Ah, frack you and the Muffet you rode in on…
I loved Adama’s speech at the end to the Chief. “You screwed up and let someone take the fall for it. He stays in the brig because he lied, and your punishment is having to face your crews.” Sounds like something I’d do to punish my kid.
Is it just me? I thought the Sergeant was quite MILFy…
I thought Boomer’s reaction to getting dumped was pretty strange. Since she doesn’t know she is cylon, it was pretty cold blooded.
But I don’t see why they had to tell the general public that the cylons now look human.
Couldn’t they just put up a photo and say, “Have you seen these men?” You don’t have to broadcast to the fleet when fourteen of the same guy shows up on fourteen different ships.
I thought so too. She didn’t have one ounce of remorse for the guy that took the fall for them.
I know its probably not going to happen but the chief really needs to tell Adama about Boomer’s little episode before the water tanks mysteriously blew up. You can tell that he suspects something when he immediately looked at Boomer when they were told that cylons look like humans.
All in all a good episode. Not quite as stellar as the previous 2 but I certainly wasn’t dissappointed.
That’s what’s confusing about Boomer. You can’t tell whether she’s a sleeper in “sleep” mode or a Cylon just playing her part.
At the start of Water she looked genuinely surprised to wake up covered in water with a duffel bag full of explosives.
But the rest of the time, whenever they show her by herself, she has that sort of smug, pleased with herself “everything is going according to plan” look on her face. Her emotional responses to things seem “off.”
It reminds me a lot of Replicants in Bladerunner. For a Cylon detector, they should use the Void Comp test. “You see a turtle on its back…”
IMHO, this was the worse episode yet. The tribunal made no sense, why did they have civilians on it anyway? And why name the poor schmuck who covered up for the chief and boomer? Does knowing his name help anyone? It smelled too much like a Ken Starr analogy than anything else - the coverup was, after all about sex, and Olmos rightfully felt that it (the sex) was no big deal. And why the hell would any self respecting Cylon agent/traitor to all humanity be willing to admit it anyway? Because he was under oath? I did like the development of Boomer and company on Caprica, but the Galactica part was mostly a confused waste of plot line. Number Six did look good in that silvery dress though.
ExTank, I haven’t clicked on your spoiler box yet - are those spoilers from this episode (which have already been warned about in the thread title), or for later episodes which have aired elsewhere in the world? I really wish we could label our spoilers to avoid confusion, and potential spoiler disaster in the future.
President Roslin warned Adama at the start that these things get ugly, and the public demands someone pay. He’s the one that paid. They couldn’t let the sabotage and the investigation go without some sort of resolution.
Munch, there are no spoilers in that spoiler box. At most, some mild speculation. It really didn’t need to get spoiler boxed.
Did anyone else catch #6’s line:
“Don’t make me angry Gaius. You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry.”
Does anyone else remember that line from the old Incredible Hulk TV series?
I kept envisioning #6’s eyes turning white and then “hulking out” to kick some ass.
I caught that line and laughed, even though I was alone. I was wishing I had someone to explain it to.
Actually, when she said “Don’t make me angry”, I said out loud “You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry”.
I was actually suprised when she said it only a moment later. The other person in the room asked if I had seen the episode before.
My counterpart and I were both watching (Galactica is the only show on SciFi she watches regularly with me–guess that says something about how good it is). Anyway, his “Okay kid, you make the choice” line (paraphrased) was spot-on. Basilisk gaze is exactly the word for it. I’m continually impressed at how strong his presence is, especially since he was much shorter than the guards he was confronting!
lev is right, if you saw last Friday’s episode there’s no spoilers in my box; I’m a red-state 'murikan and I’m just getting this stuff as it comes of the wire, unlike our overseas counterparts (the bastards).
I dunno why I boxed it. Practice?
I did the exact same thing; unfortunately, there wasn’t anyone else in the room, so I had to bask in my own glory. 
Oh, would you guys just cut the felgercarb for one centon? Sheesh, you sound like you inhaled ten cubits worth of carbide and washed it down with half a bottle of ambrosa. Everybody knows that “Muffet” is a proper name, and not the generic term for a dagget (robotic or otherwise).
