Am I the only one feeling like this season is just not what it could be? As with the rest of the fourth season, this episode has a few shining pieces of brilliance in performance, writing and editing, but again, like most of this last season, it mostly fails. We can see that the writers are desperately trying to wrap up loose ends (the final five, Earth, Ellen to name a few) and explain things left so far unexplained (Cylon motivation, various mythologies), and clean things up that have been poorly done during the 4.0 season (Gaeta's change, Tom Zarek) but its like the main writers and director's are letting amateurs do it. To try to get Apollo and Starbuck back together they are unconvincingly killing off other attachments like having Dualla off herself and by killing Anders (we assume he's brain dead now). Then, to try to explain what's going on with the Final Five, they have Anders suddenly recover lost memories and read off Cylon history, like a poor dramatist trying to clean up a poorly written play in one speech during the last five minutes. And can somebody tell me who's knucklehead idea it was to bring an obvious, well-known contemporary comedian in his comic glasses, basically doing his standard schtick, onto the show doing brain surgery on Anders?!?!? Really? John Hodgeman? The few bright spots include Cavil's brilliant speech about life trapped in the limiting body of a human and as always, Mary McConnell's nuanced performance. I desperately want to like this season and this episode and I want to see an incredible ending to what has been an incredible series . . .but so far I can only like three or four 4th season episodes. But you know what . . .I've committed three years to this enterprise and I suppose I'm going to stick it out . . .hoping that the writer's can pull it together and thrill us at least once more.
