SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal
SPOILER ALERT: Before you read this post, shave your head to indicate your deep emotional turmoil and watch the most recent Battlestar Galactica.
One way of looking at this episode is that it was a little slow, and not as much happened as should have. Another way of looking it at it is that it was a little slow, and it needed to be. When I saw the first supertitle that said the Demetrius was on Day 58 of its find-Earth mission, I was surprised that the ship had been gone that long. Of course, the feeling that the ship had been gone that long—that it was two months away from the fleet, and the crew is getting restless—was essential to the storyline, which is why we needed this full episode to create enough of a sense of tension that the crew’s final mutiny against Starbuck made sense. (Of course, the preview of next week’s episode partially spoiled the resolution of that mutiny, but that’s what I get for watching previews.)
On BSG, unlike a lot of space-opera series and movies, space travel is dingy and unglamorous—things break down, the setting is ugly and gray, and things are held together by exposed wire. But “The Road Less Traveled” was one of the first BSG episodes I’ve seen that really offer a claustrophobic, stuck-on-a-tin-can sense of space travel. The dank, close belly off the Demetrius is the kind of place where people will go to one another’s throats after 58 days, even without a dubiously trustworthy skinjob showing up to sow dissent, so the resolution of the episode made perfect sense.
In any case, unless Leoben is completelly setting Starbuck up, and I doubt it, then we do seem to be heading toward what I’d conjectured here a couple episodes ago: an alliance with the currently-losing half of the Cylon civil war. The question being: if the humans ally with them at all, will the decision to ally split the humans as well? Oh, also: what did you make of the encounter between Leoben and Anders—does Leoben know that Anders is a Cylon himself? And if not, why did (apparently) the Raider in the first episode of the season?
Oh, and won’t Roslin be delighted if Kara comes back from her trip, with a Cylon baseship in tow? It followed me home! Can I keep it?
Nothing that really grabbed me in the Baltar-fleet half of the story this week, but I’m guessing that storyline is moving toward setting up a parallel schism within the humans, as Baltar grows an increasingly Christlike following. But his early lecture about the gods not existing reminded me something I was woondering before: just how much are the Kobol gods meant to parallel the Greek gods? Obviously they share the same names and, at least generally, the same properties. (Zeus the king, Ares the god of war, etc.) Then again, there are some departures, like what we’ve heard about the legends of Kobol. But I was struck a couple episodes ago when Baltar made his blasphemous reference to Zeus being “a serial rapist.” Should we assume that the colonies not only have the same gods as the Greeks, but also the same specific myths? Was this all resolved years ago on some podcast I never heard?