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!
More mother than lover, more martyr than leader. She does these things for the glory of Gaius Baltar, because she needs something to believe in. She used to be a journalist, until Derrick got sick, and she got lost. But now she's found, and she brings the Fleet a greater news yet.Galactica's missile bays are firing at the Basestars, and a thousand Raiders and Vipers engage against the bright lights of the Nebula; a Raider takes out an entire ship with one crash. The Pyxis, led by Captain Tarney, six hundred souls aboard. Laura writes down this name, Pyxis; and keeps it close to her heart. Laura measures loss in the numbers of the dead, still. Maybe of the whole Fleet, she's the only one with a heart big enough to hold those cold equations: to count by those vast numbers. Her whiteboard was only ever negative space around the measurement of loss, and she's six hundred souls closer to wanting these monsters destroyed. "How did they find us?" Bill wonders too.
Tigh and Tory stare at each other, across the bridge. They don't know enough, about who or what they are, to measure their sins. They could be calling right now, across the void of space, set against the Nebula. They could be asking for extraction, resurrection, destruction.
The Cylon prepare to launch returning missile fire: forty, no, fifty missiles, plus inbound, targeted half on the Galactica and half on the Fleet, and those become priority.
"We can handle the hits," the Admiral grits. "They can't."
And Galactica and her Vipers and her Raptors begin to draw their fire, again.
A DOG OF FLANDERS
A Viper comes shooting out of the tube, always exciting, and it's Sam's, meaning Samuel T. Anders, born on Picon, attended Noyce Elementary, felt Dawn, saw nuclear sunset glow, loved and was loved... Seelix interrupts his concentration to remind him that he has his thumb on the transmit button, that his mantra is blocking the freq, and then the fight's on him, he takes up the quarrel, and elsewhere in the battle, missiles break through the defense shield Helo constructed, blowing like poppies of fire, and connect with that toroid ship you always notice, blowing out a segment, killing a few more people, and then Seelix is ordering her squad's formation like a quarterback, calling the Raiders one by one, setting her men on them like harriers, throwing Vipers at them like torches, and there's Sam in the middle of it, fucking up the lingo, kind of unbearably adorable as he fidgets and fumbles behind the trigger of a one-ton flying murder machine, and then he spots a Raider on Seelix, and as she climbs against the sky, like a silent lark, she sings out bravely for Sam to shoot, and somehow, for some reason, as he watches the Raider close in on her, and the world gets slower and slower, somehow for some reason he can't shoot it.