BSG: Resurrection Ship

"We're all friendlies. So let's just... be friendly."
-Starbuck, channeling Buffy

There's something about cliffhangers. Most of the times, the ones that seem really good have horrible resolutions (3.2 and 3.3, "Precipice" and "Exodus, Part 1"). Ones that don't seem particularly engaging can lead to truly awesome things. This one falls somewhere in the middle. The Colonials are all busy flying circles around each other, afraid of firing first (and you really don't know who you want to punch more: smug, superior Narcho, or "request weapons free" ad nauseam Kat). Then Starbuck shows up and gets mistaken for a Cylon again, and because she's got pictures of the Resurrection Ship, everyone calls off everything and goes to calm down aboard Colonial One, where the President tries to placate everyone and then once Cain is gone, tells Adama that she (Cain) has to die.

We discover that Pegasus had a civilian fleet at one point, but Cain stripped the ships for parts and left most of the passengers to die. She took the useful ones with her, killing the families of those who refused to come. Upon hearing this, Adama decided that Cain is too dangerous to live, so he tasks Starbuck with killing her after the mission to destroy the Resurrection Ship.

Because the writers haven't come up with Death Star II, I mean the Resurrection Hub, here Gina-Six tells them that the Resurrection Ship contains everything needed for Cylons to resurrect themselves, and that if they destroy that ship, then Gina can truly die.

Now as best as I can tell, the Resurrection Hub is kind of like the server for the Resurrection Ships, and if it goes down then none of the ships will work, in much the same way that my internet doesn't work on days when the Comcast people get lonely enough to want phone calls from angry customers. But as I said, the writers haven't made that up yet.

So anyway, they decide to blow up the Resurrection Ship, because that will buy them a reprive while the Cylons take their time getting another Ship out there. Which kind of begs the following questions:

1) what else are the Cylons doing that would require them not to send every Basestar and Resurrection Ship they have after the last two Battlestars in the Galaxy?

Answer: per Season Three, they are looking for Earth. Why are they looking for Earth if Earth contains answers that Number One doesn't want them to find? Who knows. Another possible answer, both supported and refuted by evidence presented in "Pegasus," is that other ships in the Cylon fleet have quarantined planets with natural resources so the Colonials can't use them. But Cain specifically said that there were only two Basestars in the fleet. At least in "Exodus," the division of the Cylon fleet (they go from something like a dozen Basestars in "LDYB II" to four in "Exodus") makes sense, because the others are out searching for Galactica and/or Earth.

2) How many Resurrection Ships are there, and why don't the Cylons have another one hanging around for backup? On that note, how many Basestars are there? Again, The Plan seems to indicate that there are hundreds of them (we see at least twenty attack Caprica alone).

Anyway, as the operation is planned, both Adama and Cain make plans to execute each other after the battle. Adama clearly learns from the Boomer incident, and tells Starbuck to shoot Cain in the head. Adama's code is "Downfall," a reference to a film about Hitler's final days, while Cain's is "Case Orange," which is both a reference to World War 2 and to the contingency plan in the Miniseries.

Part 2: Apollo confronts Adama about the plan to bump off his superior officer, and falters in disbelief when he's told that it was the President's idea. Poor guy lost his job as CAG, got demoted to Lieutenant, and suffered a massive blow to his idealism. No wonder he tries to passively commit suicide in this episode, and starts visiting a prostitute by the time "Black Market" rolls around.

Adama asks Sharon why the Cylons hate humanity so much. She replies that they don't; they just don't think humans are worthy of survival. Adama takes her words to heart, and ultimately quotes them at Tigh and Starbuck when he calls off the mission to assassinate Cain.

Other than Lee doing his spacewalk, the mission goes off without a hitch. There's a tremendous amount of irony as Cain tells Starbuck not to flinch, and Starbuck and Fisk wish each other good hunting. But when the moment comes, both Adama and Cain back down, Adama because of his conversation with Sharon, and Cain because... well, who knows. (Would Fisk have done it? He's scared to death of Cain, for sure, but he doesn't exactly like her, either.)

Meanwhile, Baltar gets Gina-Six to open up to him (no, not like that) by telling her a story that Head-Six told him. Which is all well and good, except that now Head-Six is insisting that she's an angel of God, so either she's lying about that (which she's not), or she told him that story because on some level she actually does want Baltar to form a relationship with Gina (which she seems jealous about). Anyway, Baltar gives her a gun and she goes off and shoots Cain, thus saving our heroes the trouble of doing it.

And thus ends the two-parter. Starbuck speaks at Cain's funeral, noting that she respects Cain's refusal to flinch, to second-guess herself. (And yet Starbuck wants to frak Lee, who second-guesses himself all the time?)

Overall reflections on the Pegasus arc: a very well-crafted story. The last episode is absolutely rife with irony; Cain telling Starbuck not to flinch from what she has to do, Fisk and Starbuck wishing each other good hunting, one Cylon talking Adama down from shooting Cain while another Cylon does precisely that.