By Todd VanDerWeff
Battlestar Galactica episodes that don’t strongly tie into the show’s mythology often rank among the show's weakest, so it was a relief that the third season’s eighth episode, the stand-alone "Hero," was a mostly subdued hour -- a meditation on the nature of heroism that resisted the bombast that marks Galactica at its worst. While the story was slight, the ideas behind it weren’t, and the show's actors made it a master class in how to perform ridiculous material without looking ridiculous.
Carl Lumbly (most recently the stalwart Dixon on Alias) dropped in as the week’s big guest star, Bulldog, the focus of the episode. Lumbly has long been an underutilized actor even on series where he was a regular; his ability to project calm in the face of overwhelming odds suits these sorts of fantastic situations. He played easily off of Edward James Olmos (as Admiral Adama), Mary McDonnell (as President Laura Roslin) and Michael Hogan (as Saul Tigh). The quickly-forged chemistry between these actors made the show’s Very Television premise (the return of a character who was once very important to the main characters even though his existence was never mentioned) work rather well.
Scripted by the show’s other executive producer, David Eick (Ron Moore is usually the producer most associated with the success of the series, but he and Eick split the duties on the show fairly evenly), and directed by the show’s lead director, Michael Rymer, "Hero" was surprisingly quiet. It opened with a disconcerting closeup of Lumbly’s panicked, disoriented eyes, instantly presaging a storyline filled with trauma. The episode quickly cut to Roslin putting her ship's affairs back in order following the short reign of Baltar (James Callis, now among the Cylons, and apparently having threesomes with them). This continued the general feeling that the show is reorienting itself after the New Caprica arc that opened the season. But the setting quickly shifted to the CIC, where Adama was watching two Cylon raiders chasing a third raider, piloted by the newly escaped Bulldog. From there, "Hero" proceeded along fairly predictable lines. Bulldog reunited with Adama and Tigh, under whom he'd once served, only to learn that he'd been betrayed by them (Adama shot down Bulldog's craft to protect a covert operation behind Cylon lines at a time of tenuous peace between Cylons and humans). Of course there some question as to whether Bulldog escaped Cylon imprisonment on his own or with the help of his captors; it was ultimately revealed that the Cylons released him, hoping he would take his revenge on Adama when he found out the truth. Of everything in the episode, this resolution was the element of "Hero" that rang most hollow. The Cylons rely on their faith in their God, but their plan in this episode seemed overly dependent on happy coincidence and a level of knowledge they may not have possessed.
But all that was inconsequential in the face of the episode’s true reason for existence -- an inquiry into the idea of heroism, the often dark deeds that support it, and humanity’s need to sweep those deeds under the rug. The loss of Bulldog stung Adama and Tigh deeply both because he was a friend and because of the No Man Left Behind ethos of the Galactica universe’s military (and that of most Western militaries, for that matter). One of the most durable and powerful war film tropes is that of soldiers doing their best to save a comrade who's so badly injured that he's beyond saving. "Hero" neatly flipped that formula on its head, asking, "What if you had to leave that man behind? And what if he came back and learned the truth? Would that make what you did -- an understandable decision in the face of war -- wrong?" 
The episode also subtly probed the idea of building up heroic myths around those who don’t really deserve them -- think of real-world analogues Jessica Lynch and Pat Tillman, who should already be considered heroic just for going into battle but found themselves the subjects of a vast legend-printing machine. Here, however, it's likely that only a handful of people will ever know the truth of what happened between Adama, Tigh and Bulldog behind enemy lines. Roslin suggests in her closing speech that maybe the true penance heroes pay is having those around them believe in their image without ever knowing what awful facts might lurk behind it. Both Adama and Bulldog are allowed to be held up as legendary figures, even though Adama arguably betrayed a friend and Bulldog’s escape was less than heroic (the Cylons left his cell door open). Adama may fear that he caused the Cylon-human war that occupies the series (though Roslin quickly disabuses him of this notion), but he can’t put those fears on public display. For the public, he must appear to be a calm and steady leader, something he’s never been behind closed doors.
