I won't mince words: There was something disappointing about Daybreak. The pacing was choppy, and the narrative choices it made - delving into Baltar and Starbuck's last days before the nuclear holocaust - seemed an odd place to go as the series is coming to a close. Why go back to the past and fill in details about Baltar's relationship with his dad when we need to tie up all those loose ends with the human-cylon war, what's up with Hera, how the Fleet will find a planet, and he fate of Baltar's girl army (among other things)?

To be fair, it's hard to say whether the episode felt weak because it was the first hour of a three-hour story which will ultimately pay off. However I think it's reasonable to ask that the episode feel meaty on its own, and advance the story forward without showing us that Baltar's family relationships looked sort of like a sadder version of the show Frasier.

There were two major developments in the show last night: One that was central to the episode, and one that was happening in the background but was no less important. The first was that Adama at last decided that the Fleet should send a chunk of people after Hera and the Cylon Colony. Basically he was able to do this by plugging Anders into the naked hybrid goo interface and prying the coordinates of the Colony out of his ramblings. Turns out the Colony is awesomely located right above the singularity of a black hole. I can only hope that this will lead to many jokes about how the singularity is near, or how the Fleet is on the cusp of a post-human singularity, or many other things that are possibly only funny to futurists and Vernor Vinge.

In a dramatic scene, Adama and Starbuck tape down a red line in the ship bay and ask for volunteers to stand on one side of the line if they want to join the showdown with Cavil and Co. As we watch people trickle and then pour over that line, the scene grows its emotional power. It's the kind of final battle prep you'd expect to see as a story reaches its climax, and it bodes well for this week's finale.

The other major development, which I feel was rather glossed over, was Baltar's power as a leader of the burgeoning girl police force of the Fleet. As the episode is coming to a close, we see him walking through the Galactica with the woman who ran the cult in his absence. He's tasked her with getting a lot of weaponry, and she's reporting back that the sex cult is now one of the most powerfully-armed organizations in the Fleet. Baltar is set to position himself as a major player in the post-Galactica Fleet Order. Where is he going with this? We don't know, but his Head Six is pleased.

The rest of the episode felt bloated, though at times emotionally intense, as we were tugged back in time to the last days of New Caprica. We learn that Roslin's entire family - two sisters and her father - was killed in a car accident by a drunk driver right after her sister's baby shower. We discover that Baltar had a cantankerous old dad who was a working class radical and that he spends a ton of money trying to keep a nurse to care for him. Six endears herself to Baltar by finding an old folks home that Cranky Dad loves. Also we at last meet Lee's brother/Starbuck's fiance Zak - yes, he's hott - and discover that Kara used to cook. Plus, Lee has always had a dangerous, alcohol-tinged crush on her.

I have nothing against flashbacks per se, nor these flashbacks specifically. But I did think it was a weird and probably wrong choice to bring them in at this point in the show's arc. I understand why showrunners Moore and Eick wanted to do it, because it helps give us an emotional context for the terrifying war that is sure to come this week. But we already have an emotional attachment to all these characters, and some last-minute backstory isn't going to change that.

What this episode left us with for the finale this week is a seemingly-impossible task: Filling every outstanding plothole, plus staging a dramatic singularity fight, all in two hours. Can it be done? Or will this series end not with a bang, but with a fail?

With only two more episodes after Friday's "Islanded in a Stream of Stars," it's only fair that this show is leading us into its final historical synthesis. What I thought was most intriguing about this episode, directed by Edward James Olmos, was that it showed us what the future fleet might look like as it becomes a human-cylon multiculture. And that multiculture won't be one of dark disco weirdness like we see on the cylon base ship and at the cylon Colony. It's going to look just like Fleet culture as we've always known it, full of bickering, politics and exploration.

That's why I'm fond of this clip of the Quorum, above, where the new political leaders from each ship debate the future of the Galactica. A cylon, Six, now sits on the Quorum and argues with the rest of them. Instead of setting up an authoritarian government that rules the human one, as they did on New Caprica, the cylons are now joining the humans' fledgling democracy.

The great dream of a hybrid race of human-cylons teeters on the brink of extinction now that Boomer has kidnapped Hera, Athena and Helo's kid and the only person we're sure is the product of a human-cylon coupling. But when Boomer figures out that Hera can do that creepy projection thing she did with Tyrol last week, it's starts to look like Hera is more machine than human. I'm thinking there won't be a sudden, pseudo-spiritual blending of human and cylon after all: Maybe the two groups will just have to learn to live together in the messy, complicated way people from extremely different cultures always have.

That's certainly what Adama seems to imply when Starbuck tells him its the Fleet's destiny to go after Hera, and he refuses. "I've had it up to here with destiny," he yells. Are we going to see a new anti-woo-woo regime on the Galactica? It seems like it, though Adama follows up his giant speech about rationality by smoking a joint with Roslin in sick bay. And Starbuck follows up her "destiny" speech by begging Baltar to "go do some science" to figure out her dead body problem. Ah yes, the Fleet is plunging into the future without losing any of its (realistic) contradictions.

As Athena and Helo's relationship falls apart, and Tigh and Ellen go back to their drunken, fighting ways, Baltar is trying to patch things up with his ex, Caprica Six. There's a great scene where he slimes and whines his way up to Caprica and offers his condolences about her and Tigh's lost baby. At that moment, we see how great the chasm is between the real-life Caprica and the one Baltar has in his head. While Head Six beams at Baltar's efforts to spread religion in the Fleet, the real Caprica scorns him and says she has no interest in "joining his harem."

