Roslin continues to gather civilian ships. She goes aboard one and meets a little girl who, well, hasn't quite grasped the fact that her parents are dead yet. That in itself is a pretty heartbreaking scene, but what's to come is even better/worse...
A Cylon scout finds the civilian fleet, and they decide they have to jump immediately. The ships that aren't FTL-capable will simply have to be left behind, and that includes the one the little girl is on. The sequence that follows is the sequence that told me I'd absolutely love this show. The slowest countdown ever commences, and the camera keeps cutting back to Roslin or the little girl, as if telling us "okay, any second now, she's going to change her mind and put the other ships at risk to save the girl." Nope! (Also: Barry Goldwater will kill us all.) The fleet jumps, and Cylons appear and blow the remaining ships to itty bitty bits. This is a series that clearly won't shy away from showing us the consequences of hard decisions, and I love it for that.
(Sidebar: Genesis of the Daleks would be 100% better if, instead of the Doctor spouting off some nonsense about the Daleks ultimately doing some good, it ended with a flash-forward into the future and showed us every single extermination thus far in the show; deaths that are now, in a very real sense, on the Doctor's hands.)
Galactica jumps to Ragnar Station, which is hidden inside a nebula of some sort, which does a good job of playing hell with sensors and communication. There's an incredibly lengthy sequence that follows, wherein they meet a guy who's been hiding there. He's acting an awful lot like he's seen Blade Runner, because he acts a lot like the replicants in that film. Unfortunately for him, Adama's played by a guy who was in that film, so Adama cottons on and bashes his head in with a flashlight. While Adama's still separated from the rest of the crew (and seriously, this sequence lasts forever), the civilian fleet arrives. Adama gets back, and he and Lee have a... restrained reunion. Adama, Tigh and Baltar discuss what it means that the Cylons look like us now. Baltar's tasked with coming up with a way to identify the Cylons, because apparently the Voight-Kampff test doesn't exist in this universe (seriously, though, Six is clearly sociopathic at the very least. She'd register as a replicant).
Starbuck is tasked with scouting outside the nebula to see what the Cylon position is. Before she leaves, she confesses to Lee that Zak (remember him? He's Lee's dead brother and the whole reason there's a wedge between Lee and Adama - apparently, although the final episode suggests that their estrangement goes back even further than that) actually flunked Basic Flight, and was only in that Viper he died in because Starbuck fudged his grades. Whoops. You'll have to wait for episode 4 of the series proper for that issue to actually be tackled, though.
Starbuck finds a Cylon force. Adama and Roslin argue about whether or not they can actually fight, and Adama eventually agrees to just run. Before they do so, Baltar frames a man as a Cylon agent (pretty much because Six told him to), and that man gets left behind on Ragnar. Not to worry, though, because he actually is a Cylon. (Because if he wasn't, Baltar would be utterly reprehensible, I guess.)
There's a fairly epic battle while Galactica screens the civilian fleet from a Cylon attack, Starbuck saves Apollo's life, and then there's the denoument. Adama claims that they're going to set course for Earth, but Roslin privately calls him on it. Now she holds all the cards; it's not enough that Adama's already said he has no intention of staging a military coup, now Roslin can just hold the "you lied about knowing where Earth is" thing over his head. At the very end, the Cylons arrive on Ragnar and spout some cryptic gibberish. One of them is identical to Boomer, meaning, dun dun dunnnnnnn, Boomer's a Cylon.
As you can tell, there's not nearly as much stuff going on in Part 2. The Ragnar Station stuff drags on for longer than is really healthy (and with the benefit of hindsight, the "mechanic drops an explosive thingy and causes a nasty accident" event is going to get recycled in the series proper). It's nice to see Baltar start worming his way into Adama's confidence once the latter gets back, and it's good to see the various "I thought you were dead" reactions Lee gets when he comes back. There's a nice battle at the end, but really, having introduced everything in Part 1, all Part 2 really seems to do is get all the chips in place for the actual show.
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