Battlestar Galactica, "Islanded in a Stream of Stars": Going down with the ship

Spoilers for last night's "Battlestar Galactica" coming up just as soon as I imagine that my bran muffin is a cupcake...

"I've had it up to here with destiny, prophecy, with God or the gods. Look where it's left us: The ass end of nowhere, nearly half our people are gone, Earth a worthless cinder and I can't even walk down the halls of my ship without wondering if I'm going to catch a bullet for getting us into this mess." -Bill Adama

"There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza." -Anders

It's all falling apart. And there's no fixing it, is there?

Roslin is near death. Galactica is about to be abandoned and scavenged. Hera is in the hands of Cavil, separated even from the facsimile of her mother. Baltar is so without hope for their current state of affairs that he's now giving sermons about angels and eternal life. Athena can't even look at Helo, and Helo is losing his grip on sanity. Tigh is losing more of his children, even as Ellen is forcing him to accept that they're his. Lee is barely in control of the new congress of fleet captains.

When Ron Moore said the state of things would actually get bleaker from what we saw in "Sometimes a Great Notion," he wasn't kidding. And while a dark, apocalyptic ending feels tonally appropriate to everything that's come before, I'm not sure how well I'm going to deal with all the deaths (of people and ships) that I suspect are coming in the two-week, three-hour finale.

"Islanded in a Stream of Stars," written by Michael Taylor and directed by Edward James Olmos, never let up on the sense of impending doom. Every scene on Galactica is punctuated by flickering lights and the sounds of creaking, protesting metal. Even the bathroom stall doors won't close (and Starbuck doesn't much care if Baltar sees her on the throne.) Every establishing shot of the fleet inevitably leads to a close-up of the gaping hole that Boomer left in the ship's hull. The Hera/Boomer story is bookended by scenes of little Hera wailing for a lost maternal figure (first Athena, then Boomer herself). There's no relief, no let-up. Even a relatively happy moment, like Lee assuring Kara that he doesn't care about who or what she is, isn't much of a respite, because Kara still needs to know (and so do we), and because Lee has to play dashing ex-boyfriend in front of the memorial wall.

(A quick but necessary detour: It's said that actors who direct -- particularly actors who direct their longtime co-stars -- often bring out more from the performances, and that was certainly true here with Olmos in charge. Not that the cast is anything less-than-brilliant, but almost everyone went to some new, scarier places in this one. Jamie Bamber was more coiled than he's ever been during the contentious fleet captains meeting, and then so effortlessly charming as he walked away from Kara. The number of emotions that can quickly wash across Katee Sackhoff's face seemed to triple. I never would have thought Tahmoh Penikett was capable of showing us a Helo teetering on the brink the way he did in the scene where he confronted Adama. And Grace Park got to show us two different Sharons, each coping differently with being separated from Hera. I could write entire posts just about each member of the cast's work in an episode like this, and it's a testament to them, as much as or more than the usually outstanding writing, direction, music, etc., on the series, that I'm going to be so wrecked if we get the inevitable unhappy ending.)

Though the episode finally takes us into The Colony, wakes up Anders from his coma (albeit by turning him into another babbling Hybrid), and prepares all of us for Galactica's destruction, it deliberately leaves most of the big answers for the Moore-scripted finale. We still don't know exactly what Cavil's plan is (when he talks about "playmates" for Hera, does he mean the creation of new Cylon models, or just that she's going to be spending a lot of time with the Simons?), nor what Kara's identity and role is, nor the truth of the head characters and the opera house visions, but we're getting extremely, tantalizingly close to all of it.

My favorite shot of the episode was of Kara, right after her discussion of angels with Baltar, going in to see Sam. Outside in the corridor, she's bathed in a heavenly white glow, while inside the compartment, she's suffused with a devilish red. Is she an angel? A tool of the apocalypse? Both? I need to find out, even as I suspect I won't like the answer -- not for being unsatisfying, but for signaling bad things to the many characters I care about.

Some other thoughts:

• Do you think Kara subconsciously realizes that Baltar will blab her secret, and going to him is her way of unburdening herself to her friends without having to tell them directly?

• One of the hallmarks of the four episodes that Olmos directed over the years is the way he likes to show us familiar parts of the ship in a new way, like that lovely shot of proud, tired old men Tigh and Adama splayed on the big sectional sofa in Adama's quarters. We've seen that couch a hundred times in different scenes set there, but never at that angle, in that way. For so many people in the rag-tag fleet, or even on Galactica, the last four years has felt like time in a floating metal prison, but to Bill Adama -- and to his dying lover, which Laura so movingly articulates in sickbay -- this is home.

• Gary Hutzel's F/X team were in fire with this episode, between all the shots of the hole, the dead Six floating through the fleet, and the awesome, horrifying glimpse of The Colony. (I type notes of all my reactions as I watch, and when that thing first popped up, I banged out, "WHAT THE FRAK IS THAT?") It looked very much like something H.R. Giger would have cooked up for the first "Alien" if he had access to modern CGI technology.

• I loved the funeral sequence, with the different speeches from different sources -- Colonial vs. Cylon, religious vs. secular -- laid on top of each other. Slowly but surely, all these different groups are coming together, even as it feels too late for it to matter.

• Was Baltar being sarcastic when he asked Kara who she was, or has he just slept with so many women over the last few years that he's forgotten the one who called out Apollo's name when they were in bed together?

• I loved our brief glimpse of the bad-ass Six who got into a fight with one of the Galactica repair crew, then saved him (and everyone else) while sacrificing her own life after the explosive decompression. A really memorable character in a short period of time, almost like they gave Tricia Helfer a chance to play Starbuck for a few minutes. There isn't much variation between the Eights, and none that we've seen among the other Cylon models, but it's a testament to Helfer that she's been able to play so many different versions of the same character.

• Silly question: how does Hera even know what a cupcake is? She's only three, and for most of the life that she can remember, she's been eating nothing but an algae diet.

• One nitpick: I could have done without the vaguely Southern accent on the one fleet captain who said "and I use that term loosely" when referring to the skinjobs as "people." Seemed too on-the-nose to have the bigot sound like he could be a Klansman.

• Even in the midst of the despair, Michael Hogan can bring the funny. Ellen's going on about how the Final Five wanted to bring an end to the cycle of human/machine violence, and Saul shrugs it off and says, "That was a bust."

For the next-to-last time, a reminder of two of the basic rules around here: 1. No talking about anything in the previews, or anything you've read/seen/heard about the last two episodes, or anything that even vaguely qualifies as a spoiler. Any comment along those lines will be deleted, period, regardless of what else you've written in that comment. 2. Show respect to your fellow commenters (and those of us who try to read all the comments) by at least skimming what's come before before asking a question or making an observation that's come up a few dozen times already. At the very least, do a browser word search for whatever it is you want to talk/ask about.

What did everybody else think?