Battlestar Galactica - Season Three
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 Another stunning season for the best show on television Warning! The following contains spoilers. If you haven't seen Season Three and want to remain spoiler free, do not read this review. Season Three of BATTLESTAR GALACTICA was the most debated and controversial yet. Much of the controversy stemmed from the number of hot button political topics it addressed. What other show would take several major characters we know and love and have them execute another character we had known from the beginning of the series for collaborating with the enemy, demonstrating in the process the extreme danger to justice inherent in independent military tribunals (disturbingly similar to the ones that the Bush administration has advocated)? What other show takes up the logic and ethics of suicide bombing by having "us" attack "them" by the death of another semi-recurring character in an effort to kill recruits for the local police force? Many of the episodes outraged those on the political right, as the parallels with the situation in Iraq was, despite efforts to minimize the resemblance by references by creator Ron Moore in interviews to Vichy France, became increasingly blatant. To his credit Moore, a member of the left but a self-admitted Rush Limbaugh listener, has not had the show lean too heavily to the left for most of the show's run, but in the season's first several episodes that balance fell away. And in the most controversial episode of the season (debated on Internet boards more passionately than I can ever remember any episode of any show) the question of whether genocide against a murderous enemy is justified, pitting several of the major characters on the show against each other. On the other hand, Season Three had several surprisingly uninspired episodes. All of these were of the "stand alone" variety. All of the "mythology" episodes (to use the X-FILES terminology that Ron Moore himself often uses) were outstanding. In posts on boards, podcasts, and interviews Moore has said that most of these episodes are produced by the insistence of the network. The thinking is that having nothing but arc episodes intimidates potential viewers. But the brute fact is that at this point in the series it is a sheer impossibility for anyone to start watching at this point. This is the beauty of DVDs. Anyone who wants to watch BATTLESTAR GALACTICA can by buying the DVDs, borrowing them from a friend, downloading them from iTunes, or renting them from Netflix or their local DVD rental store. Bizarrely the networks don't seem to have comprehended the ways that viewing patterns have changed. Season Three is structured around the Cylon occupation of New Caprica and the ongoing effects of that occupation following the rescue of the humans by Galactica. Many of the characters on the show never quite get over their experiences there, in particular Tigh and Kara. Interpersonal conflicts that were created on New Caprica, especially between Kara and Lee, take much of the season resolve, and the whole New Caprica experience doesn't really come to an end until the close of the trial of Baltar in the season finale. In one way or another the experiences there color almost everything that happens during the season. Instead of summing up individual episodes or talking about the major story arcs, I would like to highlight my ten favorite moments of the entire season. 1. The Adama Maneuver: During the rescue on New Caprica Adama gets crucial Vipers into the fray by jumping into the upper atmosphere of the planet. Since Galactica cannot fly in an atmosphere, they launch the Vipers as the ship plunges in a fiery ball towards the surface, jumping again just a couple of hundred feet before smashing into the earth. It is - and I say this with little fear of contradiction - the most extraordinary special effect in the history of TV. No one who has seen it has been able to forget it. It is inconceivable that the show won't win the Emmy this year for Best Special Effects (but then, it is impossible to see how they lost to LOST and its black smoke effect last year) and when it does, this is the special effect sequence they will show at the awards. 2. Leoben has imprisoned Kara in a living situation that parodies that of a married couple. As they dine Leoben stands beside her and tells her how beautiful she looks. She smiles and rams a pair of skewers through his neck, kicks him back and falls on his chest stabbing him repeatedly. She returns to the dining table, takes a bite, then daintily dabs at her mouth with a napkin, oblivious to the blood that covers one of her hands. 3. The death of Jammer: In "Collaborators" several characters we've known and loved kill Jammer for being a collaborator during the Cylon occupation of New Caprica. We've known Jammer since Season One when he, Cally, and Socino tried to make a still. But that doesn't prevent him from being shot out an airlock. Nearly as good was the near execution of Gaeta later in the same episode. 4. Five great Sharon moments. This is a total cheat, but here are five great moments involving Sharon in Season Five. 1) The last time we saw Sharon in Season Two she was deeply distrusted from not having told Galactica about Cavil being a Cylon. She had told Helo that she wanted nothing to do with him or anyone on Galactica. Our first shot of her in Season Three, her cell door is open and we see it filled with comfortable furniture: a desk with books, an end table and coffee table, wall hangings and curtains, a comfy chair, and a large and extremely comfortable leather couch. Adama is sitting beside her drinking tea and he tells her that he feels all alone, except for her. Clearly in the previous year, somehow Sharon had become just about Adama's closest friend. 