The Sci-Fi Cast

Today we feel confused and depressed, which can only mean one thing … Battlestar Galactica is back!

What happens when you destroy the fondest, most desperate dream of thirteen thousand people? They spiral into an all-consuming despair. This episode, written by David Bradley, is fantastically dark. Consider a three act play: Act I, meet the characters. Act II, put them in the most desperate situation possible. Act III, get them out.

If the purpose of Act I was to get them to earth, then Act II — take away their hope on a radioactive wasteland — has begun.

Note: The rest of this post contains spoilers that will ruin this episode for anyone who hasn’t seen it, and possibly the season for anyone who isn’t caught up to this point. If you don’t want to know, stop reading right now! This means YOU!

The rest of you may click below to continue.

The title Sometimes A Great Notion comes from an American folk song, “Goodnight, Irene” in which the narrator contemplates suicide with the infamous line, “Sometimes I take a great notion to jump in the river and drown.” One only needs to recall Bill’s fox hunt story and Tigh’s (suicide attempt?) revelation in the ocean to see the reference.

The latter half of season 4 picks up right where the story left off. As an away team surveys the scorched earth, Baltar confirms the worst: The ground, water table and anything edible is radioactive and unfit for human consumption. Earth is uninhabitable and must be abandoned. Broken, Laura Roslin returns to the fleet with Bill and is greeted by an anxious, desperate throng. She tries, and in the episode’s first heartbreaking moment, fails to deliver the terrible news. She retreats to her quarters where she shuns Bill, burns the holy book she’s held so dear for her whole life and submits to a debilitating depression.

Meanwhile, Kara and Leobin are conducting a survey of their own. Using a navigation device, she discovers the signal of an old colonial communicator. Following it, they find a damaged chunk of a colonial nav system among the ruins, which sparks her curiosity. This leads to  a trail of debris, and eventually a viper cockpit which contains a charred corpse. A charred corpse with long hair. Nauseated and terrified, Kara reaches inside its flight suit and removes its dog tags. As you may have guessed, they read “K. Thrace.”

Here’s where it got interesting. Realizing what happened, Leobin becomes visibly afraid of Kara. He backs away, stumbling, not even looking at where he’s going. He’s wide-eyed, and breaks into a full run. Kara calls after him, recounting the hybrid’s dreadful prophecy, but he’s gone.

With Laura incapacitated, Lee delivers the news to the fleet. Everyone is devastated and the ships fall into chaos. People are fighting in the hallways. There’s graffiti on the walls. Sad and desperate people are lying everywhere like corpses.

Dee gives Lee a pep talk, which seems to reignite the old spark between them. They make a date and Dee gets all gussied up (it was nice to see her in a dress an out of that dull uniform!). Both of them seem rather happy, which is a sharp contrast to Dee’s state on earth. Searching through the scorched land, she found a set of jacks that a child might have played with and broke down, realizing the horror of the scene.

In fact, she was affected more significantly than I thought, for as she was undressing after her date with Lee, she pulled out her sidearm, put to her temple and shot herself dead. Felix, whom she had been talking to only minutes before, could only kneel at her side and watch her die.

Heartbreaking scene numer two.

Dee’s death was Bill’s breaking point. Drunk and desperate, he staggers into Tigh’s office with a loaded gun. He antagonizes Tigh, taunts him with rude comments about Ellen, his dead wife, causing Tigh to draw his gun and hold it to Bill’s head. Bill begs him to shoot, putting his own gun to his head and saying, “If you don’t, I will.”

Realizing he had been manipulated, Tigh sits down and drops his gun. Bill does the same, and that concludes heartbreaking scene number three.

Back on Earth, the “final four” cylons have revelations of their own. Chief recongizes the ghostly paintings on the wall of a ruin as a marketplace on earth. Memories flood back as he realizes that he once lived on earth, and bought fruit and produce in that very market. In fact, he recalls the day he was buying avacados at the very moment a nuclear bomb was detonated, destroying everything and everyone.

The others have similar revelations, but the most significant is Saul’s. At the episode’s end, he has wandered far out into the ocean. The water is nearly up to his shoulders. His hands happen upon a piece of rubble which triggers a memory for him — a memory of Ellen trapped beneath some rubble two thousand years ago on earth, and his desperate struggle to save her. “It’s OK,” she tells him. “We’ll all be born again, and again, and again.”

“Ellen,” Saul says in a moment of clarity. “You were the fifth.”

This episode answered questions and raised others. While examining the remains of a mass grave, Gaius and his team determine that all of the buried corpes … centurion and bone … are cylon. So, the thirteenth colony was cylon. So why do some people have memories of life on earth? How did Kara find her corpse? What the frak is going on?

To say this was one of the best episodes of the series is an understatement. The acting was phenomenal all around. I was blown away by Dee’s suicide. I was numb with Roslin has she lay curled up on the floor of her quarters. I was desperate and lost with Bill, and confounded with Kara. This is the Battlestar I remember, and I’m thrilled that it’s back.

In Dante’s Inferno, he states that the most execrable horror of hell is to live without hope. Indeed, the fleet is in hell.