In other news, Tigh is becoming the first self-hating cylon. He wants to reject his relationship with Ellen and the other cylons and embrace his human side (which he associates with "the old man"). Will he accept his cylon nature and the "millions of children" Ellen claims he has - the eight models of cylon? Or will he ignore the Search For Hera and remain Adama's sidekick forever?

The truly awesome question of this episode, though, is what's going to happen to Anders. A bunch of the cylons hooked his brain up to Galactica's power grid, which he hooks into the same way the cylon hybrids hook into the networks of the base ships. He even starts babbling in hybrid-speak and issuing commands to the ship, which has enough cylon goo in it that it's become a kind of neural network. I'm really hoping that Anders becomes the Galactica's hybrid navigator, not only so that we can see him lying naked in goo but also because that would turn Galactica into the ultimate piece of hybrid technology.

Unfortunately, Anders keeps crashing all the ship's systems, so they have to take him offline. But he'll be back on: Mark my words.

As the episode comes to a close, Hera is in Cavil's creepy hands and we're still wondering if Boomer will grow a conscience. It seems impossible that she'll let Cavil dissect Hera to discover the secret of human-cylon reproduction. Plus, Six and Roslin have started having their opera house dreams about Hera again, so it does seem as if that Hera destiny crap will have some relevance, and soon.

Meanwhile, Baltar has discovered that Starbuck is indeed undead and announces it to a whole bunch of random people, explaining that she proves "angels are among us." WTF? Let's go back to the Anders hybrid subplot please, and figure out what Starbuck is without any references to creatures who properly belong in the show Supernatural, not BSG.

What's certain, however, is that the humans and cylons on Galactica are learning to work together better and better. One of the subplots in this episode involves a group of humans and cylons dying in an accident as they repair the ship's hull. A Six saves a bunch of humans before getting sucked out the airlock, and everybody at the funeral is blended into a bonding montage.

My guess is that the Anders hybrid thing will save Adama from having to give up the Galactica. But maybe not - in the final scene of the episode, Adama tells Tigh that it's time to abandon ship. If only Boomer would abandon that creepy house projection place instead.

I think possibly one of the problems with this episode was that it explored incredible betrayals enacted by a character - Boomer - whose entire life has been all about betraying everyone who has loved her. So there was a bit of a "no duh" feeling about the scenario, as well as a lot of skepticism about why Tyrol wound up trusting Boomer again.

Intercut between Boomer's many perfidious (and lascivious) scenes was a Starbuck subplot that reminded me of the worst moments on the poop ship when Starbuck totally lost it and started painting her cabin and dancing with Leoben. Didn't Star Trek: TNG teach us never again to do the wise piano player routine, even if it isn't on the holodeck and doesn't include Brent Spiner singing?

The point is, the episode was really uneven. Amazing and disturbing things happened, and there was a cool plot twist, but unfortunately there was a lot of randomness too. Let us now delve into the full WTF that steered the lives of Boomer and Starbuck in "Someone to Watch Over Me."

If you recall, Boomer was the first sleeper cylon that we learned about way back in season one. She was an officer working with Tyrol, having an affair with him that nobody was allowed to know about because he was technically reporting to her. They were hot and tragic, but there was never a sense that they were planning a future together - it seemed mostly like they were having a torrid sex thing. Then Boomer got all freaked out, and they broke up, and then her cylon circuits turned on and she shot Adama. Though Adama recovered eventually, Boomer didn't. Cally, Tyrol's soon-to-be cheating and snot-faced wife, assassinated Boomer before there was even a trial.

On Friday we learned that as Boomer died, she whispered, "I love you Chief," to Tyrol. We also learned that Tyrol has been pining for Boomer all these years (which we sort of already guessed), and now that she's arrived on Galactica with Ellen all he wants to do is get busy with her. So he starts visiting her in prison, sharing freaky "cylon projections" with her - basically they go to a virtual world together, which is apparently the dream house they designed back in the hot affair days. Boomer claims she's missed Tyrol every day and goes to this dream house of theirs, where she's also whipped up a fake child whose main characteristic appears to be collecting stuffed animals and making Tyrol cry as he bares his teeth.

After all this domestic brain bonding, Tyrol of course wants to protect Boomer from extradition to the cylon ship where the rebel cylons want to try her for treason. Remember, Boomer is the sole Number 8 who sided with the Cavil cylons - and she's also having sex with Cavil, who seems to have sex with everybody, including Ellen, his daughter/mother. All I can say is: Gross. And it only got grosser.

In fact, the more disgustingly manipulative Boomer got, the better this episode was. The scenes where she shows Tyrol their dream house and fake kid felt incredibly over-the-top, and despite all her protestations to the contrary, I think Boomer was doing it purely to frak with Tyrol. Her scheme works, too. Rather than letting the humans extradite Boomer, he basically goes nuts. He engineers a power outage on Galactica, knocks out a handy 8, and switches her with the imprisoned Boomer.

Yay, Boomer is free! That means she can go beat the shit out of Athena, tie her up in a locker, and pretend to be her when Helo comes home looking for a little mid-day hump. (See clip.) This scene is so twisted and awesome that it almost tipped the episode over into the mega-zone. After gratuitously doing Helo, Boomer wanders over to the daycare center, grabs Hera, drugs her, then packs her in a food supply box which she loads onto her sneaking-away ship as Tyrol glows with "you made me a fake daughter" pride. When a bleeding, scantily-clad Athena stumbles into the Bay to tell the truth, it's too late: Boomer's got the kid, and she basically blasts a hole in the ship as she jumps away to good old Cavil.

