Battlestar Galactica - "A Disquiet That Follows My Soul"

I'm currently working on the first draft of a novel. As I'm writing it, I find that the destination keeps changing and the needs of the story are causing me to have to change details of the characters, one's profession, for instance. I can roll with this, because I have the luxury of then going back and changing everything so it fits together before I show it to anybody. So, in a way, I am sympathetic to the plight of Ron Moore and the writers of Battlestar Galactica. Clearly they did not plan on there being a second Cylon/human hybrid and, when they decided to turn Tyrol into a Cylon, they left themselves with a gaping hole to fill.

The solution to that problem was one of my many issues with "A Disquiet that Follows My Soul." Out of nowhere, we get this random news about Cally that just randomly renders moot a major part of of the story for the last couple of years just because it suits the writers' need. It was lazy and boring, which kind of perfectly describes the episode.

The show this week revolved around what the fleet was going to do about their tenuous relationship with the Cylons. Adama and Roslin want to align with them, while Zarek, Gaeta, and in all likelihood a large part of the fleet want to cut them loose. In a way, this could be an interesting development - if the fleet's whole existence has come down to find Earth and beat the Cylons then it could be just as big a blow to some people to lose the Cylons as an enemy as it was to find that the whole Earth thing wasn't going to come together for them.

But the whole thing just didn't really work. Right now it seems like everyone would have much larger concerns. Roslin and Adama, both still seem too shaken up about Earth to really contribute much, Gaeta wasn't exactly convincing in his role as betrayer of the fleet, and Tom Zarek has never really done it for me. I also see the other side a little bit more than the show did. Yes the Cylons are kinda good now and sure the right thing to do is to ally with them. But let's not forget that these Cylons were completely okay with destroying the colonies and ending life-as-everyone-knew-it. You can't expect everyone to happily let bygones be bygones that easily

So this week's episode felt lazy and wheel-spinning and, combined with the mehtastic reveal of the final Cylon (that went more or less unremarked upon this week) I haven't really been feeling the last hours of Galactica so far. Of course, its still way too early to make any final judgments, but the writing problems and lack of imagination here really bugged me and had me longing for the days of season one and two.

C