Special Coverage The Photo IssueThe Must List2008 Fall TV2008 Fall Movies2008 Fall Music
Page 2 of 3

MR. ADAMA GOES TO THE QUORUM

Turns out that ''opening'' in the government Lee Adama was talking about was a rather big one: The Caprican representative in the Quorum of Twelve has apparently died, and Vice President Tom Zarek nominated Lee to take up the position. Why? Zarek told the onetime military man it's because he had the guts to confront Roslin on the stand in Baltar's trial. (Sidebar: Sure the ep was already overstuffed, but why no Gaius this week?) Translation: Zarek thinks Lee is ruthless enough to make hard choices and also dumb enough to do his dirty work for him. So he slipped Lee a classified folder after delivering some admittedly disturbing intel on President Roslin's ever-tightening grip on power.

Cut to the meeting of the Quorum with the president. It's been three weeks since Adama secretly gave Starbuck the Demetrius and sent her off on her quest to find Earth, and the fleet has been wild with speculation as to the ship's whereabouts and mission. The Quorum wanted answers, but Roslin wasn't talking. Lee diplomatically suggested that it's worth at least admitting that they're exploring all possible avenues to Earth. Strange that Lee would know about the true mission of the Demetrius, since he'd left the military before Kara was set free. No matter; Roslin shut him down: ''I personally don't feel the need to have a junior delegate appoint himself my spokesman.'' Ouch. But then Lee counterpunched, bringing out that telltale folder. Evidence of the Demetrius' location, perhaps? Nope. Plans for a tribunal system in which all judges would be appointed by, and only answerable to, Roslin, which forced the president to call it a ''work in progress'' and place it on the docket for debate well before it was ''ready'' — almost certainly killing the measure, or at least Roslin's authoritarian angle on it. Score one for Lee Adama...maybe. One never knows with that shifty Tom Zarek.

FLIGHT OF THE FRAKKED UP NAVIGATOR

Not only has Adama sent Kara off to find Earth, but he's sent some of his best men and women with her, including Helo, Athena, Gaeta, and Anders. Um, what? Anders I buy, but the rest? Helo, one of the last seasoned senior officers left; Gaeta, so constant a presence in the CIC that it seems it couldn't function without him; and Athena, who's, you know, a Cylon? On a mission led by someone suspected of being a Cylon herself? That is one giant wet sloppy kiss of good faith that Adama has given Starbuck, and by all appearances, she hasn't exactly been living up to it, stuck with visions of a trinary star system while leaving her shipmates to feel she's been sending them in circles to find it.

That is, except Anders, who remains blindly devoted to his wife, even after she told the ex-jock she married him only ''because it was safe and it was easy and you were just pathetic enough to go along with it.'' So of course, they frakked. Afterward, Kara dropped this pillow-talk bomb on her Cylonian hubby: ''Everything seems so far away...like I'm watching myself but not experiencing it, not living it, like my body's just this alien thing I'm still attached to. Does that seem crazy to you?'' Yeah, but it's finally my kind of crazy: contemplative and mysterious rather than shrieking and obnoxious. More, please!

NEXT: Cally goes to the airlock


Page 2 of 3