Jammersreviews

Note: This review contains significant spoilers.

-----
Battlestar Galactica: "No Exit"

Ellen resurrects in the Cylon fleet and engages in an extended war of 
words with Cavil. Anders suffers a serious brain injury, causing a 
flood of memories from Earth to return to him.

Air date: 2/13/2009 (USA)
Written by Ryan Mottesheard
Directed by Gwyneth Horder-Payton

Rating out of 4: ****

Review by Jamahl Epsicokhan
-----

If I had to guess what the title "No Exit" means, it's that there's 
no known exit from the cycle of destruction that the children of 
Kobol have gone through, and presumably will continue to go through. 
All of this has happened before, and it will happen again. The famous 
proverb says that those who cannot remember the past are doomed to 
repeat it. In the case of the children of Kobol, they may all be 
doomed regardless -- but there may perhaps (repeat: perhaps) be hope, 
because the past has been preserved in the fragmented memories of the 
Final Five.

"No Exit" may contain more information, confirmation, revelations, 
and answers than any singular episode of "Battlestar Galactica" ever 
made. This is a hard-core mythology episode, wall-to-wall with 
explanations and exposition, some of which is imparted at breakneck 
speed. I was riveted by nearly every minute of it. This episode may 
not have the visceral impact of an episode like "The Oath," but it 
compensates for that with a pure assault of details that will make 
your brain explode at the possibilities. This is fascinating material 
that does no less than reveal (or confirm) nearly every remaining 
secret involving the mysteries of the Tribes of Kobol. (That is, 
until the rug is ripped out from under us by whatever twist comes 
next.)

Let it be said, the issues that weren't dealt with regarding the 
mutiny at the end of "Blood on the Scales" do not get sufficiently 
addressed here, in my view. And if they don't before it's all over, 
that will be a mark against the season at large, but mostly 
against "Blood on the Scales." But I will not hold that against "No 
Exit," which proceeds full-speed-ahead toward the end of the series, 
and does so very effectively.

The story information pummels us on two fronts. On one front, we have 
Anders, who was shot in the head and has a bullet lodged in his 
brain. While being prepped for brain surgery to remove the bullet, 
his memory from his long-ago days on Earth comes rushing back. He 
tells Kara, "I remember everything."

On the other front, we see what happened to Ellen Tigh, the last of 
the Final Five, after Saul poisoned her in "Exodus, Part 2." She was 
downloaded and resurrected aboard a Cylon ship, where she had an 
extended dialog (to the tune of 18 months) with Cavil.

Both storylines are equally fascinating and equally jam-packed with 
answers, answers, answers. The beauty of all this is how it grows 
logically from what's already been established. BSG's mythology, I'm 
finding, is pretty much rock-solid. I think the secret to success is 
that the mythology basically plays fair with us. Even through all the 
twists and turns and curveballs the writers have thrown at us, the 
mythology has not egregiously violated any rule that came before. It 
has merely added new rules and puzzle pieces on top of what was 
there. The result is a tapestry that, miraculously, makes perfect 
sense when you step back and look at the big picture. What we see 
in "No Exit" doesn't come so much as a shock as the next logical 
progression and reasonable development of many threads whose 
groundwork had been clearly established, most recently in "Sometimes 
a Great Notion."

And yet it's still a thrill to watch it all unfold. This is an hour 
filled with aha moments. When we learn, for example that the 
evolution of the Centurions was accelerated during their 40-year 
absence after leaving the Colonies because they came in contact with 
the Final Five, it makes sense. It fills in a gap that seemed 
somewhat inevitable -- so much so that I had guessed it in my review 
of "Notion." It was guessable precisely because it's based on a solid 
foundation where logic does in fact apply.

Ellen's storyline picks up from her resurrection POV (a process that, 
visually, owes plenty to the "Matrix" films), and is brilliantly 
realized as a concept and as performed by Kate Vernon: She's at first 
horrified and lets out anguished shrieks, but then gradually becomes 
calm as she processes the memories now resupplied to her. She 
suddenly knows who and what she is. It's an intriguing 
transformation, sold with zero words.

But first, let's put all the cards on the table in a nutshell of the 
overall mythic chronology: The 13 Tribes left Kobol 3,600 years ago 
after a war between man and Cylon. The 13th Tribe -- all biological 
humanoid Cylons -- went to Earth; the other 12 founded the Colonies. 
The 13th Tribe, who were capable of biological procreation, built 
their own mechanized Cylons and were destroyed in a holocaust 2,000 
years ago. Just before that holocaust, however, the Final Five were 
warned and reassembled the ancient technology of resurrection 
("organic memory transfer") before the bombs fell. This technology 
was originally invented long before, on Kobol.

The Final Five were resurrected on a ship orbiting Earth just after 
the holocaust; they then embarked on a journey to the Colonies to 
prevent the same fate (an uprising of persecuted Centurions), from 
befalling the 12 Colonies. Because they didn't have FTL technology 
and instead employed some other method of near-light-speed travel, 
the effects of relativity (or whatever; I'm not a physicist) caused 
time to slow down, and they aged only a short time while 2,000 years 
passed. By the time the Final Five met the Colonial Centurions, the 
first Cylon War had already happened and the Centurions had left the 
Colonies. The Final Five tried to teach the Centurions, who were 
already experimenting with humanoid Cylons (hence the Hybrids) how to 
embrace human qualities and agreed to help them construct the 
humanoid Cylons in exchange for a promise of peace between Cylon and 
human. But something went horribly wrong.

