SPOILERS BELOW

* Much, much, much stronger episode this time, even with the umpteenth imaginary-friend reveal (which to be fair was better than Romo Lampkin’s cat). I guess I didn’t realize how shaken I was by the lousiness of last week’s ep until I sat down to watch this one and discovered I was dreading it. It was entirely possible that with so few episodes to go, last week could have set a tone from which the show would never recover. Fortunately that wasn’t the case.

* Before I say anything else, my big “whoa” moment from this episode was Athena’s really wrenching and awful cry of despair toward the end of the episode. Holy shit but did Grace Park sell that. Even just watching her underfed form stumble into the briefing room in her underwear, beaten to a pulp–ugh, tough to watch and beautifully performed. Park was just as strong as Boomer, playing the character’s singular mix of longing and deceit like a slow-burning fire. I was really impressed with her, particularly considering she was arguably the ensemble’s weakest link early on.

* Whereas last week felt like a struggle just to string together a conversation that made sense from one sentence to the next between any two characters, this week felt masterfully controlled by the writers–each of the characters upon whom it focused left the episode with us having a clearer understanding of him or her when than when it started. For Chief, this mainly consisted of establishing a through-line for him that connected both his Herculean efforts to save the ship earlier in the half-season with his 180-degree decision to abandon the fleet last week: He’s just badly, badly shaken by the combined emotional assault of discovering he’s a Cylon, realizing he wasn’t super-in-love with Cally, losing Cally, discovering his kid isn’t really his kid, losing Earth, discovering he lived there thousands of years ago, and so on. Unlike, say, Tory, who was instantly gung-ho about being a Cylon, or Tigh, who decided just as instantly that his life as a member of the fleet was the paramount thing to him, the Chief never really had that moment of clarity regarding his life from here on out. This episode showed that in his way, he’s just as adrift as Dee or Kara or Gaeta have been shown to be this season.

* The next character we got more of a handle on was Boomer. In this case the ep was, seemingly at least, deceptive. For the longest time it seemed like she was genuinely contrite about her role in the attempted assassination of Adama, the regime on New Caprica, the betrayal of her fellow 8s in the Cylon Civil War and so forth. Not only had she changed her political tune, but on an emotional level she seemed to have come to grips with the fact that much of her behavior had been a reaction to feeling rejected by the Chief way back when. Even after she went buck-wild on Athena and frakked Helo, I figured this was just the behavior of someone who’s profoundly fucked up, maybe even crazy at this point, but not evil. And even once she kidnapped Hera, I thought it was some shared plot between her and the Chief to keep the kid safe from all the turmoil in the fleet lately or something. Maybe some of this will still turn out to be true–I feel like quite a bit of it might–but as it turns out, Boomer was once again an enemy agent, there to kidnap Hera for Cavil’s side; even freeing Ellen and bringing her to the fleet was a ruse. Suddenly Boomer’s behavior makes that much more sense.

* The final character we learned more about, of course, was Starbuck. I guessed that the piano player was all in her head during his first scene and almost had to admire the sheer chutzpah of this show to dip into that particular well yet again, but I thought all that material was so well acted, well lit, and well scored that I didn’t even mind. So the theory that Daniel the Missing Cylon was her dad turns out to be correct, making her, what, a Cylon-human hybrid like Hera? That would explain why the show’s staff could be so unequivocal in saying “Kara’s not a Cylon” despite the fact that doing so rules out all the previously established ways she could possibly have returned from the dead on this show–she’s a half-Cylon, and for all we know they can regenerate too. Katee Sackhoff, of course, is the show’s big discovery acting-wise; much of her work is simply taking advantage of how she looks on the screen. There’s something really physical and present about her big watery eyes, pillowy lips, and curvy body, and that physical presence enhances all three of Starbuck’s main personality poles–violent, horny, and melancholy (“drunk” rides shotgun with all three at varying times).

* Speaking of Starbuck’s physical presence, that was some shower scene, huh? And despite being glimpsed through the crack in the door of a bathroom stall and the blurry eyes of a concussion victim, the sex scene between Helo and Boomer was hot, surprisingly explicit stuff too. Battlestar Galactica love scenes tend to be pretty memorable, and I’m not sure they get enough credit for that.

* What with all the fine character work, the show was able to elegantly advance the plot to the next stage: Boomer’s deception devastated the Chief but it also brought Hera to the enemy and inflicted a terminal injury on the Galactica; the mystery of Kara’s situation is if not solved than pretty close to it; Roslin’s psychic connection to Hera rears its head again just in time for her cancer to knock her down to the mat for what I assume is the last time. Compare how smoothly all that happened to those weird, stilted conversations last week, or the bizarrely rushed death of Tigh and Caprica Six’s baby, or the forced feeling to Ellen’s attempts to break the couple up. If anything I’m guessing that the character stuff here was so deft that the plot-fans won’t even notice how far downfield the various balls in play got moved.

* Great effects shots toward the end there, as usual. The production value this show gets out of its effects budget is unequaled in television as best I can tell.

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