Maybe she brought her good ship and crew back from the Delta Quadrant. 
SciFi’s been advertizing this ep as the season finale. From a production standpoint, you’re right, but from a broadcast standpoint, it would seem that this si the end of Season Two, and the next new ep will be the Season Three premiere. Confusing, I know. I wonder how it’ll be labelled when it comes out on DVD.
It is the only episode of the old series I remember very clearly; I think it was the best one they did.
IIRC: The battlestar Pegasus, with Commander Caine (Loyd Bridges) shows up after having gone rogue in the war against the Cylons years before.
Opposite the situation in the current series, Caine is outranked by Adama and, though there are tensions, defers to Adama’s authority.
At some point, the Galactica is being attacked by Baltar who has two Cylon basestars under his command and things are going badly. The Pegasus swoops in and catches the Cylons off-guard. There is a huge explosion, Galactica escapes, and the fate of the Pegasus is left in the air.
Correction: 3 Cylon basestars. Cain transfers all of his Vipers to Galactica, including Sheba (his daughter) and Bo-Jay. He makes an attack run on the base stars. Baltar allows his basestar to fall behind. Cain sees this and goes for him, right between the other two basestars. Apollo and Starbuck disobey orders and launch strafing runs against the inside missle launchers of the two base stars. The Pegasus sails between the two, launching her missles. Starbuck and Apollo lose sight of her in the resulting explosions, and have to return to Galactica. The fleet escapes, and Apollo states that he is sure Cain escaped, and that the Pegasus is out there still, fighting the good fight.
Hey, don’t get me wrong, I liked First Wave, but I got the impression that he was, er, playing for the other team.
I should think that the only solution to the Galactica/Pegasus conflict short of an all out battle (which one would have to think the Galactica would be likely to lose, seeing as it was about to become a museum, and took a hit from a nuke in the miniseries) would have to be Roslin stepping in and putting a stop to it.
And how could Cain refuse? By Colonial law, Roslin is the president. If Colonial law no longer applies, how does Cain have authority to order anyone to do anything? In the miniseries, Roslin convinced Adama that “The war is over – we lost.” Cain can’t claim wartime powers if the war is over. If Cain denies Roslin’s authority, Cain is no more than a pirate, and her crew very well could recognize her as one.
As for Pegasus Six, I also have to wonder what her backstory is. How did they determine she is a Cylon? Was she a member of the Pegasus crew before the attack? Or possibly a friend/lover of one of the crew members, visiting while the ship was in drydock? If this last one is the case, I wouldn’t be too surpised if she had been involved with Cain herself, with Six’s rape and torture being part of Cain’s revenge on Six for betraying her.
I agree with those who have so far asserted that Cain has no respect either for the office or the woman who holds it. If it were completely up to Cain, the civilian government would be swept aside entirely.
However, my point above was that even a martinet (nice word, c’plant) and a self-appointed dictator, for reasons of self-preservation, must be conscious of what his or her loyal followers are capable of. We saw a moment of hesitation – just a moment – from her crew when she ordered her vipers out in response to Galactica’s. We may infer from this that she’s on the line of control; the fact that she was forced to conduct an impromptu execution of an officer to maintain order further underlines her delicate state of control. There is always a line even the loyal will not cross, and the dictator needs to know what this is. And I do suspect that Cain wouldn’t want to roll the dice to see if peremptorily erasing the top civilian official would be over that line, at least until she has to.
Unless she’s just batshit crazy, which is not outside the bounds of possibility, given a few things Ron Moore said in his podcast.
If only this were always true, the world would be a considerably better place.
I must download the podcast.
However, remember Voltaire’s comment on Admiral Byng, substituting ‘Executive Officers’ for ‘Admirals’: “The British occasionaly shoot a few admirals to encourage the others.”
Well, if you recall the conversation Cain, Adama, and Roslyn have that first time in Adama’s quarters, Cain states:
There was no accounting for them because directly following three or four nukes going off, destroying a shitload of ships, Pegasus was gone. It’s not like there was going to be anyone sitting around to go through the debris and say “Hey, I can’t find anything from the Pegasus, they must have made it out of here!”
