Battlestar Galactica - “Resurrection Ship, Part 2”
Written by Scott Collura Friday, 13 January 2006
As the final episode of Battlestar Galactica’s Pegasus story arc begins, we find Lee Adama floating helplessly in space, his spacesuit quickly running out of air. The battle between the Colonials and the Cylons, planned in the previous episode, is eerily unfolding in the distance, right before Lee’s eyes as he drifts further and further away from his fellows. But before we can find out how the junior Adama got himself in to this particular bind, the scene quickly shifts back to two days earlier, when the attack against the Cylon resurrection ship was still being planned – as was the mutual assassinations of Commander Adama and Admiral Cain.
While another solid episode for a series that rarely offers anything but solid episodes at the very least, “Resurrection Ship, Part 2” suffers from a common problem that cliffhanger-style multi-episodes do. It always falls to the last segment in any such arc to tie up the various intense and seemingly impossible plot points that have been established in the previous segment(s), and sometimes it just doesn’t work that way in real life. The result is that we as audience members know that Michelle Forbes’ Admiral Cain will be gone from the Galactica universe, one way or another, by the end of this episode. How and why she leaves us is of course another matter entirely, but the fact that Adama and Cain are not going to execute each other by the end of “Resurrection Ship, Part 2” is fairly certain. It’s like the old Star Trek: The Next Generation episode “The Best of Both Worlds”: You didn’t really think Picard was going to stay a Borg forever, did you? Well, Cain wasn’t going to stick around for too long either, and you always knew that as well. But for a show that so commonly eschews pat storytelling, it’s a shame to see it rely on the easy out as it does here.
Having said that, Ron Moore and his writing team are generally willing to avoid the “reset button” that most episodic television, particularly genre television, has always relied on over the years. So whereas the original Galactica’s Pegasus storyline was undoubtedly always predestined to end with the destruction/disappearance of that non-Galactica battlestar – “This galaxy isn’t big enough for two battlestars!” must have been the credo – here the fate of the very important military resource that is the Pegasus is not necessarily as certain.
Some longstanding threads are finally resolved here in much more satisfactory fashion than the Cain story, too. Chief Tyrol and Helo, still locked up on the Pegasus for their accidental killing of a fellow officer, are getting out of that cell one way or another in this episode – and the Chief, at least, seems to finally come to terms with and find closure regarding his relationship with Sharon. Baltar, meanwhile, works through his feelings for the POW Number Six, though as usual the Vice President may not take the side of the angels in his dealing with the situation – even if his discovery of the resurrection ship has resulted in a potentially major coup for the Cylons.
And Lee Adama, floating helplessly in space? You’ll see how he gets there yourself, but suffice to say that the character by episode’s end is still floating metaphysically even after the corporeal drifting is all said and done. Where that will take Lee, moving forward beyond this segment, is anyone’s guess, but that’s the real trick to his show. We love it for its “real world” tone and implications, yet it must also adhere to “sci-fi TV” conventions at times by neatly tying up plots like the Admiral Cain situation in order to move ahead. It usually works very well. Sometimes, like in tonight’s episode, the seams show a bit more – and yet it’s still so much better than most other TV can offer us. B
No comments:
Post a Comment