Battlestar Galactica "Dirty Hands" Episode #315 2/25/2007 *spoilers*

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No, not rambling, interesting questions arising in this fantasy universe that the slacker writers are too lazy to explore in a creative, entertaining manner. They pissed away an opportunity to do so with this 'mail it in' episode.

 

Maybe their saving that for the Caprica series when they explained how it all started.

 

If there is a new series I hope either ron moore moves to it and give BSG to someone else. Or else ron moore is not part of the new series at all and let someone else have a shot at it. My vote would be to give the new series to manny coto. I thought the 4th season of enterprise was stellar and his show time series was very good.

 

Seelix is hot.

 

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Put me in the "didn't think I'd like this episode but really did" crowd.

Until the "all neat and tidy with a bow" ending. I liked hard-ass President... then she caved. She was correct, but she still caved

 

Actually the whole situation was her fault. If she was not so busy traveling to galatica to hang with adama and actually did her job as president. She should of looked at the conditions of the fleets second most important ship long ago. What she think those people would slave day and night for years on end with no break while her homies were living it up. This episode would of been perfect for season 2 before baltar became president. Heck this little labor strife would of been perfect to put baltar over the top to win the election instead of the new caprica stuff.

 

IIRC, wasn't she part of Ander's team of insurgents on Caprica?

 

I thought I had seen her around the hangar bay for a while. I don't think so.

 

I think she's the one who was helping Chief and his wife into the bay in the episode before this one (when they got trapped)...I could not help but think that I had seen her before...

she might very well have been part of the insurgents on Caprica...

she's hot...I'd take her over that skank Starbuck any day...

 

No, she's been around a lot more than 2 episodes.

 

Thank you IMDB! She goes as far back as January, 2005.

Kobol's Last Gleaming: Part 2 (24 January 2005) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Scattered (15 July 2005) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Valley of Darkness (22 July 2005) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Fragged (29 July 2005) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Flight of the Phoenix (16 September 2005) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Exodus: Part 2 (20 October 2006) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Collaborators (27 October 2006) - Seelix (as Jennifer Halley)
Unfinished Business (1 December 2006) - Seelix
A Day in the Life (18 February 2007) - Seelix
Dirty Hands (25 February 2007) - Seelix

 

We saw the Chief and his family eating algae for dinner. Do they have anything to eat besides algae? Is that a balanced diet?

 

Perfect analogy, only I suspect you don't realize why.

It is perfectly reasonable to feel inconvenienced by TSA because they are just as incompetent now as the security in airports pre 9/11. Almost every rule they've come up with since 9/11 is rubbish. The latest and greatest plastic bag thing is so overwhelmingly stupid and illogical that I often wonder whether it's a really sophisticated prank of some sort. Somehow if you put 12 3 oz explosive bottles into one plastic bag and take that onto the plane, where you could easily pour them all out and combine them together, that is somehow more dangerous than having a random 36 oz bottle.

Similarly, the refinery workers are prefectly reasonable to feel that they are being abused unnecessarily. Because they are. The pseudo-intellectual reasoning offered for requiring constant shifts and dangerous conditions is just as stupid as the TSA plastic bag rule. It is nearly inconceivable that they literally cannot bring in enough additional people to ease the bottleneck at least temporarily or once in a while. There are guys whose job appears to be pouring out a bucket and pushing clustered tylium through a grate. If the job is that important, they can find a way to get more people there.

In both cases, all you have is an appearance of reason. The writing in this episode is so far off from anything I can imagine ever happening that I honestly think the writers themselves are somewhat dim-witted.

 

Great TSA comments.

Unfortunately, I think you're spot on about the writers as well. These guys strike me as having some creativity, but it stops there. Once they have a creative insight, they get all excited and whip out a show without looking back and thinking about continuity, have we set the stage for these new developments previously, etc. They behave as if they'd just whipped out a term paper at the last minute before the deadline. No basic research, no thought to implications ahead and no lookback or revisions.

Too bad, because they tease us by writing some scenes so well.

 

Point taken, to a degree, about human selfishness.

However 9/11 killed about 3,000 people.

It didn't take the human race to the brink of extinction (40,000 people left alive), nor did it leave people with the fear that total annihilation of the human race was imminent.

I think there's a magnitude difference here that makes the analogy of 9/11 to the BSG universe not applicable.

Total annihilation of the human race is not at stake if airport security fails to detect a hijacker. Still, most people tolerate airport security with very little grumbling. The magnitude of what's at stake would tend to overcome a lot of "human selfishness".

 

I recall my grandfather telling me that on a couple of occasions the national guard was talked about being called out to keep the coal mines going in WVA during WWII when strikes were being talked about. Can't remember if it actually happened, but his comment was that you can't mine coal with a bayonette. Seems like a similar situation in that the job is so important it that not doing it means danger for all. It MUST be done.

Having said that it does seem out of character for Adama and Roslin to dismiss the workers concerns so out of hand. Perhaps if there had been more set up where other groups were complaining as well so that perhaps the refiners concerns were lost in the noise. This could have been done in one of the character building pieces of crap from the last few episodes very easily.

 

Who needs shoes on a ship?

Can you fly a raptor barefoot?

Do they have a janitor that sweeps the hallways?

 

actually, they did have a gardner on Cloud 9 who continued to tend to the garden...I think Zarek made a big deal out of it during the election...

 

Yes. we saw the Chief sweeping the hallways once, while whistling the original BSG theme.

 

The idea is a fine one, but the episode explored it clumsily, and that's a big part of why I thought it was dumb.
I can easily imagine an interesting, thought provoking, and believable episode based on that idea, but I can't imagine getting it from the people putting this show together.
So I'll watch the rest of the dumb episodes this season and hope they mange to capture my interest again