* Not a whole lot to recommend this episode, I don’t think. That’s unfortunate. There aren’t a lot to go!

* Things I liked: Fine little acting moments from actors that the show has pretty much abandoned, Jamie Bamber, Tamoh Penikett, and the still prominent but underused James Callis. Apollo shouting “Gaius Baltar?!?” in disbelief when one of the members of the new quorum asks what everyone’s favorite former scientific genius and collaborationist president turned sex-cult leader and paramilitary commander (?!?) thought of the potential abandonment of the Galactica was a hilarious moment of exasperation, not least because it mirrors my own at the notion that anyone cares what Baltar thinks in the world of the show.

* Penikett played Helo’s begging for permission to search for his daughter with just the right mix of sorrow, desperation, hope, and barely concealed rage at Adama’s obstinacy (and hypocrisy–he’s the admiral of the fleet and he abandoned everyone so he could sit around in a raptor and wait for the President to show up, remember?). And

* Baltar’s brief encounter with Caprica Six was one of the few emotionally true moments that character’s been granted in quite some time, since it sidestepped the season-long guessing game regarding his sincerity about his religious proclamations and dove right into something we know to be legit, his ever-present emotional turmoil regarding what happened between him and Caprica Six before the Cylon attack.

* I did wish that Head Baltar showed up for Six, though–was the implication that he doesn’t do so anymore?

* And since Baltar’s thought process during his cult-leader storyline has been opaque, it was impossible to figure out just why the fuck he outed Starbuck as some kind of revenant in front of the whole frakking fleet. Is it because he really believes what he’s saying about angels and wants to prove it to the world? Is it because he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying about angels and wants to convince himself that he’s not crazy or the victim of a Cylon brain-implant? Is it because he doesn’t really believe what he’s saying, and doesn’t want to convince himself, and simply wants to increase his sway over the hoi polloi for his own selfish reasons? We have very little way of knowing.

* I did like that he didn’t even remember who Starbuck was despite fooling around with her a few years back. That’s the Baltar we know!

* We’ve seen Adama start doing something, then get more and more frantic about it, then totally flip out, then crash and cry, a few too many times for it to retain much power.

* I kind of liked turning Sam into a hybrid. Led to some nice visuals at any rate.

* The thing about the show’s shift of focus from “life during wartime” to “what’s up with the Cylons” is that it went from, well, a show about life during wartime to the kind of “sci-fi musings on the nature of consciousness and life and mortality and what makes us human and so on” that we’ve been seeing for nearly a century now. This morning when I woke up I flipped on the TV and there was an episode of The Twilight Zone on involving Jack Klugman as the captain of a spaceship that lands on some planet and finds the crashed remains of his own spaceship, and he and the crew start wondering whether they’re already dead or what. Sound familiar? Don’t get me wrong, that kind of thing can be very appealing, but it would have been just as easy for Battlestar Galactica never to go down that route, and since its execution of that kind of material has on the whole been less successful than its execution of the war material, there’s a bit of a let-down inherent in having the final episodes focus on that.

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