Battlestar Gallactica Razor by Felix Enriquz Alcala and Wayne Rose (2007)
4 December 2007Ronald D. Moore has really topped himself here. The series Battlestar Galactica is fantastic, dark and brooding and a great commentary on our modern times, though it has not been looking too good in the last season and a half, but this single movie has elevated it again, because this is easily as good or better than the show ever was, giving the story of the Battlestar Pegasus that we never saw, and introducing an incredible new character who really brings this show up. The DVD is great, with extra scenes that flesh out characters back stories, and let us see more of the scenes that were shown on Sci Fi (though not all of the Adama scenes strangely) and is well worth seeing, if only it were in HD! This is probably the best episode of this show since the first Season, and I can only hope that Season 4, the final Season is this good. And this will certainly give us a new perspective on the events that happen in the new Season, which I think was the point. It is too bad this show is ending after this Season.
This is the story of the first mission of the Pegasus under the command of Captain Lee ‘Apollo’ Adama (Jamie Barber) who has been given command of the ship after it’s first Captain, Admiral Helena Cain (Michelle Forbes) was killed by the Cylon 6, here known as Gina (Tricia Helfer) then Colonel Jack Fisk (Graham Beckel) andf his replacement were killed too. Apollo gets one of Cain’s key Captain’s, Kendra Shaw (Stephanie Chaves Jacobsen) who was pealing potatoes under Cane’s replacements, and is now injecting herself with some drug, and makes her his new hard asses XO. And though Kendra we see the story of the Pegasus and what happened to it before.
REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS...
We see that the Pegasus was in dry dock getting a retrofit when the Cyclon attack happened, and that Cane’s lover Gina was doing the computer overhaul, but had the computers down, so they were not under Cyclon control. Shaw was a famous person’s daughter looking for something to jump start her career, and Cane saw right through he, and just as she got there, the attack happened and she was hurt, but she went to the command deck, helped jump them out of there, and realized the new computer program was compromised.
Cane vowed revenge, and made an attack on a Cyclon station, but it was a trap, and her XO Colonel Jurgen Belzen (Steve Bacic) refuses to put more people at risk, so she took his gun and shot him dead, and then made Colonel Fisk her new XO.
Then during a Cyclon attack, when the hull was breached, she saw 6, and realized Gina was a Cyclon, and confronted her on the bridge, and gave Cain proof, and that was why Cane had her locked up and tortured and humiliated.
And then the Pegasus found 15 Human ships, and Cain gave the order to take only the essential personnel and equipment and they would take it by force, and Cane sent Fisk and Shaw on the team to do it, which will cause problems for Adama in the future as President Laura Rosalin (Mary McDonnell) wants to take those people to justice.
In the present, Captain William Adama (Edward James Olmos) has lost a raptor with a science team, and they found an old style Cylon,, so he is sending the Pegasus on a mission to find them, because he suspects it has to do with a mission he did at the end of the war (which we see with him played by Nico Cortez) when he found a Cylon facility experimenting on humans which was the first step to making the human Cylons that they have today, so Adama is coming along, though his son is still in command.
Apollo has Shaw draw up a plan where the Pegasus is bait and a team will go in, with her and Captain Kara ‘Starbuck’ Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) who has butted heads with her to save the scientists. The team goes in, and finds the science team, and get them out, but the team gets hit, and one gets taken, but Shaw shoots him in the head, but she gets hit, and the nuke the brought is hurt as well, and can only be blown manually. Apollo orders Starbuck to stay and blow up the bomb, but Shaw forces Starbuck to leave at gunpoint, and then goes and confronts the human machine, which tells her that Starbuck is the harbinger of doom, and will lead the human race to ruin, but she can only get part of the message out to Apollo before the message is jammed, and she blows the ship and herself up. When they lost contact though, Lee wanted to nuke the ship and kill his whole team, but Adama stopped him.
Adama then talks to his son about giving Shaw a posthumous commendation, which Apollo doesn’t agree with, but Adama says they have all made choices that they will have to pay for in history, because Cane and Shaw’s decisions did make tactical sense, if not humanitarian sense. And luckily Adama had the President in his face, so he did not make the same decisions.
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Amazing, an amazing series all the way around. Shaw was such a great and interesting character, I kind of hope she is the seventh Cylon so she can return to the series in the fourth season.