3.12 Rapture

I suspect for fans of Battlestar Galactica that are as nuts about the show as I am about Lost, for example, then this episode is one that would have prompted discussion and debate in a frenzy. That debate would have been fuelled by Deanna’s experience in the temple, when she confronted the final five and learned their identities. I’ll come back to that scene.

In the meantime the cliffhangers from the previous episode were all resolved rather amicably and quickly! The Cylon ships headed to the planet all backed off, barring Deanna’s ship (a decision that had the startling prompt amongst the other Cylons that her dissension was not one they could tolerate any longer). Apollo instructed Dualla to go and get Starbuck, so he and Anders could get on with defending the temple for as long as they could.

Uneasy alliances all around then, but it made for a tense and enjoyable episode. Plenty of action and tension. Battlestar always handles this stuff well – in fact its battles and skirmishes and high-stakes situations are something of a trademark of the show for me. The only downside, for me, was the escape when the whole planet went supernova. Given there were people on the ground when it was all going off, and Tigh’s priceless remark about how it was going to be “photo finish” I was anticipating every bead of tension to be wrung out of the escape. Not so. It was all rather easy and over quickly. Probably as a result of time allowance on the episode in general rather than any artistic or dramatic decision.

Elsewhere Athena elected to have Helo kill her so she could download back on the Cylon base ship and get to her daughter again. The scenes with Athena and Cylon Boomer were bizarre; Cylon Boomer has become such a cold character! That seemed totally at odds with the character that existed on New Caprica. Still, it allowed Caprica Six justification to snap her neck, so no sooner had Athena arrived when she was back on Galactica, with her baby, and with Caprica Six in tow!

Add in Gaius managing to end up back on Galactica, also, and pretty much every major player is now back together in the same place for the first time since Season 2. The ramifications to all of that are mightily interesting. Galactica has a new signpost to follow with the supernova (in truth this seems like an event so preposterously unlikely I’ll need more justification for how that event just happened to occur at the moment in time) and plenty of interesting reactions from the people onboard to follow up on.

Meanwhile, back on the Cylon base star, Deanna’s model and the knowledge contained within has been maddeningly ‘boxed’ indefinitely, and so what, or more specifically who, she had learned about was left unknown to all but her. Which brings me to the beginning, and where the debate would have raged amongst the fanboys about who the final five could be.

There wasn’t much in the way of clues, save for the fact that Deanna seemed to only react to one of the figures she saw. When she saw this one figure she apologised for her ignorance. And, just before dying, she told Gaius he was right without defining what he was right about.

Gaius thought it might have been about whether he was a Cylon. The longer this idea has dangled the less I believe it. If he was, why would he have been the brilliant mind on Earth that needed to be infiltrated by Six to allow access to the defence systems? It just doesn’t seem right. (And yet there is that bizarre telepathy he shares with Six and the projection aspect to his flights of fantasy, so I’m not dismissing him out of hand!)

There was Starbuck’s revelation at the end, where she was shown the picture she had drawn all her life that resembled the 4,000 year old image found in the temple. On being shown this Starbuck recalled the prophetic words of the Leoben Cylon who told her she had a destiny to fulfil. This either marks her out as one of the final five, or maybe just a pivotal figure in the eventual destinies of the humans and the Cylons.

Does Deanna have reason to apologise to Starbuck as she did? That’s what I ask myself. I don’t recall them having all that much to do with each other. (Indeed, Gaius aside, Deanna hasn’t hurt very many non-Cylon people!) But then I’ve not seen everything she ever did whilst on New Caprica, for example, and maybe her apology was a more general one for whatever was perpetrated to the individual in question.

Point is, I don’t know. And I’ve rapidly watched the show from beginning to this point in isolation of any discussion, so it’s hard to retain all the facts and scenes and pointers that I could build towards any specific case. My out of the box suggestion? Colonel Tigh. Irony of ironies that the one-eyed hater of all things Cylon turns out to be one of the final five! But given that he had an eyeball gouged out, that seems to me to be something that Deanna would want to apologise for!