BSG S2 premiere:
Previously, everything in S1.
Adama’s still bleeding on the table, and it is utter chaos all around. People are shouting, Sharon’s being taken into custody, so’s Lee (with his extremely well-toned arms still covered in his father’s blood), the doctor’s on another ship, and oh, by the way, there’s incoming. Tigh (who is in the middle of some flashbacks to meeting Adama with some very bad wigs) makes the decision to jump to emergency coordinates, they’ll just have to get the doctor on the other side of the jump, and come back for the stranded team on Kobol later.
So they jump. And…nothing. The fleet is nowhere. They are alone.
On Kobol, Gaius and Six are still staring at the crib, looking down on their beautiful little hallucination baby. Six insists that she is their daughter, and that she will be real, and asks Gaius if he’d like to hold her. She’s a little insulted when Gaius tries to point out the physical impossibilities of their having a real child, so he stops trying.
Kali (Kelly? Cali? The short girl engineer) finds Gaius mumbling “Am I the father?” to himself, half-asleep on the steps of the ruined temple. They’re moving out, and she’d like him to carry something this time, if he wouldn’t mind. The injured guy is still doing really badly, so they’re going slow. Then, shots are fired, and they have to run. There’s no time to double-check the supplies. Which kind of sucks, because as soon as they find a safe spot to sit down and check on InjuredGuy again, they realize that they’ve forgotten the second medkit, and they kind of need it NOW.
The engineering trio is sent back to retrieve it, and are attacked on the way back. One dies in Tyrol’s arms.
On Caprica, the Six that Starbuck killed is lying on the museum floor. Caprica!Sharon comments dryly that her consciousness is being uploaded into a new body, which will then tell the other Cylons their position, so they should move out. Starbuck isn’t really in the mood to listen to advice from a Cylon right now, and she puts her gun to Sharon’s head. Helo stops her, insisting loudly that she’s carrying his child. Starbuck understands, she really does, she and Helo go way back, and she remembers how he felt about Sharon back then, but this is not Sharon. Sharon disagrees, which gets her more of Starbuck’s gun in her face. Helo steps between them again, and holds Starbuck off, trying to tell her that Sharon’s “not like the others.” This is a really, really well-played scene, right through to the end where Starbuck realizes that while they’ve been arguing, Sharon’s been stealing the Raider she came in. They are now well and truly stranded.
On Galactica, the source of the error has been discovered – every hour, the emergency coordinates are updated, and then broadcast to the other ships. This time, in the confusion, Galactica’s coordinates were updated, but the fleet’s were not. The only way to find the ships is to jump back to where they came from and recalculate from there. (It is at this point in the ep that the handwaving should start.) The calculations will take 12 hours. Since they know that there’s a Cylon fleet waiting for them, this is really not an option. (Meanwhile, in prison, Roslin is insisting that they must go back, because otherwise Starbuck won’t be able to bring them the Arrow of Apollo.)
Gaeta comes up with a slightly new plan, whereby they jump back to Kobol, network all the ship’s computers with some phlebotonum and the calculations will only take 10 minutes. He can build a firewall to keep the Cylons out that long. The other guy whose name I can never remember disagrees vehemently with this plan, not because it’s full of meaningless technobabble that falls apart if you listen too closely, but because it’s something Adama would never do. No networked computers on his ship, ever, period. But Gaeta insists that it WILL work, and that it’s their only chance. Tigh flashes back some more (in the flashbacks, we are gradually learning that back in the Bad Wig (continued...)