The Plan

As promised, in time for Christmas, here are my thoughts about "The Plan".

• I liked the voiceover at the beginning being spoken in several different voices relevant to what was being said, and enjoyed working out who all the voices were.
• It was so great to finally see copies of the Final Five in resurrection tanks, arranged in a circle, like the sunken beds in Joss Whedon's Dollhouse.
• Was that the same opening shot of Caprica City as was used in "Daybreak, Part 1"?
• Are we to infer that Tori, after surviving the nuclear blast in her car, was rescued by humans and taken to the fleet, then eventually became Laura's aid without any intervention from Cavil?
• I liked the sexy Natalie-looking Six wearing leather, and chewing gum, and how One hung a lantern on how the Sixes are doing a great job of differentiating themselves.
• The actor playing Tyrol has clearly put on weight since they started filming the series, and so it's quite clear which scenes are new and which are from the miniseries and season 1.
• So Boomer knew what she was, but only in the presence of the wooden elephant. We got one little flashback with her and a Natalie-looking Six before she was made in to a sleeper agent, but it would've been nice to see exactly how that worked, and what happened to her and when to place her in the Colonies as Sharon Valerii.
• The mass grave that the Fives were digging on Caprica was all kinds of disgusting. I wonder how they actually filmed that.
• Leoben as a yoga instructor for the Defence Minister?! Brilliant!
• I felt so sorry for Boomer, saying that she feels better when she's human, and that she loves herself, and it just broke my heart to hear her talk about losing what was left of her humanity after shooting Adama. After seeing the end of the series, this was just so poignant.
• Now we finally know how Shelly Godfrey apparently disappeared! Cavil had her switch with the Natalie-lookign Six (who he ends up sleeping with, eugh!), who is super fast and looks sufficiently different so as not to be recognised as the same model. Oh, and then sending original Shelly out of an airlock so she could reveal the fleet's location to the Cylons - excellent!
• Did Leoben see his future with Kara when strangling her during the interrogation scene from the season 1 episode "Flesh and Bone"?
• It would've been cool to see Simon's spine glow during the sex scene with his human wife!
• The twist that he airlocked himself in stead of blew up his ship was a good one.
• The dynamic between Tyrol and Simon's wife was great, and it really made sense to have her character there at that time. I also really liked how when he kissed her and said it didn't mean anything, she seemed to know exactly what he meant.
• The little boy John giving Cavil a red apple nicely mirrored Ellen offering Boomer a similarly red apple. And the twist of Cavil killing little John really took my breath away, as the way the scene was edited with the other One on Caprica aiming to shoot Kara made us expect that he would do that, and not the other way round (though obviously, we know that he didn't shoot Kara then).
• The two Ones holding hands as they wait to be airlocked was rather moving. And the voiceover from Cavil's monologue to Ellen during season 4's "No Exit" was a lovely touch.

Quotes

Cavil: "Let's get this genocide started!"

Five (of Doral): "His jacket was burgendy. This is teal."
Cavil: "Well, I have something else for you to wear. Yes. They call this a suicide vest, but I think that undersells all the homicide that goes along with it, don't you?"

Leoben: "I'm telling you, she flew a raider, learned how to control it from the inside. No one taught her how. Kara Thrace plucked that knowledge from..."
Cavil: "I don't care if she plucked puppies from God's ass!"

(while listening to Sam and Kara have sex)
Cavil: "He loves her?"
Four: "Vigorously."
Cavil: "She's beneath him."
Four: "Not necessarily."

Overall, I really enjoyed "The Plan." I really like they way they very neatly inserted all this backstory in to seasons 1 and 2 in such a way that really worked, though I'm sure once I go back and watch those seasons again, I'll find things that don't quite work, but I'm willing to suspend my disbelief. I especially liked the insertion of Cavil's talks with Boomer explaining why she found herself in places she didn't remember going to, and how they explained Shelly Godfrey's disappearance.

I was disappointed at the lack of D'Anna and Kara, as I felt Three could have benefited from more fleshing out of their backstory, and there are still a lot of unknowns about Kara which the series did not resolve. I was also going to say that I was disappointed at Lee not being featured really at all, but I realise that his character arch was pretty well wrapped up, so adding him would not really have brought anything new, but would have been nice. The same goes for Gaius, who we only saw in clips from episodes (there were no new scenes with him, as far as I could tell) and Laura, who I was surprised not to see at all, not even in clips from episodes.

More information about how the Final Five were integrated in to the fleet would have been nice. In fact, that is more of what I was expecting of "The Plan"; something more overarching and going back before the attack on the Colonies, to explain how exactly Cavil put all the pieces in to place in order to carry out his plan to punish the Final Five for their sins. Starting from the attack, however, really worked.

So that's it for Battlestar Galactica. This is quite emotional for me, as I found myself really connecting to this show and the characters. It's a sad thing to me that there is nothing new in this particular story.

However, in 2012, I will begin watching and reviewing Caprica, and will use this blog to post those reviews, so stick around if you're interested in that!