Starbuck = Snoopy...?

2.15: "Scar"

It's a wild n crazy Saturday evening at home with my stories...

I just got done watching the last two BATTLESTAR GALACTICA episodes... There was a particular piece of music played over the last scene this week. Does anyone know where it's from? I can ALMOST remember... fracknabbit!

I'm sure I know it from a movie, altho of course, it may have been co-opted for whatever movie it was, and originally existed as a classical or at least guitar standard on its own. It's just that that's not how it's coming back to me. Some 60s film... With some soft-touch lighting and lens work when this music is playing... Frack, maybe it was a war movie? No... I'm thinking it's a western! Ennio Morricone? That could very well be...

Nuts. Stupid brain.

It worked well enough for the ending, but the nagging familiarity kind of distracted me a bit. If I could've placed it perfectly, maybe that would've gone away.

I didn't much appreciate the stim-junkie giving Starbuck such a hard time. And then just like eating up all the accolades without so much as a tip of the wrongly-lit helmet to Starbuck for the perfectly executed assist! And AFTER falling for Scar's bait/wingman!

Bitch.

* Wrongly-lit helmets... I suppose it can't be avoided, for the sake of television and the big screen, but it's always just a teeny bit annoying to see cockpit helmets lit up in all manner of futuristic space fighters. It lets us, the audience, SEE the character's face, but likely throws up the character's own reflection, bouncing back at him or her, all over the inside of the cockpit. Even better are space suit helmets that are lit up on the inside. You're not seeing anything out of those! I think maybe ALIEN is the only movie I can remember them not lighting up the helm insides. How does Ridley Scott not rock? =)

Yeah, yeah, okay, so they've got a perfectly non-reflecting coating all over the inside of the cockpits and helmet glass... Fine. Still. Not un-pet-peeving me.

Anyhow...

Great "Red Baron" storyline, tho. I was kinda waiting for one of these. Presenting the Cylon fighters as "individuals," even if they are more trained attack dogs than willful personalities, is a very cool notion. Although if you want to mess with things, you can wonder about Boomer's shared memories and emotions, across bodies, and why Scar's battle experiences can't be shared, or copied/cloned, across multiple fighters, eh?

But hey, it's just the way it is. Maybe the Cylon ethicists have worked out all the what's proper and sacred when it comes to the up- and downloading and replication of essences, spirits, memories, and such...

Or the very able writers will decide they will have, when it ever comes up. =)

Fitting the Red Baron action into Starbuck's dealing with loving dead man Anders (I never once thought it when she was ON Caprica, but the way the flashbacks came to her throughout this episode, I want to say that he's a frickin Cylon sleeper, or maybe one who's gone over to humanity... I wonder if there were any Cylons walking around posing as twins...?) was maybe a little bit forced, along with retrofitting a growing drinking problem... But, well, in a confrontation with any Red Baron type, Starbuck would definitely take center stage, so, it kinda had to be her, and some serious issue or blowback of hers, that had to be worked out w the scarred, yet faceless, enemy.

I thought that there was gonna be some way of DEFINITELY connecting this Scar to the Cylon ship that Starbuck violates to fly herself back to the fleet after getting knocked out of the sky and stranded last season. WAS there a definite/obvious connection presented that I missed? Or did Starbuck SAY as much and I didn't pick it up thru radio static?

Does anyone (besides Jim), remember SPACE: ABOVE AND BEYOND? It was created by X-FILES brains Morgan and Wong (I'm pretty sure they're also the very fun and sharp ones behind the FINAL DESTINATION series - can't wait to see 3 =), and played, for me, like a not-so-ironic STARSHIP TROOPERS series on Fox. Young space grunts, flyboys and girls, some human, some "tank" (clones), joining the space marines to fight an unknown alien enemy. It was a good candy-like fixx of sci-fi action that would surprise me every once in a while with some really tough decisions and writing.

