A Measure Of Salvation By Luke Hung

After a bunch of previously seen clips, one of which reveals that Caprica Six knows that Baltar lied about seeing nothing strange on the infected Cylon Baseship. In ‘relatively real’ time we see Sharon ‘Athena’ Agathon and Racetrack inspecting the Lion Head nebula. They also happen upon the stranded and infected Baseship. Soon afterwards, Apollo leads a landing party on board and among five sick but surviving Cylon Humanoids they also find the astral marker presumably left by the Thirteenth Colony of Man. They also learn that the ship was laid low by a disease, which freaks out the unprotected against bio-weapons troopers. Cottle wants the beacon and all the surviving infected Cylons to run experiments on, Adama refuses on the beacon, but takes the infected Cylons. Umm, okay, but if I was going to take one, I would have taken both you can’t get infected by the same disease twice.
On the Baseship, Xena Warrior Cylon and Caprica Six accuse Baltar of being in collusion with the Colonials. They hypothesize that he intentionally led them to the infected marker, which was created and left behind by Galactica. Baltar basically tells them that they are nuts and he was only trying to help to no avail. Caprica Six brings up the beacon that he failed to tell them about. Baltar tries to explain that he didn’t tell them about the beacon because he was afraid that they would try to make him create a pathogen. Centurions march up menacingly and Baltar retreats into his little fantasy world. We later see him connected to a torture chair. He screams about the pain and Holo-Six tells him it’s all in his head. He writhes in pain so much the he pops out of his fantasy long enough to look at Caprica Six and say he loves her between gasps for air.
The Apollo lead landing party leaves the Baseship just prior to it blowing up. Well, there goes the marker and all the information it carried. I didn’t even see someone examine it for maps or computer information, what a crappy recon team. You are all fired. The boarding party returns to the Galactica and is placed in some type of quarantine. They quickly become irritating to each other. As we already know the disease has a minimal effect on humans and Cottle quickly says as much when he enters the quarantine area unprotected. The humans joyously leave the quarantine cheering, but Sharon has to stay behind. Helo turns this into some anti-Cylon racism, but we all know Cottle doesn’t roll like that. He gets the marines to drag off one of the ill Cylons and learns that the disease is lymphatic encephalitis, which is normally carried by rats. He postulates that one of the people who left behind the marker was sick with the disease and coughed on it marker. He informs Adama and Roslin that he can create a vaccine that will save the Cylons but the vaccine’s effectiveness is only temporary so they will need periodic booster shots.
Roslin, Adama and the rest of the brain trust decide to leverage the vaccine to coerce the prisoners into giving up information. One of the Cylons under questioning explains how the virus has become neurological for the Humanoid models and that this neurological contamination could spread via the resurrection process. He also reveals that Baltar is now working with the Cylons. Apollo using this knowledge theorizes that if they kill the prisoners near a resurrection ship the entire Cylon race will go down like dominoes. Helo is the lone dissenting vote. He considers the act genocide and states that makes them little better than the Cylons.
Roslin counters that the Cylons did not just make war on the human race they attempted to wipe it out and instead of letting the handful of survivors run away they are relentlessly hunting them down. Helo offers the brief pseudo peace on New Caprica as evidence that the Cylons can be benign, but that just pisses Roslin off. She reminds him that he never set foot on New Caprica and he doesn’t know shit about the ‘would be’ peace. Helo sounds more like the idealist that Apollo was supposed to be than Apollo. Roslin ultimately dismisses Helo after informing him that his opinions will be considered. Yeah right.
Back on the Baseship, Baltar continues to be tortured. Well at least it isn’t a woman for once. If torture itself wasn’t so distasteful I could get behind the Baltar suffering horribly angle. I just want to draw everyone’s attention to the moral ambiguousness of everyone, including Helo, who, I’m indicting here for his actions later in the episode. The torture pops Baltar in and out of his fantasy world. His mind creates a schism between his body, which he keeps in fantasyland fracking the shit out of his Holo girlfriend, and his mind, which he keeps in the room to screw with Xena’s faith in God. Xena frustrated with this ups the pain level, which forces Baltar further into his fantasy and he starts babbling about faith and wanting more pain. This for some reason makes Xena stop.
Helo returns to his chambers to find Sharon there. Apparently her pregnancy with Hera allowed some of fetus’ antibodies into system and protected her from the disease. Helo and Sharon are about to get busy until he tells her about he genocide plan. Surprisingly she doesn’t care. Sharon sides with the Colonials period. Adama tells Roslin that by charter he cannot use a biological weapon without a direct Presidential Order. She calls this exactly what it is, passing the buck. She gives that order, stating that if history decides to condemn them for committing genocide that means that there are humans left to call it genocide.
Hey I’m not down with mass murder, but I would be down with this. Anyways it wouldn’t kill all the Cylons because like with big domino chains there is always a point where the dominos aren’t close enough to each other. Sooner or later there won’t be a resurrection ship close enough to continue the spread of the disease not to mention this disease doesn’t exactly kill instantly so even if there were resurrection ships placed in the exact right locations they would have enough time to move away breaking the link. However this basic piece of logic escapes everyone or they all believe as I do, if I can’t get them all, get a couple. Their plan includes killing all the prisoners which I think is pretty stupid, I would keep a couple around so every time the Cylons attacked I could kill one destroying the resurrection ship that can along with my assailants.
As per their plan the Galactica drops on one of the Cylons transport lanes. Helo is conspicuously not on the bridge. He moves to a random panel and starts crossing some wires. Before long, the Cylon fleet with a resurrection ship pops in on the Galactica. Adama through Gaeta orders the prisoners deaths, but low and behold the Cylons are already dead. Outside, the Vipers and Raptors do some nice maneuvering with missile launches. Apparently Helo vented the prisoners’ air. With the prisoners already dead Adama has no reason to continue this fight. He orders the Vipers to return and make a quick jump out of the sector.
Helo following the jump waits in his cabin in preparation for his presumed meeting with Adama and the President. He remarks to Sharon they always seem to be coming for one of them and I laugh. It’s funny because it’s true. Adama meets with the President and informs her that it was an intentional wire cross by an unknown party. She wants further examination, but Adama says the case is closed. She remarks bitterly “how convenient.” Yeah I’d be pissed too, but for different reasons.
Overall the episode was a B-
Acting: B+, The acting was nice. I like Penikett and he plays well off others. Callis has mastered Baltar so he doesn’t seem that impressive anymore unless he has something major happening, which the torture scene was. I’ll give him some credit, but I think because they used direct stimulation of his nerves there was no real terror attached to it so conveying the fear was totally dependant on Callis’ performance.   

Plot: B-, There was some nice character development. As I said earlier Helo is becoming far more idealistic than Apollo ever was. This, I presume, was intentional as Apollo had to do a lot of growing or changing over the past two years. However, Apollo varied from being disloyal, to idealistic, to insensitive over two seasons. So frankly they have been so inconsistent with him so it seems less like progression and more like multiple personalities.  

Action/Episode Energy: C+, The episode was more about the development of the characters than any combat, but the pacing was still good. I am having some problems with the flashes back and forth with the Cylons and the Humans but since the switching was fairly minimal it didn’t throw me off too much.