The Passage

I'm going to backtrack a few days and talk about the Battlestar Galactica episode that aired last Friday while I was out of town.

The writer of this particular installment, Jane Espenson, was a former writer on Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Buffy fan circles have been talking about her "upcoming script" (and the fact she's already been hired for another, later in the season) for a few weeks now. It maybe had me wondering just a little bit if this was going to be a more light-hearted installment, an attempt to do something vaguely comedic, like the first season's arguably weakest episode, "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down." It was a much better episode, as it turned out. But it brought very little humor (as per Galactica usual) and nothing but the heavy stuff.

I'd cite only a few flaws with the episode, but they're all incredibly minor. At the beginning, I was a little nervous that the set-up of the episode, about the fleet needing to traverse the nebula, was a little to "Star Trek-ish problem of the week." But just like the good episodes of Buffy would do (and as good Galactica episodes have done), the problem turned out just to be grease to get a very character-driven story under way. I need not have worried.

It maybe seemed a bit emotionally manipulative to find out so much about Cat in this episode, only to have her die at the end. But really, only a bit. Cat was a well-established character that has been around for several seasons. And what can I say, but there was something very impactful in her swan song. I think a lot of that had to do with her excellent final scene with Edward James Olmos, again delivering the goods in a brilliant scene as Adama. This was a much more successful exit of a recurring character than, say, Billy in season two.

Finally, and once again a minor complaint -- this episode didn't pick up on the Starbuck/Apollo thread left in the previous episode. I suppose their relationship has been a very long-running, continuous story that has historically not necessarily been addressed every week. And this episode was clearly more self-contained in nature. So it's not really surprising that thread wasn't picked up on. But I couldn't help missing it -- last week's episode left some real unfinished business (pun definitely intended) that left me wanting to see more.

Still, a very solid episode that in my mind made it easy to see why Jane Espenson was already hired for another. I look forward to that.

In the shorter term, though, we have this week's final episode for the rest of the year. Odds are the ongoing Baltar/Cylon plot will come to some delicious cliffhangery crossroads.