Warp Section

…is kind of what I’m feeling after the third season finale. And it’s not just because of that nebula.

I remember the second season finale, when “One Year Later” flashed on screen. I immediately built a shrine to the writers because it was just so perfect. It threw everyone for a loop yet made sense. Just when we were getting a little tired of chasing and being chased by Cylons and dealing with Baltar’s intrigue, the show pulled the carpet out from under us and progressed the timeline along to an even more astonishing situation.

This season finale left me scratching my head. Here’s an interview with producer/creator Ron Moore about whether what we saw is really what we saw. The gist of the interview:

Interviewer: Did that really just happen?
Ron Moore: Why, that’s a very good question. You’ll just have to wait and see.

I wish I had posted predictions because I totally called the reappearance of Starbuck just before the end of the episode. Does it worry anyone else that BSG has become a mite predictable? And what of the discovery of four of the final five? All I can say is if Ron Moore expects me to buy that he’d better come up with a frakking good explanation.

Here’s mine: the fifth of the final five is Jimi Hendrix. It’s the only way.

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I’m still processing last night’s episode of BSG. We’ve got three more episodes until the season finale, and they should be doozies, given what happened.

And what about Starbuck? I’ve got some ideas. I just want to ask the old timers a couple of questions. You remember this guy?

Yeah. I’m grasping at straws. Can you blame me?

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SPOILERS

Welcome to Marxism 101…Er, I mean, the latest episode of Battlestar Galactica.

Not one of the better efforts, mostly because the premise rested on the idea that Balter has suddenly started channeling Karl Marx — which is only slightly more believable than the idea that anyone would actually listen to him. Listening to Baltar’s political theories would be like hiring Nixon to run your 1976 Presidential campaign. Chief Tyrol has proven himself quite an able hand at politics and leadership. He could have come up with a theory of labor relations all on his own.

At the same time, I always appreciate it when BSG tackles the serious social implications of the Fleet’s predicament. I’m just not sure the standard union rhetoric covers a situation where the majority of labor goes toward basic survival and the usual economic theories don’t apply because there’s not really an economy to speak of. I think the story would have benefited from being spread out as a secondary storyline over 3-4 episodes. As it is, we’re left with the feeling that a problem that could undermine the survival of the Fleet has been tidily wrapped up in 60 minutes.

And my gosh, when is Tyrol going to catch a break? He’s certainly had a rough time of it lately.

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That last episode of Galactica got me thinking. If you’ve got a story set in space, at some point someone’s probably going to be stuck in an airlock, or trapped in a compartment that’s undergoing explosive decompression. Space is a dangerous scary place, and an easy way to frighten the audience is to let space in.

The Dave Bowman Maneuver

This is the situation where someone is trapped in an airlock, or outside an airlock, without a pressure suit, and in order to get back to the safety of the ship, they must propel themselves for a few seconds through the vacuum of space. Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey is the prime example of this, during the famous “HAL, open the pod bay doors” scene. After HAL refuses to open the pod bay doors, Bowman launches himself, sans pressure suit, from the shuttle pod into the airlock, and seals the airlock before space gets him. The film Event Horizon has another version of this: a suicidal character traps himself in the airlock, seals the interior doors, and cycles open the exterior doors. A crewmate rescues him by waiting outside, shoving him back in, and resealing the airlock. (In my opinion, it’s the best scene in an otherwise mediocre film.) In Titan A.E., two characters leap through space in order to reach their nearby ship from a shuttle that’s disintegrating around them.

Airlock Execution
Vacuum is a really great way to get rid of the bad guys. Open your cargo bay doors, and zip, they’re sucked right out. This is assuming you are very well anchored so that you too don’t get sucked out. The Alien movies have made liberal use of this technique. My favorite variation of this is in the Firefly episode “Out of Gas,” when the crew puts out an engine fire by opening the ship to vacuum, thereby removing the oxygen and extinguishing the fire. The Battlestar Galactica miniseries also put out a fire by evacuating the air from that section. Unfortunately, a score of crewmembers were evacuated as well. The good of the many and all that.

There’s nothing quite so heart-wrenching as looking through the view plate in an airlock door, meeting the gaze of a person you’ve condemned to death, then popping the exterior door and watching them fly. This seems to be the method of execution of choice in the BSG universe. Mal threatens Jayne with flushing in “Ariel.” And you have to admit: not a whole lot of clean-up required afterward.

