Jammersreviews

Note: This review contains significant spoilers.

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Battlestar Galactica: "Scattered"

A tactical mishap separates Galactica from the rest of the fleet, and in 
order to locate it, Colonel Tigh must reluctantly fill Adama's role as 
commander.

Air date: 7/15/2005 (USA)
Written by Bradley Thompson & David Weddle
Directed by Michael Rymer

Rating out of 4: ***

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan

"Bitch took my ride." -- Starbuck
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"Scattered" is a down-and-dirty, nitty-gritty, good old-fashioned war story. 
As a follow-up to what is one of the best season cliffhangers I've seen, it 
does exactly what it must: It continues the story from the big mess we were 
in the middle of at the end of "Kobol's Last Gleaming" and it doesn't make 
the mistake of answering too many questions too soon. At the beginning of 
"Scattered," everyone is in limbo. By the end of "Scattered," everyone is 
still in limbo. Think DS9's "A Time to Stand."

In terms of characters, this is Colonel Tigh's episode, focusing on some of 
his backstory and the question of whether he can step up to the plate with 
Adama out of action. Even after all the cliffhanger elements set up in the 
previous episodes, "Scattered" is not satisfied and feels the need to add 
yet another crisis: A Cylon base star appears (destroying one turns out to 
be kind of pointless, because there's always another right behind) and the 
fleet is forced to make an emergency FTL jump. When the Galactica arrives on 
the other side, the fleet is completely gone. Where are they? We've gone 
from the frying pan to the fire and now to an empty void.

It turns out to be a tactical mishap: In the midst of the carnage and 
mayhem, Gaeta failed to transmit the adjusted calculated coordinates to the 
fleet, so they jumped to the unadjusted coordinates while Galactica jumped 
to the correct coordinates. The stand-alone plot for "Scattered" is to solve 
the problem of finding the fleet. To do so, the Galactica must jump back to 
the original position and run calculations to un-adjust for the adjustment. 
The problem is that the calculation will take 12 hours to run, there's a 
base star waiting for them, and holding off a base star for 12 hours is not 
an option.

I wasn't quite sure of a couple things here. First, if the Galactica had 
jumped to the correct location based on adjusted calculations to compensate 
for error variables, wouldn't they already have the results for the "wrong" 
location stored somewhere? Why would they have to jump *back* to the 
original location in order to crunch the numbers? They know where they are 
and they know where they were, and they know what calculations were made, so 
wouldn't they be able to plot a course without returning to the original 
location? Perhaps it can't all be done using just maps and simulations, and 
perhaps I just don't know enough about FTL course-plotting.

Meanwhile, Adama lies dying on an operating table. Time in finding the fleet 
is of the essence, because the Galactica's surgeon is on the Rising Star. 
Tigh is in the hot seat because he must find a way to find the fleet before 
Adama dies. In the meantime, a less qualified medic will have to step it up 
herself and become a surgeon for today.

Lee is put in a cell. Sharon is put in a cell. Roslin is already in a cell. 
What does it say when three of the series' seven top-billed regular 
characters are in jail? It can't mean that things are going well for the 
Colonial fleet.

Much of what comes out of "Scattered" does little to shed light on where 
this is all going (which is not a negative). With Sharon revealed as a 
Cylon, there's a viscerally energized scene where Tigh questions and beats 
on her. She has little to say, mainly because she doesn't know anything. At 
one point she provokes Tigh ("Just get it over with, you frakking coward") 
because (1) she doesn't much like him anyway and (2) she doesn't much care 
about living anymore. She doesn't prove useful as a prisoner here (perhaps 
Tigh's heavy-handed tactics are the problem), and the scene leaves us 
puzzling over what in the world they're going to do with this character now 
that she's been exposed.

