I wasn't planning to post on this episode right away, but readers need a place to put comments, so I will start with some thoughts. The episode was a good one but wasn't tremendously surprising to some. Many were of the opinion that Boomer was still working for Cavil and they were right. And we've always known that Starbuck was under the influence of the mysterious string-puller who showed her a vision of Leoben and gave her a destiny. Now that we know the Final Five wake-up wasn't part of their own plan or Cavil's, it has to have come from the string-puller, who likes All Along the Watchtower (whether Anders wrote it or not.) And Hera's been involved in the visions of the Opera House, which are also clearly the work of the string-puller/One-true-god.

Still, the depth of the betrayal was good and shocking. The kidnapping in a box. The sex. The building of a complete fantasy world, complete with kid, to seduce Tyrol. When she leaves him, she tells him she truly felt all that.

Perhaps she did. This is the Boomer who, along with Caprica Six, seemingly saved the human race by convincing the Cylons not to kill them on New Caprica. She betrayed Adama and shot him, but due to programming. Now she's ready to betray those she loved, as she betrayed her own model line.

Is it possible that she has been programmed by Cavil? This would disappoint me, I want my characters to be acting of their own will, make their own choices for their own reasons, but it is not out of the question here. The other, nice alternative is that she and Tyrol had a plan ready to betray Cavil ("I'm not sure I can do this on my own") though it is clear that Tyrol didn't realize a Hera kidnapping was part of what was going on. Where did he think he was sending her? To wander the stars in a Raptor until she runs out of air? Why did she ask him to come with her?

And I liked the stronger use of piano music. Though I kept expecting them to break out into "Someone to watch over me" at some point, not the All Along the Watchtower bass line.

A few other notes:

A Stream of Stars

Michael Hall, who has been diligent in finding Earth star patterns in recent episodes, has now found them in too many places, including the Ionian Nebula from the start of season 4 and after jumps from there. In spite of what seemed like a strong message with:

• The most well known constellations being presented blatantly over the Cylon battle location and other locations
• The use of random constellations over the 13th colony

May be just poor work on the part of the graphics dept. Clearly they have two modules for doing their backgrounds in post, one for the real solar system stars, another for random stars. They never used the real system stars until season 4, which seemed like a signal, but they've used them willy-nilly. While they would not expect most fans to have fancy star pattern matching software, the use of Orion and the Big Dipper did not require this to match.

So we have to seriously reduce the confidence we can make in predictions based on those star patterns.

Anders' last words

Anders' memories caused him to shout out "stay with the fleet. It's coming. The miracle." to the others. Doesn't Ellen have these memories? It sure seems she would be asked about them, but we still learn no more.

That Seven

While we are told to not expect much more of Daniel in this show (though those saying he is Starbuck's dad got a boost) we should pay attention to the exact wording of what they said about him. When Ellen talks of Daniel, Cavil says, "that seven was..." This suggests there were, at that time, multiple sevens. And Anders, though mumbling words, calls him "the Daniel." So Daniel might not have been the original #7, though Cavil does seem to have shut down the further duplication of that line.

Poor Galactica

It will be sad when she breaks up. Just a few more jumps. We at least learn that jumping inside a ship is bad news. And it was so nice to see the cliche space opera scene of the ship racing for the closing doors of the launch bay -- and this time actually hit the wall. Of course the bad guys always do hit the wall in that scene after the good guys sneak through, and Boomer is now fully bad guy. Curious that the Tylium ship was able to jump away while vipers were trying to land on it to board it, and they were not hurt.