| By Patrick Sauriol, Ugo.com,
on 19-02-2007
|
Favoured : 132 |
UGO Rating
Direction: A
Writing: A
Performances: B+
Visual Appeal : B
Overall: A-
Original Air Date: Sunday, February 18, 2007 - 10/9c "Thank you ,BSG, for serving a better tasting morsel than last week's flavorless fiasco." Thank the Gods. Just when it seemed that our beloved BSG was becoming too O.C. soap opera-ish, along comes an episode that rejuvenates my enthusiasm for this series. Like a breeze of fresh spring air blowing through a dusty home comes "A Day in the Life" and with it a return to the life-or-death tension and intelligent, nuanced character development that was characteristic of the first two seasons.
It seems that Bill Adama can't quite let go of his ex-wife and every time his anniversary rolls around the Admiral gets all maudlin and pulls out his six-sided photo of him and the missus on their wedding day. Complicating matters is the upcoming trial of Baltar and the concern of how, or even if, Jesus of Caprica can receive a fair trial when there's a real shortage of lawyers in the Fleet (like that's a bad thing?) And then the icing on the cake comes when the Chief and Cally get stuck inside an airlock receiving bay that's venting their oxygen supply into space. It sucks to be the guy rolling the hard eight all the time, right Bill?
We've needed a good Adama-centric episode for a while now and we've finally got it. Finally we get to see what the husband side of the character was like as Adama's mental image of his deceased ex-wife talks to him in his mind, filtering the day's events as if she were still alive and with him. In her part as Caroline Adama, Lucinda Jenney gets to chew some of the scenery and serve as a catalyst to exposing an undiscovered human side of the man protecting the last remnants of humanity. This is a face of Adama that we very rarely get to see except at times when his son's life is at stake, and certainly not in as much detail or at this length ever. The result is that Adama's character gets propelled along and evolved for our eyes; we get to hear him say that he dearly loves his son but he can't bring himself to say it, that his love for the military caused the break-up of his marriage and that he knows that he's developed feelings for that cute redheaded President of the Twelve Colonies. This lays a nice foundation for where the writers can take Adama for the next ten episodes, and damn if it isn't looking like the Prez isn't herself thinking of spending some more time with the Admiral alone in his quarters.
Revolving in tandem with Adama's storyline is the plight that Tyrol and Cally find themselves in. Aaron Douglas continues to show us a very human Chief, a regular guy that isn't a Viper pilot and so when he stares the death of him and his wife in the face, he's got a blue collar vulnerability that none of the other BSG cast members can truly show the audience. Here's a guy that may have inadvertently killed his wife and orphaned his infant son because he wanted to spend some time with her even if it meant that they were fixing junk in some corner of the ship. That same awful, sinking feeling that was prevalent amongst the first season episodes as on the job accidents befell the crew came back with us and it's been missed. After all, this is deep space, on a ship that doesn't have spare parts, has had the hell kicked out of it and everyone onboard is close to exhaustion or cutting each other's throats. That's the kind of drama that Battlestar has needed to get back to so we can recover from the Apollo/Starbuck affair (and not a single mention of it in this episode!)
The two strongest points of "A Day in the Life" are in writer Mark Verheiden's script and Ron Hardy's direction. Throughout the episode Hardy never lets us forget that we're seeing this day through the eyes of the Admiral. From the little touches like a flash of the worried faces of CIC officers responding to Adama's summation of the desperate situation in the airlock bay to showing us how the non-coms clam up and stop talking when the Admiral strolls down the hallway, Hardy does an excellent job of making us go through Adama's day step by step. For his part Verheiden has always been a good storyteller, whether it was coming up with the best Aliens or Predator stories back in their beginnings of Dark Horse Comics or crafting some of the better episodes to come out of Smallville. He's one of the best wordsmiths that the BSG has going for it. The talents of these two guys - along with Edward James Olmos, but we already know he's great all the frakking time -- probably elevated "A Day in the Life" from being a good episode into one of the best ones so far in season three. Source Link: http://www.ugo.com/ugo/html/article/?id=16772§ionId=2 Submitted by Zipper Talk about this article on our forum: http://galacticabbs.com/index.php?showtopic=1230
Last update : 19-02-2007
|
|
|
