TV Fan

Season Four starts right where we left off, with the calm in the centre of the storm: two Vipers flying side-by-side through gorgeous pastel-coloured clouds. Lee is still staring in open-mouthed astonishment at an unusually happy & centered Starbuck, returned from the dead to lead humanity to either its salvation or its doom. The calm doesn’t last for long: back on Galactica there’s barely time to run through the possible implications of Starbuck’s return before the Cylons launch a massive attack. And so the final season is off & running, with an epic space battle & more action & emotion in the cold open than many shows have in a whole episode. By the beginning of the first act the battle against the Cylon fleet is over, but the characters face choices about identity & faith that lay the groundwork for battles within the fleet itself.

Who believeth in Starbuck?

How adorable was Starbuck when she proudly announced to Adama that she’d found Earth? And yet there was something unsettling in her happiness, oblivious to everyone else’s confusion & fear. It was almost a comfort to see her back to her usual frakked-up self by the end of the episode, acting on a typically crazy plan to…kill the President? Great way to convince everyone you’re not a Cylon, Kara.

I don’t think she’s a Cylon – too obvious – & I think she’s telling the truth about what she thinks happened. There’s obviously foul play afoot, but for once I don’t think the Cylons are behind it. We know that they don’t know where Earth is, so how would they have taken Starbuck there? I’m loving the Lostian time-space discrepancy though, especially with the added mystery of her brand-new ship.

“Do you believe in miracles?” Tigh asks Adama. Adama admits to Lee that he’s struggling between his head & his heart on whether or not to believe; despite both Lee & Kara’s appeals, his head is winning. Other characters pick their sides more easily: Lee immediately – & typically – goes with his heart. Listening to her head is Roslin, who’s convinced that Starbuck is a Cylon trick. I must say, for someone who has led the fleet on many a dangerous potential wild goose chase based on nothing more than her instinct & drug-induced visions, Roslin is taking an excessively hard line against Kara’s newly acquired Earthdar, especially considering the photographic evidence. All these doubts soon have Starbuck, initially so full of certainties, questioning her own identity.

“I don’t know what the frak I am right now”

Starbuck isn’t the only one questioning who she is – the Four are also trying to make sense of reality when everything they believed to be true is gone. Even their free will has been taken away, as they find themselves questioning if every thought & action is just a part of their programming. But any philosophical or emotional quandaries have to be put on hold while they help defend who they thought they were from who they really are. Tory & Tyrol aren’t too bad at pretending everything’s normal, but in the CIC Tigh has an hallucination where he shoots Adama in the eye, a scene that eerily recalls when Boomer’s Cylon programming kicked in. Is it instructions, or just a paranoid vision? Anders, thrown into battle in a Viper for the first time, is panicked. He leaves his gun safeties on – by accident or not doesn’t matter, because he ends up saving the entire fleet without even realising it: he comes face-to-face with a Raider, & when it scans him with its glowy red eye, HIS eye glows red in response, causing all the Cylons to turn tail & disappear. (So much for any lingering  doubts about the Four being true Cylons.) The great irony is that the Four are worried about harming those they love, when in actuality they just saved humanity from probable extinction.

Who believeth in Baltar?

Also dealing with a shifting sense of self is Baltar, who after his Scarlett O’Hara moment post-acquittal discovers someone who does give a damn about him. A lot of someones, actually: a cult of nubile young women, conveniently headquartered in a forgotten bulkhead on Galactica. For reasons I don’t really understand, they view Baltar as some sort of messiah & worship him to such an extent that even the excessively egomaniacal Gaius is weirded out. Initially we get a return to Early Baltar-as-comic-relief, with misunderstandings ensuing from his interactions with Head Six. But a funny thing happens when an old cliché a dying child is brought to Baltar for salvation: he actually…seems to care about someone other than himself? Now, I know he’s notoriously slippery & deceptive, but the constant driving force behind his behaviour has always been the need to save his own skin. So his willingness here to give up his own life to save the boy was pretty shocking, & seems like genuine change of heart.