Battlestar Galactica

Last night's episode of Battlestar Galactica was perhaps the weakest episode of the series to date. The premise was that the fleet's food supply had become tainted by some unspecified contaminant and had to be discarded. A new source of protein (algae) was discovered on the moon of a ringed gas giant, however harvesting it was a problem.

To get to the algae the fleet would be required to jump through a "star cluster" with intense radiation which would scramble the ship's navigational instruments and light so bright that the pilots would become disoriented. The fleet could not jump to the other end of the cluster because it was too far and they could not go around for the same reason. They would have to jump into the cluster then jump out of it. However estimates were that the radiation would kill 80% of the people on the fleet.

The plan they came up with involved breaking the fleet up into 5 groups and having a Raptor jump with each ship, giving it the jump coordinates to get it out of the cluster. It seems that the Raptor's electronics are hardened for nuclear war and can withstand the radiation from the "cluster". Each civilian ship would off load its passengers and most of its crew to the Galactica, whose shielding would protect the people from the radiation.

The problems with this episode do not begin here, but here is were we will begin to discuss them. The Raptors were all flown by Viper pilots, except for the one flown by Helo (a Raptor's electronic systems officer the last time we checked - not a pilot). Apparently the Raptor pilots, whose job, among other things, is to accompany squadrons of Vipers and doing their navigation for them as well as providing ECM and ECCM support, were not up to the task of providing navigational data to civilian ships.

Each pilot was given a dosimeter to monitor their exposure to radiation. Each pilot was expected to make every crossing, meaning that they would have to make 10 jumps through the cluster. Why these five and only these five pilots could fly the missions is never revealed.

The crossing is made and only one or two ships is lost. However on the last crossing Cat loses contact with her ship and remains behind to search for it. She finds it and brings it safely to the other side, but takes a lethal dose of radiation.

The episode had a subplot involving Cat's past. It seems that before the Cylon attack on the Colonies she was a smuggler, a "trucker" in Colonial slang. She and her partner would run drugs and other contraband - including people (including, possibly, Cylon infiltration agents) from the outer Colonies to the inner worlds, including Caprica. After the attack she used the name of someone who had died shortly before the attack to get through the background checks and joined the Navy, becoming a Viper pilot.

What brought all this out was the fact that she ran across her old smuggling partner/lover when the civilians were brought on board the Galactica. Starbuck saw them arguing and did some digging and confronted Cat. Cat begged Starbuck to let her tell the Admiral herself rather than Starbuck blowing the whistle on her. This is what fed her suicidal desire to not leave a civilian ship behind.

The episode also developed the "Baltar on the basestar" arc with Baltar finding out that the Deanna (Lucy Lawless) model that he and Capricia 6 have been having threesomes with has been killing herself every day so that she can download. It seems that she has been "seeing things" on the cusp between life and death and is repeating the experience in an attempt to clearly remember and understand the experience.

Baltar believes that her experience may be the key to determining whether he is one of the "final five" Cylon models and is eager to help her remember. He conceives of the idea of seeking help from the Hybrid (the humanoid Cylon hard-wired into the basestar serving as its intelligent control core). The Hybrid gives them clues which may point the way to Earth and may also suggest that there is a linkage between the Cylon's monotheistic god and the pagan pantheon of the Colonists.

Perhaps this answers the question that has been plaguing me since the first episode of the mini-series. Who the frak told the Cylons that there was only one god and what his will for them was. Maybe it was the Hybrids.

The biggest problem with this episode is the implausibility of the whole premise. A "star cluster" is nothing more than an unusually dense group of stars. But even in and "unusually dense" group of stars the stars are still light-years apart. Otherwise the cluster would collapse into a black hole. The only place in the real universe where the conditions of superheated plasma and intense radiation could be found is in a stellar nursery and then only in the collapsing cloud of gas and dust which is becoming a star.

However these protostars would have to be light-years apart (see the above part about turning into a black hole). Even if the whole super super dust cloud which was giving birth to the stars was illuminated it would not all be super-charged. It should not have been difficult for the ships of the fleet to jump into a stable part of the area. Stellar nurseries are also not all that large on the galactic scale. Ships that are expected to be able to navigate across the entire galaxy to find Earth should have been able to go around it easily. After all the ships of the fleet were able to make jumps every 36 minutes for around a week during the first season.

Basically the set-up for this episode was highly contrived and unrealistic. Clearly the writers and producers simply wanted an excuse to have the fleet make a dangerous passage with some losses to remind the viewers how grim and realistic the show is and to set up Cat's heroic death.

Given the political points that the show has been making this season I'm surprised that they weren't able to work in the fact that Cat was an illegal alien. I don't know if this episode's poor quality was due to the influence of NBC and their hand-puppet Bonnie Hammer, who now runs the Sci-fi Channel, or if Ron Moore simply doesn't care any more because he knows that this is the last season in which he will have any meaningful control over the show.

Either option doesn't bode well for the future of the series.