I’d wondered why “felgergarb” had been neglected so far!
More to the point, why has nobody said “felgercarb”? 
Eyaghh! I’m such a geek…
I can’t disagree that as a standalone episode this doesn’t have a lot going for it (though I’m going to argue for something significant in a moment). It feels to me like a setup episode, like it’s not advancing the plot itself but it’s giving us a lot of information we’re going to need for future episodes. Having the Chief re-examining his loyalties, for example, is something that needed to happen if we’re going to get resolution on the Boomer-as-Cylon-mole plot. I suspect this episode will look a lot better and feel more necessary once the season has played out and we see how these developments fit into the arc. We are, after all, at episode six in a thirteen-episode season, so we’re leading right up to the midpoint, which is always the most difficult stretch to sustain in a long storytelling arc.
The one thing I want to discuss in some more depth, though, since I’ve heard some complaints about it (not so much here, but in other venues), is about the apparently allegorical nature of the story here, and how a legitimate investigation gets sidetracked into possibly inappropriate moral questions. YPOD calls it a “Ken Starr” metaphor, and there’s some merit to that.
But consider two things: First, the Sergeant doing the questioning was not wrong to zero in on Boomer and the Chief. She may not have been aware of it, and she may have been pursuing that line of inquiry for the wrong reasons, but had she been permitted to pursue it, she would probably have exposed the real Cylon threat. It’s not dwelled on in the episode, and I have no idea if it’ll be considered in later episodes, but that fact is there.
And second: Are we really supposed to cheer Adama’s move to close the tribunal and end the investigation? Aside from the observation above, which suggests it might have been premature, remember that he’s a military man whose power is, in theory, secondary to the civilian government when not in a combat situation. Sure, he’s got some pretty language about “losing your way” and the purpose of laws to “protect people, not persecute them,” but he’s still trampling on the authority of the tribunal, commissioned as it was to be independent from official military command, to simply close it down on his own word. I mean, imagine the throbbing-forehead-vein outcry if Major General Taguba had gotten up in the middle of the Congressional grilling about Abu Ghraib, said “this is stupid,” and walked out. From a practical, legalistic standpoint, how is Adama’s action any different? And knowing what we know about what the Sergeant might have uncovered if allowed to continue, mightn’t there be some severe repercussions for his decision down the line?
I’m just saying, I think the show has more complicated things in mind than simple good guys and bad guys here. In watching the episode again*, I found myself questioning my initial impulse to cheer Adama’s strength and moral clarity as a leader. My sense of admiration was somewhat weaker, a little bitter in fact, as I followed the story the second time around. Anybody else have this same reaction?
*The last few weeks, I’ve been watching each episode three times: once on Friday, again on Sunday or Monday, and then again on Thursday leading up to the new episode. I’m amazed at how well the shows hold up to such scrutiny. Sure, there’s holes here and there, like the one Starbuck patched in the Cylon ship with a piece of her jacket (heh), but there’s more than enough stuff going on to make every episode worthwhile despite whatever problems they might have. The last time I’ve been able to dig into a show like this was Firefly, which I would commend to Agent Cooper as the holder of the crown for “best SF on television, ever.” BSG isn’t that good yet, partly because we’ve only gotten half the episodes, but it’s definitely going to be a contender as the season continues and the story builds.
In a word, no. The tribunal *was * a witchhunt. It was acting on nothing but speculation, and treated accusations as fact. Evidence wasn’t being gathered, blame was. While the tribunal may have eventually stumbled upon the truth, it certainly wouldn’t have been due to legitimate means.
Now, the need for a tribunal was there, in spades. But a tribunal with absolute carte blanche, and the rights to question (and blame) anything that moved is not. It very much becomes a “who watches the watchmen” situation, and is compounded by the fact that no restrictions or regulations were initially placed on the tribunal. Adama was right putting an end to it, because it had gotten out of hand. The paranoia needed to be reigned in.
He’s also an ex-fighter jockey, a breed known for an abundance of confidence and aggression