Apr

27

“Escape Velocity” - Episode Recap

Posted by battlestar

April 27, 2008 |

Twelve Cylon models. Seven are known. Four live in secret. One will be revealed. But apparently they no longer have a plan.

Previously on BSG: Gaius is taken in by a harem where begins to preach his faith in the Cylon god. He then sleeps with Tory; she cries. Mrs. Tigh acted as an informant for the Cylons on New Caprica; Saul kills her. Cally finds out Saul, Tory, and the Chief are Cylons. Mrs. Chief takes her son into an airlock where Tory knocks her out cold, takes the baby, and then spaces Cally.

We open with a shot of silver figures surrounded by candles with a scruffy Chief reciting a passage. It’s Cally’s funeral. The camera pans to let us know who is there: Saul, Adama, Laura (sporting a new wig), Tory, and Lee among others. The Chief finishes his speech and sits down while a curly haired priestess we’ve never seen closes the ceremony with a well wish to Cally and a “So Say We All”. Laura leans over to Bill to say she liked the ceremony; he responds that he wasn’t a fan. She replies that she wants him to know what she likes. When it comes to funerals. Because she’s dying. And my heart breaks.

People begin to file out and offer their sympathy to Galen who is standing at the door. He lets Adama and the President pass, but then grabs hold of Tory’s elbow and Saul’s arm as they try to escape. He gives a wild-eyed look that seems to ask them what he’s supposed to do about his new identity crisis and what’s going to happen when people find out. The other two mumble apologies and move along. Lee is next in line to offer his sympathy, but Tyrol just keeps his eyes locked on Saul and Tory and ignores the former CAG, which I’m kind of okay with.

We cut to the brig where two officers are monitoring video feed of Caprica Six pacing her cell. Saul walks up and asks, “What’s it up to today?” The female security officer tells him it’s just the usual “sleeping and pacing” and comments that the only way Six avoids insanity is by turning her brain off.

Saul goes into the cell to tell Six that her request to see Hera Agathon is denied. Side note: Does this mean Hera is on Galactica? Who is taking care of her while Mommy and Daddy are on the Demetrius with Starbuck?

Six doesn’t act surprised by the news; Saul seems to tell her this every day. She does seem surprised that he constantly does it face to face instead of just sending a message and using his time to do things like, oh I don’t know, be the XO of the ship.

Saul turns to leave saying, “We’re done.” But stops when Six, with the face of his dead wife, replies, “I think we’re not.” We see from a cut away to the video monitors that it’s still Caprica Six in the cell, but in Saul’s head the woman in front of him is Ellen in Six’s clothes and wig. She asks him if there’s something he wants or needs from her. Scared, Saul orders her to get back.  Six tells him she’ll see him tomorrow.

We switch to a tight shot of the Chief out of his black suit from the funeral and into his usual green coveralls. Tory and Saul come walking into his quarters asking what he was thinking when he grabbed and stopped them on their way out of the service. Chief doesn’t answer. Saul asks Galen if he’s going to do anything with his crying son. Tyrol responds, “He probably needs to be changed.” Saul and Tory give each other looks, but Saul caves first and moves off to tend to the little one. Tory moves over to Chief and asks if he thanks Cally killed herself because of him. He tells her that his wife thought they were having an affair, even though they weren’t. He then begins to talk more to himself than to the others about not knowing who he is or what parts of him are real or programmed. Tory tells him that he’s “perfect” and that he doesn’t need guilt, that all he needs to do is shut off the emotion. The men disagree, in what feels like a gender reversal, and say they should embrace the feelings. Saul gives Galen a “I know what it feels like to have a dead wife” speech, but then realizes he’s getting a little too emotional about it due to his recent visit with Ellen!Six. He tells Tyrol to feel all the emotions he needs, just don’t blow their cover. Here’s a thing I love about Michael Hogan: when he (or maybe it’s just when he’s playing Saul) starts to get really emotional, this faint Scottish accent begins to creep into his speech. You can hear it at this moment in the show.

Opening credits. 39,675 survivors currently trying to find their way to Earth.

