Man, after three and a half seasons of following this ragtag fleet around space, it’s sure hard to watch them tear themselves apart. Like most mutinies, this episode was brutal. The survival of the human race is already teetering on the edge of the abyss, but now there’s a civil war brewing and things are getting ugly.
At the center of the coup is Gaeta, and Alessandro Juliani really shined in this episode. It was fun to watch him orchestrate the uprising from the CIC, throwing a little comment in here and there in order to get the Admiral to do what he wanted. It wasn’t until Bill sent the private down to take a look that Gaeta had to make his move and overtake the command center. It was a brilliant (if devious) plan.
This episode felt like one from the first couple of seasons where the show would get bogged down in minutiae, but given the limited number of episodes remaining (7), there’s no guarantee that Bill and Roslin will emerge unscathed as the leadership of the fleet. In fact, both of their lives are in danger — Bill has to survive a grenade blast and Roslin has a viper on her tail. This brings me to one of my problems with this episode: I don’t like unnecessary sacrifice. Never have. There was no reason for Bill and Tigh to stay on Galactica other than to show how big their balls are. They didn’t do anything to delay the troops from entering the hanger and the raptor would have gotten away with or without Butch and Sundance on board. Now, it may work out in the end — i.e. Bill does something on Galactica to save Roslin’s life on the raptor — but it still doesn’t make Bill’s decision to stay the right one.
The other problem with this episode was Gaeta’s failure to account for the President. Lee and Starbuck were able to walk right up to her door — no marines — and take her to safety. Didn’t Gaeta have a plan to capture Roslin? Didn’t he and Zarek want to tie up that loose end so that she wouldn’t…um…I don’t know…escape and find a way to broadcast a speech to the entire fleet? You could see Gaeta’s frustration as he finally isolated her wireless signal and ended her speech. Given how smoothly his plan was executed, the failure to deal with Roslin feels more like a plot hole than a misstep by Felix.
Otherwise, the episode moved the plot forward quickly and was suspenseful throughout. It’s tough to watch members of the fleet kill each other off, but it makes sense that there’s a sub-section that is still harboring distrust and resentment towards the Cylons. After all, it wasn’t long ago that these same Cylons killed billions of humans back on Caprica and the other colonies.