2) Because of the new trust Adama has in Sharon, she becomes an officer in the colonial fleet. Through the rest of the season she repeatedly tells others - whether human or Cylon - that she has given the fleet her word and she intends to keep it. Though some doubt her, Adama's faith in her is repaid repeatedly in the season. 3) Sharon enters the Cylon Detention Center on New Caprica to recover the launch keys that are crucial if the humans are to escape from New Caprica. She gets interrupted by D'Anna Biers, who tries to tempt her into coming back to the Cylons with the news that Hera is still alive. Sharon responds by putting a bullet into both her D'Anna's knees. She walks away, saying "Adama wouldn't lie to me" (and it turns out he didn't, since he didn't know that Laura stole Hera and faked her death). 4) Sharon and Boomer come face to face. One of the season highlights had to be the show's two major Number Eight's meeting. The irony is intense, since at the beginning of the series Sharon was completely on the side of the Cylons and Boomer was with the fleet, unaware that she was a Cylon sleeper agent. Now, however, Boomer like D'Anna before her tries to convince Sharon that she doesn't belong with the humans. Her reply is to the point: "I made my decision and I know where my loyalties lie." 5) Boomer does, however, tell Sharon that her daughter is still alive and is on the nearby Cylon basestar. After Adama confirms with Roslin that Boomer's story is true, Sharon rescues Hera by talking her husband Helo into killing her so that she will resurrect on the Cylon resurrection ship. Only seconds after reaching Hera she plots her return to Galactica. The irony is that only a few minutes earlier Roslin was dressing down both Helo and Adama for their faith in Sharon. Knowing that Sharon is downloading into a new body she tells them, "And now all of our lives are in the hands of Sharon Agathon. All we can do is hope that your wife is worthy of the unconditional trust you place in her, Captain. And you as well, Admiral." What is wonderful is that Laura states all this as if it is in doubt. But less than an hour later Sharon is back on Galatica with Hera. Oh, and Sharon is given her own handle: Athena, a nod to the original series in which Athena was Adama's daughter. And in this one Sharon has become one of his surrogate daughters. 5. "Exodus, Pt. 2": I said I wouldn't summarize any episodes and I will resist doing that here. But this episode, which contained "The Adama Maneuver" I mentioned above, is easily one of the two or three most unforgettable episodes in all of BSG. At the end of 2006 the well-known Internet TV website The Futon Critic issued its annual list of the Top Fifty episodes of the year. With total justification they named "Exodus, Pt. 2" the number one episode of 2006, not just of BSG but of all television shows combined. It was that good. Four beats made it stand out. First, Saul Tigh's killing of his wife Ellen for collaborating with the Cylons, second the Adam Maneuver, third, the rescue of Galactica by Pegasus and its destruction, and fourth, Kara learning that Leoben had lied to her by telling her that Kacey was her daughter. 6. The fight between Kara and Lee in "Unfinished Business." In the Season Two finale we learned that somehow Lee and Kara had fallen out with each other so completely that they were barely able to talk to one another. In this episode we get that back story. Adama has called for a series of boxing matches to air out grievances that crew members feel towards one another. We see Lee and Kara's story intercut with their pounding on each other in the boxing ring, learning of the night of passion that they spent with each other and their declaring their love for one another, and of Kara's sneaking off and marrying Anders the next morning. As Kara and Lee (who she is able to fight evenly partly because Helo beat up on him in an earlier fight and partly because Kara resorts to dirty fighting) collapse into each other's arms, their faces bloody messes, she tells him, "I missed you." His mouth filled with blood, he is barely able to say, "I missed you too." Her face buried in his shoulder, you can see her smile broadly as the episode ends. One of the best episodes in the show's run. 7. In a stunning scene on a Cylon basestar, D'Anna Biers tortures Baltar while he manages to project to a beach where Six makes love to him to get him through the ordeal. As he tells Six "I love you" D'Anna hears the words as addressed to her and although torturing him feels deeply moved. It is a sequence that has to be seen to be believed. 8. Adama and Laura's intimacy. Through Season Three Adama and Laura grow closer and closer, as intimate as two people can be while remaining completely Platonic. They still have conflicts. When Laura tries to justify stealing Hera and faking her death Adama walks away without even listening to her. And in the finale Roslin feels betrayed by his vote of Not Guilty in Baltar's trial. But you get the sense that they have moved to a new level. That they have an intimacy that can't be affected by mere disagreement. The highpoint of their intimacy might be their smoking dope on New Caprica and cuddling while gazing up at the stars. It is so wonderful to see two people who have shouldered so much in order to save the remnants of humanity to get a few minutes of peace/ 9. Lee Adama's moment on the stand. During Baltar's trial Romo Lampkin (magnificently portrayed by Mark Shepard) calls Lee onto the witness stand even though he is serving as co-counsel. Jamie Bamber's performance is one of the season highlights and perhaps the best moment in a season finale stuffed to overflowing with truly great moments. 