Sunday, February 05, 2006

BSG: Scar

This episode was basically a rip-off of the “Red Baron” episode from the short-lived Fox series Space: Above & Beyond (if you remember that show). A Cylon Ace has been picking off the Galactica’s Viper pilots one by one over a four week period while the battlestar has been protecting a mining operation in an asteroid belt. Fear mounts in the younger pilots as newbies are killed right and left. Predictably, the rivalry between Kat and Starbuck heats up as each vows to be the one to kill “Scar,” the battered Cylon boogieman. Meanwhile, Kara is off her game because she keeps obsessing about the guy she left behind on Caprica.

Things I Liked
  • Kat is now an instructor of the newbie pilots. It’s good to see minor characters undergoing career advancement and taking on greater responsibilities. Years would go by on a Star Trek show with supposedly competent people never rising up the ranks.

  • The dialog between Sharon and Kara when the latter wants information about Scar was pretty good.

  • Kara and Lee’s fumbling pathetic attempt to change the nature of their relationship to a sexual one was a failure, and that’s fitting.

  • Kat is the one who ultimately takes out Scar and she and Kara still hate each other at the end of the episode. If this were Star Trek, they’d have taken out Scar together and bonded. This is better.

Things I Didn’t Like
  • Anders, the guy Kara is pining for, just wasn’t depicted in a compelling enough way when last seen for me to boy that this dude is now the great love of Kara’s life.

2 comments:

The Box said...

Totally agree about Anders. I mean, I can buy that she frakked him. But I can't buy that she's hung up on him at all.
I remember Space: Above & Beyond. As I recall, it had a lotta people that preciously starred on Chris Carter's other series (X-Files, Millenium). Looking back, it's prolly the only other example I remember of a more 'realistic' scifi series.

And do you remember the Heavy Raider they flew back in from Caprica? Where's THAT thing? And why isn't it giving away the fleet's position or trying to kill them, or whatever?

Michelle Pessoa said...

Fox is really good about recycling people. The guy who played the commanding officer on Space: Above & Beyond is now on 24.

S:A&B was a good show, but it was in a bad time slot. I think it used to come on on Sundays, but because of football games running long you never knew when it was going to start.

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Did they use parts of the Heavy Raider to make the Blackbird stealth ship??