Justin Cox Presents:

Battlestar Galactica: Season 2.5

I can wrap season 2.5 up with one word: change.

The season begins with what seems like the beginning to the mother of all space battles, pitting the Galactica against the Pegasus. Though, right when things are about to get good, Starbuck shows up in the Black Bird and shows everyone why she’s the best Viper pilot in the Fleet. So what’s the giant Cylon ship being protected by two Base Stars? Well, according to Cylon-Sharon, it’s the Resurrection. Huh?

When Cylons die, their mind downloads into another body. So they don’t ever really die. Except, since they’ve been chasing the Fleet for so long, they’re to far from their homeworld and can no longer download. So they beam to the Resurrection and are good to go. So, of course, this is a priority target.

Needless to say the Fleet totally destroys the hell out of the Resurrection as well as the Base Star escorts. You can push humanity to the brink of extension but you can’t take the fight out of us — or something like that. Anyway, this is where everything begins to change.

We got a look at what the Cylons are doing back on Caprica and, well, it was an interesting look. The two “war heros” — the Number Six who is stuck in Gaius’ head and the Number Eight who shot Adama — decide that the Cylons are doing it all wrong and decide to take the lead of the entire Cylon race. In order to do this they have to kill our seventh known Cylon, Lucy Lawless. Cylons taking a deeper look at their purpose and killing their own to make a point? That’s a change.

While this is going on, Starbuck leads a team of Raptors back to Caprica to rescue the resistance, and her new boyfriend. They do, but conveniently all but about 15 people are killed just before the Raptors all arrive — this will make the return trip a lot easier. But while everyone is reuniting, they’re all pinned down by Cylon mortar fire. So they hide. Eighteen hours later they realize that all the Cylons have left. A priest, who happens to be our eighth known Cylon, tells them that it’s a sign from the gods.

Meanwhile, back on Galactica the same Cylon-priest is counseling the Chief because, after being woken up from a reoccurring nightmare, beat the living crap out of Callie [and frak! while looking up the spelling of her name I caught a spoiler. Stupid Google summary text under the link!]. Anyway, Cylon-priest delivers a message to President Roslin that the “war heroes” have shown the Cylons the error of their ways and they have decided to leave Caprica for good and will no longer chaise the Fleet to the ends of the universe. Yeah, big change.

While all this is going on the Fleet-wide election is taking place. The big swing in the whole deal is the discovery of a relatively hidden planet which 20% of it is habitable. Of course, President Roslin thinks abandoning Earth is a bad idea and, seizing the opportunity, Giaus wins the election. Change that is obviously going to yield horrible results.

This is where the biggest change takes place. The Fleet takes settlement on the planet they decide to call New Caprica. A barebones Galactica and Pegasus maintain orbit with a few Fleet ships keeping watch while everyone else eeks out a hellish living on the frozen planet. Fast forward a year. Starbuck is married and hasn’t spoken to Lee in a year, Tigh retires, Giaus is a horrible president and the Cylons show up. That’s right. They show back up and no one has any idea what to do. Giaus, not really having any choice at this point, surrenders to the Cylons giving up the entirety of humanity — except for Galactica and the rest of the orbital Fleet that had the sense to jump away at the first sign of trouble.

So there it is. Change. At this point eight of the twelve Cylon models are known. I’m pretty sure that Giaus isn’t a Cylon after all, he’s just an idiot. As for the remaining four models I’m really hoping it’s not all guest stars like the doctor, the priest and Lucy Lawless. I now have a very strong fraking suspicion that the Chief is a Cylon. I guess it’s kind of obvious since his whole nightmare thing was very similar to Sharon’s whole “awakening” thing, but other than that I don’t really have any ideas for the remaining Cylons. It would be all sorts of shocking if Tigh or Starbuck were Cylons, but I’m doubting that’d be the case. I don’t really know.

While season 2.0 really hooked me, I’m not really happy with how season 2.5 ended. I was left more in a state of disbelief than anything else. The whole one year later thing felt a lot like when the CIA shut down to reopen next season as Authorized Personal Only in Alias — in other words, sloppy writing. I’m hoping that’s not the case here but we’ll see. Netflix has sent disc one of season 3.0 so we’ll see what happens there. I don’t really have anything else to say at this point.