Never try to save money by buying cheap disposable razors, when you rely on four- and five- blade razors to keep your head nice and bald. So, now, I’ve got some nice bloody scabs forming on the side of my head.

You know what this means, don’t you? I’ll be spending $20 on razor blade cartridges the next time I go to Target.

Obviously, this post contains spoilers for last night’s episode: you have been warned.

Here’s a recap: In the wake of the attempted (and failed) coup, Tyrol and Adama tour the Galactica, and Tyrol points out various stress fractures: the big old ship is falling apart, and Tyrol wants permission to use a Cylon resin to shore up the frame. Meanwhile, Anders, who was shot in the head in the previous episode, is being prepped for surgery when he recalls how the Final Five Cylons came from Earth to the Colonies. In the meantime, in flashbacks over the course of the last eighteen months (since Col. Tigh poisoned his wife), we see Ellen Tigh being reborn in an isolated chamber on Cavil’s basestar. What follows is certainly an interesting conversation, but both the Ellen and the Anders plot points can be summed up as a whole shit ton of exposition, which, thankfully, answers a lot of questions.

And it answers those questions pertaining to the Final Five: how did they get from Earth to the Colonies? What is their relationship with the Cylons? How did they come to all find themselves on the Galactica or within the Rag Tag Fleet (in the cases of Ellen and Tory) with no memory of who and what they were?

I suppose it was all very necessary. Yet, when the water-cooler talk at the Office comes around to something like this (er, which it never does, because I’m the only BSG fan there), or to LOST, people always bitch about how the audience never gets any answers, only more questions, and I think of something Captain Picard said in an episode of TNG — “We seek not only answers to our questions, but more questions!” I’m paraphrasing, by the way.

But I’ve never necessarily been big on having all the answers. Galactica is a show that isn’t about questions, or answers: it’s about a bunch of people who survived the holocaust of their race and are fleeing across the galaxy for their lives. Questions? Answers? What fascinates me about BSG is seeing folks with nothing to live for, beaten down, in the mud, refusing to realize they’ve been defeated — I just like seeing the people overcome all the difficulties they’ve got. A good show, a great show, isn’t about questions and answers, it’s about people that the audience can relate to making tough decisions and big mistakes.

Battlestar Galactica is about people being rough and tough in space, not about them waxing poetic on some philosophical concept. Last night’s episode wasn’t much on the earlier, but heavy on the latter.

After the pace of the last few episodes, I have to admit, it was sort of like running down the street and straight into a glass wall. I did that once, well, except I was walking and it was a glass door. I was sore for a week.

Meanwhile, I was disappointed by the lack of follow up on the mutiny. I realize that with only a few episodes left, the story-telling time available is limited, and thus, characters might fall through the plot holes. But I do still want to know what happened to Nowart, the Marine who Adama told to flee; Racetrack and Skulls and Narcho; Captain Kelly, who redeemed himself.

Instead, we focus on the mysterious cracks that are showing up on Galactica. Did Tyrol’s forceful shut down of the FTL engines cause the ship’s weaknesses to manifest themselves more rapidly than they might have otherwise? “They cut corners?” Adama seethes at one point, but Tyrol’s admission that they likely did didn’t surprise me very much: as I recall, the ship was built at the start of the first Cylon war, and the Colonial shipyards were probably rushing all twelve of the first batch of Battlestars into service.

The pace starts picking up towards the end, when Sharon One (aka Boomer), who was the only one of the Number Eight models to side with Cavil early in season four, and who has been taken into his confidence, decides to spring Ellen from what is essentially a captivity, and just before Cavil subjects her to a painful medical procedure designed to literally pick her brain.

Not only is this exciting because, well, it’s the only action in the episode aside from Anders going having a seizure, but the geek in me sees Boomer rejoining the Rag Tag Fleet, which is exciting because, hey, we were all — at least, I was — rooting for Boomer to overcome the programming she wasn’t aware of during the first season. It was sleeper agent Boomer who blew up the ship’s water supply, who almost sabotaged Galactica’s search for more water, for Trillium, and who, of course, shot Commander Adama twice. Boomer was killed, downloaded, and reborn, and when we see her — and we do — she’s come to be very anti-human.

So, for me, the highlight of this episode wasn’t the answers we found — rather, it was Model Number Eight, one time Cylon sleeper agent, Raptor pilot, Sharon “Boomer” Valerii, making a decision to side, at least for now, hopefully, long term, with her former compatriots on the Rag Tag Fleet.

UPDATE:

I love Television Without Pity, which sums up Cavil’s puppet-playing as:

Destroyed utterly the life and civilizations on twelve planets, burnt the knowledge of their creators out of his brothers and sisters, killed Daniel and boxed Three, wiped and boxed the Final Five just to make sure they ended up in the holocaust, had a day-long conversation with Chief about how he wasn’t a Cylon even though he totally was, tried his best to kill off the idea of God(s) Himself(s), plucked out his father’s eyeball, and fucked his own mother while she was in mortal mode on New Caprica. Moral of story? You Never Fuck With Pinocchio. Welcome to the last act of the last season of the very best TV show of all time, and here’s your Dramamine.

Clearly, whichever graphics designer at Google designed the holiday image for the search engine, does not appear to enjoy Valentine’s Day. The image certainly appears inspired by some weird slasher flick.

HT: Claude.