Justin Cox
Battlestar Galactica: Season 3
Season 2.5 left me with mixed emotions. New Caprica had been surrendered to the Cylons and the remaining fleet had jumped away. Season 3 starts with a few episodes showing what life is like under Cylon rule; in a word: hell. A number of people have been taken prisoner, namely Tigh and Starbuck (more on that in a minute), while others have simply disappeared. An underground resistance, lead by Tigh, Anders and Tyrol, is fighting back and even resorts to suicide bombers. A group of humans become a “defense force” and are basically the Cylons secret police. Like I said, hell. Oh yeah, and Tigh lost his eye. And yes, that rhymes.
BSG Season 3
Starbuck is being held “prisoner” in a fully furnished apartment where she’s forced to live with the manipulating Cylon whom she interrogated earlier in the series. Apparently he loves her and wants her to do the same. Instead, she finds ways to kill him, yet he still comes back in a new body. Creepy. At one point in the season, he even brings in a child and convinces Starbuck it’s hers, created from the ovary stolen when she was on Caprica. The kids turns out to not be hers but the whole notion basically destroys her (more on this in a minute).
Long story short, despite it being nearly four months later Galactica had not given up on New Caprica. They had just been planing and trying to find a way to get through the Cylon-blocked radio space. They do and a rescue plan is put into place. The solution: using Galactica’s very own Cylon-pilot Boomer Athena. She can walk right into the Cylon HQ without even drawing any attention, steal all the keys to the grounded ships and initiate the escape. This is where things started to get awesome.
Galactica jumped into atmospheric orbit of New Caprica and, while falling toward the surface, launched all it’s alert Vipers. Just before the point of impact, it jumped away. This was one incredibly awesome moment in TV. I’m talking wicked awesome. The Vipers laid easy waste to the unsuspecting Raders in the air. While the Vipers, and marines on the ground, were helping clear the way for the escapees, Galactica jumped back into New Caprica orbit to distract the Cylon Basestars. They were taking a heavy beating when the Pegasus jumped into help. They had left all their Vipers defending the Fleet, and came into basically run a kamikaze strike on the Basestars. This gave the escapees enough time to jump to safety.
An eye-less Tigh watches Galactica fall from the sky.
After the dust settled, the Fleet had jumped to safety though the Pegasus was a total loss. Giaus, not having been rescued, left with Caprica-6 to join the Cylons. He ended up spending a good deal of time with them and became convinced he was a Cylon. Towards the end of his stay, he cut ties with Caprica-6 in favor of Lucy Lawless-bot. They were conducting their own mission trying to discover the Final Five. To this point only seven of the twelve Cylon models were known. Giaus learns from Lawless-bot that the Final Five are something very special, and not even known to the other models. Her pursuit of this knowledge ends up having her model “boxed” by the other Cylons. We won’t be seeing her anymore.
Halfway through the season the Fleet, running out of food, finds a planet where they can harvest algae that can be used as food. After two weeks on the “Algae Planet” the Cylons show up. Instead of killing everyone, they want to talk. Apparently the “Eye of Jupiter” is on the planet and that Eye is the next marker on the road to Earth. Chief Tyrol, in another of his “awakening” moments, is drawn to a cave formation that holds a temple supposedly housing the Eye of Jupiter.
Meanwhile a nearby star is preparing to go supernova and destroy everything in the area. This, it turns out, is the actual Eye. At the moment of evacuation from Algae Planet, the Final Five are revealed to Lucy Lawless-bot — right before she’s boxed. In the exchange, Giaus is captured by the Chief and returned to Galactica.
It turns out Giaus is not a Cylon, he just wanted to be. In actuality Giaus just wants to belong to something, to be important. Instead he’s just pathetic. He spends the second half of the season in a jail cell awaiting his trial (more on that to come).
While the Cylons were hanging out near the Algae Planet, Helo killed Sharon/Athena so that she could wake up on the Basestar and get her kid back. During the evacuation of New Caprica, Lawless-bot found the half-Cylon kid and took it. The rightful mother wanted it back. So, with the help of Caprica-6, Sharon/Athena took the kid back to Galactica.
Look familiar?
During the exploration of the temple devoted to the Eye of Jupiter, Helo noticed the “eye” depicted looked a lot like a painting he saw on Starbuck’s apartment wall back on Caprica. Turns out little miss Thrace was really “special” after all. Come to find out, she’d been doodling the Eye since she was a child, all the while her mother telling her she is special. Tie this up with her fake Cylon husband, whom she might have actually loved, telling her she has a destiny and mix in being devastated that her kid wasn’t hers, Starbuck officially hit the edge. She broke. She started seeing things: the girl, the Cylon, all kinds of things. It all culminated towards the end of the season when, flying over a huge electrical storm (that looked a lot like the Eye of Jupiter) Starbuck’s Viper exploded in front of Apollo. Yeah. Game over.
