BSG - "Scar"

This episode was far more satisfying than Black Market. Like that episode, Scar was a character study, this time focusing on Starbuck; the big difference and what made this episode actually make sense is Starbuck's emotional and psychological crises were based on actual ongoing storylines - the death of Cain and her perceived abandonment of and love for Anders - rather than made up girlfriends.

As testament to how good this show is, I liked Scar inspite of its "Top Gun"-ishness - I don't really go in for all that fly-boy high-fivin' Iceman wing man schtick. It may also help that the two best pilots are both women. Scar was a turning point for Starbuck, who managed to crawl out of the bottle and face her demons. Well, at least some of them. She is a highly skilled officer and pilot but a highly flawed human being. I find her much more interesting when we see the flaws.

We learned more about the Cylons in a gut-wrenching scene between Starbuck and Sharon - the Cylon Raider ships can resurrect, just like the Cylons. So in every battle in the first season and most of the second season, until the Resurrection Ship was destroyed, every Raider that the fleet destroyed was simply "reborn". With some kind of consciousness. Was Scar the resurrected raider that they showed Starbuck gutting in the previouslies? That makes some sense, except I wondered if the raider actually died or was it just lobotomized? Anyway, interesting to think about.

Starbuck spirals out of control as the episode progresses, drinking what had to have been every last bottle of liquor remaining in the fleet, trying and failing to have some hot sex with Apollo and distancing herself from everyone around her. In the end she faces her own mortality as well as the that of the pilots who have died so far, particularly in the next-to-last scene where she reads out the names of the fallen pilots from memory, names she had denied remembering earlier in the episode.

Next week: Dana Delaney is a terrorist!