3.20 Crossroads - Part 2

If it wasn’t for the last ten minutes, this would have been the most disappointing of Season finales. Thankfully, it had the last ten minutes. I think they’ve always known about the last ten minutes quite a few episodes ago, which kind of explains why the show feels like it’s been cooling its heels waiting around to smack the viewers around the face with it.

But I’ll get to that. First, the preceding 30 minutes of the show. . .

Yeah, yeah, it was all about Gaius and his trial. The thing is, the longer it went on the more certain I was that he was never going to be found guilty. The evidence supporting it all was just too weak, and then Apollo was cajoled into taking the stand against his father and speaking on Gaius’ behalf. It was a good speech, actually, addressing some of the issues of hypocrisy and warped justice that have peppered the show since the start. Battlestar Galactica has enjoyed those moments of moral dubiousness, and it was only right that they came back here to be picked apart and held up to the light.

So Gaius was free and, not soon after, apparently spirited away to his “new life” amongst some kind of cult people that considered him a form of God. The threads of that, no doubt, will be picked up in the next Season and potentially serve as a kind of bridge between human and Cylon.

As for the Cylons we know, not much happened with them. There was that bizarre shared dream between Laura, Athena and Caprica – but though the phenomena was presented it was never explored or explained. It was indicative of this finale as a whole: present a whole lot of crazy, inexplicable stuff and then leave it hanging in the balance.

Which brings me to that final ten minutes. Right around the time Caprica had her vision in the opera house of being with Gaius and the child and seeing the Final Five staring down at them, it occurred to me to count how many people were hearing the music on Galactica. There were four, I quickly realised, just before THAT scene.

It turns out the four of them – Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tori – were channelling a sitar version of All Along The Watchtower (I’ll come to that). Apparently it was intended to be that way, a trigger that would cause them to gather and awaken themselves to the truth: they were Cylons!

It was quite a moment. Coupled with the constant music, the Cylon attack and the power running out, it was pretty intense. I had previously earmarked Tigh as a potential Cylon after Deanna made her apology upon seeing the Final Five (I am guessing it was him she apologised too!), but I didn’t fully believe it, and I really didn’t figure the likes of Anders or Tyrol to be one (Tori, when she started behaving weirdly, I figured her as a potential, also).

Again, quite what it all means for the four of them and what they are supposed to do next hangs completely (and tantalisingly) in the balance. Tigh wants to go back to being the man he knows of himself, but I am fairly sure that all of them are going to be irresistibly drawn to their true selves and their true purpose. Earth, no doubt, figures heavily in this.

What I suppose is unique to this four is that they have been allowed to grow up, be born, in fact, as humans. Tigh, after all, has grown up with Adama. I was of the understanding that the Cylon ‘moulds’ don’t change and so could never have been children. But these other five are perhaps more ethereal, and exist in a spiritual sense at a fundamental level and only exist in humans. (Perhaps that’s the key to the Cylon’s eventual goal – to marry a Cylon spiritual form housed in the body of man. It’s the best explanation I’ve got up to now.)

And so we had the final reveal (as Apollo decided to ditch the lawyer life and get back in the Viper) of Starbuck piloting her ship. She looked the same. The ship looked the same. Except she was happy, and calming, and claimed she had been to Earth and everything was going to be all right.

And that’s all the explanation we got. The quickest conclusion to reach is that Starbuck must be the fifth and final Cylon, who realised the truth about herself upon death and has since seen ‘the light’ and knows how to lead the humans and the Cylon in that unification goal I spoke of earlier. That’s the quick and obvious – which makes me certain it’s not right.

The final shot was, as was almost expected at that moment, of Earth itself. Given that the song All Along The Watchtower existed, I have to figure that it must be a future Earth. That is if it is our Earth, and this set of us that existed in the 20th/21st century are a part of the BSG universe, I think we’re long gone now – but that song, in a sitar version – remains!

Ultimately then that last ten minutes were cracking stuff. I do feel like it also ran an extreme risk of being rather silly. I can imagine many people watching and throwing their hands up in the air, figuring that the show had finally just gone too daft all at once. The reveal of the four Cylons and a freshly-alive Starbuck and then the reveal of Earth coupled with familiar music was a mass crash of incongruous, surprising revelation not to be easily swallowed in one gulp.

I guess when this originally aired the fans of the show had a whole long wait between Season 3 and 4; time to absorb and analyse and get used to this explosion of new information. I don’t have that cushion. I’ve got the first half of Season 4 ready and waiting so I can get to see pretty soon how well all these balls that are hanging in the air get juggled around and managed to see if the show really has lost its marbles or if I’m in good hands for what, I believe, is the final Season.