Well, supposedly she’d been to earth, and needs to find her way back there so finding Leoben et. al. isn’t everything yet. Now she’s onto the Three, who can reveal the Final Five, who can probably be tortured into confessing earth’s location.
From the 33-minute recharge time for the jump drive (which was the basis of the episode “33”). Divide that into 15’07".
levdrakon, right, I forgot - Leoben says she’s still one of the few who can “hear” Earth.
But it didn’t take them 15 hours to get back the Fleet. They had 15 hours until the Fleet jumped away from where it was.
True. And we don’t know whether Roslin boat vision was “real” or not. She didn’t have that dream until after Emily described it to her. I recognized Visitor right away, but only because I knew there was an upcoming episode where she played a cancer patient :o .
And just wait 'til she finds out that old bastard Tigh might be able to hear it, not to mention “I’d put a bullet in your head” Anders.
Hm, I think you might need to watch that episode again.
It didn’t take 33 minutes for the FTLs to spin back up. 33 minutes was the length of the break between Cylon appearances. The fleet would jump, take a short breather, get themselves ready, and wait for the Cylons to reappear. Lather and repeat. There were a few ships in the fleet with intermittent FTL problems that meant they weren’t ready to jump until the last minute, but 33 minutes was not an FTL drive recharge time. Hell, in the final episode of season three, when the fleet arrived at the nebula and got fully powered down, we were told it would take just 20 minutes for everybody to get their FTL drives ready to go.
I don’t think there’s any concrete information in this or the previous episode about how Demetrius was supposed to rejoin the fleet: distance, time, number of jumps, or anything like that. And if you actually think about it, the logistics of a rendezvous are problematic. Say the fleet encounters the Cylons again, or for some other emergency reason has to make an extra jump or two, and can’t return along its original path. How’s Demetrius going to find them? Adama can’t exactly plot out the fleet’s next month of jumps, and give Demetrius a rigorously predictable flight plan, because if Demetrius and its course data get captured by the Cylons then the fleet will become a sitting duck. No, I think the details of this part of the story don’t bear close scrutiny, and need to be handwaved away a bit. They aren’t important anyway, because you could fanwank some plausible workaround: say, Demetrius will rendezvous not with the fleet but first with one of Galactica’s Raptors, which is sitting at prearranged static coordinates and is carrying updated “go here next” details (and which is rotated periodically with another Raptor to keep the crew fresh and the details up-to-date).
33 minutes wasn’t the recharge time for the jump drive. The entire fleet can spool up their FTL drives in twenty minutes, even after a complete power outage, as demonstrated at the end of season 3/beginning of season 4. It would take even less time if their engines stayed on.
The 33 minutes was how long it took the Cylons to track the homing beacon (or whatever it was) on the Olympic Carrier.
ETA: I should’ve previewed.
Just to clarify one point here, remember that it’s been weeks since Demetrius left the fleet; we were told this in a subtitle last week, I think. It’s not really plausible that the fleet would have held position for a month or more waiting for Starbuck to reappear. There has to be some other plan for Demetrius to rejoin the fleet, and this is the part that I think we have to gloss over.
Edit: Ha ha, too slow. 
This actually gives even more weight to my friend’s theory that Starbuck’s parental unit is the last Cylon, making Starbuck a half-breed. Keeping track of things, Starbuck’s 50% toasterness would explain:
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Her mom’s belief that Starbuck had a special destiny.
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The ability to “resurrect” after her death (maybe half-breeds have enough robot in them to do it, but it works differently than the Resurrection Ship).
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The music that both she and the Final Four can hear.
ETA: ::shakes fist belligerently:: 
In case anyone’s interested.
Okay, it’s 20 minutes and 22 jumps, then. Same reasoning applies - bottom line is Demetrius couldn’t make the round trip in time and Gaeta’s new nickname is Stumpy.
Galactica may not have plotted every jump for a month, no, but they only need one set of coordinates at one time in mind to set up a rendezvous. There can be any number of ways to get there.
Definitely. I’ve been waiting for the dramatic moment when one of the final four accidentally “outs” himself or herself, and I figured Anders coming to a basestar would be a perfect opportunity. First I was thinking, there’ll be some hostile cylon ships there, and then they’ll retreat after another “eye scan.” Then when the Six killed the human, I thought Anders would lose it and break out the Cylon kung fu, and send the Six flying across the room. Then when the centurion opened fire in the hybrid room, I thought, here it comes: Anders shouts “No!” The centurion says, “By your command.” Everyone looks at Anders like, “Anders, do you have something to share with the rest of the class?”
I thought about this too. It seems that they don’t have radio contact, so I’m assuming that they’ll just have to jump back to the fleet with the basestar in tow, which will require some very quick explaining. And even if you get in touch with Adama right after you jump, how do you convince him that you’re not talking with a Cylon gun to your head?