So basically Cavil totally played everybody. He let the Fleet think that Boomer fled his ships with Ellen, but in fact he'd let Ellen go just to get Boomer into the Fleet again. Tricky! Even Ellen was fooled.

Now the ship is injured even worse than it already was, the president has passed out (or died?), and everything is going to hell. So of course Starbuck is spending all her time getting drunk in the bar, listening to this piano player who may or may not exist. Let's call him Piano Man, in honor of Billy Joel.

Piano Man basically has a long therapy session with Starbuck, in which she tells him all about her dad (boo hoo - he was a Piano Man too and he left her family one day and never came back) and her whole I-burned-my-own-dead-body problem. In response, he pats her on the head, teaches her to play piano again just the way daddy did, and says things about how not knowing what the hell is going on is actually a great thing (and it had better be, if you want to enjoy these parts of the episode).

Either Piano Man is actually Starbuck's dad, or is a dad-related figment of her imagination, or something even weirder. The point is, after a bunch of really long scenes that don't involve beatings or sex, Piano Man finally gets Starbuck to play this tune that's been in her head. And it's part of the freaky-haunting music by Bear McCreary you've been hearing throughout the whole show. It's also obviously some kind of Final Five alarm noise, because as soon as Starbuck plays it Tigh does his whole dramatic chipmunk face with the buggy eye.

All the Finals run over to Starbuck at the piano and start asking, "Where did you hear that music?" And mysteriously, Piano Man is gone. It's just Starbuck there, with some notes on a sheet of paper - notes whose pattern match a pattern that Hera was drawing right before she got Boomer snatched! Whoa!

Meanwhile, Anders is still in a coma but his brain is creating really awesome screen saver patterns on the flat screen monitor that's showing us his "brain waves." Maybe those brain waves will turn out to be in the same pattern as Starbuck's song? Tune in next week, to find out whether Hotdog will get another line.

Spoilers ahead!

After last week's improbably rapid set of reveals about the Final Five and Ellen's role in everything, this week gave us a chance to integrate that information in an unexpected way: dark comedy. Ellen's return to the Galactica could have been played in a lot of different ways - overwrought melodrama comes to mind. But instead, writer Jane Espenson took it in the direction of pitch-black humor right away. As Ellen emerges into the ship bay with Boomer, Hot Dog mutters, "How many dead chicks are out there?"

Ellen starts boozing it up right away, and her inevitable tangles with Tigh's new girlfriend Caprica Six come across as monstrous in a Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? style - monstrous, certainly, but with a campy flare that gave this episode an unexpected depth. Suddenly we're seeing the Final Five and the cylons they created as a family. A psychotic, bickering family full of geniuses and tyrants, whose closets are full of metal skeletons.

I was particularly struck by this dynamic in the scenes at Anders' hospital bed, where Rebel Leader Six announces that the Final Five should come away with her and the other cylons on the Base Ship. She wants them to create a pure cylon society, away from the anti-cylon bigotry and violence of the humans, where they can finally recreate the lost 13th colony (which is a pure cylon colony, remember). Six suggests they put it to a vote where majority rules, which is a cylon custom. As Tory and Tyrol try to debate the merits of the plan, all Ellen and Tigh can do is have a crazed fight about Caprica's pregnancy. (See clip.) All the overlapping dialogue is wacky, tragic, and ultimately very human. There's even a dramatic chipmunk moment from Tigh, as he turns his head in horror as Ellen asks, "Six is pregnant?"

Ellen is so transparently manipulative that there's a sort of brilliance to her performance. Everybody knows she's being a snake, and yet they keep bending themselves to her will. She's been doing this same bitchy martyr routine on them for thousands of years, and they just keep falling for it. Family dysfunction transcends time and species, apparently.

And there are hints that Ellen is more than just an emotional manipulator. Though Tigh and Caprica's baby has been incredibly healthy, it suddenly dies almost directly after Ellen enters the picture. There's even a scene where Ellen places a hand on Caprica's belly after evilly confessing to having skank sex with Tigh upon her arrival. Baby killing from Ellen? Possibly. Certainly she's trying to kill Tigh and Caprica's relationship by voting to leave with the cylon rebels and forcing Tigh to choose whether to go with Caprica or stay on the ship he loves.

The other darkly funny thread that ran through this episode was Baltar's quest to assume power over his hippie sex cult again. In his absence during the mutiny, the women of his cult had to learn to fend for themselves - they stole weapons to defend their territory and keep gangs from stealing their food. It's at this moment that we realize how much Galactica's people are being torn apart by starvation and lawlessness. It isn't just Adama's precious ship that needs patching up, and Baltar is ready to step into the power vacuum with a new plan (aided by Head Six).

With a kind of sarcastic glee, Baltar takes command of his cult again after saying to Head Six that the only thing worse than leading his cult is being a member of it. So he spouts a bunch of nonsense about needing inner strength and feeding the poor and concludes by saying, "And we need guns. Big guns." He also has a rather mysterious meeting with the current powers-that-be on Galactica - Lee, Adama, the president - and offers them what he calls "the only human solution left" to the problems on Galactica. We never hear him say what this solution will be, though it's strongly implied that he'll be turning his love cult into a militia. To which I say: Yes! Galactica totally needs a zealous girl army to defeat the evil gangs.

The overarching issue that unites the disparate subplots in this episode - including an impending meeting between former lovers Boomer and Tyrol - is the melding of human and cylon. Even the Galactica itself is becoming a kind of hybrid baby, knitted together out of human and cylon technologies. Based on the way we've seen the humans and cylons behave when they start getting obsessed with being purebloods, it seems that hybridity is the way to go. Both in terms of survival and in terms of ethics.

