Writer: Jane Espenson
Director: Robert M. Young
Grade: B+
I was pretty disappointed with this episode. Not because I felt it was soapy, which a lot of people apparently did, but because it was full of things that seemed interesting or significant but, according to Jane Espenson, are not. And because Galen Tyrol now makes no sense at all. And because how many fucking shots do we need of Adama looking pensively at his ship? (Though I admit I did like Ellen’s “Talk to her, tell her you love her” coming in over Adama silently doing just that to his girl Galactica.)
The fact that the framing of Ellen’s first shot on Galactica—her legs and the Raptor door—mimicked her initial intro from “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down” should have been a big clue to the kind of behavior to expect from her in this episode. And really, appalling though her behavior may seem here, I’m trying to look at it from her point of view. She just came back to Galactica after having been murdered by her own husband on New Caprica and held hostage by John Cavil for a year and a half. Then she had fantastic sex with said husband, only to pry out of him moments later that he slept with their quasi-daughter. And does he then also reveal that he knocked Caprica Six up? Why no, he does not, and Ellen gets gobsmacked with that information when she least expects it. Is it any wonder she was a little uneven, a little neurotic?
When Ellen goes to visit Caprica Six in Tigh’s quarters, it feels like she’s being her old self, the one we first got to know in “Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down,” and so on until New Caprica. Jealous, cruelly manipulative, destructive. “Thoughtlessly” revealing to Caprica that she and Tigh had sex, that she and Tigh had always talked about naming their hypothetical baby “Liam.” Until Caprica Six was able to pull it together enough to be the mature one, the “bigger person.” Then we see the Base Star Ellen, compassionate and forgiving and wise, struggle to regain control. Because you have to remember that Ellen is a fractured being now. She still has the memories and feelings of being the Ellen Tigh that we first met. She can’t just turn off all that pain and degradation and become the person she was from Earth until the time that Cavil murdered her and placed her back in the Colonies with a broken and incomplete self. And when Caprica Six asks her not to make Tigh choose, not to tear him in half, and she says, “I won’t,” she wants it to be true.
It’s also worth mentioning that as petty and frail and human as Ellen seemed, there is also room for an interpretation that everything she did was calculated manipulation to make Caprica Six lose the baby. Not because she hates her, but because Ellen must ensure that the rebel Cylons stay with the fleet. She seemed to feel genuine regret and pain about what happened to Caprica Six and the baby, but the look on her face when she came and put her hand on Saul’s shoulder looked tired and wise, as if she was thinking, “I’m so sorry that I had to do this to you.”
As for what actually happened to the baby, I’m really not sure, because the whole scenario was confusing and uneven. We know that the baby began to kick and “come alive” right around the time that Anders went braindead. (People pointed this out right after the previous episode, but I thought it sounded hokey then. Not so much now…) We know that the initial baby trouble began when Saul and Ellen began to make love. We know that the problem escalated when Ellen said that Tigh loves Adama more than anyone else. And we know that Anders’ brain activity resumed shortly after the baby’s death.
What happened to the baby and what happened to Anders may very well be intertwined, but I’m going to address them separately. The baby fiasco is rather problematic and nonsensical because if the baby knew when Saul and Ellen were having sex, that implies that he’s hyperaware in a way similar to the Base Star Hybrids. In which case, why would Ellen have to actually say that Tigh loves Adama for the baby to know that and react? I suppose we could be dealing with two different reactions—the initial reaction was the baby (or Sam?), and the second was Caprica Six—but that’s a lot of fanwanking to have to do. And I don’t buy that Cybrid babies need the parents to be in perfect, unconflicted, unbroken, absolute mad love to be carried to term, because Helo fucking SHOT Athena when she was pregnant with Hera. The bottom line is, it doesn’t add up.
As for the Sam issue, someone at TWoP posited that perhaps Earthlon reproduction didn’t quite work the same way it does for humans (or maybe it does but we just haven’t gotten there yet story-wise)—it’s possible that what they were doing was simply reincarnating/downloading into unborn fetuses rather than adult bodies. New bodies, finite amount of souls? If their bodies were trained or programmed to jump to a new body/fetus when their present body was badly damaged, then that could explain Sam’s consciousness entering Liam’s body and then re-entering Anders’ body when the baby died. Anders’ original body was salvageable, but the trauma was so great that his soul reflexively wanted a new home. This could also create a bridge between the jealous god back on Kobol and the fact that Cavil is modeled after Ellen’s father—it was the same soul, reincarnated into new bodies over and over again until it became her father, John Cavil. Who died, and was re-made to the best of Ellen’s ability as John Cavil, the first Colonial Cylon. It’s a stretch, but makes some sense to me.
In any case, that moment of grief between Saul and Bill was absolutely beautiful, and so true to life. Because that’s exactly what we do: we measure our loss against one another. Whose is greater? So sad, and so perfect.