We move onto Baltar and his harem’s hiding place on the Galactica. Tory comes in to find Gaius asleep and decides to wake him by pulling out one hair on his head at a time. He looks at her like she’s the one who has constant conversations with invisible people. She licks his face; he says he liked it better when she cried; I’m already wondering when this scene is going to be over. While the two of them are talking about sin, forgiveness, and perfection, we see a group of men with camo face paint and weapons moving down a corridor. Then a small silver canister comes bouncing down the steps into the harem’s entrance and begins to release a gas. Women begin shrieking as men come busting through. One grabs a follower by the hair demanding to know where Gaius is; she says she doesn’t know. Finally, the oxygen sensors kick on and send a security alert (they seemed to work faster on Cloud Nine during “Sacrifice”). The men hurry up and leave, and we see Gaius hiding behind a beam.

We switch to Chief working on the innards of a ship, telling Figurski (who may very well be the only other original member of Chief’s team) that he just needs to replace one more relay and he’ll be done. Galen pauses in his work and flashes through memories of Cally, but is pulled out of his reverie when Racetrack asks him when her Raptor will be finished with repairs so she can take off. Chief tells her he’s finished and moves away. Racetrack and Skulls take the bird out into space and catch up with a group of Vipers. Trash talk ensues between Racetrack and Redwing about ship size and speeds. Racetrack fires up her engines to full throttle and something explodes within the ship. She and Skulls turn it back towards Galactica and warn the deck crew that they’re coming in hot. In a series of gorgeous visual effects, we watch the ship land initially on its nose before skidding across the landing deck and rolling end over end against the floor and walls of the ship.

Cut to Baltar demanding to know where Adama is from a security guard sent to investigate the intrusion from the men with guns. Head!Six tells him to read the old style writing on the wall which says, “Sons of Aries”. Baltar assumes they’re a splinter group from some set of religious fanatics upset with him for preaching about a single god. The invisible Six then draws his attention to an older lady in the harem named Lily. Gaius asks her what she is hiding in her hand, and she shows him a talisman representing the god of healing; she figured that while there may be one god, it might need a little help from the group of gods the majority of the fleet worship.

Chief and his crew begin inspecting the wreckage of the crashed Raptor to find out what went wrong. Galen pulls a burnt out relay from the ship, and then pulls out the new relay he was supposed to install but never did from his shirt pocket. He apologizes for his mistake to the pilots. Skulls begins to berate him for the slip up, but Racetrack tells him to can it, that they should just be happy no one got hurt and that the Chief’s “only human”. Chief begins to then yell at her saying that he wants her to tell him that he frakked up, but she just shakes her head and walks away.

Baltar studies Lily’s talisman while Six tells him that the people in the fleet only have room for “one great belief”: him or the old gods. Baltar asks why he “can’t just be a man” instead of taking on the gods all by himself. Head!Six entices him with thoughts of how powerful he’ll be in the eyes of others if he pulls it off. He tells her it’s not about the fame and magnificence, but rather the people who are willing to follow him and their wellbeing. He tells the harem to stop cleaning up the mess the Sons of Aries made. He says he’s tired of being afraid and that it’s time to make a stand. He storms off with the harem in tow and busts in on a service. Curly-haired priestess asks him to leave, but instead he yells insults about the gods (i.e. Zeus being a serial rapists, that the gods are just stories and rubbish) and destroys the set up seen before of the silver statuettes with the candles. He’s promptly put into custody by security.

Adama walks into Life Station to see Roslin packing up her things. He worries that he’s late for her treatment, but she reassures him that it was just tests that they were doing that day. Bill tells her that he brought his favorite book, Sea Rider Falcon, to read her. She gets excited and says she hasn’t read it in a while; he tells her he’s never actually finished it. She asks how that can be if it’s his favorite book; he tells her that he “likes it so much that I never want it to be over”. Once again we’re using books as analogies for their relationship, and once again my heart is breaking.

He takes her bag as they leave Life Station and move through the corridors towards his quarters. On the way, he briefs her about Baltar being back in the brig. She tells him it’s revenge for what happened to him that morning. Bill says he has his men tracking down the Sons of Aries, but no one is talking. Laura responds that Baltar knows there are people who deeply believe in the gods, but he continues to provoke: “We have thirty thousand people left and they’re not happy unless they’re kicking each other’s teeth in.” Adama wonders if Gaius would be willing to stay in the brig for the rest of his years “for his own safety”. Laura tells him that doing that will make Baltar a martyr to his “girly-groupie-sex-whatever-they-are”. Bill suggests that they kick him off Galactica, but Laura says she wants him close so she can keep tabs on what he does. She then leaves to go down to pay Gaius a visit.

