Larson's Poor Writing
I just sat through more than one viewing of this episode to do one of my usual fanfic adaptations, and time and again I keep marveling at how this episode, along with the others in the Terra Trilogy, suffer from an appalling case of poor writing structure. It wasn't until I watched the scenes slowly and had to back up again and again to do the adapting that I finally realized the big problem. Larson is credited as sole writer of this episode, along with EIT, and I think it is very obvious that he never had his script looked over by McDonnell and Carlson or someone else to polish it up. As Executive Producer, I think Larson likely had leeway to let his scripts be done without major fine-tuning and it really shows in both GFE and EIT.
Case in point is the whole pointless sidebar matter of the Morelands. They're introduced late in the game to be a red herring for two minutes about how destroyed the vipers, then they conveniently serve as a way for everyone to get out of the city fast. Then, there's the peculiar jump of going from this distant city to Apollo and Starbuck sliding down off the rooftops to take out these Alliance guards without so much as a single scene or line of them explaining what their plan is going to be! A little less time of Starbuck and Hector yakking as they wandered through Expo 67s ruins and a little more development of this point would have been welcome.
And another gripe of mine writing wise in the first half when it seems like everyone on the Galactica and the Fleet keeps referring to the Terrans as "children" as though it's an entire gorup of them. Hello? Didn't they see Michael the fully-grown male? Count the number of times the word "children" and "babies" are uttered in part one some time and how often they're used in a wrong context when referring to the entire group and you'll see what I mean.
But if the writing is poor what really sabotages the episode is the abysmal acting of Kelly Harmon, especially regarding her attempts to get Apollo to stay and her flat delivery when she confesses to sabotaging the vipers. If you want to know why she had to earn her living in Tic Tac commercials, those scenes are it!
Larson I think was so desperate to do something different from what had become the Galactica norm that he just didn't stop to think about whether this was a quality way of doing it. That alone is why I think most people tend not to think highly of the Terra Trilogy. Not only is it such a radical departure, but it isn't executed well at all.
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