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!
"I want to see if anyone comes to help you," he shouts, and then screams in Gaius's face, like a wounded beast. Like an animal. And the tiny part of this that was about Gaius goes away, because that's the sound of pain, not rage."Beg." He begins to scream. Gaius Baltar sat up there in Colonial One and didn't save them. Twenty-four hours a day, the only thing we know for sure is that he didn't save them. It's the one thing he did constantly for four months, and for a year before that. And then they took Charlie's son, little Kevin, the little red-haired Connor boy, before Charlie could even apologize for bringing him to New Caprica, or into this brutal world at all. All the king's horses rounded them up and shot them dead, and up in Colonial One was Gaius Baltar.
"Beg. I bet you begged the Cylons, why don't you beg for me? Come on, beg!" He headbutts the former President, and forces him to his knees: Gaius Baltar who came this close to paying for his crimes, only to have that justice snatched away at the last second by a tribunal that didn't understand about justice, which is to say that they didn't understand about Kevin Connor, who is seven years old. And now Gaius Baltar is on his knees with a razor to his throat, and he refuses to scream, and he refuses to beg. I mean to say that on his knees, with a razor to his throat, Gaius refuses to be the man that Charlie Connor has chosen for him to be. For a second you can see why she still loves him so much, after all this. How you could fall in love with Gaius Baltar.
"Get up! Get on your knees! Get up!"
And he was withdrawn from them about a stone's cast, and kneeled down, and prayed, saying, "Father, if thou be willing, remove this cup from me: nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done." And there appeared an angel unto him from heaven, strengthening him.
"You asked God to take your life instead of the boy's. Did you mean it?"
His voice sounds like it did when he was Kevin's age, back on Aerelon. Those consonants that scrape the back of the throat. "Yes. Do it. Take my life. Please." Six smiles down at him. He alternately screams, and begs: begs the angel, God, Charlie Connor, Kevin, anybody who will do him the favor of redemption, to make it stick. "Please. Please take my life." His for the little boy's. But which little boy are we talking about? There are at least three in this paragraph alone, after all. They all have different claims to his blood. Any case, something happens to Paulla; she takes out Shaunt like a wild thing, tears the handle off a janitor's bucket and beats him unconscious, then beats the everloving shit out of Charlie Connor, until Gaius stops her.