(In case you missed it yesterday, all of the webisodes, except for episode nine, were leaked early on Amazon, and should be easy to find elsewhere now as well.)

The thing that won me over about "The Face Of The Enemy," despite a bigger-than-usual dose of melodrama, was that Gaeta changed as a result of these events. And also the fact that Gaeta didn't have to view these experiences the way he chose to.

Here's what happened: a few days after the fleet found Earth, some of Cavil's Cylons showed up. (Can we call them Imperial Cylons, as opposed to Rebel Cylons?) The fleet jumps away, but one raptor, containing Gaeta, two Sharons and an assortment of redshirts, gets lost. They're running out of oxygen and the jump calculations to rejoin the fleet have gone "non-linear." So it's basically the classic lifeboat situation.

People start dropping dead, and it soon becomes clear there's a murderer aboard. Everyone suspects the one remaining Cylon, but Gaeta had an affair with her back on the planet of New Caprica, when she helped him save people from the prison camps. Oops, it turns out the Sharon really is the killer, and she also didn't help Gaeta save people — she took his lists of people who needed saving, and made sure those people got executed instead. Gaeta kills his ex-lover, and prepares to die alone, covered with blood and surrounded with corpses.

But there's a happy ending! Gaeta's current lover, Hoshi, has been searching for Gaeta in another raptor. And even though it's hopeless, and he knows he's just wasting time (and precious fuel), Hoshi refuses to give up. And he finds Gaeta, with minutes to spare.

So you can look at this story and derive a few different morals: True love conquers all, since Hoshi's love saved Gaeta. Or, be careful whom you trust, since Hoshi was trustworthy and Sharon wasn't. Or even, some Cylons are nicer than others, since this Sharon killed for the occupation while Athena was fighting to destroy it.

Instead, the emotionally scarred Gaeta leaps for the bleakest reading: you can't trust any Cylons. And love is a luxury he can't afford, because the Cylons are about to hit the fan.

At least, after Gaeta goes and bitches out poor Saul Tigh for being a Cylon, and demands to tell Admiral Adama that the alliance with the Cylons was a mistake, he then has a conversation with Hoshi where he appears to dump him, and tells him to keep his head down. And reading between the lines, it sounds as though Gaeta is on his way to meet with Tom Zarek about fomenting revolution against the Roslin/Adama regime.

(By the way, how can anyone think the Cylon alliance was a bad idea? The humans got to destroy the Cylons' Resurrection Hub, preventing the Cylons from resurrecting ever again, assuming the Cylons were telling the truth. They found out who four of the final five were, eliminating a potential security risk. And they found Earth, whose condition wasn't the Cylons' fault. The humans got way more out of it than the Cylons did.)

In any case, if this had been a regular episode of BSG, instead of an episode-length story split into ten bite-sized parts, it would have been a middling installment. Pretty good, not great. Better than "The Woman King" and the episode that killed off Kat. It definitely gets a bit too melodramatic, and the bit where the evil Sharon tells Gaeta "You HAVE to face reality. You HAVE to see the world for what it is," wasn't Grace Park's finest moment.

As for Alessandro Juliani, he does a pretty great job, especially in the last webisode, where he has to carry the whole thing without any dialogue for a bit. (Except more of that singing, of which the less said the better.) The whole sequence where he covers his face with blood, surveys the corpses all around him, and almost kills himself but then doesn't, is pretty awe-inspiring. The rest of the time, he has a bit of his usual deer-in-the-headlights thing going on, but he mostly carries the romantic lead pretty well.

I have a feeling, from the clips we've seen so far, that these webisodes will add to your appreciation of the show's final episodes, even though they were added afterwards. We've already seen a clip of Gaeta lecturing a slightly scared-looking Baltar about his restaurant ideas, and we know that Gaeta and Baltar have unfinished business.

Oh, and the consensus online seems to be that Gaeta's chances of being the final Cylon have gone down considerably after these webisodes. (Bear in mind, they could be a deliberate misdirection, and he could still be our guy.) But if he's a Cylon, he definitely doesn't know it yet, judging from the venom with which he talks to Tigh at the end. Poor Tigh — he's pretty much the only person I feel sorrier for than Gaeta.

Despite the fact that this episode was full of plot twists that were pretty surprising, the plot itself was fairly straightforward. Last week, if you'll recall, President Roslin and Baltar were whisked away on the wounded cylon Base Star to who knows where. And Sharon/Athena shot the rebel leader Six because she'd had visions that Six would steal her daughter Hera. As this week's episode opened, the wounded Six is being taken to the hospital and Athena is shipped kicking and screaming to the brig. After some gooey medicine scenes, Six dies while seeing visions of green fields that look vaguely heaven-like. And Adama is screaming at Sharon for totally fucking up the alliance with the cylons.

Meanwhile, Lee is dealing with what will happen to the Quorum, the Congress/Parliament of the fleet, now that Roslin has disappeared. Obviously, Vice President Zarek should step up. He was, after all, lawfully elected. And his behind-the-scenes deal-cutting with Lee and the president have shown him to be a canny politician. But here is where the episode encountered its first big problem.

The President Problem
Everybody is worried that Adama "won't accept Zarek" as president, even though it's completely corrupt for the admiral to be able to meddle with the chain of command. And after Lee has a phone conversation with daddy Adama, he's certain that the old man won't work with Zarek. He won't even take Zarek's phone calls. Instead doing what Roslin did, which was step up to the presidency and smack Adama down when he protested, Zarek goes along with Lee's plan to find somebody that Adama will actually work with.

For help, Lee turns to his old frenemy Romo Lampkin, who encouraged him to pursue law and politics but also showed him the dark side of both. Lampkin is the guy who defended Baltar at his trial in exchange for a cabin with a view. So Lee and Lampkin get together for a series of talks about who should basically be crowned president (there's never any talk of an election at all, which is creepy). They make a bunch of lists, and Lampkin keeps saying things about how Lee is very driven and ambitious, which Lee keeps denying. There are a whole series of WTF moments, where you know for sure Lee is going to get the crown but somehow Lee acts like he doesn't know it. C'mon — Lee isn't that stupid. The reason why he's become a politician is that he does have a kind of political savvy and it rings false that he wouldn't discuss the possibility of his candidacy right away with Lampkin.