Dramatically, they might do that. Realistically though, it’d make sense to have a Raptor waiting at a neutral rendezvous point someplace.
Now that I’m thinking about it, I wonder how wise it was to include Helo & Gaeta on Starbuck’s mission anyway? I mean, Roslyn & Adama are continuing along the path they think leads to earth. Roslyn isn’t divining the way like Starbuck is apparently. They’ve got to have some real clues, and I’d think Helo & Gaeta would be fully briefed on those clues. Gaeta seems to be the one who plots most of their jumps. So, even if the Demetrius missed the rendezvous, Helo & Gaeta would still have a pretty good idea which direction the fleet was likely headed, and that’s not the kind of info you’d want falling into the Cylons’ hands, right?
Please refer to post four. 
And yeah, I’m inclined to agree that a jump back to the fleet to drop off Gaeta would be a one-way trip. They appear, report an injury, and ask for a Raptor or other ship to come and get Gaeta. That ship arrives, and the crew reports back, “Yeah, he’s been shot, he looks bad, prepare the med bay.” Adama’s all, “Wait, who shot him?” And Helo’s all, “It’s a long story, we can’t stay, we gotta go back.” And Adama’d be like, “What’s up, yo?” And Helo says, “Listen, dawg, it’s complicated,” and Adama’s all, “Yo, motherfucker, this ain’t Lost.” And Helo’s all like, “Okay, look, Starbuck wigged out and wanted to go meet the Cylons, and we said no, and then Anders shot Gaeta, so they took a Raptor, now we’ve got to get back and meet Starbuck because she’s supposed to be bringing a base star with her.” And Adama’s all, “WTF?”
Now, if they had a Raptor, they could put Gaeta and a pilot in it, jump in, detach, radio “sorry, crisis, gotta go, take care of this guy,” and jump back out. But they don’t have the Raptor, because Starbuck’s got it, and it’s not like the Viper has a back seat they can stick Gaeta in.
But as it is, the minute they show back up with a wounded Gaeta, no Starbuck, and reports of Cylon involvement, I think Adama puts the kibosh on the whole operation.
Obviously, that’s speculative. But it seems reasonable to me.
Demitrieus is Multiple jumps away from the Fleet.
the 15 hour window is the latest they can START making jumps and still make it to the fleet.
the countdown bothered me at first as well, but after a second I realized this wasnt another james bond defuses the bomb bullshit count down. of course Helo isnt going to fucking jump, his Hottie asian/robo wife is on that mission. screw Kara, Screw Blanders, Helo doesnt want to leave that booty behind. I think the count down worked really well in that light.
The centurion in the control room must have been “the best shot in the (cylon) fleet”. None of them have been able to hit much of anything or anyone of importance, previously. It nailed that ‘8’ with one shot.
Baltar is the one who has been “reborn”. He has been born again, one might say.
I still think Doc Cottle is a cylon. That’s a very strong gut feeling.
I think you are confusing this week’s redshirt with Seelix, who was involved with the airlockings in “Collaborators” and was seen a bunch of times on NC, and a few times since. The redshirt was just that, a new character who you knew was going to bite it. Incidently, Seelix is on the Demetrius, and she called Kara a toaster in this episode.
I thought Demetrius having a Raptor was a bit of a cop-out. Did anyone else see or hear mention of a Raptor before tis episode? Having a Raptor kind of solves the problem of risking the lives of the entire crew, because it just makes sense to send a Raptor to check things out. There sholdn’t have been a standoff or any conflict at all…Sending a Raptor is what you do in these situations.
That (nagging) nitpick aside, I like this one a lot.
I keep get Helo and Sam Anders mixed up. They both have this steely eyed grim square-jawed bare-armed expression and it confuses me.
They could send Demetrius (and his posse from the 'hood) back alone first, tell Adama they have a new pet that wants to follow them home and can they keep it, huh, can they? And they made a big bunch of new friends, too.
Get the official okey-dokey, go back, get the basestar, they all rejoin the fleet, etc.
I thought the same thing when I saw that scene!!
For me it was instant. I seriously felt it was Barbara Bush. Well she looks like BB did during GHWB’s presidency. I don’t know what BB looks like now.
Anyway yeah. Awesome episode. The only thing that could be worth pointing out would be that they created the artificial tension with the mutiny about the Raptor stuff just so they could have a cliffhanger ending. It’s slightly annoying but the payoff was so good that I don’t care.
Are they really a large number of jumps away from Galactica? I don’t remember any mention of it at all. All I remember was simply that they had to get going at X time and they didn’t say how long it would take. I could have missed out though.
But here’s the question, How does Adama not think it’s a Cylon trap now? I think, honestly that this whole religion thing will play a part in that. Starbuck and Roslyn are going to get all agreeable about this stuff and convince Bill to join up with the good cylons.