Episode Report Card Jacob: A | 12 USERS: A- YOU GRADE IT He That Believeth In Me
By Jacob | Season 4 | Episode 1 | Aired on April 4, 2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.The season begins seconds after the finale, fifty-five weeks ago: Apollo has just discovered Starbuck back from the dead and flying around, the Final Four are back at work, Baltar is being shuffled off to some kind of sanctuary, and there's a huge fight about to start with four big Cylon basestars. Here's what's up with everybody:
Lee is totally confused by Kara's reappearance, but super excited, of course. He has left the military permanently, and will now be joining the government in some capacity, hopefully involving an actual storyline for once.
Chief gives Anders a quick pep talk, and the newest nugget pulls it together and heads into combat. He sends some kind of glowy signal to a Cylon Raider scan of his shiny red eyeball, and the whole Cylon attack, four basestars and all, vanish. While it would be funny if he was secretly yelling at them with some kind of scary Wizard of Oz Final Five voice, it seems clear the Raider figured him as a Fiver, and the Cylon as a group realized that shooting at him, and the Fivers in the Fleet, would be about as tacky as throwing beer in St. Francis's weave.
Tigh is showing a...bit of strain under the pressure of Cylonicity, opening up the teaser by shooting Bill Adama in the head. Literally shooting his ass in the eye. Although whether it's suppressed Cylon programming or just a waking nightmare, we're unsure. I think it's the latter, because you know his number one fear nothing to do with hypocrisy, or the futility of killing his wife, but that something will happen to Bill. Which is sweet, but it's honestly the scariest moment, watching him plug the Admiral like that.
For Kara, the time between the Maelstrom and now was just six hours, subjectively. She is high on life and carrying loads of "vacation pictures" of Earth, and it takes her a while to figure out that everybody's acting so weird because she was dead for a couple of months. Given that generally she gets the slow clap for spelling her name right, her confusion is somewhat justified. Tigh, Tory and Chief are all total paranoid dicks and make sure they have as many fingers pointing at her as possible, but Sam and Lee are on her side. Of course. Somewhere Dualla's gotta be like, "Tell me when that bitch starts raping puppies, so we can throw her a party."
Madame President is not having any of Kara's mess, and throws her in the brig before visiting Caprica Six and learning that the Five are in the Fleet. It's really cool, because Laura just teases Caprica with the old "don't think of an elephant" trick until her robot eyes cross with the logic loop of not thinking about not thinking about not thinking about the Final Five. Caprica is awesome at a lot of shit, but nobody's immune to the BSD.
Around the same time, the Four agree that if they start acting toaster-like in any way, the others will gang up on them and shoot 'em dead. Grim. Meantime, all they do is get drunk and feel weird about themselves. Just like Kara and Tigh used to, before they died/turned into evil killer robots.
The Batshit Ladies of Baltar shove him in a tiny secret room on Galactica, where he gets laid a whole lot, prays for the son of his cult leader lady Jeanne, and feels yucky about having such a crappy cult. He eventually offers God his life in return for the kid's when he's attacked by Connor from the Circle, who kept tossing people out airlocks in the name of vigilante justice. He is saved by the completely crazy Paulla [sic] Schaffer, a cultist with a certain very amazing gleam in her eye and a taste for blood, and crazy. (I am in total love with her.) Also, his big Marxist agitprop philosophy includes that the Gods plural don't exist, and now he and his followers are all about monotheism. This is, of course, like a total birthday present for Chip Six, who looks more like a scary angel shark than ever.
Kara tries to get everybody headed toward Earth (and the Apocalypse!), but because of her being dead, possibly a Cylon, and generally hard to get along with, nobody's really listening. Even the Admiral admits that it's a hard sell to question Roslin's authority on the Earth issue after so many seasons of assuming her junkie ass knew what she was talking about. Which is like, so ironic, because fully half of every season is Adama committing the entire Fleet's resources to whatever bug is up Kara's ass at the time, but until now it's always dovetailed nicely with Roslin's separate ass-bugs. Adama, however, does not understand irony.
Every time they jump away from the Nebula in the direction indicated by the Pythian Scrolls, Kara's connection to their destination gets weaker and weaker. It also makes her want to barf, apparently. So, having had enough of her new magic powers getting ignored by everybody, Kara beats the shit out of several Marines, tells Sam that if he were a Cylon she'd murder him, and ends the episode with a gun pointed at Laura's beautiful head. Which to me proves that it's Kara, being that it's the most insane option. How great would it be if that were the solution? "I had my doubts, but only Kara Thrace could come up with a plan that idiotic. Welcome home." Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Derrick has viral encephalitis, which Gaius explains to Tracey means that the only dogs in this fight are Derrick's immune system, and prayer. Doctors can't do anything about viruses. Jeanne, fearing her son's death is nearing, has brought him to die in the arms of his loving, de facto, weeks-old family. Demand anything.She takes Gaius's hand, and Tracey takes the other. And Gaius says, again and again, that he prayed for the boy. Begs her to understand, to believe that he did. "I know. I guess...I guess the One True God just doesn't want him to live, right?" Gaius stares and realizes that his rants and manipulations have finally gotten him in over his head. He realizes what this cult could be. And while he tries to swim, there's Paulla standing, watching over them all, like Six. But how much of this, Gaius, how much of this is theatre? How can you know for sure, if you're bluffing yourself as bad as everybody else?
In Tigh's quarters, the Four sit around, feeling bad and explaining the plot to us. No, they don't hear the song anymore, because it was a trigger or something. Yes, when the Raider scanned Sam, all the Cylons left the area. Perhaps it recognized him, but he's more worried about how come he didn't shoot it first, but Tigh thinks it was just a nugget mistake and not some Cylon issue in his brain, but Sam's not so sure, but Tigh feels he cannot be programmed to do bad things, but Chief brings up the somewhat visceral memory of how bad Boomer's programming betrayed her when she shot the old man, but Tigh explains to us the audience that the difference is that Boomer didn't know what she was, so it's fine. It's going to be okay.
How does he know this? How can he know, this thinking-about-thinking, whence this Cartesian bilocation that could tell him whether or not he's just a made-up thing, a puppet. How can you know if you know? How can he tell them it's going to be okay? He demonstrates by pulling a gun out of his locker, cocking it, and setting it on the table next to the liquor. "Agreed?" They nod, one by one. The Chief is sad. Everybody's sad. This is sad.
Laura starts her conversation with Caprica by stuttering: "I don't know why I'm here. Yes, I do." The ability of the human machine, the self-reflective nature of the beast that separates animal from mineral, human from silicon. "I'm here because of the things that we've shared and the things that we've seen." Specifically, Caprica nods in her shackles, the Kobol Opera house, of course.