On the mythology front, Galactica took a few tentative steps forward, mostly onboard the Cylon basestar, which retreated into the background after being prominently featured in recent weeks. D’Anna (Lucy Lawless) sent herself on an odd sort of spirit quest provoked by strange dreams and fueled by her death and download into a new model. Her dreams end with her reaching a door marked “End of the Line” and being gunned down by commandos. These dreams seem prophetic, but their true import isn’t immediately obvious. Along the way, an interesting subtext was introduced. The human-looking Cylon models to which we're most accustomed were built by their less-evolved, more robotic-looking Centurion ancestors. However, the new Cylons appear to have put the old Cylons under their control -- perhaps to prevent the old Cylons from rebelling, as the old Cylons did against the humans years ago. The Cylons still fear human control, but they have no compunctions about enslaving other sentient beings.
The episode ended with a reconciliation between Adama and Tigh. It was a long time coming. Tigh finally found a proper patch to cover the gaping hole where his eye used to be (a nice moment earlier in the episode had him testing his new field of vision by waving his hand in front of his face, trying to determine when it came into view). Thus "Hero" ended where it began: with the characters patching up wounds sustained over the course of this young season.
A note: There’s no new episode next week, as SciFi uses the Thanksgiving weekend to show movies. In the meantime, I’m indebted to Wally, who points out a few things about last week’s lackluster episode that I neglected to mention, and Bear McCreary’s site, where he talks about the score of Galactica in great detail. Both sites would make fine reading while you wait for the show to return.
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House Next Door contributor Todd VanDerWerff is the publisher of the pop culture blog South Dakota Dark.
Saturday, November 18, 2006
BSG Saturdays: Season 3, Ep. 8, "Hero"
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7 comments:
This episode irritated me. First off, I'll give it props for looking spectacular, and D'Anna's creepy-dream storyline was nicely handled. (For once, the viewers were not as tortured as Baltar.)
And I think the acting was fine, in and of itself. But I found the Adama plotline a betrayal of the character, because there is no way that Adama would ever twist his own personal guilt at shooting down Bulldog into guilt for starting the war.
First of all, who doesn't spy on their enemies? It was appallingly lax of the Admiralty to not have kept a close eye on the Cylons all along.
Second, what, one little ship noses over the Armistice Line, and a mere year later, the Cylons are ready to decimate humanity? Adama knows better than that. The invasion plans alone probably took more than a year to develop. It's especially stupid for Adama to still be bearing this guilt when he knows how Cylons had infiltrated humanity without detection! Stupid, stupid, stupid.
And what was even stupider was Apollo believing that the Old Man really did start the war. It was absurd. Thankfully Roslin smacked him around a bit, but that shouldn't even have been necessary.
Other weaknesses included the abrupt and therefore unbelievable redemption arc for Saul (nice eyepatch! finally) and the fact that Bulldog, supposedly an ace, didn't realize himself that the Cylons let him escape. How can a human pilot a raider, anyway? The ship itself is a conscious entity! They die, they get downloaded, they fly again... at least that's what I remember from "Scar". And how did Bulldog find his way back to the fleet?
Katie Sackoff was fine (and looked great) but her scenes were superfluous. They all should've known that Bulldog was released for a reason, Bulldog first among them.
There were too many gaping plot holes for me to ignore this week. Usually the good outweighs the bad, but so far this ranks as the worst episode this year.
I appreciated that they didn't have lots of scenes saying, "Well, what reason was he released for?" since I, as an audience member, was already there. The fact that Starbuck was checking out the video of his escape was enough to make me think that at least some of the people were suspicious of him (and, correct me if I'm wrong, but didn't Roslin express doubts too?).
Adama is someone who forms intense personal relationships with his best pilots -- almost surrogate father type relationships. In that case, I was willing to believe that he was willing to believe that Bulldog came up with a brave escape attempt (and, to his credit, he DID question the escape in the first scene after credits). Also, his guilt at starting the war seemed more to me a transposition of his guilt over losing Bulldog -- he lost his best pilot, he lost the war. Both Apollo and Roslin tried to disabuse him of this notion, but he takes things so personally (remember his fury at Starbuck's betrayal in season one) that there was really nothing they could say to wholly convince him.
I have to stop in immediately here and say this -- This was absolutely the worst BSG hour this year. Complete and utter, self-important crap that -- I feel like I'm contradicting the author here -- actually does mark Galactica at its worst. The point of this parable -- "It's our fault" "We're the warmongers!". Just terrible. Like it was parachuted in from somewhere else. Blech.
