Hi, Billy...
Updated 2006-02-15 16:00:00
Dana Delany's husband died somehow, which has caused her to go all manifesto-crazed and generally act like Al Pacino in Dog Day Afternoon. Dualla and Apollo go on some kind of date on Cloud 9, but of all the embarrassing people they might run into there -- witnesses to Phelan's public murder, bad guys, hookers -- it's Billy who runs into them. He then generally unspools. Ellen Tigh shows up and acts nutty and awesome, and when Encyclopedia Adama figures out that a hostage situation is about to happen, he fools Ellen into hiding with him in the bathroom under pretext of boning. Apollo finally puts his CO2-filled history to work for him, fooling the bar's sensors into thinking they're low on oxygen. Starbuck knows this is Lee's way of giving them an option, and comes in pretending to be the oxygen repairperson. Things immediately go very, very badly, and Starbuck shoots Apollo, for real. She's understandably awkward about telling Adama that she's yet again tried to murder one of his kids, but between having even-creepier-than-usual conversations with Boomer and dealing with Dana Delany, he's pretty nice about it. The demands of Delany and her crew are simple: they've learned about the second Boomer model aboard Galactica, and they would like to use her as a piñata -- basically the same kind of stage-three bargaining that the Pegasus pricks got involved in. Roslin's not happy about negotiating with terrorists, but here's who is in the hostage queue: her son-analogue Billy, Tigh's wife-analogue, and all three of Adama's children-analogues. Versus Sharon, who they hate anyway. No problem. Bill ends up sending in the original Lee Harvey Oswald Boomer's dead body, which he keeps around to chat with because he's a weird old man, but the hostage-takers quickly twig to the fact that he's keeping one Boomer back. Amidst many conversations about the fact that Boomer may have been playing them all along -- which are awkwardly shoe-horned in by, of course, Tigh's dialogue -- Adama decides that it is, in fact, possible, even though this assertion comes entirely out of the blue. Things go further and further south and get more and more intense and violent until finally, Billy dies in the crossfire. At this point, Starbuck just jumps out of the whole sick quadrangle, because we now have proof of what happens to those who dare to stand between Lee and Dualla, The Love Which All Of A Sudden. Still no forward movement on the season arc, and major ignoring of important characters continues. Next week: same deal, only instead of hostages and oxygen deprivation that is fake, it's Raptor pilots and oxygen deprivation that is real. And the week after that? It all goes down.