'Battlestar Galactica' Retro Recap: 'No Exit'

Written by John Edward Betancourt 

​I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, the finest television shows out there, find a way to reward their audience for sticking with them throughout the years. How exactly they do that is of course up to the series but often times, it comes in the form of answers to questions that we the audience have been posing for ages and wouldn’t you know it, after years of pondering upon the mystery of the modern Cylon, Battlestar Galactica finally chose to reward the audience in its final season…by revealing their rich and fascinating history.
 
Because ‘No Exit’, wasted no time in getting down to business to teach us everything we ever wanted to know about the Cylon race and their history was explored by way of two key plotlines. One involved Sam Anders as he prepared to have the bullet in his head removed and it would seem the entry of that bullet, allowed for total recall, wherein he was able to tell his Cylon brothers and sister how the Final Five came to re-invent resurrection and that they stopped the First Cylon War by promising their descendants a path to immortality and humanity and well, this was all just fascinating to learn and it was complemented nicely by the secondary storyline in this tale, one involving Ellen Tigh.
 
For this grand reveal of all things Cylon allowed for us to discover that Ellen in fact resurrected shortly after she passed away on New Caprica and it was incredible to watch her embrace her role as a leader of the Cylon race and fill us in on the remaining blanks, specifically how Cavil managed to kill a previously unknown Cylon model, one named Daniel, out of sheer jealousy for the model and really, this plot line served more as a grand exploration of this mysterious race over anything else I truly enjoyed the back and forth between Cavil and Ellen since that served as a twisted answer to an age old question that we’ve asked as humans in regards to what we would ask our creator if we came to face to face with them.
 
Granted there are plenty more little nuances and details to go over when it comes to this tale that I’m currently leaving out but doing a written play-by-play download of this particular episode would in fact do it a great disservice. Because really, what made this story so spectacular in its own right is that it reveals one incredible thing about this mysterious race of machines in that…they really aren’t that much different from mankind after all. They are as petty and vengeful as the rest of us and fear death and the great beyond as well and all of this was conveyed by way of a brilliant performance from Dean Stockwell who gives John Cavil a newfound depth in this tale.
 
But what matters most, is that at long last, we have the answers we seek, and by doing all of this now, it makes it clear that the series finale has other matters to focus upon and well, I recall that when this episode was released some people fussed about it being a download and nothing more, but I was and am still good with that. I’m just not sure there was any other way to properly give the audience the answers they hungered for and I think it’s magnificent that this series took the time to do this in the midst of everything that’s going on in the Fleet in order to give the fans something they craved and now with this reveal out of the way we can get back down to business, like the forthcoming reunion between Ellen and Saul because you know damn well, that Boomer set a course for Galactica when she and Ellen escaped…

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