Did you see an early cut of this episoide, or did I just miss the reference to old-model cylons building the human-cylons. When in the episode did that take place?
I don't think we're meant to believe that the humans are at fault AT ALL. Roslin, who's more objective in her perspective in this situation, rejects that thesis, and so do I.
At any rate, much better than last week's rather perfunctory hour.
Anon: I'm recalling that from the miniseries -- the human models were a surprise to the real humans, which implies that the old Cylons built the new ones. I don't recall if it was explicitly stated (they're said to have "evolved" in the opening crawl, but since they don't reproduce sexually with each other, evolution seems like something that couldn't actually happen).
Todd VanDerwerff wrote: The episode also subtly probed the idea of building up heroic myths around those who don’t really deserve them.
No it didn't.
The whole point of awarding Adama a medal was for his forty five years of service to the Colonial Fleet and by extension, humanity as a whole. That was the premise of Roslin's idea to begin with. After the New Caprica debacle, she needed something to raise the spirits and morale of the Fleet - celebrating Adama's length of service was a way to do that.
Adama is a hero in every sense of the word in Galactica's universe if only because of his cool, calculated command and control. The one time things went icky balooky was when Tighe was in charge and Adama had to put it back together.
Bulldog's scenario was introduced to give Adama some angst about his situation that led to his resignation had nothing to do with the original intent of the medal.
This was quite possibly the lamest scifi episode of any scifi TV ever produced and was certainly the worst episode of the new BSG.
To begin with, Adm. Adama is not Captain Kirk with angst up the whazoo. Adama is almost the perfect military commander, decisive, competent, in synch with his command, and his fleet, at every level. The commander who brilliantly used the Cylons penchant for repetition against themselves in "33", the commander who flew Glactica into an atmosphere to get a jump on the Cylons, the commander who ordered the destruction of a potential nuclear armed civilian transport, that commander is suddenly turned into a simpering dolt over something that was a military necessity?
I don't think so. The whole concept of "no man left behind" is a staple of combat movies and such, but the practical reality of "no man left behind" has more to do with bringing home the dead and wounded than it does the living. Sometimes, in particular with covert operations, men are left behind - sometimes on purpose.
It happens and you can always make an effort after the fact to retrieve personnel if circumstances warrant.
Secondly, Bulldog had to know the nature of the mission and being a military pilot, had to know that there was a possibility that the mission would go FUBAR and he'd be on his own - that also happens in covert ops. His angst over being left behind was over drawn and misplaced. Tighe even pointed that out to him when he interrupted Bulldog's attempted retribution on Adama - as if it needed to be said.
It was a poorly designed plot. Olmos and company deserve better. Heck, the show deserves better.
The episode seemed patched together and full of holes - most glaring was the whole stealth ship scenario with a transponder so Valkyrie and Adama could track it. It seems rather silly to send a stealth ship across a line of demarcation with a transponder on. Why even bother with the stealth ship when you are broadcasting the position?
I'm not even going to get into the whole Cylon scenes - ok, we get the idea - Cylon's have a god head and five as yet to be revealed models - got it. Baltar is a horn dog - we got it. The skin job models of Cylon were designed and built by mechanical Cylons and now the mechanical models are slaves of the skin jobs models - right, we got it - twice. Get over it and move on.
The whole episode was full of this kind of disjointed structure ending in the final insult of uniform switches - Adama in his dress uniform, Adama in his uniform of the day seeing off Bulldog, Adama in his dress uniform again sitting down with Tighe.
The one positive thing was the apparent reunification of Tighe and Adama. If ever two characters were in a symbiotic relationship - counterpoints to each others personality - it's Adama and Tighe. It was one of the more brilliant strokes of the original two seasons - Hornblower and Bush, Kirk and Spock - all the great Commander and Seconds of history were rolled up and presented as Adama and Tighe. The current season sorely missed that construction and I hope that Tighe's relating the story of Ellen's death will bring them once more together as a team.
I have made this point more than once (I don't think here), but I have been wondering exactly what TPTB will do once the original series major constructs were exhausted and the "reimaging" of the original needs new ideas.
It would appear, at least at this point, that they are losing that war. At some point, this part of Season Three, might well be considered "The Lost Season".
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