Galactica‘s turnaround in quality continues with this week’s episode, which brings a resolution to the mutiny arc and effectively clears more characters from the cast.  

Coups and mutinies are a tricky business, especially when not everyone is on board.  Gaeta suffers from enormous hubris and naievette, while Zarek, the bitter realist, takes things too far by executing the Quorum and pushing Gaeta to do the same to Adama.

Laura Roslin rises to the occasion this week, serving as both the voice of outrage and the conscience not only of the humans, but the Cylons.  Her anger at the wrongness of Zarek and Gaeta’s actions, and her insistence that she will do whatever it takes to undo the damage they’ve done is enough to seriously weaken the mutineers position and gives Adama the support he needs to take back his ship.

But the real lynch pin of the show is Captain Kelly, the disgraced former Galactica officer who was imprisoned for murdering Baltar’s lawyers at the end of season three.  Kelly, one would expect, has a major grudge against Adama and Tigh — but things are more complicated than that.  A chance encounter with Tyrol, who apparently was once a close friend, forces Kelly to re-evaluate his loyalties and decide to side with Adama.  It’s this decision that finally infuses BSG with a sense of hope again.  If Kelly, who was broken by the war, could change his mind and decide to go with the side calling for reconcililation, then perhaps the human race isn’t as doomed as we’d been lead to believe?

After a monkey trial where Adama is convicted by Judge Zarek, prosecuted by Felix Gaeta and defended by a conscripted Romo Lampkin, the admiral is taken down to the hanger airlock to be shot.  Fortunately, the pro-Adama forces make it in time to stop them.  Narcho, who lead the execution team, tells Adama that he always respected him, but couldn’t follow a man who refuses to fight the Cylons.  One wonders what Narcho’s respect will bring for him now.

Throughout the episode, Tyrol is seen crawling through ventilation ducts, which obviously were not created for men of his girth.  This is quite unlike the Enterprise‘s ventilation ducts, called “Jeffries Tubes,” which were designed for men of all sizes.  Finally, we see where he’s going — Galactica’s engine room.  Just as the mutineers are trying to spin up the ship’s FTL drives to jump away from the Cylon Baseship, Tyrol has the good sense to disable them.  After a failed couple of tries, he does — only to discover that there are some serious problems with Galactica’s structural integrity.  A huge crack has appeared on the ship’s bulkhead.  That can’t be good.

Adama and his team retake CIC, and he announces to the fleet that he’s back in command.  Gaeta seems almost relieved by the “reckoning.”  

Baltar has pretty much disappeared from the show since they found earth, but this week after a truncated storyline in which he expresses regret for always running, he pays a visit to a captive Felix Gaeta in his quarters.  Gaeta muses about his youth and his childhood wish to be an architect.  Baltar tries to offer his sympathies, but Gaeta refuses them — he now has to face up to the consequences of his own choices.  It’s easy to forget that these two were very close in the early seasons, and that Gaeta had been Baltar’s chief aid back on New Caprica.  

We soon cut to the airlock, where Gaeta and Zarek are tied to chairs and facing a firing squad.  Zarek looks to Gaeta sadly, as if to say: “Well, at least we gave it a shot.”  Gaeta seems oddly calm about what’s about to happen.  He notes that his leg stump has stopped itching.

Then Adama gives the order to fire.  Close-up on the marines’ assault rifles as they shoot.  Cut to credits.

And so ends the mutiny plot.  It’s hard not to feel sad for Gaeta, who in always trying to do the right thing, instead ends up doing something devestatingly wrong.  Uncovering the rigged election, working in the New Caprica administration, allying himself with Tom Zarek.  

Zarek himself is easier to understand — he’s a true revolutionary, someone who wants to destroy the status quo.  But at the end of the day, he never had any plan for governing — it’s the chaos he thrives on, not the details of leading people.  He latches on to anti-Cylon sentiment for this one final attempt at greatness, but at the end of the day he was a man without real ideology or creed other than to blow things up.  An anarchist, not a visionary.

In many ways, this is a natural end to his arc — he’s always been in the background, biding his time, waiting for his moment.  And then his moment came and he seized it, losing yet again. And what better accomplice than Felix Gaeta?

So, hopefully this little detour into politics and coups will now lead to some real effort to resolve the questions of the show — what is the mission of the Final Five?  Who was Head Six?  Does God exist?  Will they ever find a home?  Is everyone doomed to die?

Let’s hope they get around to answering them.

This week’s episode, which strongly (though somewhat neatly) tied up the mutiny arc, gets four out of five chrome toasters.