Let's not even go into the weird crap with Lampkin, who is seeing the ghost of his dead cat and freaking out, and later holds Lee at gunpoint after he realizes that Lee is the only person who can become president. This whole plot arc with Lee's disingenuous "who me? president?" act, and Lampkin's murderous freakout, reek of writerly desperation. Show creators Ron Moore and David Eick have some reason they want Lee to be president, which will probably be really cool later in the show, and they took a clumsy route to get there.

Speaking of clumsy routes to getting places, we must now consider the second major problem with this episode.

The Admiral Problem
So for most of the episode Adama is screaming at Athena and keeping her away from her daughter Hera (remember, baby-daddy Helo is on board the missing Base Ship with Baltar and Roslin). And then he gets even more screamy because he discovers, after the doctor examines the imprisoned Six cylon, that the cylon is pregnant. Based on the fact that Tigh has been visiting her every day and sending the guards away, it's pretty obvious who the daddy is. Understandably, Adama is insanely fucking angry. Tigh has been acting unprofessionally, and in a way that potentially endangers the ship. (Though there is one interesting detail here: Tigh, a cylon, was able to get another cylon pregnant. That's not supposed to be able to happen. So maybe the final five can actually make babies with the other cylons? Hmmm, interesting.)

Adama and Tigh wind up getting into a tough-old-man fist-fight over the whole thing, after which Adama pretty much admits to Tigh that he's in love with Roslin and can't imagine going on without her. A few scenes later, after Lee has been crowned president and the fleet has discovered a battered book that belonged to Roslin in a volume of space filled with smashed-up Vipers, Adama takes off his Admiral pins and hands them over to Tigh. He's going off by himself to find the Base Ship that contains Roslin, and leaving Tigh charge of the fleet. Say what? He's just discovered that Tigh is so off the deep end that he's making it with the imprisoned Six (and isn't it kind of ookily near being rape?). And then he gives command to Tigh?

Well, I guess that fits in with Adama's other completely uncharacteristic behaviors too, such as letting Starbuck take command of the fighter pilots again without so much as a "what the hell." And then as his last act as Admiral, he tells Tigh (now Admiral Tigh) to let Sharon be with her daughter Hera. Let's face it: this is not the Adama we know. Our Adama puts the fleet ahead of his personal feelings, and more importantly he knows Tigh's limits. He wouldn't endanger the whole fleet just to go after Roslin, especially when "somebody he can work with" has become president.

Like the Lee-crowned-president subplot, this subplot feels forced. There's some reason why Moore and Eick want Tigh to be Admiral — or they need Adama to hang out with the rebel cylons when they cream the Resurrection Hub and permanently destroy the cylons' ability to download. Either way, they pushed this plot through in a way that wasn't believable.

But it could have been. I really think this episode was a great idea wrapped in bad execution. Here's one possible way these problems could have been solved, made for a much meatier and more interesting plot, and left us pretty much in the same place in terms of character development.

The Zarek Solution
So the main problem with this episode was believing that the main characters made choices that were believable in the context of their established personalities. One way to fix that would have been to have Zarek — always unafraid to face down those in power in the past — refuse to step down as President. The episode could have been devoted to a power struggle between Zarek and Adama, with Lampkin and Lee working with Zarek. This would dovetail nicely with the already-existing tension between Lee and his father. And it would make sense for the ambitious Zarek.

Also, having the power struggle between Zarek and Adama would also have created a new, and more believable, incentive for Adama to step down as Admiral. In the face of widespread public outcry over Adama trying to cockblock Zarek's lawful ascension to Preisdent, and further betrayal from his son Lee, he might hand over his Admiralty in disgust. Giving the fleet over to Tigh, whom he knows to be unpredictable and violent, would be his way of punishing Zarek. And it would show how unbalanced he'd become in the wake of Zarek's triumph.

Feeling driven from the fleet, Adama would go on a search for Roslin — not just because he wuvs her (which, I'm sorry, is just not a good enough reason) but also to restore a government he can believe in. See how that works? It makes his mission less personal, more about the fleet, and thus fits with his character more believably.

I'm just going to pretend that's what happened in the episode, because it makes so much more sense. Plus, I am also going to pretend that Lampkin's insanely cute gray-and-white cat is still alive. You can't just replace a kitty with a puppy. It's apples and oranges, people.

As the episode begins, our favorite Hugh Hefner-cum-Billy Graham figure Baltar is talking about President Roslin's visions on his pirate radio station. He tells the good people of Galactica that she's "shared a vision" with the Sharon cylon and the imprisoned Six cylon. It's not entirely clear why he's making a point of this, other than to remind viewers that Roslin did indeed share a vision with Sharon and Six a couple of years ago — she saw herself in this opera house, chasing after Hera, Sharon's hybrid baby. Now all three ladies are having the same dream again.

Apparently the radio broadcast is having a giant effect on the fleet, however, because frosh politico Lee Adama marches into Roslin's office and demands an explanation. She totally blows him off, saying she doesn't need to explain herself, even though she admits it's true. Still not sure why this is a big deal. It's not like she's tossing people out of airlocks again. And the dream itself is pretty innocuous: she's running around the opera house, and then Hera jumps into Six's arms and leaves the opera house with Six and Baltar. Portentious, yeah — but treasonous? Scary? No.

Of course she's about to do something potentially treasonous when she strikes up a deal with the rebel cylons. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

Possibly the most exciting part of the episode comes right after Baltar's accusations, when the crippled cylon Base Ship and the Demetrius jump back to the fleet. Of course some kind of wacky-technical-explanation thing happens that causes the Base Ship to jump without the Demetrius — and the Demetrius needs at least 5 minutes before it can jump to join. And OF COURSE the Base Ship's comms are broken, so they can't hail Galactica. Seriously tense minutes as the crew of the Base Ship sits there realizing that they are about to be creamed by the fleet. But then Tigh figures out something is wrong — even he doesn't quite know how (maybe some kind of psychic cylon moment?) — and calls off the weapons at the last nanosecond. Then the Demetrius appears and Helo explains everything. Now the fleet knows that the Demetrius teamed up with the cylons and took control of the Base Ship.

And then the really cool stuff starts. The cylons come aboard the Galactica to explain what the hell is going on to Roslin and Adama and everybody. There's this great scene when they're all mingling around and you can just glimpse Tigh's face. He looks positively anguished. I continue to be impressed with his acting in this episode — even with a patch over his eye, his face truly conveys the emotions of somebody who fears what he might do, and yet is too afraid to tell anyone about it.

