There wasn’t time to send anybody else down even if they had somebody. The basestars jumped right after Tyrol was drawn to it, for reasons he can’t explain, and without which the humans would have had no idea. Maybe Tyrol has some latent prophet in him, awaiting awakening, like Roslin?
I remember them saying something like: “Tell the fleet to jump to the emergency coordinates”. I would think this means the ships have a “Oh, shit” location they can jump to with little notice in case of Cylon suprise.
Speaking of prophecy, is RDM ever going to revist whole “dying leader leading them to Earth” thing? Roslin is now cured of her breast cancer. Could Adama be the dying leader? If he had cancer he’d likely put off telling people as long as possible and work until no longer possible. As an atheist he’d have a much harder time accepting his gods-annointed role that Rosling did (though I got the impression she wasn’t very religious before the visions). Also given Tigh’s command history he’d start grooming Lee to succeed him (restoring him to commander in the process).
. Looked like stock footage, anyway. But I’m sure I’ve seen that formation in a number of other movies.
MacTech, I’m not sure that needs a spoiler - I mean, was there ever any doubt?
[/QUOTE]
True, us longtime fans know better, still it is bad form to spoil the next ep with a preview…
Yes, but they couldn’t jump to the algae planet without making two jumps through the hellish radiation storm from last week’s episode. This bothered me, too, unless it’s something about their FTL drive with which I’m unfamiliar: has it been established that they can more easily set their jump coordinates for some place they’ve already been without having to go through multiple stops to get there? That is, once they’ve been somewhere, the coordinates to back where they came from can be pre-set and executed without a middle stop? I can’t think of any other way they could have simply jumped away from the planet without frying the fleet in the middle of that radiation.
I think that maybe it was very hard to properly calculate a jump to the planet, what with the radiation and all. But for emergency coordinates, all you really need is for everyone to end up at the same place.
Maybe they jumped to what would be the far side of the planet from the direction they came from last week?
I’d be more worried about why the Cylons haven’t jumped in another half a dozen basestars and started shooting. They’ve had plenty of time to call in reinforcements–which are always a good thing. The Cylon model was absolutely right…Cylons have forever to find Earth, but right now they have a great chance to eliminate Gallatica.
Does the entire Cylon empire support finding Earth or just a splinter group? Could it only be a small faction that occupied New Caprica and is now chasing the Fleet?
Right, that’s kind of what I was thinking. But that opens up another can of worms about last week’s episode. If all they need is to have the proper coordinates once they arrive somewhere, then all they needed to do last week was have one raptor jump through the radiation to the planet, calculate the coordinates, then jump back and give the coordinates to the rest of the fleet. Then they all could have made a single jump from the far side of the radiation to planet orbit. Hell, if that’s all it takes, why couldn’t Athena simply have given the coordinates to the fleet once she found the planet? (Because then they couldn’t have made that episode, I know.) If they can jump from planet orbit to a known set of emergency coordinates bypassing the radiation, they should be able to just as easily jump to planet orbit from a known set of coordinates while bypassing the radiation.
Oakminster, I’m not sure I’d consider the far side of the planet a sufficient “emergency” coordinate with four basestars just on the other side. And yeah, it makes more sense for the Cylons to simply destroy Galactica now, but my feeling is there’s more of a schism within the Cylon population regarding the total annihilation of humanity.
Gods, I’m starting to overthink the nitpicks in this show. I still do think it’s a damn good television series.
I think there’s just a small task force assigned to tracking the humans to see if they can find other Cylon-inhabitable planets. The Cylons now already have Kobol and New Caprica to settle on, not just the Twelve Colony worlds now occupying most of their resources (there was a comment by Three to that effect). They may/will get the Algae Planet too, and Earth would be nice to have for even more lebensraum. That’s Cylon Command / Imperious Leader’s concept of it anyway, ISTM.