What "Deadlock" did best, however, was show us how petty failings like greed and jealousy always return to muck up grand plans for the two races. Ellen votes to segregate human from cylon simply to twist the knife in Tigh's back, not because she really thinks it's what's best for the Fleet. And Baltar offers his "human solution" to the problems of the Galactica simply because he'd rather hog the spotlight than be a follower.

Will the cylons and humans rise above their family bickering to steer their people into a better future? Or will the series end like a certain Greek tragedy where a mother sleeps with her son, just the way the Final Five keep sleeping with the cylons they spawned? We only have four episodes left to find out.

Of course no back story could ever really live up to the dramatic build-up of four seasons. For years we've wondered why the cylons went (literally) ballistic, and what that had to do with thousands of years of human/cylon conflict and galactic diaspora. And at last, in the episode "No Exit," Anders' brain injury unleashes a flood of memories that explain what the Final Five were all about.

As Starbuck and the final four cylons listen, Anders moves between mega-exposition and brain-injury babble reminiscent of hybrid speak. It turns out the final five worked together at a company on Earth where Ellen rediscovers the ancient cylon technology of resurrection. Apparently the tech had been forgotten on Earth because cylons could reproduce naturally, but Ellen and her crew are worried about an apocalypse (which they hear about from some creatures nobody can see except them - though the apocalypse itself is still never explained) and so they set up a way to download themselves to a Resurrection Ship when Earth nukes itself. OK, that helps explain the Earth backstory.

Then things get even weirder. It turns out that the Final Five spent centuries traveling across the galaxy to find the twelve colonies and warn them to treat their AIs well or they'd be the victims of a terrible cylon uprising. When they arrive, the centurion rebellion has already happened and the five strike a bargain with the centurions to prevent more bloodshed. They'll create 8 humanoid cylon models for the centurions, which turn out to be the skinjobs we know and love (minus a new, mysterious Number Seven called Daniel who was a "sensitive artist"). Apparently the centurions, like the final five, believe in "one true God" who created humans in his image. To honor this God, they want nothing more than brethren who look like the God-created humans they've been murdering. (Um, yeah.)

At this point, Anders' exposition in the episode is intercut with even more exposition from an Ellen model who has been awakened from the goo by Cavil. It turns out that Cavil was the first humanoid model Ellen created for the centurions, and he has some serious mommy issues with her. (Having sex with her back on New Caprica is just the tip of the iceberg for our freaky Oedipal skinjob.) As you can see in the clip above, Cavil is angry that Ellen imposed her idea of God on his body. He wants to be a machine, to fully embrace his identity as a non-human. Plus, he's angry that Ellen made him in the image of her father John (she calls him John, too). And he's jealous of Ellen's other cylon children, particularly Daniel, whom he destroyed long ago.

In many ways, this episode turned Cavil into the Big Bad of the series, which rang false. Apparently Cavil grew so enraged at Ellen and the rest of the Final Five that he had their memories erased and dropped them onto Caprica so that they could learn a lesson about how lame these allegedly God-made humans are. (This BARELY makes sense, given Tigh's long history with Adama - one is still left wondering how the Final Five were dropped to Caprica at different points.) It also seems as if Cavil erased memories of the Final Five from all the skinjob models except his own.

What this means is that the destruction of the colonies, the cylon slave uprising, and the whole cylon vendetta against the humans, is basically the result of an atheist son being pissed at the way his religious mother imposed her beliefs on him. We've gone from justifying the cylon's bloody war with a (somewhat understandable) quest for vengeance to justifying it by saying it was all the result of a sadistic, power-hungry mama's boy mindwiping everybody and turning them into his war puppets.

I think this is a big mistake. Turning the whole human/cylon conflict into the brainwash-enabled creation of one angry cylon really drains a lot of the interesting politics out of this show. If we take the Cavil backstory at face value, the show becomes a Dallas-style family melodrama instead of a political epic about clashes between colonizer/colonized and slaver/slave. I know what you're thinking: Why can't it be both, ala Dune, surely an excellent example of family melodrama that's inextricably linked to geopolitical strife? I absolutely think BSG can be both, but "No Exit" did a pretty clumsy job of bringing the two together. It was as if the Cavil/Ellen conflict wiped away the larger human/cylon conflict in this episode, and turned all the social dilemmas we've seen into the unintended consequences of Cavil's mindwipes.

But we do see hints that broader social issues are still on the simmer. Adama has made Tyrol into the Chief again, admitting that sometimes a cylon is the best man for the job. And Tyrol is going to integrate cylon biotech into Galactica to prevent the ship from falling apart. So human and cylon cultures are being integrated together in a way that has seemingly never happened before.

And Roslin is definitely retiring from the Presidency: She's asked Lee to do the "heavy lifting" for her in government, and to assemble a new Quorum - perhaps with representatives from each ship, rather than from their abandoned planets. Members of the Fleet will embrace their new identities as citizens of ships rather than citizens of colonies.

But we still lack some crucial information, so expect more exposition in our Final Five Weeks of BSG. The story of Kobol, the original colony, remains murky. Based on what Ellen and Anders say, it seems that the human on Kobol created cylons who rebelled against them the way the centurions did on Caprica. Some of the cylons from that original Kobol conflict fled to Earth and founded their colony. Ellen claims ignorance of the temple on Kobol where D'Anna saw images of the Final Five, and says God must have put their images there.

The relationship between Cavil and the rest of the cylons still needs to be explained. How exactly did his mindwipes work? How did he plant the Final Five on Earth? How did he get the skinjobs on his side? Why did he murder the Daniel line of cylons? (And is Starbuck a genderbent Daniel?)