The Six cylon has become the rebel spokesmodel and meets with Galactica's top brass to offer them a bargain. She tells them about how the rebel cylons only want to "join with the final five" cylons, and explains that the final five are in the human fleet. And she has a way to unveil the final five to everybody: they can "unbox" the decommissioned D'Anna cylon model (AKA Xena, AKA the hot lady cylon who had a threesome with Six and Baltar in season 2). So if the humans will help the cylons get to the facility where D'Anna's consciousness resides and resurrect her, they'll reveal the final five to the humans.

But that's not good enough. Roslin wants to know what's in it for the humans. "Vengeance," says Six. Then she plays her hand. The D'Anna cylon is kept in a facility with the "resurrection hub," a ship that is the main database controller thinger for all the resurrection ships. The rebel cylons will hand over the coordinates of the resurrection hub and give the humans the chance to destroy it, thus robbing all the cylons of the ability to "download" and be reborn in new bodies. "Imagine," the president muses later, "A mortal enemy."

A deal is struck. The humans will help the rebel cylons unbox D'Anna, then they'll destroy the resurrection hub and hand over the final five to the cylons. Nobody really talks about what they'll all do about the whole "finding Earth" thing, but it's on everybody's minds. In secret meetings afterwards, the humans decide that their covert plan will be to refuse to hand over the final five to the cylons until they find Earth. And the cylons secretly scheme to take some human prisoners whom they won't hand over until they have the final five.

I love all the weird backstabbing and plotting as the humans and cylons try to work together. What makes these sequences better than mere spy vs. spy stuff is that everybody genuinely seems to have a guilty conscience about it. At a certain point, Six starts second-guessing the cylon plan, freaking out about how they are resorting to violence and coercion. She worries that the final five are watching and judging them (which is, in fact, true). Meanwhile, Tigh finds himself in on several conversations where Roslin is speculating about whether the final five are just ruthless killers and he has to take a position on this question. I love when Tigh says not to unbox the D'Annas and basically to "bomb them all." Of course, this hard-line stance benefits him, since that way D'Anna will never unmask his true identity as one of the final five.

Once the quorum gets wind of Roslin's plan to work with the cylons, they freak out and start considering a vote of no confidence. Lee delivers this news to Roslin, and she's totally a snot about her own government, calling the quorum "perpetually needy representatives." What the hell? Are we supposed to think it's cool that Roslin is basically a dictator who refuses to listen to her people's representatives?

Eventually Roslin relents a little, and finally goes to meet with the quorum and explain her decision to them. She brings spokesmodel Six with her, who delivers this weird speech about how she and the rebels want to destroy the resurrection hub because they need mortality. She says death is what makes humans whole, and without it cylons can't be really awesome or something. It doesn't make much sense, and besides we know she's lying about a bunch of stuff anyway so it's hard to take her too seriously. Still, the quorum seems appeased despite the fact that Roslin has just allied herself with their human-genocide-loving enemies without consulting them.

What I haven't been telling you about this episode is that Gaeta keeps singing. I don't want to think about it, because Gaeta was totally my boyfriend until Friday — he was the cutest person on Galactica by far, and he's always doing geeky things like looking at maps and computers and making comments like, "We can't use our FTL because the wazzleblorp needs the most recent software patches from the zompleflip." So hot. But in this episode, Doc Coddle has to chop his leg off. Remember how Anders shot Gaeta during the mutiny? Yeah, Gaeta is now a one-leg, and apparently there is no prosthetic technology to fix him up.

According to a shell-shocked looking Anders, who spends the whole episode working the bug-eyed stare, Gaeta sings every time he feels his phantom limb. Apparently he feels it a LOT. And his songs sound like something the dude from The Decemberists would sing if he had been hit on the head with a two-by-four and a dog had chewed on his vocal chords. I say this with great sadness, since I love The Decemberists and Gaeta was my boyfriend and all. But seriously, every time he started singing, I wanted to bitchslap my TV set and every writer ever involved with BSG. And maybe every TV that has ever tuned BSG too.

Speaking of bitchslapping, there's a great scene with Roslin and her hidden-cylon aide Foster. When Foster comes in to meet with Roslin one morning, the president orders her to find out who is telling Baltar about the president's visions. When Foster stares dumbly at her, the president says, "Well you are sleeping with him, aren't you? I've just been informed that you're down there enough to be a charter member of his nymph squad." Oooohhh, FACE! Foster is totally humiliated, and tries to apologize, mumbling that she's come to believe in Baltar's teachings. "My trust means frak to you," says Roslin. "You have a job to do." Then she turns her back.

Foster is totally bummed out, so she immediately fraks Baltar in his silky tent. Then she accuses him of lying about the president and acts all upset about it. He protests that it's true, that Six told him about the visions. I just love how psycho Foster is, taking sides randomly and acting all weepy one minute and all let's-kill-Cally the next.

Of course the episode climaxes with Roslin, Six, and Sharon all having the dream again. Same thing, with Hera being carried off by Six and Baltar. And then things get really weird in non-dream life because Hera starts drawing pictures of Six with the number "666" next to it. OK, so is she turning into Damien or are show creators Ron Moore and David Eick trying to show us the origin of Christians' belief that the number "666" is evil? Is Six the Original Superdevil Lady? Omigod, what the hell does it mean?

Right after Sharon finds Hera's 666 drawings, the little girl disappears. Long scene of Sharon chasing after her, flashing back to her dream where she's chasing her through the opera house. She's freaking out.

Meanwhile, Roslin has had a secret meeting with Baltar, after Starbuck reveals to her that the Hybrid who controls the wounded Base Ship said a bunch of incoherent stuff about dying leaders and visions of opera houses. Roslin confesses to Baltar that he was right, she is sharing these opera house visions with Six and Sharon — and he's in the visions too. Now she's ordering him to go with her to meet the Hybrid and get to the bottom of the whole freaky mystery. Honestly, the best part about this situation is that at last Baltar looks less sweaty and is wearing a sharp black trenchcoat instead of his Hugh Hefner pajamas.

Just as Roslin and Baltar are watching the cylons on the Base Ship plug the Hybrid back in, Sharon finds Hera on Galactica. The little girl has literally bumped into the spokesmodel Six — the one who gave the speech about how great death is. And she's doing the creepy-little-kid smile at Six, and Six is doing the creepy-anorexic-Playboy-model smile at Hera. They are touching, and Having A Moment. So Sharon totally freaks out, with visions of Six and Baltar stealing Hera dancing in her cylon brain. Of course, Sharon whips out her gun.