Reality
It’s generally accepted that the human body is resilient, and exposure to vacuum does not mean certain death. In 1965, an accident in a NASA vacuum chamber involving a leak in a suit caused an astronaut to lose consciousness, but after atmosphere was restored, he recovered with no ill effects. In an earlier high-altitude balloon experiment, the test pilot lost pressure in his right glove. At an altitude of 100,000 feet, his hand swelled and became useless. Upon returning to the surface, the hand returned to normal, and he suffered no permanent injury.

In the history of human spaceflight, there has only been one recorded instance of a decompression accident, in 1971, on the Soviet mission Soyuz 11, which resulted in the deaths of three cosmonauts. Cause of death was asphyxiation.

The main threat from exposure to vacuum is asphyxiation. A person will lose consciousness in about 15 seconds, about the time it takes oxygen-deprived blood to reach the brain. Count out 15 seconds to yourself — a lot can happen in that time. A quick rescue, for example. If you have friends helping you out after you lose consciousness, you have even longer until permanent damage from lack of oxygen occurs.

The word from NASA:

“If you don’t try to hold your breath, exposure to space for half a minute or so is unlikely to produce permanent injury. Holding your breath is likely to damage your lungs, something scuba divers have to watch out for when ascending, and you’ll have eardrum trouble if your Eustachian tubes are badly plugged up, but theory predicts — and animal experiments confirm — that otherwise, exposure to vacuum causes no immediate injury. You do not explode. Your blood does not boil. You do not freeze. You do not instantly lose consciousness.”

So that bit at the end of Total Recall where Arnie ends up on the surface of Mars and his face swells up and goes into contortions while his eyes bug out of his head? Wouldn’t happen.

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Forever Geek is reporting the Saturn Award nominations today.  Much to my surprise Superman Returns received 10 nominations.  I have yet to see it, and from what my friends are saying about it, I think I can still wait.  X-Men III, yeah that was good.  Of course Pirates of the Caribbean was good.

The nominees for the 2007 Saturn Awards have been announced, with Superman Returns leading the pack with 10 nominations. Other nominated films include: X-Men: The Last Stand, Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth, Casino Royale, Mission: Impossible III, Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest and Stranger Than Fiction
Source: Superman Returns leads 07 Saturn Award Nominations at Forever Geek

Forever Geek picks their favs for the winners.  For the animated category I have to agree with Scanner Darkly.  That was one freaky film.

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Whew! I haven’t been that tense during an episode since they almost flushed Gaeta. Airlocks and anxiety: they just go together. (I can’t wait until our experience of living and working in space becomes extensive enough to see if the Dave Bowman Maneuver (as I like to call it) would actually work.)

Other thoughts:

• Galactica has daycare. Because you know, I’d wondered what Nicky and Hera do all day.
• I bet Mrs. Adama and Ellen Tigh used to hang out together drinking martinis in the Officers Club.
• 2 episodes now without Baltar. Bet that stubble’s getting pretty scruffy.
• 49 days without enemy contact. And you know what? I actually kind of miss the Cylons.

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…on last night’s episode. Yes, there might be spoilers.

• Sharon and Helo have really nice quarters.
• I like imaginary Baltar better than the real Baltar.
• Is it just me or does “Bonus Scene” really mean “You probably ought to know what happened here but we couldn’t figure out how to fit it in the episode”?

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Spoilers might follow, if you’re not caught up on BSG. Don’t say I didn’t warn ya’!

This is one of the burning questions that Battlestar Galactica has hanging over us. Who are the last five models of humanoid Cylons? Way back in the miniseries we were told that twelve models exist. Excluding apparently non- or semi-sentient models like the mechanized Cylons, Raiders, and Basestar ship-minds, we have met seven of those models: Caprica, Boomer, Doral, Leoben, D’anna, Simon, and Brother Cavil.

Each of those seems to have a task, or a specialty. Caprica/Number 6 is a project manager and seductress. Boomer is an infiltrator, possibly built to sympathize with human beings in order to aid her ability to pass as human. Doral is slick, concerned with image and big pictures. Leoben is a visionary, prone to religious insights, and talented at psychological manipulation. D’anna is (was?) a zealot. Simon is a scientist. And Brother Cavil is a cynic, a realist.

And those seven don’t want to talk about the remaining five. So who are they? What do they represent? Something dangerous, something mysterious, even to the Cylons. Next obvious question, then: what do they have to do with Earth?