And we also don't know what's going to happen when Cavil opens up Ellen's brain and tries to yank out the secret to recreating the Resurrection Ship.

My hope as we enter the homestretch is that show creators Ron Moore and David Eick conclude by exploring how Battlestar is ultimately about two groups' search for social justice - not about a sadistic little boy who blew up the world(s) because he's angry that his body isn't made of steel.

Spoilers ahead!

"Blood on the Scales," the title of Friday's episode, referred to the kind of justice we saw meted out in this shoot-em-up resolution to the Gaeta and Zarek-led mutiny against the Fleet leadership. Both Adama and, later, the mutineers are subjected to mock trials that end in executions. These trials, and the ongoing tensions within the fleet over the human-cylon alliance, raise the question of what exactly counts as justice when you're marooned in space, pursued by ruthless enemies, and have no homeland to look forward to.

As we learned over the past two episodes, Gaeta and Zarek's idea of justice is to separate the human fleet from the rebel cylons. And then to execute Adama for the crime of "aiding and giving comfort to the enemy." While their actions are heinous, we can understand their motivations: The cylon have tortured and killed so many humans that it's hard to swallow the idea of trusting them with the future of the Fleet.

However, I think one of the flaws in this episode was that Zarek went so far over to the dark side that he became a moustache-twirling caricature of a bad guy rather than a misguided political leader. First he kills the entire Quorum, and then he turns Gaeta's trial of Adama into a joke when he appoints himself judge. There's a nice return from slimy-but-good-hearted laywer Romo Lampkin, who is appointed to defend Adama. However, even this corrupt attorney knows immediately there will be no defense, merely the vaguest pretense of it. If Zarek is judge and Gaeta is the prosecution, what other possible outcome could there be but execution?

So Zarek becomes the ultimate bad guy, who murders at random instead of mutinies for understandable reasons. And Adama himself becomes the ultimate action hero, a role which hardly suits our shades-of-gray leader. He makes wiseass cracks during the trial and chews the scenery: Yes, it's wonderful to see him taking charge and regaining the ship with help from Lee and Starbuck, but the tone feels a little too Die Hard for a show whose greatest strength is showing that even the most horrifying enemies have complicated motivations that make them wrong rather than evil.

Don't get me wrong - there was a lot to praise in this episode. The sequences where Tyrol escapes, in part aided by one of Zarek's henchmen who realizes that Tyrol is not the enemy after all, are terrific. And I liked the mood established in the faster-than-light drive room, partly because of Tyrol's desperate attempts to destroy the drive before Zarek can jump the Fleet away, and partly because the FTL drive just looked frakkin cool. Starbuck and Lee's rescue of the cylon prisoners and the retaking of the Galactica CIC was amazing, and the final scene where Gaeta and Zarek were executed was pitch-perfect (though I could have stood a little less of Gaeta's last confessions to Baltar).

However, what this episode really left unanswered was whether Adama and his crew's notion of justice was really so much better than Zarek's. Obviously Adama isn't killing people randomly to gain power, and he does make some efforts to answer to the Quorum, the Fleet's main political body. However, the Quorum has been almost unanimously opposed to the alliance with the rebel cylons, and especially opposed to those cylons upgrading the Fleet's FTL drives. Indeed, the alliance with the cylons has been done by fiat, ordered by Adama (and to a certain extent Lee and Roslin), over the wishes of the people.

As viewers, we may sympathize with the rebel cylons and know that they are basically good people - at least, as far as we know - but the Fleet doesn't know that. Is it really just to force the Fleet to use cylon technology to find another habitable planet? Why can't the cylons just follow along with the human Fleet at its slower pace while the humans grow accustomed to the idea of sharing their fate with their former enemies? Last night, we learned that in a pinch, the cylons will defend themselves rather than helping to defend the Fleet - they are about to jump their base ship away when Adama announces that he's taken over the Galactica again.

Friday's episode seemed to brush those questions about the wisdom of the cylon alliance aside in favor of an action-packed "retaking the ship" plot, which is fair enough. Sometimes we need to retake the goddamn ship. But at this point it's hard to ignore the fact that Adama's leadership is no less authoritarian than Zarek's would have been. We simply hope he's making the right decisions. I guess what I'm saying is that just because Adama may be right, that does not make him just.

Spoilers ahead!

In "The Oath," a young tactical officer named Felix Gaeta lead a rebellion against Admiral Adama's leadership, challenging the military government's choice to ally with the Rebel cylon fleet. Though Gaeta has been living in an ethical gray area for a while, many were taken aback by his sudden flare-up of evil.

His transformation, however, represented the culmination of several plot lines stretching all the way back to the Fleet's encounter with the fascistic Battlestar Pegasus, whose violent, military leader Admiral Cain was a dark foil for Adama. If you were a dork like me and watched the DVD extras, you'd have seen a plucky, cute side of the early Gaeta. In one extra scene, the young tactical officer meets with officers from the Pegasus, who say they can transfer to him all the data on their shipboard computers, including some kind of futuristic mega-Wikipedia that contains all human knowledge. Gaeta smiles and says, "Hey, do you have any porn?"

We know that Gaeta served with Adama for a few years before the Cylon attack, and his talent with techie tactics has helped the Fleet out of several scrapes. He's also often held the ship's leadership to a high moral standard, and has a history of acting on his convictions. He's the guy who uncovered Tigh and Dualla's plot to rig the election when Baltar is running against Roslin. When he refuses to keep quiet about this perversion of democracy, he's rewarded by new president Baltar with the position of presidential aide.