"You will not take my daughter away," she yells. Six protests that she would never do that, blah blah blah. Her human guards have their guns on Sharon, but Tigh tells them to stand down. Sharon sends Hera off with Tyrol (who just happens to be nearby fixing the Jeffries tube or something). And then Sharon frakking shoots the shit out of Six at point-blank range — bringing up images of that other Sharon model who didn't know she was a cylon until she got activated and shot Adama. It's a seriously intense scene, very well done.

Then suddenly, back on the Base Ship, the cylons have the Hybrid plugged in. She wakes up, bugs out, and screams, "JUMP!" That means the Base Ship, carrying Roslin and Baltar, jumps to somewhere. We have no idea where. And Sharon has just shot the humans' one connection to the rebel cylons.

And guess what happens next. Gaeta starts SINGING. That's how the episode ends, with whiskery Gaeta singing a really awful folk song. ARGH! Bad ending, bad! But good until that last second!

In two weeks, you can look forward to some kind of investigation that reveals Tigh has been doing the nasty with the cylon in the brig. What nasty he's been doing is unclear. All I can say is that I can't wait to see more of the rebel cylons. Plus, Xena — erm, I mean D'Anna — is coming back. And that can only be good. As long as she doesn't sing. Which she really might, knowing Lucy Lawless. Moore and Eick, for the love of the gods, NO MORE SINGING.

Face-slamming excitement initiates the episode: Starbuck has a slitty-eyed glaring contest with Helo as he leads a mutiny on the Demetrius and tries to throw her in the brig. She's totally pissed off and Athena grabs her in a headlock while Helo yells "stand down!" a lot. More stand-downs ensue as Starbuck's cylon honey Anders goes nuts, aiming his gun at random people and demanding that Starbuck be reinstated as captain. Helo is yelling at Gaeta to jump the ship to its rendezvous with the Galactica, and Anders is yelling at him to stop, and Starbuck is freaking out, and in the craziness Anders shoots Gaeta right in the leg.

At that moment, Starbuck seems to snap out of crazy art girl mode, quickly patching Gaeta's wound and telling Helo that he was right. The Demetrius shouldn't go chasing after Leoben's promised Base Ship and cylon allies. Instead, Starbuck should take a Raptor, pack it with Leoben's cylon ass, and check out the Base Ship story for herself. A lot of "no ways" and "stand downs" later, Starbuck has an away team: Athena to be cylon interpreter, Leoben, Anders because he's Starbuck's arm candy, and a hot throwaway cast member who you know is going to be dispensable as soon as she says Starbuck as been "kicking ass all along." The Demetrius is going to wait for them for 15 hours, while Gaeta's leg goes to shit, before jumping to the Galactica rendezvous.

Oh poor throwaway cast member with the cute haircut, we will sorely miss you because as soon as the Raptor lands on board the least-crippled Base Ship, you die. But before we get to the death orgy, though, let's assess the coolness factor of seeing the horrible remains of the cylon civil war. As soon as Starbuck and Co. jump to Leoben's coordinates and tune out Leoben's inane commentary ("Can you feel the excitement? God is making my cylon nutsacs tingle!"), they are in the middle of carnage.

This really is a great scene, as the Raptor moves slowly through the charred remains of the Base Ships, their broken limbs glowing red like ripped muscles or burst blood veins. We know the Raiders are organic, but this is the first time we've seen the biological side of Base Ships. Does that mean the Base Ships are potentially autonomous beings like the Raiders are? Turns out the whole battle scene is what Starbuck has been painting in her cabin all this time, and the giant flaming comet she drew was actually the Base Ship they're about to rendezvous with. Whoa, religious epiphany, destiny, all that crap. Much oohhing from Leoben. Luckily nobody sees a giant electric Buddha like in Matrix Revolutions.

When the Raptor lands in the Base Ship from Starbuck's paintings, we get more of the organic creepy-coolness: the ship bay closes up with a slimy thud, red sinews and muscles blocking vacuum rather than a metal bay door. And more yuck awaits. As the away team steps out of the Raptor, Athena is immediately met with a bunch of Sharons in matching baby-blue sweater sets (scary!) who all want her to help them rebel against the Sixes. They start pushing Athena to teach them free will because Six is making bad decisions and "she must be stopped." Weirdly, Athena rejects their requests, telling them they should pick a side and stay with it, not leave at the first sign of trouble. Huh? Didn't Athena herself chuck her cylon sisters when the going got rough and she got busy with Helo? Whatever. Now she's all about the "stick with your sisters" thing.

After a tense meeting with the Sixes and Leobens, where one Six says something pretty funny about how all the Leoben models are obsessed with Starbuck, the alliance is secured. The cylons will help the humans, and in return the humans will help the Base Ship get its FTL drives back in order. They'll all go to Earth together. But first, Starbuck needs to fulfill that destiny that Leoben keeps whining about by visiting the cylon Hybrid who controls the Base Ship. That's the crazy, babbling lady who lives in goo and basically is a kind of avatar of the Base Ship's consciousness — or maybe the pilot of the Base Ship, or its symbiote.

But before the Hybrid tells us the future and reveals the plot arc of the rest of the season, Six kills the hot expendable crew member. Turns out hottie is a former member of the resistance on Caprica, and she killed that particular Six model in an incredibly horrible way in a septic tank. When the Six mentions her murder to expendable hottie, unfortunately hottie says something kind of insensitive, like "I'd do it again." So Six beats the shit out of her and kills her. Then Anders goes crazy and wants to kill the Six, and Starbuck is like "stand down!" and it looks like the alliance will be off until another Six comes in and talks to the murdering Six, telling her stuff like, "I thought we'd worked through this." Then she kisses the other Six and pulls the trigger on the gun Anders has aimed at her head. Whoa! So two things: One, holy crap. And two, apparently cylons can be extremely traumatized by being killed. Which makes sense.

The Starbuck-Hybrid meeting scene is nearly as cool as the tour of the cylon combat zone, and for some of the same reasons. Not only does the meeting advance the plot and give us more hints about the human-cylon alliance to come, but it also gives us a sharper understanding of how the cylon technology works. Starbuck is visiting the Hybrid because Leoben has told her it can reveal her true mission or path or whatever. But the complement of cylons are there because they have to take the Hybrid offline so the Raptor can reboot their FTL.

