''Battlestar Galactica'': Deaths in the Family

Share this article

• Tweet

All About

Battlestar Galactica

Get the latest photos, news, and more

MY HUSBAND, THE TOASTER

I'm going to be blunt: Up until this episode, I'd only liked Cally in small doses. Actress Nicki Clyne never seemed to have the chops to carry anything more than a few lines of wide-eyed adorableness — see: season 3's ''A Day in the Life'' — and with the promos for ''The Ties That Bind'' hinting that this was going to be a Cally-centric episode, I kinda feared the worst. So serve me up a steaming plate of crow, because frak if Clyne didn't pull it off, delivering a strung-out, freaked-out performance as a wife smacked hard with the realization that her worst fear — her husband's having an affair — didn't come anywhere close to the actual truth: Her husband's a frakking skinjob.

Cally can't exactly be blamed for suspecting at first that Galen was schtupping Tory after catching the way the president's aide was caressing the Chief's elbow in Joe's Bar. (Can we pause for a second, though, and marvel at the fact that the bar napkins for Joe's Bar actually have four 90-degree corners?) It may have meant nothing to Galen, but even though Tory said later in the weapons locker that the Chief's not her type, those sure looked like bedroom eyes to me. Not only is Tory the Cylon we know least about; she's the character we know least about, so perhaps it's easier to believe that she'd quickly become a borderline sociopath after realizing her true nature. (Rekha Sharma gives great vacant stare, too.)

Tory's at least with it enough to realize, though, that little Nicky Tyrol is the second human-Cylon hybrid, a notion that seems to have escaped the baby's father. I mean, if Tory didn't care about Nicky, she wouldn't have bothered to have swooped into the airlock and placated the suicidal and infanticidal Cally — ''I do know we're not evil; we're not inhuman'' — just long enough to lift Nicky from his mother's arms. Then whoosh, bye-bye Cally, which seemed pretty evil and inhuman to me. One question, though: Wouldn't Cally have bothered to tell someone that she knows her husband's a toaster before heading out to shoot herself and her baby into space?

We ended the episode on the widowed Chief, who said rather ominously in Joe's Bar, ''I don't do well with change.'' That shot of Tyrol cutting his own finger and then licking the blood — even if it was merely just a flash of Cally's imagination — was by far the most unnerving image of the night, and I fear things will only get worse from there.

I leave you with these questions: Do you think Helo and Athena brought Hera on board that sweaty rust bucket Demetrius? And if so, don't you think we needed at least one scene in which someone brought up the fact that once upon a time Hera's blood eradicated Roslin's cancer and maybe it'd be a good idea if the tyke were kept around, even as a last resort? Speaking of Roslin, is Zarek just being his normal two-faced self, or has she truly grown more strident of late? Can you imagine Baltar running those Quorum meetings when he was vice president? And could someone please make Lee another suit, one that preferably doesn't make him look like he's a dancer in Guys and Dolls?