BSG rewatch, 1.09 -1.11

Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down

Oh Ellen. Ellen Ellen Ellen… your return to Tigh’s life just makes things so much more complicated. And you are such a complicated character yourself. Of course, you don’t seem complicated at the start; you seem like a lush, and a bit of a nymphomaniac frankly. There is probably no other character in the entire show who makes me as uncomfortable as you, every single time I see you. It’s all very well and good for Saul to be overjoyed at your return… but to immediately start sowing dissent between him and Adama? Trying to crack on to Lee? Ew.

We also get the first real signs of the distrust sown by Leoben coming to fruition, in the suspicion between the President and the Commander. With the Cylon-detector finally on line, apparently, Baltar is made to go back and forth between determining whether Ellen or Adama is a Cylon. And he declares neither of them is, but whether that’s the truth is of course completely unknown. We certainly know Baltar is untrustworthy….

This is also the episode where Starbuck stumbles upon Baltar and Six having sex… although of course Six isn’t actually there… oops. Also, EW.

The Hand of God

This is the ‘searching for tylium’ episode. The fleet is desperately short of fuel, so – as with the search for water – we have raptors out looking for asteroids that are tylium-rich. They find one… and it’s crawling with Cylons. Of course. Starbuck (whose quote is the title of this post) is still recovering from her broken leg, so rather than leading the crazy-ass mission she gets to experience the joys of command; she does so because her crazy-ass thinking is exactly what’s required for this attack to succeed. They use ships as a decoy, and things look to be going badly… and then Starbuck and Adama pull out their Sekrit Plan, and hurrah! everything goes well. Apollo gets to act the outrageous one for a change, proving himself to himself and his father. And there’s a lovely Star Wars-esque moment with Apollo flying up a fairly narrow tunnel.

Oh, and back on Caprica, Sharon spews….

It’s a run of the mill episode, really, where “run of the mill” involves an exciting and tension-filled action sequence, some frisson between the President and the Commander, and a few flashes to poor old Helo and Caprica-Sharon hiding out from the big bad Cylons.

Colonial Day

Oooh, a political episode! The quorum of 12 get together, and Tom Zarek gazumps the Pres by demanding that there be an election for VP. Which makes sense, and of course it looks like Zarek will be the man… until the Pres does the dirty on her original candidate, and replaces him with Baltar, who ends up winning. URGH. I really like Zarek in this episode; I love that the writers gave him really attractive politics – well, to me anyway; basically he comes across as a socialist. It’s all about the good of the community, and that’s fun. It certainly complicates his relationship with the President no end, because you can’t really argue against those things; you have to argue against the man himself, and that just gets a bit messy and uncomfortable after a while. Meanwhile, Baltar actually gets a real-world outlet for his overdeveloped libido, and Ellen just keeps on being lewd.

Also meanwhile, back on Caprica… Cylon-Sharon is no longer spewing but starving – GOSH I wonder what THAT could mean – and then Helo discovers that she’s actually a Cylon. OH NOES! Whatever shall we do!

There’s also an assassination attempt, proving that even with fewer than 50,000 people in the population there are still utter nutters out there who are willing to murder for their beliefs… or money…

BSG stats:

• Starbuck in the brig: 1
• Baltar in the brig: 1
• Women Baltar shows interest in (not including Six): 3
• Women Baltar actually gets to sleep with: 1
• Baltar religious conversions: 2
• Different sexy dresses worn by Caprica-Six: 6
• Apollo sides with President against Dad: 2
• Number of Cylons viewers know about: 4
• Number of Cylons humans know about: 2
• Roslin has a vision: 2
• People deliberately thrown out the airlock: 1 (+1 threat)
• Ships lost: 1
• Ellen gets suggestive: 3