And that's when our plucky, idealistic young Gaeta started to go bad. Baltar decides to bring the Fleet to New Caprica, which is soon occupied by a cylon force. During the cylon occupation, Gaeta tries his best to retain his strong moral center. When he discovers that resistance leaders are being executed, he betrays Baltar and begins secretly passing information to resistance leaders. Without his aid, it's likely the human resistance would never have succeeded. But when he returns to the Fleet, after risking his life repeatedly to save it, he's spit on by the people he saved.

Nobody believes that he was part of the resistance, and Starbuck's secret court almost has him airlocked. He's treated like a pariah, beaten, and nearly killed for a crime he did not commit. At the last minute, he's able to prove he was the resistance mole and Starbuck lets him go. Eventually, his role in the resistance is widely-known and he's given proper credit by the Fleet. Even after he's reintegrated into the fleet, however, he's still punished. He loses his leg in a clash between Helo and Starbuck during their search for Earth.

Still, as we learned in the webisodes "Face of the Enemy" that took place between the first and second half of this season, Gaeta has a lot on his conscience that we didn't know about. When he was working with the resistance on New Caprica, it turns out he developed a romantic relationship with a Number Eight Sharon model cylon whom he thought was helping him to sneak prisoners out of the cylon jail. But in "Face of the Enemy," his Number Eight reveals that she was, in fact, killing many of the prisoners he'd asked her to release. And then she kills more humans when they are stranded in a space capsule together, arguing that they had to die so he would have enough oxygen to survive. Worst of all, she blames Gaeta for the deaths of the prisoners back on New Caprica, claiming he suspected what she was doing and had done nothing to stop her.

At that point, it seems that all of the pain Gaeta has endured in his efforts to help the human Fleet comes crashing back into his brain. He's lost everything, now. All the sacrifices he made on New Caprica, and all the horrors he endured when he returned, seem for naught. Perhaps he really was the evil collaborator that Starbuck believed he was all along. In a fit of rage, he murders his Number Eight right before the Galactica rescues him.

It is this Gaeta who returns to the Galactica and begins the insurrection as the second half of season 4 begins. His confidence in his own moral goodness has been shattered, and his one positive relationship with a cylon has turned to terrifying betrayal. Though he hates Starbuck, he suspects that she may have been right about him after all. What happens to a person who believes they have been doing good, but then learns they have been collaborating with evil?

I think we have to regard Gaeta's actions in "The Oath" in this light. We know that the once-carefree and idealistic tactical officer has a history of speaking truth to power. He may not be one of the most powerful people in the Fleet, but he wasn't afraid to call shenanigans when Tigh tried to destroy the Fleet's nascent democracy by rigging the election. And he also wasn't afraid to challenge both Baltar and the occupying cylon fleet's power by passing intel to the human resistance. Throughout these trying times, Gaeta has kept himself together by believing that he's upholding moral principles and protecting the Fleet from abuses of power. He's the quintessential little guy who stands up to the Man.

The problem is that when Gaeta challenges the Man, even on legitimate moral grounds, it always makes things worse. When he challenged the rigged election, he wound up putting the weak and corrupt Baltar into power. And when he challenged Adama and Lee's alliance with the cylons - whom he knows from experience cannot be trusted - he allied himself with the power-hungry Zarek. While Zarek's intentions may have been good at one point, he long ago became a classic Machiavellian politician who uses people's idealism to manipulate them.

Unfortunately, the shattered Gaeta falls for Zarek's manipulation completely. Gaeta is still an idealist at heart, and he believes that the military's alliance with the cylons is yet another instance of corruption of power on Galactica. He's just discovered that cylon allies may not be what they seem. He sees the Zarek mutiny as the only way to save the human Fleet from the same fate that met those prisoners on New Caprica, the ones whose lives he trusted to a Number Eight.

If you consider Gaeta's actions from the perspective of all this history, it makes perfect sense that he tries to save the Fleet by taking out its most powerful members. And it also, tragically, makes sense that his efforts result in a situation far worse than the one he's trying to fix. Instead of saving his human brethren, he turns them against each other. Instead of saving lives, he destroys them.

It seems that Gaeta is beginning to realize this when Zarek kills an innocent bystander at the beginning of the episode, but at that point it's too late to turn back. Zarek has become a new version of Gaeta's Number Eight - an ally whom he trusts to save humanity, but who is actually bent on violently controlling it.

I think what's brilliant about "The Oath" is that Gaeta's perfidy may have the unintended consequence of saving the Fleet, just not in the way he expected. In the face of his mutiny, many of the characters who have been wallowing in ethical ambiguity suddenly sharpen up and remember their true duties. Starbuck returns to heroic soldier form when she rescues Lee from mutineers. Adama and Tigh reaffirm their bromantic love for each other as they fight side-by-side for the freedom of the Fleet - and for peace with the cylons. Even the tormented Tyrol returns to form, aiding the resistance against Zarek and Gaeta, risking his life to save president Roslin and Baltar.

Indeed, one of the most promising results of Gaeta's mutiny is the return of Roslin to the role of strong, decisive leader. She's been wanting to step down, enjoy her new romance with Adama, and slowly fade away. But when push comes to shove in "The Oath," she thinks fast and takes command, guiding Starbuck and Lee to Baltar's quarters, where she knows Baltar has a secret wireless communications system she can use to entreat the Fleet to resist the mutiny.