When everybody comes to the Hybrid's chamber, the Hybrid's babble makes more sense than last time we visited her: a lot of what she's saying are clearly commands to the ship, or maybe just logs of processes happening on the ship. She mentions the FTL failure several times, and then says repeatedly that "the children of the one reborn shall find their own country." I'm guessing Starbuck is the "one reborn." Then things get seriously awesome because they unplug the Hybrid and she totally freaks out, screaming in this eerie voice and seemingly inducing a Centurion to shoot one of the Sharons. (Remember, they're out of range of a Resurrection Ship, so death is for keeps.) As the Sharon dies, her blood staining the Hybrid's goo, Starbuck grabs the Hybrid and yells "What the frack?" or something like that.

And suddenly the Hybrid focuses totally on Starbuck, saying, "You are the harbinger of death, Kara Thrace." Then she goes kind of J.J. Abrams on our asses, and adds, "The missing three will give you the five who come from the home of thirteenth." Six and Starbuck quickly figure out that this means they need to reanimate D'Anna, the de-activated cylon model 3, who has seen the faces of the final 5 cylons, who apparently know about the "home of the thirteenth tribe," AKA Earth. So they zoom off to rendezvous with the Demetrius, and then head onward to resurrect D'Anna (damn I missed Xena, so thanks for that).

Meanwhile, as all this coolness has been going on, Roslin is confronting her mortality and starting to see why Baltar's message is so seductive. As she bonds with another cancer patient in the hospital who likes Baltar's message, she begins to realize that Baltar has captured a true desire in the fleet for answers to their spiritual agony in the wake of the cylon attacks. Roslin even has a vision of heaven as Baltar describes it: an otherworldly place full of her dead family, which she can reach on a ship that travels across the water.

Oh, and by the way, Roslin has one scene where she's handing off power to Foster while she undergoes her final treatments which is awesome for two reasons. First, Roslin doesn't have her wig on — she's totally bald. And she looks frakkin gorgeous. Brief moment of wow. And of course she's handing over all her power to Foster, which is a brief moment of the other kind of wow. Not so good.

By the end of the episode, Roslin is so taken with her dream of heaven and her reevaluation of Baltar that she visits Adama in his quarters and tells him she's starting to believe in what Adama calls "Baltar's horse manure." Adama is weirded out, but listens to Roslin then leans into kissing-range of her face and says that she's made him have faith in their trip to Earth. But they don't kiss. Damn.

Previews for next week look seriously exciting, though: Athena and Helo's hybrid baby Hera has started drawing scary kid drawings full of "66666" and pictures of blonde ladies. Has she become Damien? Or is she just yearning for Six the cylon? Tune in next week to find out!

I can't decide which is more ookie: watching Starbuck paint, or watching yet another prisoner get the freaky-ass beatdown. Regardless, this episode certainly delivered both manifestations of creepiness in every possible way. We begin with Starbuck strung out on her visions, glassy-eyed, painting more planets on the ceiling of her cabin and searching through grubby piles of coordinates to figure out where her second-in-command Helo should hop them to next. They've been out in space for two months, and she wants to keep returning to the same coordinates, and when Helo questions her judgment she goes Crazy Vision Chick on his ass and does a recon mission herself.

While zooming around in a Viper, Starbuck stars muttering to herself batshittily, "Where are you? Where are you?" Just as the guy out doing recon with her starts to ask what's going on, they stumble upon a wounded Heavy Raider — the exact same kind of ship Starbuck followed down to her doom last season. Turns out there's a Leoben on board the ship, and he's all dumb-grin happy to see Starbuck because apparently (according to him) she's shed her doubts and is a new person with a desire to follow the path or the quest or some other Caprica-version-of-Joseph-Campbell thing.

Starbuck not only decides to bring Leoben on board, but invites him to stay in her quarters and starts doing the ceiling-painting dance with him. Literally. When the rest of the crew finally burst in on the two of them, Leoben has his arm around Starbuck's waist and his hand on her painting hand and they're practically doing the let's-make-a-hybrid twostep.

So the Demetrius crew throws Leoben in the brig, beats him up for a while, and starts to talk seriously about mutiny.

Back on Galactica, Baltar's wearing pajamas and this shiny-collared robe as he does culty pirate radio broadcasts via what looks to me like a gold-painted CB radio. He's still doing the "you are perfect" thing only now he's added into it a lot of hugging and talk about how "there are no gods" (except his one god). More and more folk rock ladies are flocking to him, and a couple unfortunate looking hippie guys.

But Tyrol is listening to Baltar on the radio while he skips rope maniacally in his cabin with the ever-whining hybrid baby. We discover that Tyrol has gotten himself a nice shaved head and is doing the Robert DeNiro in Taxi Driver thing: getting psycho, getting hairless. You practically expect him to start looking into the mirror and yelling, "Hey Cylon, you talking to me?"

He's also obsessively visiting the airlock where Foster sucked Cally out of the ship, and Foster keeps stalking him and telling him about Baltar's idea of god. Eventually Tyrol wanders in a hate-filled daze to one of Baltar's revivals, and Baltar tries to get him to hug and touch and accept Baltar as his personal savior. Hello — don't try to pet the bug-eyed, shavey-headed guy! And indeed, Baltar is rewarded with a punch in the face, which is something he seems to like anyway.

Meanwhile, on the Demetrius, Leoben is having a little religious mania heart-to-heart with Anders. In between beatings, he spits blood and talks about how there's a war between the Cylons "who embrace their nature" and "those who do not." He wants Anders and Co. to join forces with him and his pals (we can only assume the Sixes and Sharons and Xenas) against what he calls his "savage brothers." He also thinks that if Starbuck would only follow her shining path, she could go visit one of the Cylon hybrids, those ladies on LSD in goo baths who seem to guide the Base Stations by talking like language poets.

Anders actually decides to consider Leoben's request, and goes back to the rest of the crew with the idea. Gaeta practically smacks him upside the head, and everybody else is just worried that the Demetrius won't make its rendezvous point with the Fleet in time. If they don't meet up at the designated coordinates, the Fleet may assume they're lost and leave them behind on their next jump.

Starbuck doesn't seem to give a crap about this, and just as the crew is getting really pissy about the rendezvous, Starbuck walks onto the bridge and says they're definitely joining up with the Cylons to go to Earth. This whole issue is probably the most interesting and rewarding part of the episode, since some kind of alliance between the Cylons and the humans is both narratively intriguing and inevitable. I also like bringing Leoben back to lead the call for alliance, since he's always wanted to mingle with humans but in an incredibly wrong way (witness his captivity of Starbuck, whom he claimed to love, on New Caprica).

