Battlestar Galactica - "The Ties That Bind"

Two weeks ago was the first time I've ever watched "Battlestar Galactica" on television. My roommate in Los Angeles, summer 2005, turned me on to the season 1 DVD - we watched two or three per night, usually with a quick puff before, after, and (when the square marrieds in the duplex room were on vacation), during. A fanboy engineer in my abroad program hooked up me with the whole second season - I was avoiding studying for finals, lurking in the computer cluster in the Berlin study center, when I saw the gamechanging invasion of New Caprica. I didn't have a television in LA or Berlin, but even when I had one sitting in my room all during third season, I never thought to actually figure out which day of the week BSG actually aired. Hell, even that term, "aired," didn't have any meaning for me. Somewhere around midweek, the new episode would suddenly appear, like out of the ether or some planetary mist, on the FTP site that was my purveyor.

My preferred method of watching hasn't really changed since then - same computer, albeit with a slightly dustier screen, usually on my lap (sometimes turned on its side so I can watch with my head in my pillow.) As grand as BSG is, my relationship to it is private, almost intimate. It's not like "Lost," where everybody I know talks about it, and I have to plan out weeks in advance who I'll be watching it with, and there is some odd charge from watching it when it debuts, on Thursday night.

But I watched the rerun of the season premiere on television - on the Sci-Fi channel, which was a laughable obscurity before BSG and will be again very soon. It was weird. I couldn't make the screen smaller; I couldn't pull the tiny little pointer forward or backwards; yet the picture was also clearer, there was less distortion during kinetic sequences (and with the shaky camera, that's all the time); it felt like I was watching television, not just watching BSG. Weird.

I was thinking about this today while I was watching "The Ties that Bind." It was just after noon, I was on my couch, and there was this awful glare on the screen. No matter which way I turned it, if I refocused my eyes just a little bit, I could see myself seeing the screen. I tried wearing a dark shirt. I tried moving all around the room. But we don't have blinds in my apartment, so my only options were watching from inside the bathroom, or squinting a little bit whenever the screen was predominantly dark. I lived with the squint. And realized - man, this show is dark.

I don't mean thematically - although this episode, which started with a marriage on life support and ended with spousal abuse, attempted suicide, and plot-twist space homicide, was maybe the darkest yet. I mean dark like they need to get some better fracking lighting onboard. The happy band of distrustful searchers onboard Starbuck's sewage ship look like they're hanging out in a Turkish prison (right down to the catwalk that runs right over the dining table); the sick bay feels like a morgue-in-waiting; and, inside the tiny little dorm room that is (was) Chief and Cally's humble home, their kid's night light casts shadowlights of stars across the dark, sad walls. The show has had some great visuals - nuclear missiles cutting through space just moments after a Battlestar warps away; Cylon copies hanging out on New Caprica, wearing the same clothes and saying hello in exactly the same way - but I can't think of any image more poetic than Cally, always the most overlooked of the show's cast by the show's cast, trying to sleep while the stars pass by her, over her.

By the end of the episode, of course, she's out among the real stars - floating forever, frozen in a moment of realization, of horror, of infinite loss. One of the best things about the show is how threatening space is. In "Star Wars," space was where you had space battles - you could imagine living comfortably onboard the Millenium Falcon, or joy riding in an X-Wing. Space itself was never really threatening, no more than a highway is threatening - its the other cars that you have to worry about. "Star Trek" was pretty much the same way - for all the times that various engineers fretted over hull breaches, space felt almost abstract - viewed on a monitor, with an energy shield of nebulous physics protecting the ship from harm.

Not on Battlestar. You can feel the blackness of space pressing in at all times. Cylons and traitors have been blown out of the airlock - the most horrific punishment imaginable, some awful combination of hanging, drowning and freezing to death, with full knowledge that you will never be buried, nor even have some place marked in ground to remember you. Your own body is your memorial, unless you're fortunate enough to hit a comet or fly into a supernova or float away over the edge of this universe, where matter is antimatter and the dead dance away.

Poor Cally. Because she was such a small character, and such a small girl, it was always great when she appeared on the show, because you'd always be expecting a meek little lamb and instead you'd get a hard-charging toaster-hating big-mama wolf. I can remember Ronald D. Moore and his writers laughing in one of the commentaries about how unexpectedly violent, and fierce, she'd turned out as a character. When a prisoner in "Bastille Day" tries to rape her, she bites off his ear and gets shot for the effort. She Jack Ruby'd Boomer, without remorse, with a look of utter hatred in her big doe eyes; she made sure Boomer knew that she'd do it again. A restless wife, she pushed the Chief into igniting a socialist revolution - wives on this show, from Ellen Tigh to Starbuck to the dearly departed Mrs. Adama, are always much stronger than their husbands. And in last night's episode, Cally proved she had no shame when it came to her husband and her family - sleep-deprived, pumped full of antidepressants, carrying her half-Cylon baby through a bar, she felt no qualms about running over to her seemingly cheating husband, screaming in his face, then vomiting right on the floor.

Cally - her fitful story arc, her short and unhappy life - epitomizes what's great about the show. Although it gets longer, it never seems to get bigger. Look at how other shows swell in cast size, and how new story arcs always seem based on addition. Each season of "The Wire" added in an entire new cast of characters (the docks, the government, the schools, the newspaper.) Each season of "Lost" adds in a new group of ambiguous antagonists - the tailies, the Others, the freighter folk. On old Star Treks, each week would bring a new bunch of aliens, a new planet.

BSG just excavates what's already there. So much of the show is less about moving us forward than moving us sideways towards a different point of view. You could see that in the subplot about Lee's first day in the Quorum. How fascinating to see Roslin in her role as Commander in Chief, obfuscating to help Adama, dodging questions from the people who represent all humanity in what should be a democratic system. What's nice is that this view of her - as a somewhat callous, potentially monomanical, certainly secretive benevolent tyrant - doesn't feel forced, or like some dramatic personality shift. You can absolutely see how the fierce defender of democracy who battled against Adam's military regime (and the utterly lovely romantic who lay next to Adama one lovely New Caprican night) is also the Nixonian president seemingly despised by nearly every other politician at her table.

And you can also see how Cally, who has always loved the Chief - who has lived most of her adult life in service to him, first as a workman and then as a wife - could have no qualms about knocking him in the head and almost killing his half-breed child. You could see that stern resolve in that magnificent shot, with the Chief out of focus and his voice dialed down, robotic.


Gotta love the ending of this episode. First that point of view shot as the landing bay fades quickly away. Then the tiny, ridiculous human body floating through space, not even struggling (we remember that this is Cally's second uncovered excursion into space; second time's the charm.) Then the close-up on her cold, dead face. Then the long tracking shot back, from the Chief's face. Adama is there, no doubt giving him some kind words. She hadn't been sleeping well. She had been depressed. It's important to go on, Chief, for your son. She would have wanted you to go on.

Except she wouldn't have. Cally was a soldier. Cally had all the stones that the Chief has never had. If the Chief wanted to honor her death, he'd put a bullet through the synthetic brain of his newfound Cylon friends, then one in his baby's head, then one in his own. Cally believed in humanity. Cally hated Cylons. Poor Cally. Poor "Battlestar Galactica." You can tell it's not going to end well.