In the following weeks a lot of things happened: Anders got stupid drunk in grief, broke his leg, and decided to become a Viper pilot while fraking the President’s assistant. Giaus started writing a manifesto and had it smuggled throughout the Fleet inciting a union strike, lead by Chief Tyrol. We learned that back on New Caprica Apollo and Starbuck hooked up, decided to leave their significant others for each-other, and instead Starbuck married Anders the next morning. Cold. Also back on New Caprica, President Roslin and Admiral Adama shared “a moment.” A lot happened.
Fast-forward to the end of the season: everything was culminating with the trial of Giaus Baltar. Apollo quits Galactica to defend Giaus and, in an eloquent defense, actually gets Giaus off. What he said made a lot of sense but it should would have been more fun to see him thrown out the airlock. That was all well and good but the big events of the finale had nothing to do with Giaus at all, it had to do with the Final Five.
The Fleet jumped into the orbit of a nebula, another marker on the trail to Earth. At the moment they entered orbit, a very large number of Cylons jumped into orbit and power was lost across the entire Fleet. While most people were scrambling to get it up and running again, four instead were trying to figure out the source of music there were hearing. The four were Colonel Tigh, Chief Tyrol, Samuel Anders, and Tory Foster (President Roslin’s assistant). Evidently the power outage and the music were connected and somehow activated all of them. An entire season had gone by without revealing any Cylons and in the last five minutes four become known. Tigh tells all of them that finding out he’s a Cylon doesn’t change the last forty years of his life that he spent in service to Adama and that none of them should give up on their friends now. So instead of brooding, or trying to figure out what it all means, they all run to action stations just as power is restored to the Fleet.
Now here is where it gets fun. Let’s go back to my vary first BSG post. Here’s what I said:
My other guess for a Cylon is Colonel Tigh just because I don’t like him very much.
Well look at that. A bold prediction I made was actually true. Crazy. The revelation of the four out of the Final Five wasn’t the only big moment at the end of season 3, there were actually two more.
Apollo, despite having quit, decides to take a Viper and get back in the game. While heading toward targets, an unidentified bogy appears on DRADUS so Apollo goes to investigate. The bogy is a better pilot than Apollo and turns out to be Starbuck. Is she the fifth of the Final Five? I mean, Apollo saw the Viper explode in the storm. Starbuck, seeing Apollo’s (and my) confusion, simply says this:
Don’t freak out, it really is me. It’s going to be ok. I’ve been to Earth. I know where it is and I will lead us there.
Excuse me, what? I think this means Starbuck is a Cylon for one reason, and it’s not that she has seemingly come back from the dead — though that is a good indication: Lucy Lawless-bot’s secret mission involved having her unit killed time and time again with the purpose of being reborn. In this process she discovered that there was “something beautiful between life and death.” This place, it turns out, was the opera house that Giaus had visions of in season one. When the Final Five were revealed to Lawless-bot, she was also in the opera house, seemingly the place between life and death. She walked up to one of the Five and said “I didn’t realize it was you, I’m sorry I mistreated you.” Now if Starbuck is a Cylon, then it’s probably a safe bet that opera house is on Earth and that she saw it between life and death. Either that or somehow she didn’t die when her Viper exploded. I have no idea. It was pretty crazy.
The final big reveal at the end of season 3 took place in the final seconds: we’re shown that the fleet is eerily close to Earth. Like the real one. Like, we’re shown the United States from orbit. Looks like the myths were true afterall and they really are on the right path. Crazy awesome.
The last five minutes of the season was so awesome I went and found it on YouTube. Unfortunately the moron who posted it disabled embedding so you have to actually click a link to see it. It’s pretty awesome and contains everything I’ve been talking about for the last five minutes and is set to one hell of an awesome rendition of All Along the Watchtower. Speaking of, if you happen to know where to find said song, let me know. It’s not on Amazon MP3 or iTunes.
So the cliffhangers left to ponder before Battlestar Galactica: Razor are seemingly few:
- Is Starbuck the final of the Final Five Cylons? If she’s not, how did she survive? And where did she come from? Vipers don’t have FTL, do they?
- Now that the Final Five have been activated, what’s their purpose? Are they special because they were born, much like Sharon and Helo’s baby? And what does that mean for Tyrol and Cally’s baby?
- What is the Cylon endgame? It’s become clear over the last season that the Cylons don’t seem to be hell-bent on destroying they human race anymore. They do want to find Earth as well, but it seems that the humans have almost bored the Cylons. Strange.
That’s about all I can think of. If Starbuck isn’t a Cylon then there better be some sort of LOST style flashback showing exactly what happened after her fraking Viper blew up.
After almost two thousand words, that’s all I’ve got.
6/6/09
Ashley
I’m pretty sure the only way you can get the song is by buying the soundtrack. It’s totally worth it, though. I have all three that have been released. I listen to them all the time.
to Ashley
6/6/09
Justin
Man, that stinks. I’d have to buy the actual physical CD and have it shipped. That’s so 1990’s!
to Justin