Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: B- | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Speaking Truth To Power
By Jacob Clifton | Season 3 | Episode 8 | Aired on 11.16.2006
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Add one to the survivor count when a pilot from Adama's old command, the Battlestar Valkyrie, escapes from a Cylon basestar. It's POW Daniel "Bulldog" Novacek, played by Dixon from Alias, and he has many secrets. Years ago, the Valkyrie was sent on a black ops mission to the Armistice line, possibly provoking the original Cylon attack on the Twelve Colonies. When Bulldog's Viper got too close, Bill shot him down and left him for dead in order to protect the Armistice. Good decisions with good consequences! Tigh gleefully sends Bulldog to tie up and beat Adama after letting him in on the whole shoot-and-run issue. It's only Starbuck and Tigh who look closely enough at the details of Bulldog's escape to figure out he was released on purpose to hurt Adama -- amounting to a motivation ironically identical to Tigh's. He makes up for it, though, by talking Bulldog down from several different flavors of ledge. In so doing, Tigh gets his swerve back, to the point that Bill calls him back into service as XO. Bill tries his best to feel bad about all this stuff -- shooting down a fellow officer while on a horrible creepy mission; possibly causing the genocide of the human race -- but between his son and Roslin both pointing out that he was following orders, and the medal Roslin pins to his chest, he decides on her orders to suck it up and keep going. Bill and Saul reconcile, and Saul begins to tell his best friend about how his wife Ellen died. Meanwhile on the basestar, yet more robot threesomes and weird religious epiphanies abound as Three goes even crazier than ever before and engages in several high-risk behaviors including sex with Baltar and Six and recreational suicide. Want more? The full recap starts right below!
Bizarre graphic leading into the Previouslies, reading "In The Beginning..." Which translates roughly as "Hope you're not a nerd, because we're about to do stuff to continuity that not even the Japanese have invented. Check out these scenes from the mini-series on! Radical recontextualization to follow!" Not even Olmos's trustworthy voice-over is going to save you from brainfreeze and heartbreak if this is the kind of thing that freaks you out. Speaking personally, continuity means nothing to the particular story at hand, not to mention that half the time, as we've seen, I can't remember the difference between, like, Caprica and Kobol. So but here's the rundown: Adama said that sometimes history bites you in the ass and we thought he meant how his family invented Cylons, but maybe there was more to it after all, and while he was thinking about this, Six was kissing hell out of the Armistice functionary guy, and then the Armistice station got blown to hell after forty years, and that's how everything started. Due to the war and annihilation, Adama was totally not interested at all in probing why these things happened. ("Armed and trained Afghanis to do our evil bidding? Surely you jest!") Later on, he kind of made up for, like, every mistake ever when he beat up the entire planet of New Caprica while mustachioed, but he was too late to save his BFF Saul Tigh -- who, it turned out, had become full of bile and hatred and poison. And then Tigh totally threatened to commit suicide, but like people ever mean it when they say that, so Adama ran off and refused to stand up to Roslin's nuttiest plan to date.
There's breathing and a heartbeat, and a sound like water, and we're on a basestar. We're in a cage, though, rather than a house of whoredom and/or creepy sex torture -- and the cage itself is not the disco kind -- so it's not Gaius. There's a flash of Dixon in the cage; it's he who is breathing. And he's crazy, also.
Tory and Laura have decided to officially ignore the Colonial Gang exposé on their lesbian affair, because until Giorgio Armani can give an eyewitness account of your heterosexuality as "neverending," you might as well ignore the problem altogether. Okay, that's a lie, but their clothing is sexy/casual and weekend-functional, because they are doing spring cleaning on Colonial One, and they're being, like, adorable. They agree to put Gaius's self-portrait over the john, which is a lady thing to do because they won't ever have to look at it, but I'm wondering: are they going to put the whiteboard up again? Have you ever noticed how Roslin's such a packrat when it comes to the morbid and depressing? She's like Winona Ryder in Beetlejuice: dead people, dead ships, the whole Sorrow And The Pity diary, the horrible whiteboard....Oh, look: the dossier Billy made her for what she calls her "first day aboard Galactica," which...we're not even going into that one, and Laura and Tory open it up and start going through it. You know what I hate when it's cleaning time? ADD shit like that. "I'm just going to clean up this little pile here...oh, look! Six years of back when Sassy was good! And under that: Proust! Rad!" Tory, looking at a pretty fit picture of Adama on the CIC deck of the Battlestar Valkyrie, exposits that it was Adama's command before Galactica, and further that this year is the Admiral's forty-fifth in the Colonial Fleet, and finally that his commissioning anniversary is mere days from now. Roslin decides to throw a party for Adama and give him a medal, and she and Tory talk about how depressed everybody's been -- what with all this high-level black ops stuff that only like, ten people know about, while everybody else is just happy to be home, even in refugee camps -- so it'll be good to throw a party for Adama. Just like they do like every single week. One can only hope there will be an applause montage with adoring faces.