In hindsight, I agree, though in support of my original assertion, Cain did say that they had been tracking a Cylon fleet and jumping to where they thought that fleet would be going in attempts to get ahead of it and conduct hit & runs. Given that line of conversation, it would make perfect sense for the Cylons to appear.
However, I do agree that Roslyn and Cain are going to have to have it out, and there was an interesting bit of foreshadowing. I’m not talking about the “Secretary of Education?!” bit either. When everyone is making introductions in the hangar bay, and Adama and Cain shake hands, there is a definite emphasis given to the handshake, and that Cains hand is on top, specifically turned to a top-bottom grip. When Laura and Cain shake, their hands remain perpendicular. Cain respects the office of President, or at least considers it an equal.
And to follow up on that handshake thing: when Roslyn is leaving Adama’s quarters, and she tkaes her leave saying (to Cain): Thank you for finding us. They shake hands and, though it’s ever-so-slight, Cains hands is on the down-turn. This is immediately after the whole “Chain-of-Command” and
Everybody else has already covered the salient points about the ep (one of the best cliffhangers, right up there with BOBW in TNG, and “Bad Timing” in Farscape, i’d give the edge to Bad Timing, putting myself back into the mindset i was in when FS was being aired, after all, this is a show ('Scape) that appeared to have killed the two main characters…
this cliffhanger ep is a very close second, January is too long to wait, frak it!
i did like the way they modeled the Pegasus, from the outside, it seemed to look older than the Galactica, i’d daresay it looked very close to the original Galactica from the original series, however, from a thruster view, it looked more modern, what with the ring of engines around the stern of the spaceframe, internally CIC looked more advanced than Galactica, more “glowy glass (or maybe Transparent Aluminum? 
) Panel Thingies” (yes, that’s a technical term )
i guess it would make sense, that the Pegasus could be mechanically an older spaceframe that was retrofitted in the most critical areas to be more modern
as far as Adm. Cain (and by extension, her crew) are extremely unsympathetic, nobody there to like, heck, they seem colder, emotionless, and more mechanical than the mechanical Toasters…
it’s really a sign of good writing, characterizations, and acting if i start feeling sorry for characters that have killed a baby in cold blood, nuked an entire civilization to the brink of extinction, and shot the CO of a Battlestar in cold blood…
seeing Six lying on the floor, in chains, bruised and covered by a simple cloth made the rage rise in my gut, yes, yes, i know she killed that woman’s baby in the mini, and her “people” nuked the Colonials to near extinction, but still, you DO NOT abuse and rape prisoners, Humans are supposed to be better (or at least more moral/human) than the Toasters…
(and seeing as PegaSix was raped numerous times, what are the chances of her having a Pop-Tart in the oven, maybe that’s what NeuroChipSix was referring to when she told Balty he was gonna’ be a daddy earlier in the series “i want us to have a baby, Gaius”), this will be a test to see if love was neccecary for the Meatbag Toasters to concieve with Humans)
the attempted rape scene of Boomer, well, let me just say i was glad the “interrogator” got a bolt thru the temple, two things are clear from this scene…
Boomer clearly wants to be Human, and hates her Toaster side, she wants to be trusted by the crew of the Galactica again, and the crew of Galactica (esp. Adama, Tyrol and Helo) clearly want to be able to trust her again, but know they can’t because she could go “Toaster” again at any moment…
This is covered in the podcast: There was a cut scene commenting on her relative youth, and that she was on a peacetime promotional fast-track. Ron Moore specifically says “she must have been hell on wheels” as she was coming up.
Actually, the podcast says that a lot of material got cut. On the first editing pass, they wound up with a full act of material, ~15 min, that would have to be cut to get it down to an airable hour. They found themselves with a choice: Either put everything in the show and ask Scifi to let them run a 90-minute finale, or be vicious with the scissors. They tried it both ways, and they decided they liked the relentless one-hour version over the flabby ninety-minute version. However, Moore indicates that the original one-hour-and-fifteen version (i.e. one hour even, minus commercials) will apparently be offered on the eventual DVD. They also sometimes offer a few cut scenes on the website, too.
