satisfying fulfillment of the Larger Than Life Opera House visions than the quickie chase montage we got.
But I can live with it.
The CIC doesn't stay a safe place for Hera for long, because Cavil and cohorts break in, and he seizes the girl as a hostage.
(Another reason why the payoff of the visions seems small; all these characters had been having numinous visions for years that describe their role in protecting the child for a couple of minutes, after which she's got a gun to her head? Really?)
I did like Baltar seizing the moment and giving his awkward God speech to try to get Cavil to release Hera and take a step of faith, with the Final Five offering to recreate resurrection technology.
The speech needed polishing. In particular, the "God is beyond good and evil; we create those categories" line was nonsense, but that could be fixed by simply snipping the line, so it only required a dialog fix. (I'm somewhat lenient on things that only require minor dialog fixes, particularly when someone who is a non-religion expert–like Ron Moore–is trying to be profound and not quite making it. It's one thing to say that God transcends humanity [and cylonity] in bunches of ways, but if God is beyond good and evil–in fact, if God is not Goodness Itself–then God is not worthy of the worship of adoration.)
In any event, I like that Cavil tentatively accepts the offer and everybody very tentatively stands down and the fighting stops, leading to . . .
THE FINAL HOUR.
I agree with you about the Opera House stuff. Taken in isolation, that segment, and the intersplicing of the Opera House and the ship, was very effective, but in light of all the prophesying throughout the series, I was a little disappointed. In fact, that was a general complaint I had about the later seasons — the way the Pythian Prophecy, the weirdness with Kobol, and so on, got dropped. But then, I’ve always preferred fantasy to science fiction.
This hour as a whole, however, was excellent. (Although part two of the mutiny remains my favorite by far — Adama’s righteous anger, Roslin’s sheer force of will, and Tyrol crawling through the ship and sabotaging the FTL drive with his bare hands. SO GOOD.)
I enjoyed the entire series as a whole, but I think this is where things started to crumble. The “Less Momentous” fulfillment of the Opera scene may have been where I realized that “unlike Babylon 5, they did not have a detailed map of what was going to happen from day one.” I guess I was hoping they did. Perhaps my expectations were too high. After all, it IS network television.
I’ve heard cops use “he bled out” since the late 90’s. Don’t know if that’s where it started, though.
Baltar’s speech was simply terrible. In the immediate aftermath of the episode, religious and non-religious fans alike were harshly critical of it. It’s rare that you get something so utterly tone-deaf. Ugh. One thing I appreciated about JMS of B5 was that he “got” religion, even though he’s an atheist.
They did the best they could with the Opera House, but I was expecting a let-down because, as Jimmy said, it’s clear they hadn’t thought through what it all meant.
I think this review is especially timely because I see parallels between my reaction to BSG and the reaction of Lost fans to the finale. I’ve learned that if a show’s creators start talking about a (false) dichotomy between paying off the story arc and doing justice to the characters, they don’t have a clue on how to resolve the plot elements they’ve built up.