We move down to the brig, but instead of the President and her former VP having a chat, it’s another round of Caprica Six and Tigh. He tells her that he wants to know what feels like to kill all the humans she was responsible for murdering in the initial Cylon attack. She tells him that she feels guilt, but Saul doesn’t believe her and thinks she just shuts it off like Tory was telling Galen to do earlier. She says that he thinks the two of them are different but “you know we’re not.” He orders the security guards to draw their weapons.

Figurski enters the hangar asking the Chief if he got up early or worked through the night. Tyrol pauses from his wielding job, pulls up his facemask, to reveal a sad and regretful look on his face that just makes me want to give him a hug. He slowly meanders his way out of the hangar leaving pieces of his uniform—the mask, gloves—along the deck’s floor.

Back to Caprica Six who tells Saul that he acts like she only made up of “switches and relays”. Six shows Tigh her arms saying that they’re veins inside and not wires (which might be a good line if during the second season Athena hadn’t wiped out the Cylon virus infecting Galactica’s computer by inserting a fiber optic cord into her arm). Saul looks down at Six’s arms and looks up into Ellen’s face. The XO asks his dead wife in a quiet voice how he can live with what she did. Ellen!Six asks that if he’s looking for forgiveness, she can give it to him. He turns to the guards and orders them to stand down and step out of the cell. Tigh gives his attention back to the woman, who has turned back into Six. He tells her she has nothing to offer, that they’re different, and then walks out of the cell.

Meanwhile, Laura walks into Baltar’s cell and tells him that his situation is being looked into, which he doesn’t truly believe. Roslin tells her to look at him, to see the wig, to know she’s dying. She continues saying she doesn’t want his pity, but instead wants him to know she’s going to push for legislation to limit the number of people who can assemble for his protection, and to know that she’s “going to be slipping from this life very soon” and that research says people who get close to dying no longer have regards for “rules, laws, and morals”. He feels like he’s being threatened, but she tells him that she isn’t threatening him but if he doesn’t bother anyone, then she won’t bother him. Which, you know, is kind of a threat. The President tells him that she’s “no longer in the mood to indulge” him and that he’s being released.

Admiral Adama pulls up a seat next to Tyrol at Joe’s Bar. The older man tells the younger that he knows he misses Cally and that if he needs less work or more work, he understands and can arrange it. Chief tells him that he doesn’t need special treatment. Adama grabs his drink and says, “I guess she just couldn’t take it, huh? Married to a Cylon. Being the mother of a half-breed abomination.” Chief looks at the other man with a terrified look in his eyes, but sees the Admiral is only then grabbing for his drink the first time and Galen relaxes in the knowledge that he was hallucinating. Adama toasts Cally with his first sip saying, “She was a good woman.” Chief responds, “If you really believe that, then you wouldn’t have threatened to stick her up against a bulkhead and shoot her.” And we realize that the woman Galen is mourning is not his “shriek” of a wife, but rather his true love: Boomer. Chief goes onto rant to Adama about how people have had to settle because the ones they truly love are “dead, dying, or Cylons”. The admiral tries to get Chief out of the bar since he’s drawing attention to himself, but Tyrol refuses and instead continues to rant about how the life he’s living is not the one he picked. Adama asks him to leave the bar again before he has to do something the Chief might regret. Galen basically tells him to bring it on. Adama tells him to report at 0600 the following morning for reassignment.

Cut to Lee reprimanding Roslin about the piece of legislation she passed using emergency powers to limit the number of people who can gather together (in Baltar’s name). She defends it as crowd control to avoid another “brutal” situation like the ones caused by the Sons of Aries. Lee counters that it’s only targeting the harem and not all religious meetings. Roslin responds that wherever Baltar goes, violence ensues and that it is her job to protect the people in the fleet. She reminds the quorum members about how much tragedy they experienced when Gaius was in her position on New Caprica, which might work for the whole quorum except for Lee, who was busy running away on the Pegasus and getting fat; thus, he threatens to have the bill overthrown because it is only targeting Gaius. Laura tells them to do what they want to do, but if they succeed they need to be seriously afraid of what Baltar would do with “blind, religious devotion”.

