Escape Velocity

I found this week's Battlestar Galactica to be a big improvement over the last, and a great sign that things are right back on track. I complained last week that the story had been overburdened with sub-plots -- things like life on the Cylon base ship, and Starbuck's search for Earth. It's not that I was saying any particular subplot was bad, but that by stuffing them all in one episode, none were given the chance to breathe and play out.

As if by request, this week excised a few running plots to focus more squarely on a few others, and things were much better for it. Best of all, each of the remaining plots had a very strong element of character and emotion to it.

We got a lot of great material on the way "the four" (well, minus Anders) are dealing with their guilt. Tory is becoming sociopathic, and while I've always found the actress playing her to be one of the weakest recurring performers ever to be on the series, I admit I got a chill or two from her demeanor this episode.

Galen was sloppy on the job, and in the end lashed out at his life, his job, at Cally, and at Admiral Adama, in a shocking scene that appears to have resulted in the "Chief" being Chief-no-more, and getting kicked off Galactica. Watching Tyrol pour out all that pent-up hatred toward Cally (and, really, himself) about how he's "settled" for a terrible life was very hard to watch, in that great way that Battlestar Galactica makes the hard-to-watch so compelling.

None of which had anything on that totally creepy story for Colonel Tigh. His haunting visions of his wife Ellen (made, I think, doubly effective by just how almost natural she looked dressed up as Six; you can totally buy the hallucinatory confusion of the two) really put him through the wringer. And it ended up in the very unsettling place of "Caprica" kissing him. Yikes!

Not that all the good drama was Cylon-centric. In fact, as seems to be the norm these days, the stellar moments of the episode went to Baltar. The political commentary on impeding his right to assemble "for his own protection" was very effective, and it culminated with another incredible James Callis performance of another incredible speech. Most of you know I'm not really a religious fellow myself, but I found his speech about "something in this universe loves me, and I'm perfect" to be very powerful.

It's a tricky thing, episodes I enjoy this much. They make me love that the show is back on, but they also immediately get me sad that there's so few of them before the show goes away again for another who-knows-how-long break? (I believe there's only six more episodes before the strike-created gap in the middle of this final season.)