BSG The Plan

If this is to be the very last word about Battlestar Galactica then I can’t help but feel it’s left a few things unsaid, and what it did say it perhaps might have said a little better. This straight-to-DVD feature-length special, The Plan centred around the original intentions the Cylons had for their assault on humans right up to the sudden shift in Cylon agenda that occurred at the end of Season 2.

The Plan began with a scene that slotted chronologically at the end of Season 2, with the two Cavil’s being taken to be flushed out of the airlock, and one Cavil telling the other why there had been a change in tactic. As a framing device it worked well enough, and it wasn’t shortly after that we were seeing the attack against the colonies from the viewpoint of the Final Five as well as the Cylon base ships.

The effects, whilst hardly blockbuster standard, were mostly impressive. The first hints that there was some greater force in the universe shaping events was present in such moments as Tory’s survival from the blast, crawling out of her car when everyone else around her appeared to have been wiped out. Ellen Tigh, also, survived in such a way like she did back on the original Earth. These were neat touches but, like most of the show, would probably be lost on everyone but proper BSG fans.

The manner by which the film skimmed along certain episodes from the first and second series was another narrative device that would have been bewildering to all non-BSG watchers. And yet here, in this conceit of filling in the gaps of episodes, is where my biggest complaint about The Plan arises. For every good fill-in there were some massive omissions.

A good one? Boomer’s ‘awakening’, dripping wet, having planted the charges in the water supply. We find out that Cavil was interacting with her, using an elephant as a recall tool to trigger her Cylon consciousness. It was nicely done and worked. And I like that we found out who Six turned to talk to in the miniseries after she had been with Baltar. Again, that was Cavil, and it was nice to have those moments revisited. Again, with Six, as the agent that tried to discredit Baltar - that was an odd episode that got a behind-the-scenes exposition.

But the omissions? The point that the Cylons kept attacking the fleet every thirty-three minutes. I presume this was because the Cylons were tracking them, and this was how long it took for the base ships to calculate their next jump? (Seems really slow, when you consider the Hybrid’s speed at jumping in later seasons.) But then the ship that had apparently been tracking them, the one Apollo and Starbuck shot down, it had appeared empty in that first episode. What had been going on there? The Plan felt like the perfect chance to answer that mystery, and it missed it.

Same goes for Starbuck’s internment in The Farm, where she received a scar. The Plan actually touched on this very subject, actually went there and showed pieces of it, and yet didn’t bother to explain why Starbuck had been given the scar. It was such a frustrating overlook that I really don’t know how to justify.

The Cylon plan itself did seem somewhat petty. That the Cylons were all hanging around the Final Five, and had inserted themselves within the fleet to mop up any survivors didn’t seem like the most machine-like and efficient way of achieving their goals. The suggestion was that the other Cylon models, aside from Cavil, were not so wholeheartedly bent on destroying humans. It’s really the only way of considering the Boomer/Helo on Caprica sideplot from Season One – that the Cylons wanted to know if the humans could love them and so, potentially, redeem themselves.

There were some interesting depths of the Cylon psyche mined. The Simon model, having a wife and family with humans, served as a direct counterpoint to the cold Cavil and the murder of the child at the finish (a fine BSG moment of ruthlessness). And Leoben’s drawing of the mandalas, and his intuition apparently drawn from future visions of Starbuck, all helped embroider his character’s actions. There was good stuff in The Plan, but the patchwork quality of the narrative didn’t help it all flow along enjoyably.

The only real tangible ‘plot’ was Anders and his Pyramid ball team’s survival and resistance on Caprica. Again, it was a nice touch that he was watched over by a Cylon model (Simon, again) but I didn’t really feel like I got into their plot as much as I could have. Perhaps the whole thing was blighted by the fact that it was a rehash and fill-in piece; the audience knew where everything was headed, who lived and who died, and how certain things had to play out so there was an inherent lack of drama. A similar problem inhibited the Razor special episode but that one did, at least, function as a standalone story. The Plan can’t make the same claim.

As a swansong then, it wasn’t the most graceful of exits. If this is the last word, perhaps there were some things that were better left unsaid and instead left for us to talk about amongst ourselves.