That's why it's disappointing when we have to go back to Galactica and visit with Baltar and his sermonizing yet again. I'm all for the idea of making Baltar an ambiguous cult leader, but do we really have to hear all his sermons? Really? I think we'd get the idea that he's mouthing a bunch of platitudes if we heard just ONE sermon instead of twenty-million like in this episode. Probably the best Baltar moment is when Foster tells him — after a roll in the sack — that President Roslin knows about his pirate radio broadcasts but doesn't care because "nobody of consequence" is attracted to his ideas.

Is she saying the folk rock ninja ladies are of no consequence? How can that be? They're so good with lead pipes!

After an explosion on Leoben's Heavy Raider kills one of Starbuck's crew, she pretends to be a folk rock ninja lady for a while and kicks Leoben's jaw with her boot a few times. That's when he calls her an angel blazing with the light of god, and we're obliged to remember how the goo hybrid in Razor said something about angels leading somebody somewhere. At that moment, you'll be so blanged out on the whole flaming angel on a path thing that you'll yearn for a Baltar sermon.

Unfortunately, show creators Ron Moore and David Eick are not afraid to give that to you, and the episode ends with a spectacularly yuck moment where Baltar goes to Tyrol's cabin to beg his forgiveness. Tyrol is in full Taxi Driver mode, a gun on his chest and pate clean-shaven. Surprisingly, he lets Baltar prattle on about being sorry and finding god and how Cally would have wanted Tyrol to be his friend. Then he says, "I wish I could have known [Cally] better," and Tyrol takes Baltar's hand. WTF? It would have been way more realistic to have Tyrol blast one of Baltar's knees off.

So just as Tyrol is being saved (or is he?), the Demetrius crew decides to mutiny. led by XO Helo. And Starbuck is seriously pissed. Just as her angry squinty eyes fill the screen, we get the dreaded "to be continued" message and are forced to spend the rest of the evening debating whether an episode without Adama is an episode not worth watching.

Right away, you could tell this was going to be an episode about getting religion because we begin with a fairly long religious ritual from Cally's funeral, complete with Tyrol speechifying in a stripey shirt I think he got at Banana Republic. There are statues of gods and goddesses, talk about death, and a priestess being all mystical. Roslin is in the audience looking totally blissed out, and she tells Adama it's the kind of funeral she likes. Adama isn't so crazy about it, which is reason number one why I wish this episode had been about him or the atheist Cavils instead of the god-addled of the fleet.

After the funeral, Tyrol immediately starts getting the crazy eye. He stares freakishly at Foster during the funeral, and later starts bugging out in a meeting with Foster and Tigh. He has no clue that Foster actually killed Cally, and keeps pointing out that she killed herself because she thought Foster was having an affair with him. Foster gives him a whole trip about how they are Cylons and therefore can just shut their guilt off, and embrace their strength. "Think of all we can do," she says. "We're not human — we're stronger."

Meanwhile, Tigh is having "I killed my wife" flashbacks and keeps unhelpfully explaining to Tyrol that it's "natural for a man to feel this way," and that it's ultra-mega-manly to go batshit over your dead wife. Oh, and just to make Tyrol feel extra-better, he adds that Tyrol will be seeing Cally "every day" for the rest of his life. Thanks for helping, pops. Seems like both the "kill your guilt" Cylon solution and the "embrace your pain" human solution pretty much suck ass.

No surprise that Tyrol finally loses it completely. But before we go there, let's talk about all the what-the-hell action going down between Foster and Baltar, and Tigh and Caprica Six.

Foster goes to visit Baltar with her new Creepy Cylon Powers in full effect, finding him lying in his silky bed among the folk rock lady ninjas. (Roslin later refers to them as the "girly groupie sex whatever they are," bless her cancer-ridden heart.) Foster snuggles up next to the freaked-out Baltar and proceeds to give a whole bizarro speech about how good is evil, evil is good, and everybody is perfect. To demonstrate, she starts yanking hairs out of Baltar's head while stroking his nether regions. She babbles something about how pain and pleasure can intermingle, making the two things indistinguishable. Somehow this all adds up to more hair-pulling, and more nether-region-stroking, and Baltar stammering something about sure he's kind of horny but that doesn't mean everybody is perfect.

Are you getting all that? Pain-plus-pleasure adds up to "we're all perfect" and that's supposed to mean something bad — or good? Luckily you won't have to think about it for very long because just when things are getting too nauseating for words there's a raid on the folk rock ninja ladies' palace. A bunch of militia guys throw tear gas into the hold, then beat the shit out of the nice ladies and rape them while Baltar hides in the rafters and Foster stares accusingly at him. Kinda weird that the militia guys keep attacking when they realize the President's closest adviser is hanging out right there, but whatever.

And now things go to serious yuck. In the aftermath of the militia attack, the Six in Baltar's head eggs him on with delusions of grandeur, telling him it's time to "take a stand." By take a stand, apparently she means that Baltar should take a bunch of his followers, run inside the churchy place where the militia guys are taking in a religious ritual, and start screaming about how they are all serial rapists and dickwads. He throws around a bunch of incense and pretty much immediately gets dragged away by some handy guards.

While he's in prison, Roslin takes away the right of assembly. As she tells the Quorum, she thinks Baltar's people are just provoking attacks by getting together in that cargo hold with all the silky blankets and crystals and the hippie-Buddhist-pagan shrine to Baltar which I think is covered in hot pepper lights and photographs from Rush album covers but probably really isn't. Lee and everybody else push back against Roslin, demanding right of assembly back again.

Meanwhile, Tigh keeps unhingedly visiting Caprica Six in prison. Every day, he comes and yells something angry at her and hallucinates that she's turning into his wife. Six acts all holy and forgiving and keeps asking if she can do something for him or if he needs something. Finally they have the Ultra Meaningful Confrontation, where Six says, "Hey, I'm just like you — I feel things, I have veins in my arms," and he says, "No you're not like me," even though IRONY OF IRONIES we know that he is.

And that's when things get seriously fucking twisted. Tigh tells the guards to leave so he can be with Six alone, and asks her the question that's really on his mind. Can she help him get rid of the pain he feels? This is actually a great moment in an episode of what the hell, because we're watching Tigh struggle with a pain that transcends human vs. Cylon. Plus, we're not sure if Six knows he's a fellow Cylon or not, and it's kind of like he's asking her whether she can give him a lesson in having a Cylon brain.

