Echoing what others have said, the answer is no, there is no vaulting of Selachimorpha in season two. In fact, by the end of the season, you’ll almost certainly be even more hooked than you are now.
However, I do agree to some extent with this:
The thing is, though, knowing how television drama works, I think it’s a necessary evil. See, the show flew under the radar for a while. The miniseries got very strong ratings, and when the series started, people continued to watch. But those strong ratings are in the context of the Sci-Fi channel’s usual viewership, which is a niche network, so the mainstream wasn’t really aware of the show.
Then the buzz really started: the weekly newsmagazines mentioned the series, various TV critics praised it, the blogs picked up on it, and more viewers tuned in. But the problem is, as a serial show with complicated ongoing storylines, it’s hard to join the show midstream. It’s a dilemma for the producers: how do you keep your longtime fans engaged while making the show accessible to new viewers?
The way they dealt with it on this show was to do a series of largely standalone episodes, structured more in the classic hour-of-television vein than Galactica had been doing up to that point. By this, I mean episodes that are self-contained: any new characters and conflicts introduced during the hour are dealt with entirely in that show, and then discarded. The “Black Market” episode is probably the best example of this; I won’t spoil it, because you aren’t there yet, but when you get there, consider that the bad guy, the flashback girlfriend, the new girlfriend, and everything else are introduced, examined, and resolved neatly within the confines of the single episode. That’s old-style television, and it feels really awkward in Galactica’s narrative universe, but it’s clearly part of an attempt by the producers to avoid alienating any of the hordes of new people who were checking out the show. For that stretch of five episodes or so, the series feels like it’s spinning its wheels, and to a great extent, that’s exactly what it’s doing, giving curious newbies a chance to catch up a bit. (“The Final Cut,” toward the end of the first half of season two, is a one-episode example of the same thing.)
So yeah, it’s a hiccup, but it’s a fairly minor one. By the time you get to “Downloaded,” the show is firmly back on its mind-blowing track.