And now let’s talk about Galen Tyrol. I was actually thrilled with both the actor and the writing of his arc, until this episode. I still don't blame Aaron Douglas, but the writing for Galen is really not working how they're intending.
It’s true that we’ve seen him lose damn near everything he’s ever loved on the Galatica. Boomer, his own humanity and personal history, his wife, his job, his child. And yet, as far as his reaction to those things, so far in 4.5, most of what he's done has been to protect Galactica, Adama, and the fleet. I have seen nothing indicating that he was nursing the option of abandoning them. He was crawling around the guts of Galactica out of loyalty to Adama and the ship, he shredded his own hands to save everyone's ass. Yet according to Espenson, he accepted the position of Chief again simply because “Adama asked him to." Maybe someone should have let Aaron Douglas know, because I saw gravity, rather than reluctance or hesitation, in his re-acceptance of the Chief position (though admittedly he looked a little uncomfortable when Adama said he wanted all the work done with human crews).
Even in this episode, the first thing Galen did was get between Adama and Boomer and out her (which, by the way, was disturbingly HOT, as was him watching Boomer sleep at the end of the episode). I feel like the writers are expecting us to make a lot of "off the beaten path" connections with Galen, and it's just not working.
It's not that he can't be complex enough to have done all of those things and still want to abandon the fleet and get a fresh start, it's that they haven't given viewers enough meaty character moments to show us that. They've shown us nothing but loyalty from Galen, and yet we're somehow supposed to see that he's nursing enough bitterness to want to leave at the first opportunity? The man has a perfectly functional mouth! They could have shown us a scene of him talking to Tigh or Sam about some of these feelings. There's a big difference between "subtle characterization" and "mwahaha, you thought you knew this character, but we'll show you!" I.e. this recent departure feels like something they did for cheap shock value, much like what they tried to do with Lee in "Black Market." And it was also a necessity to create the drama around Ellen being the swing vote, but I just don’t feel it was worth sacrificing truthful characterization to create drama with another character. At least he stuck up for Ander’s vote, and his “Can we talk about the offer, maybe talk about the baby later?” was hilarious.
The overwhelming fan response to Galen's vote in this episode was along the lines of "WTF was up with Galen?!" To me, that indicates that no matter what the writers intended for him, they didn't set it up very well. I'm actually surprised that I'm so miffed about this character, because he wasn't someone I was invested in for most of the series. I've grown to really like him in 4.5, though, so I'm going to do my best to pretend his vote didn't happen, as long as the writing in future episodes doesn't make that impossible.
The Cylon memorial wall that we saw at the end seems like a good idea. I did wonder how that many Cylons could have died since the Alliance, but I’m sure the mutineers killed a few who were hanging out on Galactica, and they also accidentally nuked a large portion of the Base Star when they were trying to shoot down President Roslin’s Raptor.
As far as the Baltar portion of this episode, I’m not terribly interested. The writing and acting was a bit vague as far as conveying whether little Gaius is Baltar’s bastard son. The mother’s tone on telling him, “It was his father’s name” didn’t seem very “I’m trying to tell you something and you’re probably too dumb to get it.” And how old was that kid? Was he conceived before or after the attack on the colonies? If after, is Gaius a really popular name among the Colonials? Out of the 50,000-ish initial survivors who could have fathered that child, there was another Gaius? Eh, whatever.
The “let’s get more guns” storyline bored the shit out of me, and the reasoning for why that was “the last human solution” wasn’t laid out very clearly. I’m sure it’s going somewhere awful, but I can’t be bothered to care.
The most interesting part of Baltar’s storyline for me was HeadSix returning when Baltar wasn’t top dog anymore, which seemed like it could be significant, except that according to Espenson, “There is not a mythology reason for it.” Then why the fuck did it need to be there? I refuse to believe that Baltar’s head character is only a fractured, self-serving part of himself, simply because a) it knows things Baltar couldn’t possibly know, and b) the Final Five saw head characters of their own back on Earth. So Espenson felt the need to bring back a part of the show’s mythology without it actually being tied to the show’s mythology? I don’t get it. And I really wish I’d never read that interview, because a lot of things worked better before I found out how little they actually meant, or that I had no clue that Galen Tyrol was feeling the way he’s apparently been feeling.
I am, however, very hopefully for the next episode. It looks like we’re going to get answers about Starbuck, and maybe some poignant Chief/Boomer stuff. The episode is written by Weddle and Thompson, who have not only done a fabulous job handling all the other Starbuck-centric episodes, but are also responsible for gems like “Downloaded” and the “Exodus” two-parter. And not only that, but the episode is directed by one of their best, Michael Nankin. Given all of that, if “Someone to Watch Over Me” isn’t completely, mind-blowingly awesome, then I’m not terribly hopeful for the remainder of the season.
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