10. The last ten minutes of the season: In the final few minutes of the season we learn the identify of four of the Final Five: Tigh, Tyrol, Samuel T. Anders, and Tory (the four T's--giving additional credence to the thought of some that Kara "Starbuck" Thrace is the fifth member) by their response to a song that they keep hearing in their heads, which turns out, almost impossibly, to be Bob Dylan's "All Along the Watchtower" (leading some to refer to them as the Dylons). Then the Cylons attack. The four new Cylons ponder what to do before Tigh magnificently tells the other three: "The ship is under attack, we do our jobs. . . . My name is Saul Tigh. I am an officer in the Colonial Fleet. Whatever else I am, whatever else it means, that's the man I want to be. And if I die today, that's the man I'll be. But those lines are rivaled by the last of the season, as Lee pursues "a bogie at my ten" in his Viper and discovers none other than Kara Thrace, who had died spectacularly three episodes earlier. She looks at Lee, assures him that it really is her (a fact confirmed by executive producer Ron Moore, who also confirmed that the four Cylons really are Cylons), and tells him, "It's gonna be okay. I've been to Earth. I know where it is. And I'm gonna take us there." The camera pulls up over their two Vipers and then rapidly pulls back through the colonial fleet, through the pursing Cylons, back through the nebula and an arm of the Milky Way, and then rushes across the galaxy to our solar system, focusing on earth as the season ends. It is an utterly breathtaking moment. This is absolutely essential television. If you care for great television, this is the kind of stuff you have to care about. The tragedy is that while every major television critics has passionately praised the show and while a host of major publications from TV Guide to Time to Rolling Stone have proclaimed it the best show on TV, it has struggled to find viewers. The irony is that many Sci-fi fans don't watch it because it doesn't resort to the clichés that dominate the genre and make it in most cases completely unchallenging television and many mainstream TV fans don't watch it because they mistakenly think it will only appeal to Sci-fi fans. It is what it is: the best show on TV. You need to watch this.  Battlestar for Al-Qaeda! It's amazing how quickly my favorite show on television in over a decade turned into my most hated. The first two seasons were nothing short of brilliant, I watched my tapes again and again then bought them on dvd and watched them again and again. Everything was perfect. Then I saw the first episode of season 3 and thought Bin Laden had taken over as chief writer. It was straight from the talking points of terrorist websites and suicide videos. Suddenly an epic struggle of good vs. evil turned into Bush is bad, terrorists are just poor souls. Something that is echoed again and again for the rest of the season. It would be like going back to WWII and saying that Nazis were forced to open camps because the Jews were alive. I can't unrecommend this box set enough, in fact I unrecommend it so much that I sold my Seasons 1 and 2 box sets and soundtracks and donated money to the Military who continue to fight so writers and actors of Battlestar can continue to hate America. POSSIBLE SPOILERS - Still the best, BUT..., IF... and it's a big BUT, and a big IF. BUT - it shows signs of losing the plot midway, and IF - season 4 pulls it all together again. And, I'm afraid, there are a few threads that it would take a Thomas Pynchon (Gravity's Rainbow) to pull together with style - we have the weird love triangle on the Cylon ship, with Baltar, No 6, and the Cylon D'Anna ( playe by Lucy Lawless, 'Xena, warrior princess'), and new hints about Baltar's destiny, and then D'Anna goes doo-lally, and there's the ongoing mystery of why Baltar and No 6 hallucinate each other's presence - all that alone would take a genius to pull together, and there's much more, like Sharon 2's child, and why the Cylons didn't know who the final 5 were. I've just watched the series 4 sneak preview on the Razor dvd; one of the cast says a lot of balls were thrown in the air in series 3, and he thought some of them were bound to get dropped - that's a hint! All the same, I can't think of ANY other series that would be worth Pynchon's talents. It starts great; there's a change of pace, announced at the end of season 2, with the Cylons changing tack, and deciding against exterminating the humans. The occupation, escape and consequences are great, and continue the momentum of the previous 2 series through discs 1 and 2 , episodes 1 to 8. As other reviewers have noted, episode 8, Hero, has a rather unconvincing plot, but it does contribute important background to the plot. However, I find Sharon's wholesale conversion to the human side a lingering weakness, though not a fatal one; I can indulge them a bit of artistic licence - this is SF, not Tolstoy, and all the better for it, in my opinion. But there's a slight sore thumb: in one episode we see the Cylon's deciding that Sharon's baby must be protected at all costs; then, in the next episode we see Sharon saving the fleet from a Cylon all-out extermination attempt - this does not compute! But there's a bigger sore thumb - as previous reviewers have noted, when they have a chance to destroy the Cylons and save the human race, SOMEBODY SABOTAGES IT AND NOBODY SEEMS MUCH CONCERNED - WITHOUT EXPLANATION (apart from, possibly, some qualms about genocide)! That just seemed to dissipate the momentum of the story (though it certainly picks up