Peter and Sylar finish their showdown. At first, it looks like Peter might have the upper hand. But as everybody knows, YOU CAN’T BEAT CRAZY! Peter ends up “dead”, while Mohinder knocks out Sylar (but doesn’t kill him for some reason), then takes Dead Peter to the Petrelli house, where Mama Petrelli and Nathan cry and gnash their teeth … then Claire shows up and says, “Um. Did you guys try just pulling this piece of glass out of his head?” Et voila, Peter is alive again.
“There must be some way out of here,”
Said the joker to the thief.
“There’s too much confusion — I can’t get no relief.”
So go the opening lines to “All Along the Watchtower”, a song written by Bob Dylan in 1967, popularized by Jimi Hendrix a year later, and recently performed by Prince at the Superbowl. It’s a poem set to music, really, which expresses dissatisfaction with the status quo and portends a coming apocalypse. I’ll reprint the rest of the lyrics at the end of this post, for those who have never read them.
The Cylons are on the Fleet’s heels. Tigh gets drunk, and admits to killing his wife. Roslin gets stoned, and admits that the cancer is back. And some of the crew — Tigh and Anders included — are hearing strange music. It’s all a big build-up for next week’s season finale. But the star of this week’s show was Apollo, who asked me if he could take a moment to sing a little song for his father.
The following is sung to the tune of “I’m Not a Girl, Not Yet a Woman” from the Crossroads soundtrack …
I’m busy this week, so I’ll keep it short …
Everybody’s grieving the “death” of Starbuck. Baltar’s lawyer gets blown up, so now Badger is his new lawyer. (Any Firefly fans out there? Hello?) By the way, I’m going to keep calling him Badger, because the character’s real name, Romo Lampkin, makes him sound too much like a hobbit. Anyway, much of the plot revolves around this new character, who as far as I can tell is a heart-broken orphan that used to be a thief, but was reformed by Joe Adama, the admiral’s father. He’s part klepto, part Columbo, swiping objects from people then discerning all sorts of behavorial and psychological details from those objects. Apollo is assigned to be his bodyguard, and one point, he jumps into a lake to save Badger’s son when the boat he’s on explodes, and they fall in love … no wait. Sorry, wrong story. But seriously, Apollo does seem to fall a little bit in love with Badger, and with the idea of being a lawyer like his grandfather was. So against the wishes of his father — who is one of THE FIVE (yes, five) that comprises Baltar’s tribunal — Apollo volunteers to be Badger’s legal assistant.
It’s all coming together now, with plenty of twists and turns and characters overlapping all over the place …
Peter is especially mobile this episode, first dodging bullets at Isaac’s, then eavesdropping on Nathan’s meeting with the FBI, and finally ending up at Mohinder’s. Where, in one of the funniest “meta” moments in television history, Sylar slices off the long bangs that have apparently been driving Milo Ventimiglia insane for months. But I’m getting ahead of myself …
BIG TIME SPOILERS IN THIS POST!!!
So only read ahead if you’ve seen this week’s episode of BSG already …
Sorry, I got a bit behind last week. So to make up for it, I’ve written another song parody — this one based, appropriately enough, on The Beatles’ A Day in the Life. It sums up the events of the last two episodes. Please to enjoy!
Wow!!! I defy anybody to “meh” that episode. We got action, flashbacks, history reveals, parallel storytelling, and the most brutal Claire-healing yet. Okay, so no Sylar, no Petrellis, and after two weeks, still no sign of Niki. But the focused storyline was well worth it to get so much information and closure in one episode.
Hana the Human Web Surfer finds Ted, who now wants to blow up Bennet, whose wife is dying because of too much mind-wiping by the Haitian, who accompanies Bennet to NYC to try and capture Claude, who is saved by Peter, who thanks to Claude is now able to better control his powers, which he uses to fly he and Claude to safety and to confront Isaac, who is now a narc for Bennet and who unintentionally kills Simone, who dies in the arms of Peter, who is becoming increasingly aggressive (like Sylar?) and who Claude is pissed at for revealing his not-deadness to Bennet, who Claire is pissed at for making her mother sick and who has been injecting radioisotopes into people like Hana and Ted and Matt, all of whom invade the Bennet house with guns to get justice, which is what Suresh tells “Zane” he would like for his father, who was killed by Zane/Sylar, who also kills the Mechanic with Super-Hearing, whose powers he steals, which gives him a Super-Headache and probably makes him wish that everybody talked in subtitles, like Hiro and Ando, who almost get killed by Hope, who shoots at Hiro, who unwittingly uses his powers to rewind time and stop the bullet from hitting him and who tells Ando to go home in order to protect him and who boards a bus driven by Stan Lee, whose awesome cameo was completely spoiled by the opening credits.
So … yeah. Great episode. But kind of self-contained, with no real impact on the other storylines or the mythology in general. A racist doctor is killing off refugee Sagittarons, Helo figures it out, nobody believes him at first, then they do, and the doctor is arrested. Presumably, the Sagittarons are the colony that nobody else likes, because of their hardcore fundamental beliefs, including a rejection of modern medicine — which makes them kind of like Christian Scientists, I suppose. Says Papa Adama, “There’s hate, and then there’s allowing hate. Two sides of the same coin, really. We’re guilty of both.” Which I guess is the episode’s object lesson. Whether or not anybody will actually remember this lesson in coming episodes remains to be seen. Particularly as regards Sharon.