She delivers a stirring speech, begging for peace, and forges what I believe will become an important alliance with Baltar. Even Baltar, the whiny, greasy, morally blank fake religious leader, is redeemed by Gaeta's mutiny. In a pinch, he aids the president and Adama, despite their long history of animosity. And he tries to convince Gaeta to stand down, in a scene that's taut and moving.

For the first time in his life, Gaeta's efforts to save the Fleet may have worked. Just not in the way he intended.

There were a lot of great moments in this episode, written by former Deep Space 9 scribes Bradley Thompson and David Weddle, and the action came fast and intense. Moments after Adama arrives back on Galactica with cylon D'Anna, the careful house of cards that the sleeper agent cylons have built begins to tumble down. D'Anna knows exactly who the final five are, and as she steps off the shuttle she stares meaningfully at at the four we already know about. Without giving away what she knows, she announces that the four should feel free to come be with their people on the Base Ship. Until those four are on board the Base Ship, D'Anna says she'll continue holding the President, Baltar, and several pilots hostage.

Foster takes the bait first, feigning that she wants to go to the Base Ship to deliver the President's medication. But once she arrives, she tells Roslin off in a chilling speech and clearly wants nothing more to do with humanity.

Meanwhile, Tigh decides to take the high road and finally confesses his cylon status to Adama. Realizing his lifelong friend has been the enemy all along, Adama has a kind of mini-breakdown which is genuinely scary. After guzzling alcohol and punching his fists bloody on a mirror, the Admiral wails in his son Lee's arms until Lee takes matters into his own hands. And by "hands" I mean the airlock, where Tigh has probably wanted to go more times than we can count.

One of the major themes in this episode is how much the humans are willing to sacrifice to get to Earth. Because the prophesies have said that the final five cylons have been to Earth and know where it is, the humans want to hold on to those cylons until they've got the coordinates of the planet they hope to make their new home. Before Adama leaves the Base Ship, Roslin makes him promise that he'll blow up the entire Base Ship rather than hand over the cylons. And as Tigh stands trembling in the airlock, Lee is ready to sacrifice his father's greatest friend to convince D'Anna to release her human hostages.

We know the cylons want the final five for more complicated reasons than the humans do — the five hold religious significance to them, as well as the key to Earth. (Making all of this more complicated is the fact that D'Anna says there are only four of the final five in the fleet, leaving some to speculate that the fifth cylon is dead or was never in the fleet — though the imprisoned Six told Roslin that she could "sense" the final five nearby.)

Before Lee can make any sacrifices, however, Starbuck discovers that the Viper she drove home from her still-unexplained journey to Earth now contains the coordinates to the planet they've been searching for all this time. The coordinates show up on its instrument panels after Anders, Tyrol and Tigh feel a strange compulsion to visit the ship and drag Starbuck along. After she gets over her shock that Anders is a cylon, she realizes the humans got what they wanted from the final three — and in a dramatic scene, she races to the airlock to stay Tigh's execution and begin the weird process of forging a true alliance between the humans and rebel cylons.

Though the two groups make an uneasy peace, and the humans share Earth's coordinates with the Cylons, it's hard to forget the ruthlessness the humans have displayed in this episode. Roslin was willing to sacrifice not just herself but all the other human hostages on the Base Ship. And Lee was clearly prepared to toss all the stealth cylons — people who had been his friends and allies — out the airlock. Could any planet, any homeland, be worth such brutal sacrifices?

As the fleet prepares to jump to Earth, we see everyone celebrating: Lee practically rips off his shirt with joy, and Roslin and Adama almost make out. (Sadly, we don't get to see Romo dancing with his imaginary cat.) It's hard to understand why everybody is so psyched when they all remember so vividly how awful it was last time they tried to settle on a planet with Cylons. What makes them think Earth will be different from New Caprica? Or even from Caprica itself?

When we arrive at Earth, those dark questions seem retroactively to be the only ones we should have been asking all along. The gorgeous blue planet is right where the Viper's coordinates said it would be, and as the landers tear through foamy white clouds, I said a little chant to myself: Please don't make this lame. Don't make it be the 1980s, or the cro-magnon/Neanderthal era, or the Roman Empire. Don't make it be not really Earth, or a cliffhanger where we have to wait 8 months to find out whether Adama ever gets to touch Earth's soil.

I got my last wish first. Via grainy "alien world" cam, we see Adama dig into the sand of a beach . . . only to see it crumble between his fingers as a Geiger counter registers that it contains massive radiation. The landing crew is surrounded by the burned, weather-beaten ruins of what looks like it was once a city on the ocean. It's hard not to think the place is supposed to be New York, given that the place is so clearly intended to evoke that last moment from Planet of the Apes where we see the Statue of Liberty and realize humanity destroyed itself long ago.

The Earth the fleet finds is so unexpectedly depressing that the scene was a pure, tragic pleasure to watch. It also remained true to the heart of the show, which is at its core deeply dystopian and apocalyptic. This is not a show about happy reconciliation and exploration. It's about the shattered ruins of a species that has warred and slaved itself into an evolutionary corner. Battlestar Galactica forces us to look at how potentially ugly the future could get, and I'm glad show creators Ron Moore and David Eick weren't afraid to keep horrifying us.

Of course the discovery of the radioactive dirtball that is Earth is just setup for the show's final season, so eventually I'm sure we'll see a light in what appears completely nightmarish now. Already, we can begin asking intriguing questions. And no, I don't mean "who is the fifth cylon," which I could frankly care less about at this point. I mean the big questions, such as why we've been told repeatedly (by various semi-religious figures) that "all of this has happened before." Did the Earth humans create a bunch of cylons who bombed the crap out of them, jump-starting the exodus that led to the founding of the twelve colonies? Are the final five (or four, or whatever) descended from those original, Earth-bombing cylons?

