Remembering Battlestar Galactica’s “Hero”: A Thirteen-Year Retrospective
Warning: This analytical article contains spoilers and critical commentary for viewers who may not have seen the entire Battlestar Galactica series. Views are the author’s own, derived from his informed opinions.
“Hero” Mission Brief: A figure from Adama’s past returns to haunt him. His return raises questions about why the Cylons launched their initial attack against the Twelve Colonies. — Source: BattlestarWiki.org
The junior season of Ronald D. Moore’s interpretation of Battlestar Galactica was fraught with many moments of deep introspection, and no one had been safe from that. Not even the complex patriarchal figure of the show, William Adama, whose past had returned to haunt him. Dreadlocks and all.
Despite the fact that Adama had been a self-admitted, well-meaning liar with a questionable moral compass, the Tigh-ing up of threads during the post-New Caprica interregnum continued in this mis-titled installment, “Hero.” As of this writing, the episode aired 13 years ago on the channel formerly known as the Sci-Fi Channel on 17 November 2006, and was a self-contained affair in terms of its A-story.
A questionably contrived means to re-establish a sense of normalcy between two military hombrés, executive producer David Eick wrote an episode that may be best considered a crucible in which Adama and Saul Tigh would reform their relationship in the destructive wake of New Caprica. In doing so, Eick employed both a throwaway character and red herring piñata, while pulling out unripened “member berries” to other plot points that lead to other dead-ends vis-à-vis the nonsensical biological “Cylon virus.” (I’ll touch on that and others in future articles.)
Following Moore’s Maxim—“it’s the characters, stupid”— and the demonstratively unwritten refrain that “all other literary and logic conditions are expendable ad absurdum,” the episode served to remind viewers the virtue of “quality over quantity.”
Hitting the viewer over the head with the waxing pathetic “it’s my/our fault” motif—woven in the series DNA from its beginning—this installment’s catalyst arrived in a homage to the opening of Ron Moore’s earlier Star Trek: The Next Generation entry, “The Defector.” In doing so, the damaged-yet-metaphorical harbinger of destruction “Bulldog” proved that the damaged-yet-mythical harbinger of destruction Kara “Starbuck” Thrace were equally matched and thus both able to successfully operate a bio-mechanical Cylon Raider via deus ex MacGuffina.
Authorial Digression: Now, how exactly Bulldog is capable of piloting the thing is still anyone’s guess 13 years later, seeing as it took Starbuck (and a team of people) weeks to figure out everything, including the FTL drive. Was he “programmed” by the Cylons to learn how to pilot the thing during his time in captivity, and then forget being trained as a Manchurian candidate?
Perhaps this is best filed under “it’s a television episode, stupid.” Moving on.
Regardless of the aforementioned issue requiring to airlocking of all disbelief, Bulldog’s survival from the ill-fated mission concocted by Colonial Fleet’s Admiralty introduced the necessary catalyst to get Adama to question, of all things, whether his actions directly precipitated the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
For Frak’s sake, the poor guy had lost both his mustache and his best—and only—hombré.
Thus, viewers had already known this self-doubting concept was patently ridiculous, particularly in light of the fact that Cylons had already infiltrated the Colonies years before Adama was sent on his mission. This is not even accommodating the yet-to-be-revealed fact that John Cavil is the puppet master behind the over-hyped Cylon “plan:” a plan that had already been in motion for over thirty-plus years before Adama even resumed his military career, not to mention Tigh’s hair loss.
And, yes, the hair “member berry” planted in season two was the point of a very dead-panned, bash-you-over-the-head joke Adama made during the series’ senior year. However, to get there, one must have suffered the travails of “Hero.”
In flashbacks from “a year prior to the attack,” not only were viewers subjected to an excuse for the reuse of Pegasus’ CIC set and new future decor for Eick’s Vancouver office in the form of Valkyrie’s wall emblem (file under: “Unjust Enrichment”), but they were subject to what amounts to throwaway dialogue that should have been best excised from the script during the draft stage.
Additionally, given the compartmentalized nature of Adama’s mission to scout behind the Neutral Zone… apologies, “Armistice Line”… there had been nothing to indicate that similar missions had not already been attempted with minimal success.
This squadron of red herrings continued CBDR to unsuspecting viewers, among them being the incongruent plot point to shoe-in Laura Roslin on the pretense of celebrating Adama as a “hero,” and to reflect upon what being a “hero” truly meant. Additionally, a shoe-horn turnabout where father and son drank of the “member berry” wine regarding previous ethical decisions.
Fun Fact! For those keeping score after 13 years: Lee still won, given that he fired on and destroyed Olympic Carrier in “33,” and the fate of those civilians remained nebulous per the SCI FI Channel’s squeamishness. Oh, and Pegasus.
However, Adama isn’t the hero of this hour, for it has been said that in the kingdom of the blind the one-eyed man is king.
“You’re full of bile, hatred, and I know it has something to do with Ellen. I’m sorry for that. And if you need time Saul, you take all the time you want, but I gotta run a ship. And the last thing I need is a one-eyed drunk sitting down here, sowing discontent and disobedience. So I’ll tell you once again, Saul, you can pick up that weapon and kill me. Or you can get your ass back into your quarters and not leave… ’til you act like the man I’ve known for the past 30 years.”
— William Adama, “Torn”
Seeing as Saul Tigh needed to rise to the occasion — as future storylines hinged upon the positioning of our one-eyed drunkard as one of the “Final Five” to be played off Adama — it must take the ghost from both their pasts to reunite them.
Ergo, Bulldog. The sacrificial lamb that Adama had ordered killed to preserve the peace that puppeteer Cavil had already planned on breaking? Affirmative. That one. Dreadfully for all concerned, the Skinjobs hadn’t bothered giving Bulldog hat memo before not-so-miraculously being pointed to Galactica, as the ad hoc infamous “Cylon plan” hinged on such happenstance. (cf. Gina and Gaius Baltar’s nuclear bomb on Cloud 9, “Lay Down Your Burdens, Part II.”)
Between Tigh’s act of proving in vino veritas and Starbuck’s “Cry ‘Frak’, the Cylons’ let slip the Bulldog of war!” to Tigh later, the true hero of the episode realized the damage he had done while under the influence. As already demonstrated in “Torn,” Tigh could not bring himself to kill Adama and, despite his declaration “that man [he had been prior to Ellen’s ‘death’] doesn’t exist any more,” what transpired next effectively proven the statement to be one made from both regret and pity over killing Ellen.
Thus, as their Bull[dog] in a China shop went after the Old Man as one would a piñata, Saul Tigh saved the day. For “God” wanted that for him, and he needed to be in a position to listen to some music that was in the frakking ship. Or Tigh couldn’t bear to kill his friend through inaction, in keeping with Issac Asimov’s “Three Laws of Robotics.” Why not both?
Regardless of any outside intervention and debate regarding the question of free will, Tigh had overcome his demons to become the hero needed to face truths that Adama could not. Not just for that particular moment in time, but for the time to come.
Perhaps the only worthwhile takeaway from “Hero” is this revelation from Tigh, which laid the groundwork for Adama’s recovery from alcoholism following the soul-crushing revelation regarding the Thirteenth Colony:
“Tell you a dirty little secret: The toughest part of getting played is losing your dignity. Feeling like you are not worth the oxygen you are sucking down. You get used to it. You start to believe it. You start to love it. It’s like a bottle that never runs dry. You can keep reaching for it over and over and over again.”
In keeping with the beating of the already deceased “reaping what we sow” horse, one must prepare for the no-holds-barred pummeling to come as this post-New Caprica interregnum has some unfinished business.
End of Line.