Wow, that sucked. I think someone forgot to tell the show's writers that the show is going to be ending in four episodes, because they're sticking with the same formless crap they've been trotting out since the New Caprica storyline ended, and I'm looking forward to hearing BSG dissident Bill Simmon rip this ep a new one when the podcast pops up. Perhaps the most frustrating thing is that the show had been developing a positive momentum during the past few weeks, and it was making me think that that awful episode after the season opener might well have been an aberration. Now, it looks as though the show is reverting to the mean. Seriously, it seems like every time the show starts to get awful it has a brief good spurt before reverting to suck. This spurt is over.
Basically, Ellen Tigh returned to the ship today. In the first of a series of jump the shark moments in this episode, she got angry when she found out that Saul had fathered a child with Caprica Six. This is the same Ellen Tigh that slept with most of the fleet. This led to several angry confrontations with Six. How dare she steal the man of a dead woman who everyone thought was a human until three episodes ago! BSG as soap opera. I guess she was angry because it showed that Tigh loved Six enough to give her a child but didn't love Ellen. Let's put aside that Six is in her late twenties or early thirties and that Ellen is likely menopausal. Let's ignore that the idea that "love" creates a cylon baby is just a rumor that Helo and Sharon thought of to explain why she was pregnant. The fact that Tigh would stay with a woman like Ellen--who constantly lied to him and betrayed him, while he did no such things to her--would likely be due to love, no? And then Caprica Six has a miscarriage, presumably because Saul doesn't completely love her anymore? WTF?! I thought that the whole point of their liaison was because she reminded him of Ellen. Clearly there can be pregnancies when Saul is in love with other women. This episode was so stupid and poorly written I really do want to hurt whoever wrote this thing (and this isn't even mentioning the fleet's command authority giving Baltar's cult guns? What? Are they really that stupid? Answer: when the story requires them to be that stupid, they are!) And let's not notice that the most libertine, freeloving character on the show is now the most prudish? Ellen was never interested in having children before this, in any event, and I realize that the whole end of the Cylon race thing might make her reevaluate those choices, but then under the circumstances shouldn't she be happy that Cylons can reproduce, and that the Tigh-Six baby proves it? And then she wants to leave the fleet on top of the stupidity, despite being utterly defenseless. So much for carrying on the cylon race!
At some point a long time ago, BSG ceased to resemble anything of aesthetic value and merely became brainless entertainment. Fine. I can do that. But it's getting so that you can't just turn your brain off to enjoy it--you need to use your brain to reconcile the flaws in the stories that are being introduced. I feel like a Soviet intellectual trying to use dialectical materialism to square the circle of the Leninist worldview. And the antilogic of the show would be easier to handle if it actually were still able to captivate. That isn't the case either. What I don't understand is that the show was able to elegantly tie much of the show's mythology together in last week's installment. Why can't they write a simple episode that doesn't require massive intellectual contortions to square with established character traits and common sense? I suppose some of the mysteries of BSG will never be solved.
