SPOILERS SPOILERS
* Infodump! I thought it was pretty elegantly done for all that, though, because they couched it in compelling material. With Ellen, you had her panic and confusion and desperation upon waking up in the Cylon ship, rapidly replaced by an entirely new personality for that character–the real personality for that character, as it turns out. The frisson of this material, plus getting to see her duke it out intellectually with that candy-colored clown they call the sandman, Dean Stockwell, gave her and Cavil’s part of the infodump some real charge.
* It did feel a bit like Anders’s gunshot-driven revelations could have been better conveyed over a longer period of time, or visually rather than verbally. But I also understand what the show’s temporal and financial limitations are at this point, and once they waited this long their choices were few. As I’ve said a million times, I’m here for the human drama more than I’m here for some complex mythology–after all, when you start watching BSG, the complex mythology doesn’t even exist!–so all things considered I’m really glad they’ve spent this half-season dealing with things like the coup than with mysterious flashbacks to the earth-Cylons’ past or what have you. In a way, they tried to bridge that gap in the Anders segments, having his revelations come as a direct result of the wounds he incurred during the coup, and making the main conflict in his half of the episode be “Starbuck and the Cylons want to find out what the hell’s going on” vs. “Starbuck wants to help the man she loves.” Heh, that’s the main schism of Battlestar Galactica fandom in a nutshell!
* I think the best sign of the success of the infodumps here is that my two favorite BSG bloggers, Todd VanDerWerff and Jim Henley, each preferred a different one of the two approaches.
* VanDerWerff also accurately notes that we fans have wanted to know this information for so long that his episode had a lot of goodwill to coast on in order to reach its goal. Even though the mythology isn’t necessarily my thing, I can certainly confirm that–I was just so excited to hear the story come together in a way that made sense and had some emotional and thematic heft to it that they practically could have gotten away with having a character sit in front of the camera reading it from a book.
* Part of me is a little iffy about the idea that the Cylon nuclear holocaust wasn’t really all the humans’ fault in that they built the Cylons. I know you can trace it back thousands of years or whatever, but I’m with Tigh–the Five Cylons are to blame for the depredations of the Seven Known Models at least as much as humankind is, and I’m bummed about that. You lose some of that Frankenstein’s monster mojo if that’s the case.
* The rot in the bones of the Galactica is maybe the show’s most obvious metaphor to date, but this is the time in the series for obvious metaphors as far as I’m concerned.
You know, I really really hated the infodump. I know that they probably had financial/logistical limitations, but they had to have known those limitations going into the START of the 4th season. To have all this mythology get shotgunned out through expository dialogue in, like, the fifth-from final episode is pretty inexcusable. Even if (or maybe even ESPECIALLY if) one, like you, isn’t all that invested in the mythology anyway.
Of course, reasonable people can disagree. What reasonable people CAN’T disagree on (and I will challenge any dissenters to a duel) is that the appearance of John (Johnny One-Note) Hodgman is just a slap in the face. I hesitate to use the shark-jumping metaphor, but this kind of cute cameo is exactly what that term was invented to describe.
Carnival of Battlestar
* First, this seems like as good a place as any to collect the links to all my Battlestar Galactica posts for this final half-season. * Episode 4.5.1: Sometimes a Great Notion * Episode 4.5.2: A Disquiet Follows My Soul…