The Invisible Library

So, when exactly did throwing people out of the airlock become the answer to everyone’s problems on Battlestar Galactica? Got an uppity Cylon who won’t talk? Airlock him. Traitor of humanity won’t tell you what you want to hear because his fractured mind is too busy coming undone? Threaten to put him in an airlock. Cally and Chief having marital problems? Throw them out the airlock and catch them in a Raptor. It’s like on Star Trek: The Next Generation, when the writers couldn’t figure out a real solution to the made up problem of the week and the catchall answer was to Reverse Polarity. Which sounded cool, until you realized that it meant putting the batteries in backwards. Throwing people out of an airlock is the post 9/11 polarity switch. It sounds hardcore, but accomplishes exactly nothing.

Somehow, the writers forgot what story they were telling. When we last saw a good episode of Battlestar Galactica, the fleet had just narrowly escaped the Algae Planet before the star went Nova. This gave them the clues that allowed them to discover the roadmap to Earth. Starbuck realized she’s been painting signs to Earth since she was little. They had the traitor of humanity and his Cylon Girlfriend in the brig. Helo and Athena had just committed a minor act of treason in order to rescue their magical cancer-curring hybrid baby. Baltar and Caprica Six faced the realization that they were well and truly frakked and being a Cylon, for all it’s cool immortality points, wasn’t going to spare either of them from some major retribution falling on their heads. Oh, and Lee and Kara were busy sabotaging their marriages.

By my count, that’s at least half a dozen solid episodes worth of material right there. Hell, on any other show, that would be about a season and a half. But this is BSG, not any other show. At least until last week’s, “Racism is Bad M’kay?” episode and this week’s, “Let’s Go Play In An Airlock and Talk To Our Dead Ex-Wife” episode. And next week’s “Labor Issues in Spaaaaace!” episode isn’t looking any better.

Seriously, Mr. Moore, did you and the other writers misplace your story notes? This is “Black Market” territory here.

For those not familiar with the episode (or who have mercifully blotted it out), “Black Market” was the one where Apollo tries to woo a hooker, and then rounds out his film noir resume by going into the seedy underbelly of the fleet’s Black Market to figure out who murdered Pegasus’ Captain of the Week. What qualifies a fighter pilot for detective work? Pretty much the same thing that qualifies him to head the legal committee the President wants him to form in order to have Baltar’s trial. So, to review: Apollo is not just a pilot and a daddy’s boy who wants to sleep with his best friend, he also is a detective and lawyer. In “Black Market,” as in “The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” we met characters that apparently had been there all this time but had never been seen before (and have not been seen since) and learned that the Black Market is so big, bad and vital, that it hasn’t even been mentioned casually again. The writers were clearly bored that week and decided they wanted to work on their Blade Runner meets Homicide: SVU spec script. That’s what we have with these last few episodes.

“The Woman King” and “A Day In the life,” both introduce pivotal characters who have never even been mentioned. The fleet has a civilian Doctor? Who is pals with Col. Tigh? And was on New Caprica? Since when? We knew Admiral Adama had a wife, she was his ex (as conveniently mentioned in the recap, which had to call back all the way to the mini series to find that one) but why is the dead ex-wife now so much more important than, say, finding Earth? I know these are flawed characters but that’s narcissism on a level that truly staggers.

Honestly, are you telling me that Helo has nothing better to do then take on worthless causes like defending Christian Scientists from embittered doctors? Maybe he should be worrying about the fact that his wife can casually incite him to betray his friends. And since when does Helo get to be the righteous hero? Somehow, we are to believe that Admiral Adama has nothing more pressing on his mind than his dead ex-wife and flirting with the President. Never mind the genocidal cyborgs that have been chasing them for the last two years, or his mutinous crew. And what has Tom Zerak been doing for pretty much all of season two? Also, the Cylons, who apparently haven’t bothered the Colonials for 49 days, what are they doing? Last we saw them, they decided to put the entire D’Anna/Three model into deep freeze, which is the equivalent of the US Congress saying, “All you Mormons are a nuisance, what with your unconventional religious fervor, so we’re going to sedate the entire state of Utah indefinitely.” That might be worth some screen time.

Here’s an idea for an episode: While the Cylons deal with the ethical ramifications of boxing 1/7th of their collective soul, the Colonials discover a D’Anna model that escaped and has been hiding out in the fleet. She’s going crazy because she is cut off. She has no connection, no greater purpose. she’s just a person now and she can’t cope. Various people on Galactica just want to airlock her but Helo and Athena try to reason with them. In the end, D’Anna kills herself because she can’t handle being alone. It covers all the areas of the stand alone episodes: racism and survivor guilt but also throws in the existential theme of being separated from God/purpose and allows Helo to be a saint. It also has the added bonus of not introducing anyone new, while moving things forward plot wise. What’s not to love?

Instead, we get Saint Helo and a two dimensional doctor, stereotypical anti-science religious fanatics and the ghost of Mrs. Adama. And next week, it’s Chief doing his Cesar Chavez impression.

I hear in the episode after that, they find a planet full of sharks and haul one up to the ship just so they can throw it out of an airlock and jump it.

I don’t mean to pick apart what is, on the whole, an impeccable and well crafted show. I do it because I love the show, and don’t want to see it devolve into just another lazy sci-fi program. BSG has, since the miniseries, been fearless in its willingness to tackle some real cutting edge themes and ideas and using sci-fi tropes to do so. It’s rooted in the great tradition of speculative fiction, spinning What If scenarios and taking them to their logical conclusion, but transcends the need to do the racism episode, or the sexism episode. Those things are handled in the subtext anyway. All that these inferior story lines that have no relation to the main plot do spin our gears. If I want to see labor disputes and racism handled in a sci-fiish way, there’s a Star Trek rerun on, somewhere.

Perhaps it’s a good thing that season 4 will only be 13 episodes. The writers will have to stay on target and stick to the main themes in order to finish the story by episode 13. There won’t be any room for padding out episodes about standard and well worn sci-fi ideas. Until then, however, we’ll have to find a way to endure the next few episodes, until it’s time to leave us hanging over a cliff, again.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 20th, 2007 at 8:25 pm and is filed under Battlestar Galactica, Writing, Geek. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.