Episode Report Card Jacob: A- | 1 USERS: B- YOU GRADE IT The Engine You've Built With Your Blood
By Jacob | Season 3 | Episode 16 | Aired on February 24, 2007
Fenner meets with the Admiral and the President, bringing up how there are people in the refinery that have been working 18-hour shifts for the past six months, or longer. Adama's like, "Yeah, but if the Cylons show up, can we jump? Maybe once." Roslin hmms and nods. "That's a margin that's much too narrow for me. How about for you and your men? You have a problem: fix it." What I like is that he's laying out the whole unanswerable question of the episode up front: war demands sacrifice, but sacrifice isn't a bottomless well. It's not just pilots that die, or get tired or crazy; the one advantage the Cylons have always had is that they don't die. This is the flip side of that: how do you run just as fast and far as an immortal enemy, when you fall down sometimes? It's terrible to contemplate. This whole 3.5, and 2.5, have avoided asking the questions like this, because you can't solve them narratively, which is what writers like to do. This episode is about what it's like to be fucked, independent of the bad guys, which frankly the whole demi-season should always be about, instead of creating problems that are either negligible (2.5) or nonsensical (3.5, "Black Market") -- everybody in the episode has both a stake and a valuable viewpoint, and all of them are right, and all of them are wrong, and we're fucked, and that's so much more satisfying than a bunch of episodes where either the problem is made up and stupid, or people act out of character in order to make it easier, or whatever it is. Sudden kids in sex danger or sudden racist serial killers are easy to close the loop on: this story lets itself breathe, and I can think of about ten episodes in the last two seasons that could have used being less obvious. This story doesn't click closed like a box, and that makes it better. It's like during the Occupation: whoever's talking, they're right, because everybody's right, and not knowing that is how you end up at war.