Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Hi, Billy...
By Jacob Clifton | Season 2 | Episode 16 | Aired on 02.09.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Dana Delany's husband died somehow, which has caused her to go all manifesto-crazed and generally act like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Dualla and Apollo go on some kind of date on Cloud 9, but of all the embarrassing people they might run into there -- witnesses to Phelan's public murder, bad guys, hookers -- it's Billy who runs into them. He then generally unspools. Ellen Tigh shows up and acts nutty and awesome, and when Encyclopedia Adama figures out that a hostage situation is about to happen, he fools Ellen into hiding with him in the bathroom under pretext of boning. Apollo finally puts his CO2-filled history to work for him, fooling the bar's sensors into thinking they're low on oxygen. Starbuck knows this is Lee's way of giving them an option, and comes in pretending to be the oxygen repairperson. Things immediately go very, very badly, and Starbuck shoots Apollo, for real. She's understandably awkward about telling Adama that she's yet again tried to murder one of his kids, but between having even-creepier-than-usual conversations with Boomer and dealing with Dana Delany, he's pretty nice about it. The demands of Delany and her crew are simple: they've learned about the second Boomer model aboard Galactica, and they would like to use her as a piñata -- basically the same kind of stage-three bargaining that the Pegasus pricks got involved in. Roslin's not happy about negotiating with terrorists, but here's who is in the hostage queue: her son-analogue Billy, Tigh's wife-analogue, and all three of Adama's children-analogues. Versus Sharon, who they hate anyway. No problem. Bill ends up sending in the original Lee Harvey Oswald Boomer's dead body, which he keeps around to chat with because he's a weird old man, but the hostage-takers quickly twig to the fact that he's keeping one Boomer back. Amidst many conversations about the fact that Boomer may have been playing them all along -- which are awkwardly shoe-horned in by, of course, Tigh's dialogue -- Adama decides that it is, in fact, possible, even though this assertion comes entirely out of the blue. Things go further and further south and get more and more intense and violent until finally, Billy dies in the crossfire. At this point, Starbuck just jumps out of the whole sick quadrangle, because we now have proof of what happens to those who dare to stand between Lee and Dualla, The Love Which All Of A Sudden. Still no forward movement on the season arc, and major ignoring of important characters continues. Next week: same deal, only instead of hostages and oxygen deprivation that is fake, it's Raptor pilots and oxygen deprivation that is real. And the week after that? It all goes down. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Previously, Billy and Dee were in some sort of ill-defined relationship that, not unlike the chief export of Picon, picked up whatever flavor you had lying around. Lee Adama was in an ill-defined relationship with somewhere between four to eighteen women, some of whom may or may not exist anymore. Kara was in ill-defined love with a dead sports player, Boomer totally thought you deserved to die, and the whole world ended when most people exploded. One of them, although not immediately, was Ray Abinell, the husband of Sesha Abinell, a crazy person.
Forty-eight hours earl...waaaait a minute, there's none of that nonsense! This is already the best episode in a while! Right here in the lovely, wonderful present, aboard the Freighter Greenleaf, Sesha Abinell is wound tighter than Captain Lee Adama, trying desperately to understand how her husband could have overcome all the odds and made it out of the Colonies and joined the Fleet, only to get sucked into space after a Cylon attack ten weeks ago (which by my reckoning would have happened between "Flight Of The Phoenix" and "Pegasus," but I don't want to get into a knife fight about it). Sesha is doing this, as people so often do both in TV and real life, by obsessing on huge conspiracy theories and trying to find someone to blame. Well, besides the Cylons, of course, who actually are to blame. In fact, all of her info is pretty much on target, which is interesting. She's, like, Mel Gibson: exciting! There are press clippings creepily covering all the walls, de rigeur for the agent provocatrice, and lots and lots of pictures of Boomer everywhere. It's a scene that relies heavily on us processing both the spoken and the written word, as we flash on various paranoid writings and pictures and stuff while Sesha types things, speaking them aloud in a completely different order from how she's typing them.
The Cylon M.O. involves: sleep deprivation, "assault on natural resources," emotional manipulation, suicide bombing, Cylon impregnation and reproduction, multiple models, sleeper agents within the Fleet, takeover by brute force...There are various articles asking very Weekly World News questions like, "Can Cylons Reproduce?" A picture of Ray and Sesha, happy. One cool article about suicide bombers reading, "Commander Adama and President Roslin must finally make public the terrifying secret known only to a select few: Cylons now look like humans," with the pullquote: "Cylons want to kill us. That's all they want to do." It's interesting because between these people, whatever their name, and the DEMAND PEACE people, that's pretty much every viewer that ever had a thought about Boomer. For comparison, here's an interesting part of the Demandifesto: "WE BELIEVE: Only open dialogue can save mankind. The military is the servant, not the masters, of the Fleet. The Cylons will respond to reasonable dialogue. Democracy is the key to responsible decision making for the future of mankind. Man and Cylons can coexist in peace. We are at the dawn of a new beginning for mankind. The enemies of peace are the enemies of mankind. DEMAND PEACE." (Emphasis mine, because the coolest thing about revealing both of these factions within the Fleet close to the same time is that they are right about everything -- this whole paragraph is true -- except for, possibly, the highlighted sentence. The Cylons can do "reasonable," just not "dialogue.") We see Ray running down a corridor and getting sucked out after a Raider pass, as Sesha shakes off her tears and keeps typing. Dana Delany is one of my favorite actors in the world, I'll say that right now, and it's not really a coincidence, because the show seems to have not only good taste but specifically my personal taste, and maybe yours, in guest stars. China Beach! Wild Palms! Pasadena! Sesha sends these incredibly intense vibes at one of the pictures of Boomer, like, so intense that she might just go ahead and beat up the picture. But the Post-It attached tells us that it's not the famous Adama-shooting Boomer, but the one currently pregging it up in the Galactica brig. I knew she could only avoid being a political football a few more weeks. Man.