More intriguing still: Who are we going to find on Earth? Because I'm sure the planet isn't empty.

You'll have to wait until the "first quarter" of 2009 to find out. But you know what? I don't feel as ripped off by that as I thought I would. The season concluded on a satisfying note — if that "arrival on Earth" scene had happened in a movie, I would have considered it a helluva great ending. Since this is TV, I can say it gave good cliffhanger, leaving me with really big questions that I won't easily forget about in the intervening months (especially since Moore and Co. have promised at least one TV movie before the year's end). This was season ender truly worthy of the promise BSG offered when I first watched the miniseries and thought, "Holy shit this show is too awesome for TV."

One of the big problems Battlestar has is its self-seriousness. I mean, it's hard not to be grim when the subject matter is the galaxy's last group of humans hanging on to species survival by a thread while being menaced by dangerous robots. But this season we've gotten a lot of egregious seriousness in episodes filled with Baltar's sermons and last week's abysmal cat-related brooding and Lee becoming the Emo President. "Hub," however, proves that you can have some pretty intense stuff happen while still taking the time to throw in some dark humor and cylon shit-talking.

As I said earlier, cylon politics are more interesting than human ones right now, and this episode explored why. Cylon loyalty is fragmenting as the bots move closer and closer to leading human lives — first, with several individual cylons refusing to do what others of their model do; and second, in this episode, with every cylon becoming mortal. The more ambiguous the cylons become, the more they seem to occupy an uncanny valley of character. They're human enough to arouse my recognition, and yet so clearly alien that I'm completely weirded out (but in a good way).

One of the best examples of this ambiguous human/not-human feeling the cylons are throwing off right now came early in the episode when Helo and a Sharon model are discussing how the fighter pilots should attack the Resurrection Hub, the giant ship whose tech allows the cylons to be born again. They're coming up with cool strategies when suddenly Helo gets some kind of crick in his neck. Sharon rubs his shoulders in some special way that Helo says only Athena knows how to do. Looking sort of embarrassed, Sharon admits she's been fascinated by his relationship with Athena, so she "accessed Athena's memories," and now those memories are hers.

I just love when Helo kind of backs away as Sharon says this, and then a distraught Sharon says awkwardly, "Sorry, I don't want this to be strange." It's like some kind of weird, future-robot-society version of meeting your ex — or meeting the memories of your wife in the body of a woman who looks exactly like her but isn't her and yet sort of is her. Is there etiquette for that?

Later, when Helo is arguing with the President that she shouldn't betray the cylons, we return to dystopian romantic comedy land. Apparently perceiving that Helo is being swayed by his growing affection for the cylon with his wife's memories, she snarks at him: "You are not married to the entire production line." I love that this line actually makes sense, and shows us that even in the darkest circumstances we can have a little sarcastic humor.

Speaking of sarcasm, this was the first episode in about 400 billion years that Baltar wasn't horrible to watch and listen to. Though he did get a little preachy when some flak ripped his stomach open in an explosion, most of the episode was a big giant reminder that Baltar is sometimes just a pompous windbag. At one point, he and Roslin compete to communicate with the hybrid cylon who controls the Base Ship and spouts nonsense. "I am OPENING MY HEART to her," Baltar whines grandly, then yells at the hybrid to prove how "open" his heart is. A few scenes later, he's earnestly trying to tell a Centurion about God. The big silvery lug, to its credit, just stares at him and tilts its head questioningly, as if Baltar is babbling nonsense. Which he is.

Of course, "Hub" needs a lot of sarcastic wit to counterbalance the treacly subplot where President Roslin has a vision of herself dying and gets a lecture from the Wise Sagittaran Priestess (read: Magical Black Lady) about how she needs to Love Somebody. Oh, and also she shouldn't kill Baltar either, even after he tells her in a drugged-out pain haze that he gave the cylons the passwords that allowed them to bypass the humans' defenses and kill everybody at the beginning of the series. I'm not crazy about the Adama-Roslin lovefest, but I would way rather have watched them do their prissy, non-kiss hugs for like 15 minutes than watch some priestess tell Roslin how she needs to be nicer.

By far the best part of the episode was the return of D'Anna, the cylon who was "boxed" at the end of last season for going nuts over God and Baltar and a bunch of other crap. She's the most-wanted cylon right now — by every conceivable side in the intra- and extra-cylon battles — because she's seen the final five cylons. Roslin wants to interrogate her, as do Cavil and the rational cylons, as do Leoben and the psycho new agey rebel cylons.

The great thing is that D'Anna could give a shit. When Cavil and the cylon he calls "my pet Eight" resurrect D'Anna, she comes out of the goo pissed and hungover. She promptly murders Cavil, then refuses to tell Roslin anything after Helo and Sharon rescue her. "I'm not giving you any names," she spits. When Roslin presses her, she snaps, "Don't you know that you are a cylon?" When Roslin looks stricken, D'Anna cracks up, hooting, "Oh you should have seen the look on your face." I'm liking the new, sarcastic D'Anna model. She's playing every side against the others, not trusting cylons any more than she trusts humans. And now the Resurrection Hub has been destroyed, she's the only one of her model left alive — so she has good reason to be a little crazy.

Ambivalent and ambiguous, the now-mortal cylons of "Hub" made this episode worth watching. Let's hope the cylons can continue to become more human while still retaining their robotic weirdness at the same time.

Also, let's hope that Adama and Roslin finally get to have sex. Give those shippers something new to sail on already.