There's also the question of the people stranded on Kobol, who must take 
cover from an unseen enemy (presumably Cylon), that have landed nearby. One 
character follow-up in this storyline is the question of the Cylon/human 
hybrid child that Six told Baltar about. I'd assumed she was talking about 
the Helo/Sharon pregnancy, but here she says the baby is hers and Baltar's. 
How is that possible? What does that mean? I guess the thing with Six is 
that you never know if what she says is to be taken literally or 
metaphorically (or as truth or lie), or whether it's Baltar's mind and 
paranoia playing tricks on him.

The scenes on Kobol are conventional, well-executed  dramatizations of 
military ground tactics -- transporting wounded, finding cover, evading the 
enemy. There's continued exploration of Crashdown's inexperience, Tyrol's 
experience, and the fact that Crashdown is in command and Tyrol is not. 
After retreating into the forest, half the unit (three soldiers) has to go 
back to the crash site to retrieve a missing med kit, or their wounded man 
will die. Leaving the med kit behind is on Crashdown, because he gave the 
order to bypass the equipment check. Tyrol and his team retrieve the med kit 
but the unseen enemy opens fire on them, and a man is shot and killed. This 
sequence has a visceral impact but, above all, demonstrates how soldiers in 
war sometimes don't die heroically but instead pointlessly, and without 
warning.

The Galactica scenes also deal with war strategy, but more high-tech and 
involving the use of ships and war machines. Gaeta comes up with a plan to 
network four major computer systems together in a way that will allow 
Galactica to plot the course in 10 minutes instead of 12 hours, but this 
goes against one of Adama's core standing rules: no networks on the ship. It 
leaves the computer systems vulnerable to Cylon viruses, with only software 
firewalls to provide temporary protection. It's Tigh's big decision to take 
this risk, and he does so standing on his own.

I was a little unsure about the software points here. First, how could Gaeta 
implement a plan so quickly that goes against the primary standing rules of 
execution? Would the Galactica technology even support it? Second, how is it 
the Cylons can hack an internal network from wireless remote just because 
four computers have been connected to each other with cables? Isn't that 
sort of like saying you could hack an internal LAN from the Internet even if 
the LAN itself wasn't connected to the Internet? Perhaps there's an 
explanation involving software security and the way the Galactica and Cylon 
technology works that could explain this, but it's not in the episode. 
Which, by the way, is the right choice, because people don't watch this show 
to learn about computer networks.

Besides, as a plot device, this race against the clock of software firewalls 
being penetrated works fairly well when put alongside a battle sequence 
involving a base star, hundreds of Raiders, and lots of battlestar artillery 
exploding. My one question is how the Viper pilots can repel a superior 
force, even for a few minutes, that seems to outnumber them -- oh, I 
dunno -- 20 to one.

The story's character arc is clearly Tigh's, and it makes for an 
interesting, if not yet conclusive, one. It's about this guy, the 
no-nonsense XO, taking the reins of command and making the life-or-death 
decisions he never wanted to make. There's a moment where he's standing over 
an unconscious Adama in the operating room and says, "I don't want a 
command. I never did." The flashback narrative reveals some intriguing 
nuggets but doesn't give away all the backstory. It would seem that both 
Adama and Tigh at one point had been out of the Colonial Fleet for years, 
before Adama somehow got back in, exploited his political connections, and 
finally pulled Tigh back in at a point where Tigh, washed-up and drunk, 
could not have gotten back in any other way.

Getting the short end of the stick, as usual (although one hopes the trend 
will change this season), is Cylon-occupied Caprica, which is given just one 
scene in the episode. Starbuck basically wants to kill Sharon, but Helo 
stops her, and while they're arguing, Sharon steals Starbuck's Raider. This 
leads to the show's best line, which you gotta admit when said by Starbuck 
is funny and true to character: "Bitch took my ride."

I really wanted to see more of this storyline, but that's sort of the point 
of "Scattered" -- it bides its time and leaves you thirsting for more. The 
episode knows what the main storyline is about (Tigh taking command) and 
keeps its focus where it is needed, while reminding us that all the other 
characters are still in play. As the season heats up, the other storylines 
likely will, too.

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Copyright 2005, Jamahl Epsicokhan. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is prohibited.

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