Welcome to Earth. You didn't forget you were watching Battlestar Galactica, did you? Were you lulled into expecting something other than a gloriously painful turn of events, unhelpful to anyone's future? Did you fall prey to the illusion of hope?
Yeah. Me too. If there's any glimmers of light in BSG's future, it's going to make us earn every last moment.

The Human/Cylon alliance sure didn’t last long, did it?  First the Cylon’s start spacing humans, then the humans threaten to space three of the final five, then the Cylon’s start warming up their nukes and I may be mistaken, but is this the first time we haven’t been rooting for the Humans?  Both sides are just an obstacles to the developing middle way.  Tyrol and Anders tip off Kara Thrace that there is something weird going on with her MysteriouslyCleanRaptor.  It’s the probably-human Kara we’re rooting for as she desperately runs across the ship, to stop these two warring parties from their stale games of brinkmanship.  Meanwhile Baltar, aboard the baseship, tries to remind D’Anna of the various times brute force hasn’t worked.  Change is on the horizon.

Interim-President Lee Adama’s solution lies in stark contrast to Roslin’s duplicitousness of only one episode prior.  When Kara’s revelation is known, that they have a homing beacon toward Earth, Lee plays fair with the Cylons.  He encourages change and “taking a different path.”  My lord, with that kind of progressive thinking, no wonder he’s so quickly usurped by Roslin’s reinstatement as President.  New thinking could actually produce new results, instead of the same cycle repeating over and over again.

The entire episode is like a high-velocity bullet shot from a very powerful gun.  It relies on all the set-up that’s gone before and moves forward relentlessly, turning over all the chairs and ripping into everything that was, changing it.  What am I supposed to say about Tigh’s revelation that he’s a Cylon?  Edward James Olmos’ performance, as he learns that Tigh is a Cylon, is just breathtaking.  Lee tries to comfort him without avail.  This man has been utterly destroyed.  How can he possibly go on?  And yet by episodes end, he does.

Because whoa nelly they’re going to Earth!  Yes!  At last!  W00t! w00t; as;dlfkj asdf;   …aaannnd it’s an irradiated ruin.  As Kara said to Lee, “something’s orchestrating this for a reason.”  And goddamn it, what reason?  Whether God or Dirk Benedict or a deus ex moore, something wants the Cylons and the Humans to discover a ruined Earth, together.  This episode could have functioned as the end of the series, in a very David Chase kind of way.  Yeah, there’s a lot of dangling plot threads, but an accord has been reached, revelations have been made.  But it ain’t the end.  As full of surprises and conclusions as this episode was, there’s still more to come.

If I’d been writing this six months ago, when the episode first aired, this likely would have been three times the length and filled with various theories and predictions.  But instead it was written less than a week before the next episode airs, and I’m not so interested in theories as I am in knowing what happens next.  There are an enormous number of questions left hanging in the air, and in less than ten episodes (three months air-time), we’re told all will be revealed.   Having just watched this episode, I realize it does what all Galactica cliff-hangers have done to date: make me want to dance around the room like I’ve just drank ^{three gallons of sugary kool-aid} and twelve pots of _coffee screaming “OH MY GODS, WHAT COULD _POSSIBLY HAPPEN NOW?!?!!”  I want to accost random strangers, shoving DVDs of Galactica into their purses and anyone who hasn’t seen the show gets 10 years in the gulag with their eyeballs taped open and forced to watch it all from the beginning but they have to _{miss the end just as a} punishment.

Go go Galactica cliff-hanger!  Make James loose brainz again.  I’m just going to hit my last stray thoughts in point form:

• Tigh’s solution is just so Tigh-esq.  He gets to confess his Cylon nature, get himself thrown out an airlock so that [a] he saves the fleet by his actions and [b] doesn’t have to deal with any of the fall-out.  One of the most telling shots is Tigh’s reaction when he isn’t thrown out the airlock; very much an “Oh frak, now what do I do?” look.  If there was one thing he didn’t want, it was to continue to live with his Cylonhood hanging over his head.
  “Y’know, Leoben said something to me when he was holding me in that dollhouse on new Caprica: That Children are born to replace their parents. For children to reach their full potential, their parents have to die.”
  ~ how Starbuck chose to comfort Lee Adama, as he wondered what fate may have come to his Father
• Don’t they have star trek like planet scanners?  Is “land all the ships all at once” really the best move?  At the very least send some advance party to check things out.  Tactical speaking, for all anyone knows it’s inhabited by flying-motorcycle losers.
• As a distraught Adama threw everything off his desk, Janine remarked: “Thank heavens there’s no little ships on his desk.”
• If Roslin tried to kill you, do you think you’d be able to utter the words “thank you for not murdering me” so soon afterwards?  When Baltar changes, he changes.
• I love Tyrols reaction to being captured.  A smile, a shrug and a cocky look that says “Oh well. Fun while it lasted.”

In a few months I’ll be sad for the fact that it’s all over.  But it ain’t over just yet.  Friday seems so very far away. And plus, it’s not like the exciting tension filled cliff-hangers are going to stop.