Switch to Saul smiling over a sleeping Ellen!Six, who then wakes up. Now changed to Caprica Six, she asks him if this is something she should get used to. She makes note of the lack of security guards with him, and he reminds her that she hasn’t answered his question about how she can live with all the blood on her hands. She tells him that she doesn’t want to shut off the pain, but rather use it as a learning tool. Caprica switches back to Ellen!Six as she continues to tell Saul how she fell in love with a human man who was complicated, proud, and fallible. Tigh switches from being touched about hearing his dead wife talking about him, to feeling sorry for her and maybe for what he’s done. She continues to tell him that she took the knowledge of Baltar’s eventual death as something to learn from and understand how humans work. Saul yells at the woman, who then turns back into Caprica Six that he doesn’t want to hear anything about the other man. He then dismisses the two officers watching the security feed and turns off the monitors before walking back into the cell. Caprica Six tells him, “I can tell you how to turn it off” by teaching him how to gain wisdom from the pain and guilt. She switches back to Ellen!Six and tells Saul that “When you’re in pain, that’s when you learn who you really are.” She then removes Saul’s eye patch revealing his empty right eye socket. She tells him that she “can give him that clarity again.” So does this mean she was the one responsible for taking his eye?

Baltar and part of his harem move down the corridor towards their living space, but are stopped by a pair of guards who inform Gaius that there are already twelve people inside and the new law states that there can be no other individuals added to the assembly. Baltar counters that this is home and they can’t do that to him. One of the ladies offers to come out so Gaius can come in, but the guards refuse. Head!Six tells him to seize the opportunity, to “step forth and take a stand”. Baltar cringes, “I don’t want to be a hero. I just want to go to bed and go to sleep.” Head!Six promises him that if he steps up to the guards, then he won’t be hurt. So he does, and then gets beat up by the guards—guess she was lying or can’t see into the future.

Switch back to Ellen!Six, who promptly reverts to being Caprica Six. Saul tells her to get her hands off his face; she punches him. He falls to the ground, and she pounces him and continues to beat his face with her fists, letting a smile escape as she does it. Six stops and asks if he can feel the clarity amidst the pain.

Meanwhile, back with the harem, the process of Baltar picking himself up off the ground, standing up to the guards, and getting beat down for it repeats itself a few times before Lee shows up in his full, civilian, political glory with news that the Quorum voted against the new legislation and it doesn’t exist anymore. The ladies gather Baltar’s beaten body from the deck and get ready to carry him inside, but not before Gaius thanks Lee. Young Adama tells him that he “doesn’t do these things for you.” Baltar leans on Adama (which makes me think of While You Were Sleeping and Joe Jr.) and responds that he does because of god. Lee gives him a “You’re a freak” look and grabs his tie back from Gaius.

We then move to Life Station where Laura is talking to Bill in that tone where mothers say, “You won’t believe what your son did today” to fathers. Bill tries to stand up for Lee, but quickly realizes it will be easier to sit and listen to Laura complain about doing the right thing is occasionally a “luxury” and how Lee refuses to think that’s true. She stops herself saying that she’s not supposed to get worked up during her chemo. Roslin asks Adama to read the next chapter; he warns her that they’re getting to the part of the story he hasn’t read before. She asks if he’s “going to be able to continue” with that smile she only reserves for him. He puts his glasses back on; she curls up in the bed. He reads, “Chapter seven. The raft was not as seaworthy as I’d hoped. The waves repeatedly threaten to swamp it. I wasn’t afraid to die. I was afraid of the emptiness that I felt inside. I couldn’t feel anything.” He looks over to see she’s closed her eyes and he shuts the book, but continues. “That’s what scared me. You came into my thoughts. You filled them. I felt good.”

And we’re again in Six’s cell where Saul is asking her to continue to punch him. She refuses and caresses his bloody and bruised face. Six says that this isn’t what he needs, and kisses him.

Cut to Baltar addressing his harem, plus some stragglers including Tory and Lee. Gaius tells him that he’s never been religious in his life let alone a decent man, but has realized “something in the universe” loves him. We get a quick shot of Head!Six smiling and encouraging him while Tory stands next to her unaware of what Gaius sees in that direction. He continues talking about the thing that cares for him and how he will call it god, and that if those around him will look inside, they will find god, too. While he speaks about “loving” and “embracing” your mistakes, we cut to shots of Chief watching over Nicky. While he speaks about “And when we know what we are, then we can find the truth out about others” we see Kara asleep at a table covered with maps and Anders watching over her. Baltar ends with, “The truth is we are all perfect, just as we are.” Harem ladies break out into tears, others applaud, Tory gets a huge grin on her face, Lee looks like he may be thinking it was a mistake to stand up for Gaius once again, and Head!Six looks Tory up and down with a smile on her face.

Roll credits.


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