Broadly speaking, there are two kinds of flashback episodes (or films). You can do a "Fool For Love"-style thing, with a plot going on in the present day, interlinked with a plot going on in the past. Alternatively, you could do something like "In the Pale Moonlight," where the "present" sections are just a framing device for something that happened in the more immediate past.
Battlestar Galactica's fourth episode, "Act of Contrition" is probably the only example I've seen of a sucessful combination of both techniques (other than, maybe sort-of, The Prestige). It's one of the fan-favorite episodes of Season 1, and the only reason it's not my favorite is because it's just a little bit too predictable that Starbuck will be forgiven in the next episode just because Adama's so glad she's alive.
The framing device for this entire episode is Starbuck in a Viper that's slowly burning up all around her, remembering how she got here. So technically the entire episode is a flashback, but as we'll see, there are flashbacks within that flashback. Anyone who was confused by The Prestige might as well stop here.
So the synopsis: a bunch of pilots are killed in an accident. (This scene is our very first glimpse of a much-less-disciplined, "off-duty" Lee, by the way.) Adama decides that Kara "Starbuck" Thrace would be the best person to train a bunch of recruits.
Now, later on in the season (specifically in the episodes "Flesh and Bone" and "Kobol's Last Glaming, Part 2"), I'm going to touch on this subject again, but this is the first instance of what I like to call "the case for another pilot." Basically, it seems like the writers weren't exactly sure what to do with Starbuck until the beginning of Season 2, and while her job in this episode at least stems from the fact that she was (somehow) a flight instructor before the war, it becomes evident when she's called on to be an interrogator in "Flesh and Bone" that she's just being shoehorned into episodes where, frankly, it doesn't seem like she belongs.
Now, look, this is nothing against her character, or the actress, or the writers. I love this show to death, but this issue does kind of stick out for me. She's the best pilot alive, but she has a serious attitude problem. So how exactly does she get picked for, well, any mission that doesn't involve flying a Viper? (Oh, and on that note, "Bastille Day" justifies her presence on the Marine squad by saying that she's "the best shot in or out of the cockpit." Tell that to whoever wrote "Sacrifice.")
As I said, this only really becomes a sticking point in "Flesh and Bone," and only in retrospect does this episode seem kind of odd. To their credit, the writers did set it up in "Bastille Day" that when Lee's off the ship, Kara is the top dog. And back in the miniseries, we established that she was (somehow) a flight instructor. So, yeah, this is at least somewhat believable, and certainly more so in the aftermath of the Cylon attack when there simply aren't any other pilots who are as good as she is who are also more disciplined.
Training doesn't go particularly well, and she washes everyone out. Lee tells her that the next batch will be even worse, and then tells Adama that she might be emotionally compromised because of what happened to Zak. See, throughout this episode we've been getting flashbacks to Starbuck's nights with Zak, where we find out that not only was Zak hot for teacher, they were actually engaged. Adama finds out about their engagement after Zak's death, and basically adopts Starbuck as a daughter.
Now in the sort-of-present, Adama finds out that Starbuck boosted Zak's failing grades to get him into the Viper he died in. Now, she's flunking the newbies because she refuses to let a subpar pilot into a Viper, because she doesn't want another death on her hands. The scene where he finds out that Starbuck basically killed his son is a tour de force for both Edward James Olmos and Katee Sackhoff. Olmos plays Adama at the complete opposite end of the scale from Avery Brooks' Captain Sisko on Deep Space Nine, which is to say he tremendously underplays the role. When he tells Starbuck to leave his cabin "while [she] still can," you don't doubt that he's on the verge of just completely snapping, but there isn't a sliver of emotion more than there needs to be on his face. Sackhoff's exit, complete with hair-grabbing, screams "kill me now." It's one of the most perfect scenes in the show's history.
Starbuck reactivates the newbies' flight statuses and takes them out on a training run, where they're ambushed by eight Cylon Raiders. Starbuck being Starbuck (and quite possibly having a death wish at this moment), does what she does best and takes them all on. She (with a bit of help from one of the nuggets) gets them all, but the last one damages her Viper, and she goes spiraling off towards a moon, out of control...
As I hinted at before, there are only two real problems with this episode. One, it is fairly obvious that Adama's basically going to forgive Starbuck once she gets back to Galactica alive (and, as it turns out, with a fancy new toy) in the next episode. Two, Starbuck is, in her own words, a frak-up (cf. "Kobol's Last Gleaming, Part 1"), and as we learn later on, her problems did not start with Zak's death (cf. "The Farm"). It's clear from this episode that Adama did not meet Starbuck prior to Zak's death, so that raises the question: who else in the military was lenient enough to let her be an instructor?
As I also said, these are fairly minor quibbles, and yes, this is one of the best episodes of BSG's first season.
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