It’s almost certain that one of the five will be someone we know: a human being among the Colonial Fleet, someone we wouldn’t expect, who may not even know what they are. But who? This seems to be the million dollar question.

The Battlestar Wiki has an entire page dedicated to this, tracking what clues we know and what might exclude someone from being a Cylon for all the likely characters (Admiral Adama, for example, has a long, verifiable history and family that almost certainly excludes him). I agree with most of these assessments. I also keep thinking BSG has a few more rabbits in its hat, and any of them might make all these predictions obsolete. It’s just that kind of show. (”One Year Later” is a phrase that will haunt me forever.)

But you know what? I don’t even care who might be a Cylon anymore. I just hope the payoff on all this build-up is worth it. When we learn the identities of the Final Five, I want the outcome to make sense and not require a huge amount of ret-conning. I want to keep trusting that Ronald Moore and his writers, like the Cylons, have a plan.

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Standard Spoiler Warning Applies. You know the drill.

We’re halfway through the third season, about to head into season 3.5, so I thought I’d do a broad recap. Remind us where we are, and where we’ve been.

The show spent something like a season (from the midpoint of season two until just a few episodes ago) dealing with internal issues. The Colonial survivors struggled to maintain a stable government, with varying results. The arrival of Pegasus introduced a whole new set of internal problems and conflicts. And finally, the settlement, occupation, and revolt on New Caprica had the show dealing with issues of government, humanity, freedom, and sacrifice on an intense level. All of these plotlines have looked inward, to the nature of humanity and human communities. We’re constantly left asking ourselves: can humanity even survive? Can they coexist with the Cylons in any meaningful way? Do they, or the Cylons, even want to?

But now, all parties are focused on the search for Earth. It’s like after all that internal trauma, both the Colonial survivors and the Cylons woke up and asked, “What’s the point of all this? Are we just here to continually beat the crap out of each other, or do our lives have a higher purpose?” Both sides have decided that their continued existence depends on finding the lost thirteenth colony, and that’s where the plot seems to be going. Last season, Starbuck brought back the Arrow of Apollo, which unlocked the star map in the Tomb of Athena on Kobol. Now, Colonial forces are in search of the Eye of Jupiter. (I can’t help but think of the great red storm that marks the atmosphere of our planet Jupiter.) However, so are the Cylons.

Thoughts and predictions: I want to say that Chief Tyrol will have an epiphany that will allow him to find the Eye of Jupiter before Admiral Adama is forced to blow up the temple to keep it from the Cylons. But that’s the easy, standard plot solution, and BSG never takes the easy way out. So I’m going to predict that the temple will be destroyed before any meaningful clues are found. Starbuck will be saved, because heck, she’s Starbuck. Will she and Apollo continue with their relationship? Who knows. I rather hope not, because they’re both behaving like asses. I don’t think the Cylons will continue to try to eradicate humanity, because they need them to help find earth. And they all will find Earth, eventually. Here’s a question: would Helo and Sharon defect to the Cylons in order to be with their child?

I’ve been re-watching the first season on DVD, and it’s been trippy and nostalgia inducing. I don’t have a good memory for details, so it’s a shock to see Crashdown manning a Raptor with Boomer, and Jammer working the deck with Chief and Cally, knowing what happens to them later on. That’s one of the things I admire about BSG: the background and secondary characters are just as strong and well-developed as the primary characters and can play pivotal roles. It’s also a bit hard watching my favorite characters go through what they believe to be hell, knowing how much worse it’s going to get for them.

Some of the characters have come so far and changed so much. I’d forgotten what a hoot it is watching Baltar try to figure out what this Cylon creature is doing in his head — especially when he doesn’t always remember that no one else can see her. Now, though, Baltar almost seems resigned to his fate as a cowardly, narcissistic tool of powers he can’t identify. He seems almost to be embracing the role rather than worried about his image, as he was early on. He’s grown comfortable with the idea that his fate is not his own. And no wonder, after all his attempts to determine his own fate turned to dust in his hands. But this is BSG, and he may surprise us all in the end.

Need to catch up? Try the Battlestar Galactica Wiki.

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If you’re killing time until good TV comes back, you can check out
*Jake 2.0, 3 episode Mini-marathon this Friday at 8pm on Sci-fi
*Battlestar Galactica marathon, Monday 8am on Sci-fi

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