At that moment Six reveals some interesting stuff, such as the fact that Cylon brains are based on human ones and that by reverse-engineering human brains Cylons have learned a few things about human psychology that humans don't know. For instance, she claims that pain is what teaches people who they are, as well as teaching them about morality. She tells the story of how falling in love with Baltar and realizing that she could lose him is what made her realize that what the Cylons had done to the humans was wrong — and that she won't turn off her pain or guilt because she wants to remember that lesson.

It's a fairly interesting, moving scene until Six touches Tigh's face sort of mind-meld-style, and says, "I can give you clarity again." Then she punches him in the face. Over and over again. While saying stuff like, "Pain gives you clarity. It tells you who you are. Do you feel the clarity?" I mean, she wearing this sexy dress and frakkin straddling Tigh, pounding his bloody face, and asking about clarity. And then Tigh moans, "More."

"Oh," says Six, "I was wrong. I know what you need." And then she starts making out with Tigh. WHAT THE HELL.

This would all have been moderately more bearable if it weren't for the fact that at the very same time, we are treated to a parallel scene where the Six in Baltar's head is getting him beaten to a bloody pulp too. It's like a sadomasochism sundae with two flavors of Six and two flavors of fucked-up sweaty dudes. When Baltar gets out of prison, a bunch of guards refuse to let him return to folk rock ninja central because right of assembly has been revoked. So the Six in his head urges him to try to get in, promising he won't be hurt. Of course he is hurt, and is being beaten with rifle butts when Lee arrives in the nick of time to say that right of assembly has been restored.

So you've got bloody Tigh lying there sucking face with Six, and you've got bloody Baltar stumbling into his sex cult cave after the police brutality orgy. I know it's supposed to be this meaningful moment of parallel experience and transcendence-through-pain, but it just comes across as clumsy and wrong and gross.

The episode was partly rescued by one disturbing scene towards the end where Tyrol gets drunk off his ass and tells Adama — loudly, in the middle of the bar — that he never loved Cally. It's a raw and truthful moment in an episode that's mostly a bloody mess of overwrought symbolism. Adama is trying to comfort Tyrol over his loss, and Tyrol just busts out with a whole screaming speech about how Cally wasn't an angel, and he didn't love her — he just settled for her. And then he raises his voice more, so everyone can hear, and yells, "How many of us settled because the people we really loved were dead or dying or Cylons!" At that moment, when those of us who have been tuning in for four seasons remember Tyrol's intense affair with the original Sharon Cylon, the scene is genuinely moving. Because the humans have been so reduced that even their love lives are impoverished.

While it makes for good drama, Tyrol's outburst doesn't improve the poor guy's life. In fact, it gets him fired after he challenges Adama to send him off the ship. Probably a good idea to fire Tyrol anyway, since he's been so tripped out that he is making a bunch of mistakes when he fixes the Vipers in the engineering bay.

As the episode concludes, we're in an incredibly awful, bleak place. Tyrol has just flushed his career down the toilet, and Tigh has just had something way more intense than sex with Six. And Baltar is giving yet another religious-maniac speech to the folk rock ninja ladies, while Lee and the cops and Foster watch. Covered in blood, leaking his usual tears, he declares that his true belief is that we are all perfect. It's the same speech Foster gave him earlier, and which he resisted.

I'm still unclear on why the "we're all perfect" thing is supposed to be bad, but clearly it is. So of course Baltar is all over it.

We begin with Cavil's resurrection in the Cylon goo chamber, where a bunch of his buddies (including the "swing vote" Sharon) are toweling him off and getting seriously grumpy about how the Six models got the Centurions to blast the shit out of them. Turns out "swing vote" Sharon is doing the nasty with Cavil, and they start making out even before he's scraped all the rebirth sludge off his face. Nice.

Sharon calls the Six rebellion a form of "ethnic cleansing" because it eliminated all the Cavils and Simons from one of the Cylon ships. We know something bad is going to happen when Cavil grins evilly and replies, "Teach me to trust a democracy." I love the idea that Cylon society is based on democracy, but one that's being destroyed by the religious mania of the Sixes. Later in the episode, that point is driven home when Cavil and his buddies trick the Sixes and Sharons into an ambush. Out of range of the Resurrection Ship, they begin bombing the shit out of the Sixes, "really killing them" as a Sharon puts it.

"They will have their god to look after their immortal souls," observes Cavil.

"What about ours?" asks swing-vote Sharon.

"We don't have souls — we're machines, remember?" he replies tartly.

Atheist robots against evangelical robots in deep space! Now we're cooking with gas.

Meanwhile, on Starbuck's secret mission to scout for Earth based on her visions, things aren't going so well. Starbuck is sweaty most of the time, totally doesn't know where she's going, and keeps painting pictures of Earth's solar system on the ceiling of her cabin. I like macho Starbuck, but weird art girl Starbuck not so much. Luckily, her angst explodes into some seriously rough, angry sex with Anders.

It may be all nookie and art projects for Starbuck and Co., but back on Galactica the press corps are starting to ask questions. Why are Starbuck and a bunch of the crew gone for three weeks on a classified mission? In one of those oddly West Wing moments in this show, we are treated to a fairly lengthy meeting of the quorum — with Lee Adama sitting in as the most junior member — where the action gets explosive when Lee points out in front of the press that the president has a secret "executive order 112" to create puppet courts whose judges are all appointed by her. BSG creators Ron Moore and David Eick are not afraid to get wonky, you know what I mean? This is practically an ACLU press release about the Patriot Act.

So Lee is standing up to Roslin, which is awesome. But he's being coached behind the scenes by Zarek, which is not so awesome. On the bright side, Roslin is dying and we get to watch Admiral Adama reading to her in the hospital from a Dashiell Hammett-sounding novel about a detective in Caprica City called Love and Bullets. I hope the author of said novel shows up in spinoff show Caprica. I've always wanted to find out what it would be like to write hard boiled fiction on another planet.

The best subplot by far in this episode, however, is Cally's discovery that hubby Tyrol is a skinjob. She's been snot-nosed and depressed as usual, screaming at Tyrol about not spending enough time with her. In between popping space valiums, she decides to find Tyrol when he's late getting back to their cabin — and discovers him in the bar with Foster, who is talking in her newfound Creepy Voice about how great it is to be "open to changes" as a Cylon. While inappropriately stroking Tyrol's elbow.

It all looks very bad, so you can understand when Cally flips out and then follows Tyrol on a different night, only to discover the real reason he's been hanging out with Foster. She eavesdrops on a meeting of the sleeper agents, figures out that there's a skinjob conspiracy, and goes completely batshit. After braining Tyrol with a wrench (not fatally), she tries to suck herself and her hybrid baby out the airlock.