The meatbags assigned to the task force might have been chosen for their eagerness for the mission, which might be due to their religiosity, which is defined essentially in contrast to the humans’ fascinating religion more than by its own standards. I suspect too that there are some who have a religious notion of establishing a utopian society where both species can live in service to God, after of course the pagan heathen humans have been converted to the One True Monotheism. But their faith also includes a realization of their imperfect understanding, even to the point of listening to Tub Girl’s babblings for insight.
The hybrid baby plays a role in that cult - what, now that she’s sick, her full load of Magic Hybrid Baby Cures-Everything Blood notwithstanding. The search for the 13th Colony fits into that too - why, there’s a whole *planet * of humans available for salvation there.
Or they could just be sadists, taking their time, of which they have plenty, to torture the humans a little before completing the ethnic cleansing operation, maybe doing some ethnographic studies of the lesser, doomed race just for academic purposes.
Regarding the emergency jump, I thought the food planet was on the other side of the star cluster, not surrounded by it. My understanding was that they couldnt go around the cluster because of the size of it, once they were through it they could carry on as usual.
Hmm. You’re right, they had mentioned it was too big to go around last week. Maybe that’s one nit we no longer need to pick.
In general, I thought this episode set up a very intriguing story, with Ron Moore’s traditional cliffhanger. (As an aside, this is the first cliffhanger I’m experiencing in real time, having caught up with the show just prior to the start of this season via DVD. The wait is gonna suck.)
The cliffhanger is rough, but at least we only have to wait a month for the resolution. What was it, three months before we got the rest of the Pegasus story? It was funny, the people I was watching with all said “Arrggg!” at the same time when the “To be continued” came up on the screen. Closure, damn it, I need closure.
So did I miss the background about Tyrol’s family in some previous episode? The way they present it seems like they touched on it somewhere previously, if I had to guess it would be somewhere within the Arrow of Athena arc but I don’t recall it.
And how come no one mentions the “I used to dance around naked holding porn mags” line!?
– IG
Speculative spoilers follow:
Katee Sackhoff has mentioned that she’s not showing up in this season after episode ~14 or so. Moore has mentioned that things have gotten too “safe” and that they’re planning to kill off someone important this season. Personally, I think they’re just taking the piss on fans, but there’s rabid speculation that this means that Starbuck buys the farm before the season’s end.
I don’t think Sam will end up dying. That would essentially free Kara from her vow that she won’t break, which would make the whole dilemma they’ve just put Kara and Lee into rather pointless. They’ll drag out the angst for a few more episodes, yet.
Also, they didn’t have time to get anyone else down to the planet before the Cylons jumped in-system – they were just talking to Tyrol about the discovery when the Baseships popped in. Tyrol is the best expert on the ground because he’s about the only one on the ground who hasn’t been drafted by Lee’s defense (and dirty Kally) – he’s needed in the Temple to set up the blow-it-up charges, so he may as well try to figure it out while he’s there doing that.
That was funny, wasn’t it? Seems he was introduced on the Pegasus but is now filling in some sort of Dualla/Gaeta position. Does he speak 647 languages? I must know more about this person.
Didn’t Adama tell Baltar that they only had five nukes left? Though on second thought that was before they met Pegasus, so maybe Pegasus had more and they split the arsenal evenly between the two battlestars.
Poor Boomer. Not only was her life as a human yanked out from under her, not only did her efforts to influence the Cylon on humanity’s behalf come to naught, but to add insult to injuy, her place has been taken by a doppleganger. If I’d written the series, I wouldn’t have split the Sharon character into Boomer/Athena; I’d have had Boomer get pregnant by the Chief, have her rescue the party stranded on Kobol, and then continue the role now served by Athena.
Poor Baltar; he never was really worse than a selfish, immature person who still retained a lot of likeable qualities; and yet one step at a time he’s marching down the highway to Hell.
I would say he’s running flat out, screaming for the others to wait for him. 
I’ll be very annoyed if they flesh out this Hoshi’s character when I’m still waiting for them to throw a bone to the poor guy who plays Capt. Kelly…
Yeah…that looked pretty awkward.