again). I really hope the writers have realised that and will make sense of it in season 4, I hope they don't just glide over that. Anyway, their plan wouldn't necessarily have finished off the Cylons - just the ones on the closest Resurrection ship. That was sloppy too. Come to think of it, they could fix most of the outstanding flaws by inserting a few 30 second scenes here and there, but then I'd have to shell out more money for a new 'director's cut' - I probably would too! The next episode is where things start dropping slightly below standard, for me, and this continues for the next 2 discs, episodes 8-16; momentum having already been lost a bit, in my opinion, we now find what some reviewers have called a 'soap opera' intruding - a lot of time being spent on the mixed up love lives of some of the major characters. Opinions seem divided over episode 9, Unfinished Business, which concentrated on love lives - I couldn't say it wasn't good, and it fills out the characters a bit, but I find myself itching to use the fast forward for the first time in my BG life - maybe I'm a hopeless boy's adventure type. I agree with some reviewers that I found the next episode, the Passage, could have done with a pre-amble, but it's a good episode; BUT, it did leave a slight sour taste in my mouth - one recurring character is written out in a way that could be interpreted as suggesting that her heroic death was an atonement for her recently discovered previous criminal life - a bit severe, to say the least! And the the love interest from Unfinished Business crops up again to water down the next 3 episodes, which are great in themselves - it's not the human interest that bothers me, it's the amount of time it gets, and that the writers don't really do anything interesting with it. Then there's episode 14, the Woman King, which all reviewers including myself agree is a filler, and seriously below standard - but not that bad, really! And the next 2 episodes while very good, and containing more useful background, are a bit in the 'crisis of the week' mould. Episode 16, Dirty Hands, is great though - it's just a pity it comes 3rd in a row of 'slight diversion' episodes. Dirty Hands deals with industrial disputes and labour problems, and some of the dialogue hints, for the first time, at the class/power structure of the world of the colonies. This is something that has been missing from BG so far; in Babylon 5 and Joss Whedon's 'Firefly' the hinterland of corrupt politicians and shady corporate power is an important part of the story - without dwelling on it too much, we're made aware of the structure the characters inhabit, but BG seems to exist in the abstract - for instance, how did a system dependent on robot labour adjust after the robots rebelled? What about the corporate powers that manufactured the Cylons in the first place? All we know about the colonies (apart from hints given in this episode, mostly in a conversation between Chief and Cally) is that they have sports teams and an elected government involving a 'quorum of 12'. Dirty Hands helps fill it out a bit, but there's still a lot missing. Anyway all the above niggles accumulate to diminish the spell a bit, for the first time, but Dirty Hands is the beginning of it getting back on form again, and the last 4 episodes are back to the old edge-of-the-seat form. The revelation of the remaining Cylons (bar one) is great, and done with real style, and I'm sure there's a good explanation coming up for that and how come you-know-who's been to Earth. If all the above seems a bit negative, take it as read that I agree with all the praise others have heaped on it - there's no point in repeating it - this is still head and shoulders above anything else on the tv, even the Sopranos; and it's a good contender for the best tv series ever - it's certainly the best looking, and most convincingly realised science-fiction ever, on tv or feature film. But it still only gets my number 3 for favourite tv series, after Babylon 5 (though BSG makes B5 look like a stage-show) and Oz (HBO's prison drama)- maybe joint 2nd spot with Oz!, and I think I've figured out why, and a big reason why this series of BG wanders so much - there are too many significant characters, and many of them have doubles who are also significant characters(several in No 6's case); and some of the 'male romantic lead' types, like Apollo and Helo and Anders, are hard to tell apart at first glance, I find, because they're about the same size, weight and have similar hair colour and style. But again, compared to nearly anything else, no praise is too high for Battlestar Galactica. PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE, MAKE IT ALL COME RIGHT IN SEASON 4. A slight quibble about the discs though - some of them can be really reluctant to load; and the navigation - if I use the 'select episode' option, it sometimes takes me to immediately after the main theme music, missing out the bit of the story that always comes before it - could be very confusing to newcomers. As an afterthought, having just seen the trailer for series 4 - it looks great! Can't wait! Can't get better than this One only wishes there were more episodes in each season. The first four episodes are amongst the best ever done for TV , the episodes taking place while the search for the Eye of Jupiter goes on makes you think ' well ... can't get better than this ' - but it does, for the last quarter of the season is simply awesome. Watching this series is a great pleasure - and never disappointing, for it treats you as an intelligent person. Direction, acting and writing and production are perfect and the story it tells is one that you want to know. Don't miss it. | |||||||||||
