GINO Review: "He Who Believeth in Me"

Season 4 of the new Battlestar Galactica began last night. Those of us who are still fans of the original series refer to it as GINO, or Galactica In Name Only. Since the show began, I've been reviewing it episode by episode, and I post the reviews at the Moist Board, Tombs of Kobol, and the official SciFi Channel website. And, now that I have a blog and everything, I'll post them here, too.

Beware of spoilers.

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Well, the show is back. And so am I. Why?

Many of you have wisely pointed out that I clearly don’t like it much, so why do I bother to watch and review it? Well, I’m not even sure why myself. I guess it’s because I’ve been a part of the revival discussion for so long that I feel invested in the thing, and I’m still enough of a fan of Battlestar Galactica that I think someone ought to chronicle this dismal show as it dances on Galactica’s grave. I feel I ought to – what? I don’t know. Keep a record. Or, to use Gaius Baltarian terms, to “bear witness.”

Or maybe I’m just a jerk. That’s probably the best explanation.

Anyway, on to the show.

Rumor is that Michael Hogan, who plays the curmudgeonly Tigh-turned-Redeye, is supposedly perturbed by the fact that his character is a Cylon, because it doesn’t fit the way he’s played the character over three seasons. Glad to see that someone else has noticed. Nothing much fits anymore – this show is filled with fervent brainstorms and wild-eyed conceits, none of which can be combined into a cohesive whole. There’s lots of motion and no substance. The strategy, it seems, in this fourth and blessedly final season, is to keep things moving at such a frenetic pace that nobody has time to notice. Although it’s nice that they’ve finally dropped the reference to the Cylon plan from the opening montage. Since they abandoned even the pretense of having a plan about two years ago, it’s high time that the credits should follow suit.

Switching gears for a moment: Robert Reed, AKA Galactica 1980’s mad scientist and, more illustriously, the man named Brady who was busy with three boys of his own, once wrote a letter to the Brady Bunch producers complaining about the inconsistency in tone of how that silly little show was written. He compared it to a scenario where the surgeons from M*A*S*H are in the operating room, when, suddenly, who should burst in but Adam West’s Batman. Now, it’s conceivable that this M*A*S*H Batman is a mental patient, deluded and tragic, but it can’t really be the same Batman from the world of that TV series and still exist in the grimmer, more naturalistic world of M*A*S*H. Conversely, Alan Alda’s Hawkeye and Cesar Romero’s Joker with makeup over his moustache couldn’t meet up on the streets of Gotham City and start plotting Batman’s demise in a giant cream puff, at least not without fundamentally altering who Hawkeye is. These characters exist in different universes; they function by different rules.

Yet GINO is chock filled with Batmen in the OR.

When we last saw our heros, the Final Four-out-of-Five heard a Dylan/Hendrix tune and mangled everything we knew about these characters, and now “everything’s changed.” Anders can look at a centurion in a raider through the vastness of space – yes, raiders used to be unmanned, but go with it – and their red eyes blink in unison and suddenly they call off the attack. Wouldn’t such a recognition sequence have been useful for Colonel Tigh when his fellow toasters were scraping out his eye? I guess that was pre-All Along the Watchtower, so it doesn’t count. If they’d only had a classic rock station on New Caprica. Then we would have known that this characters, who defy everything we know and understand about Moore’s Cylons, are just M*A*S*H- style Adam Wests without the cowls.

Meanwhile, back in the Church of Baltar, where only hot chicks are allowed to worship, Gaius is praying to some tramp in a red cocktail dress and curing viruses by allowing angry ex-constituents to go all Sweeney Todd on him. This Baltar subplot is arguably the silliest element in a show that’s gone whole hog on the silly scale, because the writers clearly think they’re dabbling in something profound. In real life, weird cultists aren’t all fashion models, and religion is not solely the province of damaged, disturbed people. I don’t know where they’re going with all this, and neither do they. Yet they probably think they do, which makes it all the more incoherent.

The same could be said about the rest of the show. How can I get worked up about Starbuck’s return one way or the other? I’m not convinced that the writers have figured it out, so my guess is as good as theirs. I’m not sitting on pins and needles waiting to see what they finally pull out of their butt, because every indication is that it will be the same kind of sloppy storytelling shoehorned in to fit whatever cool new idea Moore and Co. had while eating cantaloupe for breakfast. Maybe she’ll turn out to be the lost 13th Cylon model.

But how can that be? Don’t the Cylon only have twelve models? Well, yes, they do now. But we still have 19 more episodes to go. Anything can happen! See, it turns out that there were really 13 all along, and didn’t you see the signs? Because, see, all the paper in the colonies have the corners cut off, which, according to Pithia, means that 12 is really 13. So everything you knew is wrong, and just pretend it didn’t happen, and the Cylons don’t have a plan, but don’t you want to know who the last of the Final Five is? I mean, Final Six? Or, maybe I should say, Secret Six? Because there are only six left, except the Subterranean Seven, who will come to life when Demigod Baltar plays “I Got A Brand New Pair of Roller Skates” on his sacred piccolo? But who has the brand new key? WHO HAS THE BRAND NEW KEY?!!!

Maybe Batman does. Look, he’s swinging into Sickbay right now.