So for everyone who says this episode feels a bit overstuffed: That’s why.
I think to be fair, the most we can say is that she clearly wants the humans to think that she wants to be human and hates her toaster side.
I assume it will all be labeled as Season 2. I saw Ron Moore on Attack of the Show and they were calling it “mid-season finale”.
This whole “season finale” half-way through thing started when Sci-Fi cancelled Farscape after announcing a fifth season. Half-way through the fourth, they cancelled the show and announced the 11th episode as a “season finale”. They then ran the rest of fourth season calling it a fifth, even though that was a lie.
When it came out on DVD, it was all called the fourth. It’s like Sci-Fi thinks we won’t notice that the seasons are way too short.
Got link?
The shows near the end of the First Season convinced me that the President of the Colonies DOES NOT have the same powers as the President of the United States.
Specifically, it is blatantly obvious that she is not, in fact, the Commander In Chief. Near the end of the first season, she wanted to use the captured Cylon Raider to jump back to caprica and retrieve the Arrow of Apollo. Commander Adama refused. And it was clear that the President did not have the power to order Adama around. Adama simply said “It’s a military decision,” and that was that.
My guess is the relationship between the Colonial Military and the President is similar to the relationship between the Emperor of Ancient Rome and the Ancient Roman army. The army had the duty of protecting the Roman civilian population; but, while the Emperor was the head of the civilian population, the army had a considerable degree of autonomy, and would only follow the Emperor if they were on good terms with him.
Wouldn’t surprise me at all, seeing as how the Blackbird is obviously the re-imagined RECON VIPER from the original 1970s Galactica series.
Any bets on how long it’ll be before Starbuck discovered that (A) the Blackbird has no weapon system, and (B) they’ve installed a Cylon-annoyance-level intelligent computer named C.O.R.A.?
Got dialup.
And man I hope it doesn’t happen. Far too neat and something we’ve all seen a bajillion times.
On the other hand, that would give Starbuck a clean shot at the MegaMonsterShip which, I’m guessing, is the humanoid-cloning-assembly ship.
Regarding the interaction of Roslin and Cain…well, it seemed pretty clear to me that if Roslin had tried to exercise any power Cain would have said, “Go frak yourself, schoolteacher. We important people have stuff to do here”.
Spiralscratch - the XO over on Pegasus seemed decent - he’s just terrified of the boss. As for the deck chief, you have to wonder how much good he’d do over on the Galactica side. A population to put to work manufacturing fighters…real fighters, made by a true expert.
Six’s reaction, well, she thinks of herself as the ultimate being, I think (short of God, of course). She continually refers to others as weak, flawed, etc. Seeing a Six like that must have really shaken her faith in her breed. And in her defense regarding the baby’s neck-snapping, she knew the planet was going to be nuked really soon. The neck was a certain instant death, a slow death from radiation poisoning wouldn’t have been. So, maybe she didn’t see it as being so bad.
Let’s also remember that while raping the Cylons is bad…it’s not even a crime to murder one!
Ranchoth - Roslin has also continually referred to Boomer (and Airlock Boy) as "it’ and “this thing”. So, it’s not just the Pegasus crew.
Cain’s refernce to Starbuck’s ‘disobeying orders’ could refer to all sorts of things, but I suspect it means that Cain knows about her little joyride to Caprica. Which means she’d know the Earth thing…maybe she doesn’t care, and maybe this episode covered only a couple hours’ time.
Tracer - I think you’re misunderstanding the deal between Adama and Roslin. I think that, originally, the President of the Colonies was the CinC of the armed forces. However, Adama and Roslin made a deal where they’d stay out of each other’s way in their respective spheres. It showed Adama’s loyalty to his oaths while showing Roslin’s sensiblity in that she understands that she is absolutely not a military commander. Adama obeys Roslin because he wants to have a true civilian government, but she’s not a military person and there’s no way in hell he’ll allow her to do anything he considers monumentally detrimental to their cause - such as letting Starbuck take the Raider.
-Joe