SPOILERS: Battlestar Episode 03-09 and Minor Rant

This episode left me completely breathless. Truly amazing all the way through.

It really helped relieve a lot of the personal "grrrr" I was feeling about how Anders and Lee (especially Lee) were kicking Kara around after her horrible detention experience. With this background, I now know why Lee has been such a bastard towards Kara through third season. Also, it was completely in character that she’d run like hell and marry Anders right after her experience with Lee. Kara has huge commitment issues, and the whole "Zach died" thing had to be weighing heavy on her mind. I only hope that the aftermath of all of this is confronted in future episodes. 

Dualla has to know her days are numbered. A part of me thinks she’s known this all along. In many ways, I feel like she’s more "in love" with Bill Adama than his son. She loves the aspects of Lee that she sees in his father. Not that the Admiral’s going to jump into the kiddy pool on this one.

I also loved the fight between Adama and the Chief. Beautiful. Frackin’ beautiful.

This episode also makes up for the bizaare use of encephalitis that completely annoyed the heck out of me in the whole "Cylon killer virus" arc two episodes ago. 

There are two reasons why this doesn’t make sense (which have been bothering me like mad since three weeks ago, but I’ve been too busy to adequately rant on the subject.)

1. Battlestar has this annoying habit of wanting an illness/virus to act a certain way, but instead of just making up a virus/illness, they try to use an existing one in a completely ridiculous way. Encephalitis is not a psychic virus! If you want a psychic virus, just make up one. Don’t make me twist my brain in circles trying to figure out how encephalitis mutated to do that.

The most irritating example of Galactica’s medical mishaps for me was Roslyn’s breast cancer. You’d think if you can travel between solar systems using hyper jump technology, you’d be able to get yearly mamograms. This was even more annoying to me because my mother had breast cancer right through first season, and every time Roslyn would fall closer to an agonizing death, I had to put my mom back together about her own cancer and the fact that modern medicine was doing one  hell of a job to keep her alive! (she’s doing fine now, thank you surgery, radiation and tamaxofin)

2. Once you introduce the logical idea that viruses evolve, and thus we may not be immune to new strains, it brings about the question for both humans and Cylons: will we all die on Earth? For humans, there’s the corallary question of the plague ship: will the colonists bring viruses to Earth that kill Earthlings (in the same way the European colonists gifted the Native Americans with smallpox), and will Earth viruses kill us? It’s worse for the Cylons, who (a) have no logical reason at this point to go to Earth, since they seem to have left the wonderfully logical destroy all humans motive, and (b) are destined to certain death if they step foot on Earth through disease: War of the World’s style. I don’t want to have to think of this! And none of this would be a problem if they’d just made up a virus and had the ancient Colonists plant it on the beacon to destroy the next incarnation of Cylons who touched it, as stated in the prophecy, Lords of Kobol, etc.

Every episode that doesn’t concern medicine blows me away with how awesome it is. Once they get into the medical stuff though, it’s always so painful for me. I wonder if anyone else has the same POV?
 
Overall, in spite of the above rant, Battlestar blows me away most of the time. Because of Episodes like this one, and the previous one, I’m able to fall in love with all of the wonderful things that can be done in science fiction television.

Nuff said.