That "something" is the crux of the drama here (apart from the reams 
of information). What went wrong is that after the humanoid Cylons 
were constructed, Model No. 1 (Cavil), whose given name was John, 
rebelled and killed the Final Five. When they downloaded, he blocked 
their real memories, gave them human identities, and put them on the 
Colonies, where his plan for revenge (the "Cylon Plan"?) subjected 
them to the fate of humanity. When they survived the holocaust of the 
12 Colonies, he put the Final Five through still more games, which 
neatly explains why so many of these people have suffered such 
hardships, like Saul being tortured on New Caprica. He did this out 
of a need to prove a point, so that when the Final Five eventually 
did return to the Cylons and regained their memories, they would see 
he was right all along about the distastefulness of humanity.

My, what a neat, tidy package this is. I would call it contrived -- 
but that word has such a negative connotation. Or perhaps we should 
simply embrace the word. Of course this is contrived. Truthfully, the 
whole series is a contrivance -- but a bold and brilliant one.

Ellen's dialog with Cavil is intriguing. She and the other Final Five 
created him and the other seven humanoid Cylons (yes, seven; more on 
that in a moment). Indeed, Ellen thought of John/Cavil as one of her 
children. But Cavil views his existence only as a bad joke. He is a 
bitter, self-loathing creature who savagely hates humanity in no 
small part because he hates the limitations that being created in 
their image has brought him personally. His identity problems have 
left him twisted and evil. Some of Cavil's speeches reminded me of 
Agent Smith in the first "Matrix" movie, who also hated being cursed 
to live as a human when he believed himself to be a far superior AI 
being.

Cavil has great intelligence, but he also reveals a great deal of 
emotional immaturity. In a sense, he is a petulant child who has 
greatly abused his power in terrible ways. When you consider that 
Ellen created Cavil in the image of her father, and thinks of her as 
a son, and that Cavil knew this (and at the time she didn't) while 
having sex with her on New Caprica -- well, that's just twisted and 
demented and disgusting and wrong. It constitutes a deviously sick 
joke of bizarre logic that seems all the more appropriate because 
Cavil thinks of himself as a machine, and of humanity as beneath him. 
And Ellen's presence here brings out the worst in him, even as she 
tries to offer him forgiveness and a road to redemption and assures 
him that she still loves him. Perhaps she even blames herself for all 
he's done.

The dialog here is great stuff. It's not simply exposition (although 
exposition certainly is a big part of it). It's also philosophy and 
psychology, and provocative science fiction. It's storytelling that 
examines the concept of an AI that cannot come to grips with the fact 
that it was designed with limitations, and instead took the worst of 
its given human emotions and became Wrath unleashed, which had 
catastrophic consequences for humanity.

Cavil says he wanted "justice" for what the humans did to the 
Centurions, but I think it goes even deeper than that, into the 
depths of his own self-loathing. The Final Five intended to stop the 
Centurions from destroying the 12 Colonies, but instead they may have 
hastened it. This notion of culpability is echoed elsewhere in the 
episode when Tigh and Tory argue over who's to blame for the cycle of 
destruction. Tory wants to blame the humans, because, well, the 
humans on Kobol made the Cylons, so it always goes back to the 
humans. You might as well argue about the chicken and the egg. Tigh 
is quite ready to own up to responsibility and move forward: "Maybe 
we share the guilt with the humans, but we don't just get to shove it 
off on them."

We also learn about a mysterious 13th Cylon. Again, the notion of a 
13th Cylon seems inevitable in retrospect, if for no other reason 
than because of a need to balance the narrative scales. Just as the 
12 Colonies were missing their 13th sister tribe, the 12 Cylon models 
are missing their 13th sibling. That Cylon was named Daniel, and was 
destroyed when Cavil intentionally corrupted the genetic material of 
all the Daniel copies. I can't shake the feeling that Daniel's 
destruction has something to do with what Kara is. After all, there's 
long been speculation she might be a Cylon. Could it be she was the 
phoenix that rose from Daniel's ashes? This is an intriguing hint, 
and I'm dying to know where it's going.

If there's a problem with the structure of the Ellen/Cavil dialog 
(and it's a minor one), it's that it purports to take place over the 
course of the full 18 months that Ellen has been away from the fleet. 
For that matter, I'm often left slightly lost about the amount of 
time that passes in the course of a BSG season. This episode also 
alleges that four months has already passed since the resurrection 
hub was destroyed in "The Hub." I don't know how that's possible, 
unless a lot of time -- nearly the entire four months, really -- went 
by off-screen in between "Sometimes a Great Notion" and "A Disquiet 
Follows My Soul." By my 
estimation, "Revelations," "Notion," "Disquiet," "Oath," and "Blood 
on the Scales" collectively only account for a few days, and this 
episode picks up only minutes or hours after "Blood." (I was 
similarly confused by Caprica Six's claim that there's been no 
alcohol around Tigh's quarters for weeks. Has she even *been* in his 
quarters for weeks? This again must come down to how long went by off-
screen just before "Disquiet.")

