Battlestar Galactica: The Plan (review)

Now, The Plan -- directed by Edward James Olmos and written by Jane Espenson -- makes no sense at all if you haven’t seen and just about memorized the four years of BSG. You’re totally left to wonder, if you don’t already know, how Dean Stockwell can be on a spaceship in space plotting some sort of nefariousness, and at the same time down on a planet plotting other, perhaps connected nefariousness. There are a few brief mentions of copies and duplicates and such, but most of the fun here comes not in the retelling of stuff we already know but in the filling in of a few blanks in the huge narrative gaps a years-long series inevitably creates. And some of those gap-plugging answers just lend themselves to asking more questions. That’s The Plan of Battlestar Galactica, I think: Ron Moore just keep making fill-in-the-blanks movies that raise new issues and need to be answered with more movies that fill in the blanks yet raise more questions, and so on into infinity.

There are some intriguing notions about the inadvertent human influence on the Cylon skinjobs: when you hang with your enemies long enough, you stop seeing them as enemies. So there’s the Simon, the No. 4 model skinjob (Rick Worthy), who loves his human family, including his wife, Giana (Lymari Nadal)... despite Cavil’s (Dean Stockwell) disgust at the thought. (I like how Giana’s remark about how she’d never met anyone from Simon’s childhood touches on the questions we’ve had about how the skinjobs integrated themselves into pre-apocalypse colonial society, or didn’t, without actually resolving too much; there’s fodder for another movie.) One of the Leobens (Callum Keith Rennie), after relating to a Cavil that Kara “Starbuck” Thrace learned how to fly a Cylon raider from inside, starts to doubt that Cylons are favored in God’s eyes. And even one of the Cavils himself is full of uncertainty and misgivings about the attack on humanity and all the human deaths. (Back before the attack, though, he was gleeful, and curious to witness a nuclear holocaust, which is disturbing but oh-so Cavil-like.)

We see some of the resistance Sam (Michael Trucco) is leading back on the devastated Caprica, created around the core of his pyramid ball team, which had been training in a remote mountain camp when the Cylon attack came. It’s cool and all, but it does raise new wonderings in my head. I’ve always thought that there must be millions of survivors across the colonies -- civilization would be destroyed, or at least thrown back into a dark ages, but plenty of people will have survived -- and the Sam/Caprica segments only pour a lot of fuel onto the fire of that notion: clearly, life is going on on the colonial worlds. Not fun life, not pleasant life, but life nonetheless.

So, here’s an idea for another movie... or, hell, even another series: What is going on on Caprica, Picon, Tauron, and the rest of the colonies? How are the survivors pulling themselves together? If we’re to accept the finale of the series -- that 150,000 years later, we are the descendents of the colonials who landed on Earth -- then doesn’t that mean that, who-knows-how-many light-years away, we have cousins on those worlds who will have pulled themselves up by their bootstraps and reestablished their civilizations, too?