Hub

A pretty good episode of Battlestar Galactica this week. This time, we followed the more compelling half of the "after the Basestar jumps away" story, finding out how the attack on the hub and recovery of Three went. It was an engaging story punctuated with a great space combat sequence and good drama along the way.

Of course, it wasn't reasonable to expect the writers to give us the identity of the final Cylon as soon as D'Anna returned to the show. Yet it made it no less frustrating that D'Anna returned to the show, but we still don't know who the final Cylon is.

And yet what a brilliant tweak to the people who thought it would be Roslin (sorry, but I gotta say, "folks like Mkae"), to have D'Anna totally pull a gotcha on both Roslin and the audience.

I have to admit, her little prank got me for a second there too. I'd heard the Roslin-as-Cylon theory, and had been silently rooting against it for weeks. I felt the "dying of cancer" storyline was (and will be) much more emotionally and dramatically impactful than any "wow! she's a Cylon!" revelation we could have gotten out of such a twist. And in that moment when D'Anna tells Roslin she's one of the five, I had this crestfallen moment of "well damn, why'd they go and throw all that good material away like that?!" I should have known better. So, well played, writers.

On the other hand, I'm not quite sure the writers sold me on exactly where, when, and how the change came about where Roslin went from wanting to let Baltar bleed out and die to being desperate to save him. Yet I'm not sure it entirely mattered, because Mary McDonnell acted the hell out of it and made me totally accept the moment.

And give her more praise for the final scene of the episode, in which she reunited with Adama. Great work from both actors. Well written too, in that the words seemed perfect, and yet they weren't quite what you'd expect them to say.

Toss in a few other great tidbits to round out the fun: Baltar trying to talk a Centurion into rebellion, one of the Eights very creepily revealing to Helo that she's stolen and copied his Sharon's memories, and a brief return of Elosha in Roslin's visions.

In any case, things look all set up now for some kind of mammoth mid-season cliffhanger to arrive next week and leave us waiting until who-knows-when. Let me tell you, I'm both looking forward to and dreading that.