Battlestar Galactica & Caprica Reviews

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BSG TOS 1978 - Season 1 - Episode 16

BSG TOS 1978 - 1x16 - War of the Gods, Part 2 - Originally Aired: 1979-1-21

My Rating - 7

Fan Rating Average - 5.82

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Synopsis
At first thrilled that a mysterious stranger on board will lead them to Earth, the Galactica leaders discover their benefactor is the evil Prince of Darkness. [DVD]

Problems
- Tigh says Apollo was scheduled to visit the agro ship 9. But they only had three agro ships. And two of those were destroyed...

Factoids
- Human life expectancy in this universe is about 200 yahrens.
- Humans in this universe are just beginning to unlock the mind's true potential, with latent telepathic and telekinetic abilities.

Remarkable Scenes
- Baltar confronting the council of 12 and Count Iblis.
- The Triad sports game.
- Adama using telekinetic abilities.
- Starbuck: "Sweet lady, there aren't many places I've been in my life where I didn't feel like I was in complete control, but, uh, this is an exception."
- Alien to Starbuck: "Because as you are now, we once were. As we are now, you may become."
- Apollo, Starbuck, and Sheba reciting the location of Earth: "Earth, quadrant alpha, nineteen million sectares by epsilon vector twenty-two, on a circular reckoning course of zero-zero-zero-point-nine... in a star system of nine planets and one sun."

My Review
This episode is fascinating. We learn a lot about the nature of the Galactica universe here. For example, we learn that humans in this universe live longer than in the real world and they have latent telekinetic and telepathic abilities. We also learn that humans are on an evolutionary path in which they will begin to refine the power of the mind to the point of living to thousands of yahrens and having godlike powers. This episode implies that all it will take to accomplish this is for the human race to spread across the galaxy... to find Earth and bear new colonies elsewhere from it.

Even more interesting are the unfortunately vague implications of Count Iblis having some sort of connection to the Cylon leader. Is he / was he the Cylon Imperious Leader? Or more likely was he responsible for the destruction of the race that created the Cylons? Did he interfere with the Cylons from 1000 yahrens ago? Did he program the various Imperious Leaders? We're not given this answer, and it's really a shame too. Because it would give far more meaning to the whole story.

Overall, a pretty good episode. But it would have been much better as a single episode instead of two, with more time spent showing us some more details about the various religious philosophy thrown around, the history of these beings, and less time spent on Iblis being evil.

The following are comments submitted by my readers.

  • From hugo on 2011-09-01 at 1:45pm:
    So what was in the space ship wreck? Points of for the cheesy "dream sequence" with the ancient aliens. Q beats Iblis in every way!

    Oh, and I am no big fan of psychic powers in sci-fi.

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