Unfinished Business

Last night brought a pretty good installment of Battlestar Galactica. All of the flashback material, filling in parts of the "missing year" in season two's finale, was excellent. The boxing material in the present I found more hit and miss -- pun not intended. Let's take the pieces one at a time.

The real meat of the episode was exploring the falling out between Apollo and Starbuck. This was absolutely top notch material, about as good as Galactica gets. And it felt particularly welcome to me right now: Lee has gone without a really good episode for a while (the horrible "Black Market," the basically-abandoned "fat Lee" storyline), and some of Starbuck's recent material hasn't played as strongly as it could have (her story with Leoben down on New Caprica). We found out here what happened to cause their estrangement, and it fits perfectly. We now know exactly why Kara was so reluctant to call Lee for help to save Anders' life.

The plot between Laura and Admiral Adama was just as compelling in its own way, even if it was not as important to the episode. It was great to see them let their guard down in the flashbacks, almost to the point of letting themselves actually begin a romantic relationship with one another. I think it really would make you look on the eight episodes so far this season in a different way, if you watched them again.

The flashbacks delivered lots of other fun, minor moments for the fans. A sweet little story for Tyrol and Callie. A scene showing Baltar back when he was still riding a wave of popularity as president. Colonel Tigh and his wife Ellen, long before everything went sour. Even a brief appearance by Duck, the man who became the suicide bomber in this season's opener. Really, the only thing missing was an explanation of how Starbuck and Tigh -- formerly so at odds with one another -- had come to be friends on New Caprica.

But as I said, I found the boxing material in the present a bit of a weak link at time. Sure, the episode had to have some kind of framing device to get at the flashbacks. And at times, the idea really worked. Adama's fight with Tyrol culminated in another fantastic, put-a-lump-in-your-throat speech from Edward James Olmos. And Starbuck embracing her rage by challenging Lee was fitting as well.

But the material before that? Helo boxing Lee? Huh? Why? Two people I don't even know fighting each other? Why should I care? What the hell does Hotdog have against Starbuck? (And not that Starbuck isn't butch, cause she can hang with the best of them -- but is Hotdog really such a wuss that he loses to Starbuck in about 90 seconds?) And how falsely shoehorned into this storyline was Roslin? She's got some relative that used to box or something, which doesn't really tell us anything meaningful about her character, but is a convenient excuse for why the president of the colonies attends an amateur boxing match without any sort of guard.

So I guess I'm saying this was 75% of a really great episode. The flashbacks were all great. The second half of the boxing material (from Adama's speech until the end) were great. I just was a bit unsure of the set-up at first.