I don’t really have a ton to say about this episode. The chief is likable, Boomer still sucks. The episode really explores the moral repercussions of scapegoating, which is interesting but didn’t make me engage 100%. Once again, Commander Adama rejects the authority of President Roslin, potentially setting up a bit of a power struggle for later episodes. Good stuff but not the most interesting.

I’m going to write about these two episodes in a single post because they are the two halves of the same narrative arc and I’m all about efficiency. These episodes are a beautiful piece of storytelling. The precipitous event, the killing of the BSG’s pilots because of a freak accident, is very interesting. I was initially torn because a seemingly random event sparks the rest of a pretty major plotline. I’m generally cautious of these random events because they can really illuminate the meddling hand of the storyteller in an engrossing narrative. This random event, however, serves the purpose of subtly reinforcing the impression of direness for the viewer. The BSG was going to be decommissioned, it is an old, old ship. The accident demonstrates that these kinds of freak events happen, and following the invasion of the Cylons, there aren’t enough people left to cover over these freak accidents.

The solution to the initial freak accident naturally leads to the elucidation of Starbuck’s background and helps to deepen her character as well as naturally pulling out the more of the relationships between Lee, the commander, and Starbuck. In the second episode, the search for Starbuck again naturally and subtly demonstrated for the viewer the way that the commander and Lee Adama feel about Starbuck, as well as demonstrating that the commander is willing to disobey the president. All of this interesting character stuff and it all felt so earned and so real. Awesome! AND it demonstrates that Starbuck is a certified badass AND we get to see what the inside of a Cylon looks like AND that they depend on Wetware for their functioning. Incredibly well done, I’m so impressed by this episode.

I really don’t mean to gush, but oh my goodness. The character development was so good. We begin to see Lee Adama developed as a serious character when he is forced to decide between blindly following the word of his father or becoming the president’s new piece in her political game. The villain is not the Cylons but another human, not even an objectively evil human, but a freedom fighter. He does not want to be a slave, nor does he want his fellow inmates to be used against their will. The president and Commander Adama don’t want to kill these men, but they have a very real need for their physical strength. Is their inclination to use the prisoners motivated by prejudice? Maybe! Lee Adama chooses to blaze his own path and, in the process, demonstrates himself to be a strict moralist. Gray areas and complexities, that’s what I wanted. So good!

To be perfectly honest, I was a little underwhelmed by this episode. It definitely wasn’t bad, I just think that it could have been better. My central issue comes down to the episode’s opening sequence. It seemed to me that a lot of the narrative subtlety that I loved so much in episode one was just thrown right out the window. The first episode does an excellent job of setting up that most classic of Scifi mysteries, Just who is human? The Cylons have perfected terminatoresque technology that allows them to take convincing human forms. And, in another stroke of classic Scifi magic, these human Cylons sometimes don’t know that they’re Cylons. It’s a tale as old as time. Is this character a Cylon, a human, a hallucination, or a sentient hallucination induced by a nanochip embedded by the Cylons in a human’s brain? So you have all the makings of a classic Clue (The board game) like scenario where all of your protagonists are trapped on a ship, and we don’t know which one of them is secretly a Cylon agent. Put Clue in space with the fate of humanity resting in the balance, that’s pretty compelling storytelling in my opinion. But then the show reveals who the Cylon is in the opening credit sequence! We know from the start! And they show a montage of the Cylon agent’s plot unfolding. All the tension, all the mystery, all the DRAMA out the window! As a media consumer, that was definitely frustrating to watch.

To be fair to Battlestar Galactica (BSG) this may be a function of the streaming service on which I watched the episode. To be even fairer, I was still captivated for 45 minutes by the acting and the writing. There is a compelling moment where the Cylon-human character seems to wrestle with her programming. We got to watch as the person she thinks she is becomes strained and twisted by the fact of the sabotage she committed against the Galactica. Grace Park, the Cylon-human, did a phenomenal job of conveying evolving denial and internal conflict. I just wish that we, the viewers, got the chance to watch the narrative evolve naturally. Not to be corny or obnoxious, but I think good television avoids spoon-feeding the viewer. A compelling story is something that feels like it has stakes, that doesn’t seem overly contrived or simplified. Real stories, real human complexities aren’t dumbed down and given to us one digestible bite at a time. The television shows that we as a culture herald as truly great (The Wire, Breaking Bad, The Sopranos, The West Wing), all share a respect for the viewer. There is an almost post-modernist understanding that the viewer, the consumer, will make sense for themselves. A pact is made: We’ll tell the story, you figure out what it means. I just think that BSG didn’t respect the viewer as much as they should have this time around.

This show is bananas! The pilot episode is no holds barred tension from beginning to end. It opens on an exhausted crew and a clock ticking down in 33-minute intervals. Why is the crew exhausted? Who is the crew? They’re running from something? Right? What are they running from? The show gives us none of this! Everything that I expected from an opening episode was thrown out the window. I don’t know the character names, I don’t know their motivations. The first episode is entirely plot-based. One thing happens then the next thing happens then the next thing happens, one after the other after the other. People die, then come back to life. A lady is a hallucination, no wait she’s a robot, no wait. It’s a constant, unexplained, mess. But the mess is executed with good writing and compelling cinematography. There is a short space battle, but nothing crazy. Normally I would say plot-based writing was a bad thing, but the air of mystery that surrounds the first episode, paired with plot points that feel like the climax of a greater narrative, makes the first episode so engaging and suspenseful that I did not miss the character development. I’m confident that all the things we’re missing in this first episode will come out later, subtly and naturally. Isn’t that exciting?