And here's the awesome dose of awesome: Foster comes into the airlock in the nick of time and talks Cally down in a hazy scene of tearful bonding and "yes we're Cylon but we're not evil" PSA messages. Just as Cally is coming around and deciding not to commit suicide, Foster punches her in the face, steals her baby, and sets the airlock to "kill Cally." Holy crap! I am liking this new evil Foster a lot.

By the way? I am so glad Cally is dead. She was a whiny bitch who never did anything but cry.

Before we jump into the cool Cylon stuff, let's check in with the humans.

A lot of the human characters become their own foils in this episode, called "Six of One." Adama finds himself believing that Starbuck's return is a miracle, and that she may indeed hold the key to finding Earth as she claims. Roslin, who has always been a religious woman and has led the whole fleet into danger to follow her goddess-motivated instincts, has become the hard-bitten doubter. She's clearly pissed about her impending death from cancer, and gets into a pretty nasty fight with Adama over Starbuck. Roslin doesn't there's anything miraculous about Starbuck — she just thinks the macho pilot is a Cylon. Probably doesn't help things that Starbuck broke into the president's bedroom with a gun and screamed at her about how she knows the way to Earth.

And Lee, Adama's military jock son, has started wearing stretchy v-neck sweaters after deciding for sure to join the council to work with Zarek on political stuff. There's a lot of tearful "goodbye to Lee" scenes among the military types in this episode, and when Lee gives the news to Starbuck in her prison cell they share one of those tongue-down-your-throat moments that prove the two of them need to do some therapeutic communicating and work through their issues by using "I' statements.

Meanwhile the four Cylon sleeper agents decide that Baltar, king of the folk-rock ninja girl cult, might have some insights into their Cylonic predicament. But how will they establish contact with him? "He poked a Cylon," Tigh says in his most I-am-a-fucked-up-badass voice. So it's decided that poor Foster will get into Baltar's confidence by fucking him. Were you thinking the sexual issues swirling around Baltar couldn't get any more nauseating after last week's cult sex moment? Well I've got news for you. TEN TIMES MORE YUCKY. But yucky with a cause, because it looks like Baltar's hookup with Foster may well change him into a guy with a shred of decency. Especially after Foster cries when they fuck, and then asks him plaintively whether Cylons cry.

Oh, and by the way, Baltar is now seeing Baltar in his head — the dressy Baltar that Caprica Six used to see in her head when Baltar wasn't around. Yeah, it's a very what-the-hell moment when Baltar talks to Baltar about porking Foster.

So while Baltar is getting down and Adama and Roslin are not getting it on, the Cylons are falling apart. In a Cylon council meeting, we discover that the Cylons suspect the final five are in the human fleet, and that the Sixes, Boomers and Leobens want to reach out to them somehow. Cavil, on the other hand, wants to follow the rules, which say that the Cylons shouldn't think or talk about the final five. Six makes a passionate speech about following the destiny of the one true god, and how there is some mystical thing they need to know because of what the "original programmers" intended. I think this is the first time I've heard them talk about the "original programmers." Who the hell are they?

So Six is basically advocating a kind of intelligent design theory of life, where the Cylons should figure out what the original programmers wanted, and follow the destiny intended for them by those programmers. Cavil, on the other hand, is all rationalism. He wants to keep up the orderly military Cylon fleet, and screw destiny. Especially if that destiny involves dealing with humans or upsetting the Cylon social order.

Turns out that Cylon social order is much less cohesive than we were led to believe in previous episodes. Though we've seen human-sympathizers among the Cylons before, it has always seemed as if the Cylon models acted as unanimous, collective-consciousness units. But in this episode, we find out that it isn't just Sharon 2 and Caprica Six who can become Model Traitors and go against what others in their model want. In a fight between Cavil's faction and Six's faction over the whole destiny vs. rationalism thing, one of the Sharon models defects and goes over to the Cavil side.

Apparently that's never happened before in an official Cylon council vote, and it results in the most explosive and cool development of this and last season.

Here's how it happens. We find out that the toaster Cylons (the Raider ships and Centurion warriors) aren't just born obedient animals. They are actually born as thinking beings whose minds are "shaved down" or "suppressed" by the Cavils and Simons. Six, Leoben, and Sharon want Cavil's crew to stop drilling the brains out of the Raiders and Centurions (awesome Raider brain-drilling scene, by the way). They view the evolving intelligence of the toasters as part of the one true god's plan, destiny, all that crap. Cavil and Co. think it's better to have dumb warriors to fight for them and don't mind doing a lot of brain-drilling to make those warriors into killing machines.

When the issue of whether to keep drilling or not comes to a vote, there's a stalemate. But then one of the Sharons defects to Cavil's side. Whoa. Apparently no Cylon has ever voted against its model before. The Cylons are starting to become individuals. What that means, in the short term, is that Samuel gets to keep drilling on the Raiders.

In the long term what it means is that Six stages a coup. She removes the intelligence suppressors in the Centurion's brains, and tells them about how they and their Raider brothers are being oppressed. Then she walks into the Council chamber to confront Cavil. At first Cavil is cavalier, yelling at Six that her beliefs really "rankle his ass." I love a Cylon whose ass gets rankled, by the way. That's when she brings in the big guns — a bunch of Centurions — and tells Cavil about how pissed his toaster brothers are. It's class warfare among the Cylons! Needless to say, the Centurions blow away the Cavils, Simons, and Number Fives who are hanging out in the meeting room.

A big question for next episode is what exactly this coup means. Can't Cavil and Co. just get reborn? Why would it even make any difference if the Centurions killed them? I'm also looking forward to finding out what a smart Centurion and fully-intelligent Raider might have to say. Will more models start factionalizing like Sharon did? These are exactly the kinds of interesting, meaty developments that are putting BSG back on track this season. We're also getting answers about how the Cylons run their society, and concrete shifts in our long-static characters.

And — may the one true god help me — I'm even curious about what's going to happen with greasy Gaius and weepy Foster after their night of grody love.

One thing we know for sure: Adama is following his instincts and as the show concludes he's secretly given Starbuck and Helo an old garbage ship so they can try to find Earth — based on Starbuck's "feeling." So Starbuck is off on a maverick mission, Baltar is poking a Cylon again, and the Raiders are about to start reading Karl Marx.

So say we all!