Saturday was the day I’ve been waiting for since the last episode of Season 3 of Battlestar Galactica.
Razor, the two-hour movie that is based on the Battlestar Pegasus, finally aired on SciFi. Unfortunately, I had it in my head we’d watch this from the time Pegasus was in the docks getting repairs till the time we meet up with Galactica and the fleet. But in what seems like typical Ron Moore styling we start with Lee taking over Pegasus and then are given flashbacks to fill in the back story on the new characters.
The story revolves around Lt. Kendra Shaw (Stephanie Chaves-Jacobsen) and how she deals with Admiral Cain and her stern approach to running her ship and crew and how it affects her. Lee Adama picks her to be his first XO to carry on Admiral Cains legacy and to give the crew someone familiar with as a leader. Shaw was previously demoted to kitchen staff by previous captains after Cain was killed due to insubordination.
The events she dealt with under Cain are playing heavily on her. We see that Shaw is directly involved with killing innocent civilians as they scavenge for new crew and supplies. To help cope with these pressures we find that she hides a syringe in a container in the kitchen that she used to shoot-up.
Besides the back story which fills in the details we heard from Cains XO, Colonel Fisk, in a previous episode when he was sharing a drink with Colonel Tigh, we also are presented with a new story line in what is present day with Lee Adama commanding the Pegasus.
Admiral Adama gives Lee and Pegasus a Search and Rescue mission to rescue a lost Raptor. While on that mission they run into a horde of old Cylon Raiders. We gather from Athena that these are likely old models that are still doing their mission of guarding a experiment facility where the Cylons were trying to create human cyborgs. Obviously this is a first attempt at making humans that didn’t seem to make the grade and was abandoned by the rest of the Cylons. But this group still remained protecting the experiment.
Admiral Adama having a personal encounter with the experiments, he found the lab 41 years ago during the first Cylon war, now wants to be involved in the search and rescue. After some planning from Shaw, the mission is set. Starbuck, Shaw and team are to jump in behind the Raiders that are attacking Pegasus and board the mother ship rescue the crew of the downed raptor set a nuke and get out.
While on the mission they encounter resistance from the old Centurion models. The special effects team did an awesome job at recreating the nostalgia of the original series while upgrading it and giving it that special flare that made the models seem really evil and scary.
The mission isn’t completely successful as the nukes remote detonation is damaged and will need to be set remotely or Pegasus will fire a nuke at them. Shaw forces everyone to let her stay behind and arm the trigger. While she is on the ship giving the rest of the crew time to leave she stumbles on to the ships collective being. The ship tells her the same theme we hear in the series, “All this has happened before and all this will happen again” but then he tell Shaw something interesting that might have an impact on how Season four turns out. He says that Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its death. It’ll be interesting to see what happens with Kara and the search for Earth going forward.
Razor felt like a two hour episode of Battlestar Galactica instead of a separate movie. The use of flashbacks in the movie I felt was really unnecessary, I think the movie could have flowed a lot better if it started right from the beginning and went in chronological order to the end. Other then the flashbacks I found the use of the old Cylons was really cool and well worth the inclusion into the story.