4.19 Daybreak - Part 1

I hope Ron D. Moore knows what he’s doing! He took over the reins for this episode and the last, the double-episode finale, and then that will be it for BSG! So I don’t think it was unreasonable of me to expect this would be an episode where things got moving. And yet, what happened? It went into FLASHBACK!

Frak me.

I didn’t think the flashbacks were bad. Indeed, seeing Gaius with his father (and how Six worked her way into his life, winning his favour and securing his time with her) and Starbuck meeting Apollo (with Zach there! I wonder if that’s the same actor we saw in the photo all those seasons ago!) and, perhaps most affectingly, Laura with her sisters before tragedy hit her family. . . It was all good stuff. And yet it felt utterly out of place.

For one thing I didn’t get the reason for it. I couldn’t understand WHY I was being shown these histories. I couldn’t understand what the relevance for it was. I presume there was one, I just didn’t see it. The closest I got to any kind of revelation of character was a drunk Apollo trying to chase a bird out of the room. That felt significant somehow, some way, but I can’t quite put my finger on why. Anders’ flashback was the most revealing, with him discussing time and motion and perfection clearly part of his Cylon psyche – of mathematics and music – working away.

(I guess we have to presume the musical notes did represent the co-ordinates to where the Colony was. I don’t recall that being made explicit. Potentially it got edited out of the finl cut; I got the feeling quite a lot got cut from this episode, like Adama’s flashback story for one thing.)

The real gripe, of course, is not that the flashbacks were bad it’s that they were unwelcome! There’s so much to be getting on with – about the Opera House and Starbuck’s true nature and Head Six and Head Gaius – that dawdling around in the past felt so intrusive. I just sincerely hope Ron D. Moore knows what he’s doing – that he has got it all laid out beautifully for the finale episode.

Fingers crossed.

In the meantime, then, the stage was otherwise set for a whopper of a confrontation. All our heroes (except, bizarrely, Gaius – whose choice wasn’t made explicit so far as I could tell) are set to join Adama on his rescue mission of Hera. That they have one small attack approach on the Colony creates a classic against-all-odds scenario for Galactica’s last hurrah. I thought it was interesting that the Final Five were all convinced they had to be together, and had to go. There’s meaning for that, I am sure.

With it being the last episode the odds of who will live and die are out of the window. I have to assume a few of them will make it back, probably in a Raptor, with Hera. But Galactica won’t make it, and the very frail-looking Laura I fear will die with a resigned Adama. . . That’ll be a heartbreaking end, for sure. But maybe it’s in death that the secrets of the Opera House and other mysteries may find their resolution?

It’s exciting and worrying and pushed for time. All the hallmarks of great Battlestar Galactica episodes, of course, but this last one is the one that really counts above all the rest. Oh I really hope Ron D. Moore knows what he is doing!