Also, it gave some very able young acting types, more than a few of them veterans of one-shots or short runs on X-FILES I'm pretty sure, a regular gig. Well, regular-ish. As it disappeared after a season or two on Fox, bleah.

The sorta "primary" pretty boy character also played a young... I think it was Pops Mulder? Opposite the Spengler actor as the young Cancer Man...

The "tank" in the squad was on the X-FILES as the guy whose tattoo spoke to him w Jodie Foster's voice.

Lucky jerk.

And the tough girl w the Jolie-esque lips in the squad, frack... her name... It was alliterative... Kristy Krazinski-like... except it had something unexpected in there in the last name, like eight consonants in a row, or a surprising "th"...? Something just unusual. My lame brain.

Anyhow, AFTER Fox killed the show (I'm pretty sure that's how it went down, and without anything that I can remember feeling series finale-ish?), she ended up on MILLENIUM w Lance Henriksen.

Their tough-ass leiutenant was a "tank," too, played by white-haired CTU boss guy who's butting heads with Samwise on 24 this season. There was an episode where the squad had saved or boarded or something or othered a colonists' transport, and there were a number of cold storage bays, full of tubes of colonists in suspended animation. The ship takes some damage in an attack and it turns out that in order to avoid some gravity well or other that would send the ship into a collision, they would have to drop some of their mass, one of the storage bays would do it.

They discover that one (at least) of the bays is all "tanks." Most of the episode is debate and stories about experiences w tanks, and along the way, hunky tank boy finds out that one of the suspended girls in storage is genetically a relative - a sister. When they have to make a decision about what to do - determined by some mass x speed x distance x commercial breaks formula - the lieutenant convinces tankboy that it's the tanks that have to go.

THEY AGREE THAT THEY ARE WORTH LESS THAN THE HUMANS. Or at least, they agree to follow orders that reflect that notion.

That was frickin wacked. Knocked me out. I don't remember specific references to that in any other episodes, but I hafta admit I don't remember a lot of things (see every other paragraph above =), and didn't watch every episode of the show. Hrmmm... I suspect that SciFi has played it in block form before. It might be a good complement to GALACTICA now, altho... I suppose it might also sort of dilute its power, look like something of a DEEPSTAR 6/LEVIATHAN vs. THE ABYSS latecomer knockoff... even though it was on the air years before and all...

And speaking of latecomer knockoff... The reason I brought up SPACE: A&B in the first place here, is that this episode reminded me of the "Red Baron" episode from THAT series. I'm pretty sure there was an existentialist plot driving that one as well, this one personally involving the lieutenant tank, who I now recall was a... Black Angel, I think it was... An ex-member of an elite squad of fighter pilots. And I kinda sorta, maybe fakely filling in the blanks in a narrative gap sorta way, recall that he was dealing with his right to life, purpose, and identity as a tank.

A running arc throughout the series was that tank-racism, as well as... frack, AI-ism. And comparisons made between tanks and AIs as tools created by true humans, which of course means, that's how they should be treated.

Classic scifi stuff.

Right, well, just wanted to get that off my TV-soaked brain.

If you're not watching BATTLESTAR GALACTICA, you should. It's about a human civilization, a culture, attacked and hunted almost to extinction by an enemy, an artificial race, or species, of machine-organics that it created (and mistreated?) to be its servants. The survivors are on the run in a fleet of spaceships, led and protected by the last remaining military battleship (the Battlestar Galactica) and its soldiers and pilots. The government and order are preserved as best as possible, but an imperfect system in the best of times struggles terribly under the stresses of war with a tireless and sometimes undetectable enemy. Religious fervor motivates factions on both sides, and profit and power drive political and criminal elements within the fleet, at times turning humans against each other.

If only its crazy fantastickal plots and issues somehow related to "real life" here on planet Earth. Then it would be much easier to sell to people, donchathink?

O well. =)

Keep on keepin on~