2.20 Lay Down Your Burdens - Part 2

Well well well. By happy chance I hadn’t realised that this was an extended episode, so right around the time when I thought the episode was due to end I was feeling a little disappointed. For a while there I thought BSG appeared to have run itself out of steam. How wrong I was. . .

Picking up from the previous episode, Starbuck and her team were looking doomed on Caprica. But then the Cylons withdrew completely. That was odd. More odd was Cylon Al showing up – revealed in that instant to be a Cylon since we knew there was another one of them being a priest to President Laura. So another Cylon mould was revealed, there to deliver a message: that the Cylons had realised their error in attacking the human race and would do so no longer.

This is evidently a crucial point in relation to what went before and what was to come. In terms of what went before it showed that the Cylon Al mould was somehow fostering the belief that the attack was wrong all along, just the protest had been ignored. Interesting that even the Cylons have their own factions concerning religion and atheism! In terms of what was to come, it suggests that the Cylons no longer have extermination of the human race on their agenda – which makes me wonder what new plan has supplanted this.

But I’ll get to that.

What really bogged the episode down was the election result between Laura and Gaius. I really thought this was where the episode was going to conclude, once the fixed result had been corrected and Gaius was named President I thought the episode was coming to a gloomy finish. When Pegasus Six detonated herself with the nuke she had been carrying I was fully expecting to see the end titles pop up and allow my disappointment to sink in.

Cut to one year later! Gaius has carried out his decree for the human race to populate New Caprica and things are miserable. He’s a drunk, pill-popping arsehole of a President. The people are striking, when they’re not cold and dying. Starbuck and Anders are married, only he’s on his last legs with pneumonia. And Tyrell and Callie are together (at last!), and she was pregnant, I noted.

Things were certainly shit down there, and not much better on the Galacticas. Running on skeleton crews, when that mass fleet of Cylons showed up they were in no position to fight. So the two Adamas did the only thing they could do: fled, with a promise to return! (If I read the numbers right I make it that about 15,000 people fled with the Galacticas and the fleet, leaving 30,000 to the mercy of the Cylon invasion.)

So the episode closed with Gaius surrendering to the Cylons who promised to leave him unharmed if he did so. There was not much in the way of clues about what the Cylons’ intentions were. Assuming annihilation is not on their agenda I can only guess that something akin to ‘the farm’ is on the cards. That is the Cylons do not look to destroy and replace the human race, rather enslave them? Or perhaps interbreed them, like Boomer’s kid (who Teacher Laura, it was shown, retains a close eye on).

Cylon Boomer and Caprica Six do appear to have become big chiefs amongst the Cylons now, and last time we saw them they were not interested in killing people. I can’t really make many more assumptions than that, and luckily for me I won’t have to wait innumerable months for the next season!

So all in all it was a good season finale. Brave is perhaps the best description. The show broke its own mould and got outside of the eponymous Battlestar Galactica to take the programme into new territory. Given that the show is called Battlestar Galactica, of course, it’s hard to imagine that not being a key factor. It’s hard to imagine that the Adamas won’t return and stage some form of rescue and perhaps flee again and continue their journey to Earth? That’s always been the driving force of the show and it’s certainly not a spent plotline so I’d be surprised if it was abandoned now.

Still it was good they had this shake-up at the end. It’s certainly got me keen to see the next series to learn of the direction the show will take. Such a doom-filled ending as a Cylon invasion over a miserable human race on a harsh planet isn’t the kind of situation that gets made into happy ending quickly or easily! Roll on Season 3.