Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: D | 4 USERS: D+ YOU GRADE IT BattleNoir Redactica
By Jacob Clifton | Season 2 | Episode 14 | Aired on 01.26.2006
Lee wants to get back to the plot, though: "And what about those children outside?" Siobhan stares at him. "How are they 'helping the Fleet'?" Phelan equates a bunch of things at once including pedophilia, cigars, liquor, and Siobhan. Is there a shortage of prostitutes? What? Phelan gets to the actual point, cutting through a lot of higgledy-piggledy: "It's hard to find the moral high ground when we're all standing in the mud." Lee's grossed out, even though that's the loudly-trumpeted and only fairly interesting point of this entire exercise. They front on each other for awhile about how they're just the same, or totally different, depending on what kind of deluded they are, and the thugs eventually pull guns on Lee. "I came alone. But Galactica tracked me on dradis." He's like a little boy living out a bad cop movie. He's got this ongoing smirk of bad-assery. "All they'll need to vent this ship into space is an excuse. So, let's make a deal. I want Siobhan, the girl. I walk out of here, and you shut down this operation. And all of you will live." Phelan apologizes that Paya's already been paid for, and Siobhan freaks out about that, so they rough her up. Pushed beyond the limit by this nonsensical abuse, Lee grabs one of the thugs' guns and points it into his own chest. "Come on, do it. Do it," he purrs. Dude, if you're going to get all drama every time you're confronted with moral relativism, just airlock yourself right now. I get that he's got this death wish and this fear of intimacy and this desire to reconnect with Adama/masculinity through becoming a father and all that jazz, but I didn't need this circus to know that shit. This is like Ally, or like Battlestar Adventures -- the oversimplified cartoon version of stuff you already know. Apollo and Phelan front some more, and Lee takes the thug's gun away and points it at Phelan, so that we're caught back up to the thrilling yet unnecessary res we started out in.
Commercials. Far be it from me to even acknowledge internet drama, especially involving the whizbang illiteracy and creepy misanthropy of your average IMDb discussion, but I so, so love how the guy over there decided that I agreed that this version of the show was fake and evil and sex-obsessed just because I hated this episode, like I had finally seen the light or whatever, when in fact, the reasons he hates this show are the exact reasons that science fiction is a fucking joke to everybody that's not in on the joke, and that my hate of this episode is hate for everything he stands for -- not to mention that, for the same reason, he'd fucking love this episode, for exactly the reasons I hate him -- and it -- in the first place. Which is tidy and ironic but doesn't change the fact that this show, which I love precisely because it takes that which sucks about sci-fi television and turns it into awesome, has power-injected those things into this episode with a fucking vengeance. Nobody wins. What kills me is, what if this was the first episode you saw?