'Battlestar Galactica': Thank Gods It's Friday

STARBUCK RETURNS

She's back. And not dead. (I guess I was wrong in my TV Watch on the season finale last March. Oops.) And she's confused as to why everyone's surprised to see her. Apparently, she thinks she was absent for only six hours or so, not the months that everyone else endured. She doesn't remember her Viper getting all blowed up, nor how she got to Earth. It'd be easy to call her loco except for the fact that her shipboard cameras really do have pictures of the mythical planet in question. So nobody thinks she's crazy; they just think she's a Cylon. Anders and Lee don't care all that much; they're just glad to see her.

To be fair, Kara's story of her absence holds about as much water as a tennis racquet: She followed a Cylon heavy raider into the mandala-storm (from ''Maelstrom''), took some hits, and woke up orbiting Earth. She snapped some photos, turned around, and somehow ended up right back where she belongs. (Fox Mulder might say that she's missing a whole lot of time.) Roslin doesn't buy it, and the physical evidence doesn't help sell it: Starbuck's Viper looks brand-new, and the navigation computer is a blank slate. The lady prez thinks that, even if Kara's not a Cylon, her reappearance is a toaster trick, designed to knock them off the course toward Earth.

Complicating matters even further is Kara's newfound ''Earth-dar,'' which tells her when she's getting closer to Earth or taking a perilous jump away from it. And that urgency, while not driving her crazy, drives her to do crazy things — like bust in on the sleeping Roslin (who's shacking up with Adama!) holding a gun.

It feels to me like the producers are setting Kara up to be some kind of prophet — and all too often, prophets lose everything in the process of delivering their message.

A fine start to the final season, methinks. It didn't belabor anything, didn't wear out its welcome, and moved every story line along (even if that movement was more of a nudge with a gentle hand).

What do you think? Is Battlestar Galactica going to be the same without Apollo in the cockpit? And is that ''position in the government'' gonna be as Roslin's vice president? Why can the Cylons in the toaster fleet — like the raiders — recognize that Anders (along with, presumably, the rest of the four) is a Cylon, but Athena can't? Have the Cylons sent out a ''system update'' that Athena didn't get? (Was it ''All Along the Watchtower''?) And when did Laura Roslin get to be such a hard-ass?

Need a refresher on who's who in the Galactica universe? See the EW.com Battlestar Galactica Cheat Sheet: 15 Things You Gotta Know

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