With Adama back in charge of the fleet, Roslin makes a religious appeal to the people to follow her to Kobol, which produces some surprising results. On Caprica, Kara is injured in an ambush, and she wakes up to a shocking discovery.

A note to first time BSG watchers; these aren’t the reviews for you. I plan to write about the show with the ending in mind. If you haven’t seen the show, you will be spoiled on stuff that happens at the end. You’ve been warned.

“Does the walker choose the path, or does the path choose the walker?” – Garth Nix

The above quote seems to fit this episode rather well; on one side of the story, President Roslin chooses to go into full-on prophet mode, handing out blessings and asking her people to follow her on an impossible mission. On another side, Starbuck is once again being confronted with her *special destiny* that she’s not ready to accept. And on another, Adama is back from the brink with a serious case of PTSD and a lot of misdirected rage.

Let’s start with Adama; a little while ago, he had a pretty crap day. His daughter betrayed and abandoned him to pursue a foolish hope. His son then turned against him to help out his newly formed enemy. At then, another daughter of his returns from her moment of triumph and tries to kill him.

He wakes up into a world that’s fallen apart without him, but he’s still back in that day, and he cannot let the hurt feelings and the anger go. He keeps stoking his rage to convince himself that it’s OK for him to stay angry (“Could you love a machine?”) but at the end of this crap day, he’s left with more children who have abandoned him and more hurt feelings and still more rage.  Just one more episode and he’ll pick a different path, but he is one broken Zeus here.

Roslin’s choice comes down to how far she is willing to go to fulfill her mission; turns out, it’s pretty far. With her path winding down, she is even willing to do what she needs to do to win, even if it vastly contradicts what she wants to do. That blessing scene is downright creepy, and she knows it, but this is what her followers ask of her and it is what a prophet does. Her Path demands it.

Now we get to the meat of the episode, Starbuck’s adventures on The Farm. She meets the charming Cylon Simon (the criminally underused Rick Worthy) and gets her ovary removed, while also reliving some trauma of her childhood.

First time through, I didn’t think of a lot of this episode, but in hindsight, it packs a lot of character moments into what is essentially an action episode. We learn a little about what makes Starbuck *Starbuck,* but we also get to see a softer side of her with Anders, a man she has feelings for, a man she will eventually marry (for good and bad reasons), a man with a secret that won’t break her. We get glimpses of her Path, and he will play a big part of her journey.

From the beginning, I liked Anders. Sure, he’s a little bland at first (and a bit reminiscent of one Riley Finn), but he’s a good guy with a good heart, and the writer’s really went the distance with his character and made him someone that 1) we cared about and 2) that Starbuck would care about. He goes on quite the journey, and I’m glad both the character and the actor got to stick around; he sounds like a pretty cool guy.

We also get to see part of the Cylon plan; they want to make babies naturally, but since they’re not natural, they are experimenting on human woman to try and force the process.  It’s good to see part of this plan (even now the details are a bit fuzzy), but it also lends this tinge of sadness to those genocidal robots. Ever species should be able to reproduce, and they’re stuck as they are forever.

They can’t even follow their own god’s Path. It’s not even an option for them; how much sadder does it get?

Next up: “Home, Part One”