Worth noting is that not everything was orchestrated by the Final 
Five and/or by Cavil. The role of D'Anna seeing the faces of the 
Five, as well as the "All Along the Watchtower" song, were not 
planted in anyone's programming. Ellen argues they must've been 
orchestrated by the One True God, which, as it happens, was a concept 
that the Final Five learned from the Colonial Centurions; Ellen 
believed that it was through God that peace could be attained and the 
cycle of destruction broken, so she passed it on to the humanoid 
Cylons.

After months of fencing, the turn in the Cavil/Ellen story comes when 
the hub is destroyed and Cavil wants Ellen to help build a new one. 
She says she needs all of the Final Five in order to do it. He 
threatens to probe her brain for answers. Cavil has by this point 
shown a capability to rise to any level of demonstrative villainy. 
It's finally at this point that Boomer, Cavil's own student, helps 
Ellen escape. (If you watch closely, the seed for this was planted at 
the outset, when Ellen asked Boomer to watch closely and make up her 
own mind.)

The Ellen/Tigh dialog runs parallel with the equally compelling 
adventure in breathless revelations from Anders. There's so much 
information racing through Anders, and he tries to impart it to Kara 
and the other Final Four as fast as he can. It's exciting and at the 
same time excruciating, because it's clear just how much medical 
danger Anders is in.

Again, the vast amount of exposition is wisely anchored to an 
emotional dilemma, namely Kara's tough spot where she wants answers 
as much as anyone (particularly the answer of whether she's the 13th 
Cylon), but has to play the role of the sensible wife and protect 
Sam's medical interests. Katee Sackhoff grounds these scenes in 
humanity, showing the emotional toll this takes.

At a key moment, when time has run out, Anders urgently tells 
Tigh: "Stay with the fleet!" Could Tigh's Cylon baby be the salvation 
that breaks the cycle? And after Anders' surgery is successful, but 
his brain activity stops, what does that mean? It's as if his 
consciousness has tried to download out of his head, and has 
inexplicably gone missing.

The third tier to the plot is about Galactica itself. Turns out that 
crack Tyrol found in the FTL room was merely the tip of the iceberg. 
Below decks there are cracks everywhere, and deep structural problems 
with the ship's main support beams. The ship is a ticking time bomb 
that could "fold like a book" at any moment. The metal of the ship is 
disintegrating everywhere because of old age, wear and tear. Adama, 
ever the pragmatist, restores Tyrol as chief and charges him with 
fixing the problem. But the only workable solution Tyrol comes up 
with is a Cylon technology: an organic resin that can grow into the 
metal and strengthen it.

I gotta tell you: This gave me a bad feeling in my gut. Very bad. 
We're this close to the end of the series, and Galactica is on the 
verge of structural collapse, and the only cure may be worse than the 
disease. Adama has a bad feeling about it too. He balks initially and 
strenuously. But like everything else around him, options have 
dwindled. Doing nothing isn't an option. Meanwhile, Adama's drinking 
and pill-popping only seem to be getting more dire. When Adama is 
drinking more than Tigh, that can't be good. This plot, more than 
anything, filled me with intense unease.

"No Exit" seems to describe the dilemma of all these people. Either 
doomed by their natures into repeating their mistakes, or doomed by 
fate while trying not to.

--
Some bulleted footnotes:

* Roslin grieves for the Quorum on Colonial One, which is about the 
only fallout shown regarding the mutiny storyline. I could've gone 
for more navel-gazing and at least a hint at what happened to 
Racetrack, Seelix, et al, but we don't get it here. We also don't get 
Roslin resuming her role as president. She says she will keep the 
title, but wants Lee to remain as de facto president. Will there even 
be a government from here on out?

* I dug the new "Cylons were created by man" opening. Nicely done, 
and much better than the similar previous openings. When it 
says, "One was sacrificed," the suggestion is that it was Ellen, but 
as it turns out, I think the one they were actually referring to was 
Daniel.

* When Boomer is brought in by Cavil to be an audience to his and 
Ellen's war of wills, and it's clear Cavil is sleeping with Boomer, 
Ellen says: "What about the swirl? Has he taught you that yet?"

* "Daily Show" Resident Expert John Hodgeman is the fleet's resident 
brain surgeon. Worth a grin.

* For the record, the 13 Cylon models: (1) Cavil, (2) Leoben, (3) 
D'Anna, (4) Simon, (5) Doral, (6) Six, (7) Daniel, (8) Sharon, and 
the Final Five, who are not numbered. When they labeled Sharon as No. 
8, I wonder if the writers had any clue where this would end up. My 
guess is no. Very clever how they have filled in the blanks.

-----
Copyright 2009, Jamahl Epsicokhan. All rights reserved.
Unauthorized reproduction or distribution of this article is 
prohibited.

Jammer's Reviews - http://www.jammersreviews.com
Jamahl Epsicokhan - jammer@...