'Battlestar Galactica': Prophet and Loss

When we left the crew of the good ship Lollyfrak, Helo had forcibly relieved Kara of command of the Demetrius — after she thought it was a brilliant idea to follow a plan laid out by Leoben, the same Cylon who made her play psycho-house with him on New Caprica.

I guess, sometimes, people who are delusional can't see the delusion from within. And I guess it takes blood to snap some folks out of it. Otherwise, how does one explain Kara's sudden burst of logic? Of course, it makes more sense to take a raptor to investigate the Cylon baseship and send the Demetrius back to the fleet to resupply. That would've been a sane person's first thought — but Starbuck only got there after Helo's mutiny, and after poor Gaeta lost any prayer of a career in track and field. (Man, that kneecapping was pulpy, wasn't it? Kara rooting around inside Felix's leg is one of the grosser things I've seen on Battlestar Galactica — which, you'll recall, already gave us a creepy Cylon maternity ward and the goopy interior of a Cylon raider.)

The twin stories of this week's episode worked together far better than last week's pair. Perhaps that's because one of them advanced the plot while the other dove deep into character. And because they were both about women who learned that nothing is certain, and that faith can be shattered — or restored — in the blink of an eye.

GETTING THE BEST MILEAGE OUT OF YOUR HYBRID

As a painkiller-happy Gaeta begged Helo not to let Doc Cottle cut off his badly wounded leg — hey, isn't amputation a sad, grand tradition of naval warfare? Suck it up, Felix — Kara led her team on a hunt for the crippled Cylon baseship, and to confront the Cylon hybrid. The raptor containing Kara, Athena, Anders, Leoben, and Barolay jumped into the remnants of the Cylon fleet — jagged shards of flesh and metal, spinning through space. As Kara piloted the raptor through the toaster graveyard, she spotted what looked like a comet near a gas giant — the same planet she'd been painting on the walls of her room on the Demetrius. But the comet turned out to be the baseship they were looking for.

It's a hell of a thing to have one's dreams come true, to find what you've been ridiculed for validated. Alas, Starbuck's prophetic reverie was interrupted by flaming debris. Somehow, after Kara blacked out, Athena landed the raptor on the baseship, and then found herself surrounded by dozens of her fellow Eights, who looked on her with amazement. ''You were the first to say no,'' one of them told Athena. ''You showed us that we don't have to be slaves to our programming.'' And the Eights were no longer content to be slaves to the Sixes. I wonder if part of the Eights' programming was to swap allegiances, to naturally sense where the power rests and sidle up next to it. That's certainly what they've been doing during this Cylon civil war — making nice with, and occasionally dancing sexy for, the model pulling the strings. Now they sense a new power base: the Colonials. And Athena wanted none of it. ''You pick your side, and you stick,'' she told them. ''You don't cut and run when things get ugly.''

NEXT: Remembering your own death

You Might Also Like

• Photo Gallery 'Galactica': 12 things we learned this season | Marc Bernardin
• Television News Eric Stoltz tapped for ''Battlestar'' prequel