“How many dead chicks are out there?”
—Hot Dog

Really? We couldn’t have packed most of the events of this episode into 15 minutes and then moved on to something else? We needed to watch growly Adama stroke the walls of his ship 35,000 times in order to understand what’s at stake if he loses her? We needed to see 35,000 chummy scenes of him bonding with Tigh in order to understand that they are in deep, utterly platonic man love? Which we’ve known for, oh, four or five years now? And ditto the 35,000 times the Final Five (plus Six!) voted on whether to stay or jump ship? Yuck. I don’t mind the talkies, but this one suffered from a serious lack of urgency: a weird stop on forward movement in half the storylines combined with lightspeed narrative unspooling in the other half. So we’ll make this short & sweet & epically crabby, and then you can holler at me in the comments, because the less time I spend thinking about it—and my fear that Tricia Helfer is going to stab herself in the eye with her own cheekbone soon—the better.

First up: LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE LOVE. Right? That’s the point? Because I was scared I might have missed it. Ellen loves Saul who loves Ellen for all eternity but loves Bill and the Galatica more, and also Caprica Six, at least since he got her pregnant, only not enough to save the baby we’ve been talking about for almost a year now, and who is eliminated from the storyline just in time to bring back Samuel T. Anders. So what was the point of this miracle conception in the first place? To prove that love is all? That love is pain? That love withheld, or not felt deeply enough, kills? Or that BFF love kills babies, specifically? Maybe I would’ve felt all of this more keenly had we seen any kind of development or real connection between Tigh and Caprica Six, who from what I can recall went straight from angry brig sex straight to babies and living together and being in LOVE. And now the whole thing feels like a writer’s device, designed to…what? Who knows. Does Six move out now, so Ellen can move back in? Do they all live together in his cozy little XO quarters, or does Tigh move in with Adama and the Prez? Tricia Helfer certainly knocked those miscarriage scenes out of the park, as did Michael Hogan and the partially-evil-again Kate Vernon, and they’ll probably pick this up again next week and make it brilliant, but I was curiously unmoved by the whole thing.

Plus, I hate to say it, but do you remember how on “Remington Steele” nobody would ever actually call Pierce Brosnan “Remington,” because it was such a stupid fucking name? That’s sort of the way I feel about “Caprica.” I mean, I get that it’s an awesome otherworldly name for a planet and a brand new SciFi series and all, but as a given name for a person whom we’re not actually supposed to laugh at, it’s a little preposterous, and especially when Mary McDonnell tries to say it with a straight face. Although I love that “Caprica” of all people—one of the primary annihilators of the human race—is the one who has to remind Laura Roslin how to be human, re: babies and maternal love. But then Laura’s never been all that up with people anyway, or even the tiniest bit maternal, even before she was injected with all that hybrid blood and kidnapped that hybrid baby.

Anyway, damn, I love Laura Roslin, and especially that pissed off look she shot at Adama when he pulled the flask from his pocket and handed it to Ellen. But how did she have nothing to say when Baltar came looking for guns? I’m curious to know exactly how much was left on the cutting room floor here, because it sure seems like some pretty big moments got clipped in favor of a lot of repetition and strange character backtracking—what with Ellen morphing back so completely into Season 1 Ellen, and Baltar taking up his goofy, hormonally inspired preaching mantle again, and Tyrol suddenly pretending the last couple of weeks didn’t happen. We’ve seen that his last connections to humanity have been stripped away, but then why set him up as Galactica’s big savior over the last three episodes? Why bring him back into the fleet’s fold? Why bother making him Chief again? Because I don’t think I dreamed that shit up, and now it makes no sense at all.

But hey! I like the circular logic of Tyrol heading straight back to Boomer, when it was his own human wife who killed her before he learned he was a Cylon, too. Although it seems weird that we’re going to focus so much on Boomer now, after we’ve practically forgotten her over the past two years. And I do love how the Cylons are turning out to be just as emotionally stupid, if not more so, than the humans. But I suppose it’s their manufactured humanness that made them so stupid in the first place.

Speaking of which, did Adama really just arm Gaius Baltar and his band of religious sex hippies? With little discussion and zero argument? And again, I understand that he’s now drunk from whatever the space version is of “sunup to sundown,” but how many times do we need to be reminded of it? And how many times in three minutes can the guy refill his own glass? We get it: the old man is LOSING HIS MARBLES. And overlooking the fact that his own girlfriend was once made part Cylon in order to save her life. And that nobody was raising much of a stink back then, when the President of All Mankind was “blended.” Right? That’s what we’re all freaking out about now? We get that, too, so let’s please move on.

Oops, last question: where do the Cylons get all those clothes?