There was a time when Battlestar Galactica was an amazing show — it was dark, but its characters somehow overcame the horrors of holocaust. There was empathy, humanity, even heroism and self sacrifice. Then that all went away for most of last season and the start of this one only to finally return in episode 4.6, “Faith.” Wow, this is the show I fell in love with way back when — let’s hope it can keep it up.

Spoilers follow.

This week’s show deals with two plot threads — Starbuck, Athena, Anders and a hapless red shirt Colonial warrior head off to Nathalie’s crippled base star, while Laura is forced to face the hope the Cylon religion offers the human survivors when she encounters another woman dying of cancer. Both stories are far superior to anything we’ve seen so far this season and inject much-need humanism back into BSG.

The standoff with Starbuck and her crew on the Demetrius is resolved fairly quickly this week, but not without a serious casualty in the form of Felix Gaeta. Anders shoots him in the leg to prevent him from jumping the sewage treatment vessel back to the fleet. When Helo decides to give Starbuck a chance and let her take a Raptor and a small crew to the Cylon basestar to see what their hybrid knows of Earth, the lack of medical care almost certainly assures us that Gaeta will lose his leg, if not his life.

There’s only a short amount of time before the Demetrius has to rendevouz with the fleet, meaning that if Starbuck is not back in time, she and her people will lose the fleet forever. The ticking countdown to jump time serves as a source of tension for the episode.

With Leoben, Athena, Anders and a faceless female red shirt in tow, Starbuck finds the debris field left behind by Cavil’s ambush several episodes back. As they explore the remains of half the Cylon fleet, Starbuck sees one her paintings realized by a comet-like base star burning up in the atmosphere of a planet. When it appears that no Cylons remain alive (or at least functional), they come upon Nathalie’s heavily damaged basestar.

Once inside, Athena is the first off the Raptor and encounters a group of her “sisters.” It’s similar to Boomer’s meeting with the other Eights in the first season of Galactica, but this time they’re all wearing clothes. As usual, the weak Eights are wringing their hands about their decision to join with the Sixes and Leoben’s in the civil war. Athena basically tells them to buck up and grow some balls. Their problem has always been their inability to stick it out and commit, which Athena has finally decided to do by marrying Helo and becoming a Colonial officer.

As Starbuck and Leoben head below to meet with the ship’s hybrid, the Colonial red shirt encounters one of the Sixes. Although this Six is unnamed, she’s very much in the same mold as Caprica Six and Head Six and not Nathalie, Gina or the other “darker” variants. It turns out that the red shirt was a member of the resistance on New Caprica and had killed this Six who is now not ready to forgive the human for what was done to her. Moments into an exchange, Six uses her superior Cylon strength to kill the colonial. It’s brutal fight scene and lacks the “excitement” seen on other shows. The violence is jarring.

When Nathalie and Anders arrive, the red shirt is already dead. Furious for the murder, Anders takes down the Six and puts a gun to her head.

It’s here where “old” Galactica returns. The Six has clearly been emotionally damaged by her experience on New Caprica — her death at the hands of the Colonials still haunts her and she shows signs of post traumatic stress syndrome. This is the kind of point that’s been lost in recent episodes — that the Cylons are sentient beings like the humans and suffer from many of the same frailties. In this case, severe psychological damage after having survived a violent ordeal.

Ultimately, with a standoff now in place with Anders demanding justice for the murder of his fellow Colonial, it’s Nathalie who makes Anders pull the trigger. She reminds us that the Six won’t resurrect — that she’s dead for good. It’s a sign that Nathalie is committed to helping the humans, even if it means executing one of her own dwindling sisters for murder.

On Galactica, Roslin meets a woman named Emily who is also dying of cancer. With no hope for survival, Emily has turned to Baltar’s radio sermons for solace. She has come to believe that there may be some truth in the Cylon religion, and it gives her some small comfort that she will be reunited with her family once she passes on.

This is hard for Roslin to swallow — the alien monotheistic faith is a discomforting to her as its leader. But Emily is not swayed by her arguments — debating Laura regarding about the ineffectual polytheistic faith the Colonials follow. Where Laura sees the gods as abstract concepts meant to teach complicated parables, Emily sees them as useless when compared to the potency and love of the Cylon god and his message.

It’s important to note that Emily is played quite impressively by Nana Visitor, who is best known for her work as Major Kira Nerys in the late great Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. She was at the center of some of DS9′s most emotional episodes — namely “Duet” and “Second Skin,” which dealt with reconciliation after a horrible war. She presents Emily as a woman who survived the initial Cylon attack and the occupation on New Caprica only to rot in a cargo hold aboard a freighter before getting cancer. Through Emily we see the desperate lives of people in the fleet, and how appealing the deliverance promised by the Cylon faith really is for them.

In the end, Laura has a dream similar to one described by Emily earlier in the episode. They’re on a boat, crossing a river, and on the other side are their loved ones. Emily goes to them, disappearing from the boat, but Laura chooses to stay, her work still unfinished. But you get the sense that she is coming to grips with her death, possibly by accepting Baltar’s teachings. When she awakens, Emily’s bed is empty and Baltar’s sermon plays on the radio. Having Emily’s body simply removed rather than seeing her corpse has a tremendous emotional weight — Nana Visitor’s performance was so strong and so key to the story that her absence has as much of an impact on us as it does on Laura Roslin.

Back on the basestar, the hybrid babbles some prophecy mumbo jumbo — it’s pretty clear by the end of her exchange with Starbuck that they need to reactive the D’anna’s if they plan on learning more about the Final Five and the path to Earth.

As an Eight unplugs the hybrid so that they can connect the Cylon ship to the Raptor’s FTL drive, a Centurion is so troubled by the pain the Hybrid is suffering that it shoots the Eight in the stomach. The other Cylons and humans have no choice but to take the Centurion down before it turns on them.

As the Eight dies, she asks for her Athena to come to her and comfort her, but Athena refuses. It’s Anders who reaches out to her and calms her as she passes. Despite the fact that he shot Gaeta earlier in the episode, the empathy Anders has for the Eight is pretty amazing. Of all the Final Four, Anders is the most compassionate and human.

Starbuck and her new Cylon allies are able to jump back to the Demetrius in time, which means there will be a basestar (albeit a damaged one) traveling with the rag tag fleet. It will be interesting to see how things play out, with the bad blood still so fresh on both sides of the conflict.

The episode ends with tremendous momentum. For the first time this season, I’m finally engaged with the show and looking forward to the next episode.

Relieved that an old favorite has returned to form, I give “Faith” a superlative 5 out of 5 chrome toasters: