"BSG" Scorecard: In Space, No One Can Hear You Flip Out

A difficulty in juggling a big ensemble cast and multiple plotlines as "Battlestar Galactica" does is that, some of the time, a few will fall short. With the Cylon civil war getting into full swing, and the hidden Cylons clinging desperately to survival while trying to figure out what they're supposed to do and be, it's hard to care  very much about Adama vs. Roslin vs. Adama. This is surprising because Pappy Adama and Roslin are arguably two of the most interesting characters in the show, but at the moment I just can't get worked up about their political bickering. Let's be generous and say that's because the other stories are way too cool.

We only get a snippet of what's up with Starbuck and the crew of the Demetrius, who have apparently been on the road for a few weeks. It's not very interesting, but it's also not really long enough to do anything but remind us that Starbuck is crazy (but still hot) and show the crew chafing under her nutty, nutty command. Still, it feels superfluous, which is a shame because the main plot threads are so jaw-droppingly awesome. But this is a numbers game! Let's see how it stacks up.

• Inventive Uses of the F-Word: 1 (Clusterfrak! Nice)
• Cylon-on-Cylon Crime: 1 (But what a doozy! Also it's more than 1 if you count all the Cylons onboard the ship of insurrectionists.)
• Cylon-on-Human Crime: 1 (Wow, Tory = No mercy of any kind. She's starting to get a creepy converted zealot vibe.)
• Human-on-Cylon Crime: 1 (At least before she went out, Cally got a chance to seriously smack a bitch. With a wrench, no less.)
• Really Boring Meetings: 1 (Hey, who needs to watch boring meetings on TV when you can have them in real life?)
• People Crazier Than Starbuck: 1 (I think Cally really outpaced Queen Crazypants this week, which is probably why she had to die.)

At a 6, there sure was a lot going on in this episode. Why shoehorn the nonsense with Lee getting manipulated into going after Roslin into an episode where it's guaranteed to be the least interesting thing going? No doubt it will all pay off in the end, because it always seems to, but the pacing of this episode seemed hurt by following so many threads at once.

The benefit of writing a show which pulls no punches is that you can have a crazy woman step into an airlock with her toddler and generate real tension about whether or not she's just going to space herself and her little robo-spawn. On any other show, you'd be certain that a mother and child would be safe, but BSG is just sick enough to do it. Luckily for the mini-cylon, he gets rescued by Tory and lives to cry another day. I'm guessing that Tory isn't going to be very popular with the chief after that little scuffle.

Oh yeah, and also a bunch of sixes and eights prove that there's some weakness in their model by falling for, seriously, the most obvious trap in the history of Cylonkind. That's the way you thin out the cyber-genepool, right there.