War comes to Reach.

Spoilers

This is the hinge around which the entire story turns. Time and again this season the show has done its best work on the ground, using the infantry-scale combat to show the sheer scope of the war and this episode is the zenith of that work. It’s full of haunting moments which often step dangerously close to overwrought but never get there. It reminded me, and this is intended as the highest of praise, of both the initial Battlestar Galactica mini-series. There’s the same sense of everything burning all at once, the same small victories stitched together. The same realisation it isn’t enough.

The Chief and Perez sprinting down a street trying to warn civilians in the final seconds of their normal life. The Chief tackling an alien soldier through a store window, completely unarmed, going anyway. Riz’s hard-fought return to the front, alongside Louis and his husband. Louis’ glacial, fatalistic calm when he realises that he’s alone. Keyes’ final scene. Perez’s final scene. The charging horde of aliens lit up by an explosion and the living definition of danger close. The episode is crammed full of tiny, personal events that tapestry together into a story of the final hours of a world. Everyone matters. Not everyone lives. That matters too.

It’s a bittersweet, gallows humour action movie of an hour and my favourite moment is Admiral Keyes’ Henry V speech to the marines remaining behind. Abandoned by ONI and left with almost no equipment, they have no hope of anything beyond buying enough time for the civilians to leave. Danny Sapani shows us everything Keyes is going through, rage, sadness, betrayal and in the best moment, disgust, He pulls John, fighting without armour thanks to ONI, out of the crowd and introduces him to the soldiers saying ‘he doesn’t need armour today’. He hates saying it, John hates hearing it but it gets the job done and that’s all that matters. Something like victory, snatched from the jaws of certain defeat. It’s not enough, none of it is, and the cast is noticeably smaller by the end of the episode. But the final shot here, of Vannak’s last moments focusing on the birds he loved, tells us everything we need. It isn’t enough. But it all matters. 10/10

Alasdair Stuart