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!
Tigh orders a jump down the line in the direction indicated by the Nebula, and Dee starts spinning the FTL, and Kara complains to Helo about how nobody believes her, and Helo tells her the best way to take care of that is to find the star system, and she whines about how it's a waste of time, but he doesn't understand she means that literally, that that's not how it's going to happen, so he explains how she shouldn't lose hope because this stuff sometimes takes months, and just when you're positive this scene is going nowhere, the Admiral arrives and tells Helo to take a hike.
"It doesn't work like that. It's a feeling. An intuition. I didn't use nav fixes to get there and back. When we were at that Nebula, it was so clear to me. But every jump we take farther away, the clarity fades. If we keep jumping like this, I won't be able to find our way back." Literally, that's what she says, and that's what happens. I think I would not be so offended by all of this if the words themselves weren't so darned unlikely. Nobody ever talked like this in the history of the universe. It's a brilliantly structured episode and it's really fun to watch, it's an A episode, but damn if there's not some unnecessary George Lucas stink around the edges.
"The President's adamant." (See? The resident president's adamant and assonant and carries a laminate. If you're having trouble writing convincing human dialogue, find some humans and ask them. This is why people hate fucking science fiction and can't explain why, this stuff right here, because it hits your ear wonky and makes no emotional sense and takes you out of the story. The point is to get us past the spaceships and alien robots, not to point them out all the time. You know?) "We're gonna continue on the course laid out by the Eye of Jupiter."
Dualla counts it down, and they jump. And Kara's head goes crazy, and she shakes. "We're going the wrong way. If we keep jumping like this, I'm gonna lose the feeling completely, never be able to take us back." The Admiral asks Kara if she's seriously suggesting that he approach the President of the Twelve Colonies and tell her to forget Pythia and the Eye, because Kara has a "feeling." Um, yes. That is what you are supposed to do, and it's obviously what you're going to end up doing, so...
Adama's horrified and sad and tired from all the stuff going on with her: "I can't. I just left your ship. There's not a scratch on it.