Mark made an amazing Eggplant Parmesan from Mark Bittman's book "How to Cook Everything", and I made an Arugula Salad from Ina Garten.
I really enjoyed this episode, while it takes on an episode specific situation we also learn a lot about the overall relationships between characters and you can see a lot interpersonal dynamics coming to life.
In this episode the Galactica is dealing with a water shortage that we learned about in the last episode. They come across a planet that has a lot of ice that could be utilized to solve their water situation. In order to mine the water from the newly discovered ice planet they need 1000 men...the supply of which can only be met by utilizing prison labor from the prison ship, the Astral Queen. Adama wants to force them to do the labor, Roslin is reluctant to use the prisoners as slave labor. So with Apollo, they come up with an idea to get the prisoners to volunteer to do the labor in exchange for points that will count towards their freedom.
Things go awry when Apollo visits the prison ship to serve as an ambassador to get the prisoners to agree to the proposal. A political prisoner (played by the actor who played Apollo in the original series) organizes a prison revolt. He takes Apollo and his team as hostages in order to satisfy his agenda to force an election for president, instead of accepting Roslin's authority.
Apollo's negotiating really shines through here, he treats the leader of the revolt with a lot of respect, offering a middle ground solution where the prisoners get to control their own ship and he promises elections within the next year, in exchange for their cooperation with mining the newly discovered planet for water.
Mark here...Laurel did a good job of summing up the events of this episode. The actual plot line of the prisoners isn't super riveting as much as the outcome. The interplay between the characters is very interesting as we get a little more development in Roslin and Adama's relationship with each other, which is still quite uneasy. There's respect but both are still suspicious of the other. Apollo seems to serve as a bridge between the two. This dynamic is upended by the end though as his solution to the prisoner revolt on the Astral Queen pleases neither of them. His call for an eventual election makes sense, although Roslin takes him into her confidence to reveal she has cancer (which we learned in the mini-series) and she's afraid knowledge of this will jeopardize her leadership.
Separately, Adama gives a very unstable Baltar a nuclear warhead with the goal of using the plutonium inside to create a Cylon detector. Adama clearly has reservations in trusting Baltar, but has no choice as he is the only scientist they have found in the fleet. We see though that Baltar is still having visions (and internal conversations) with Cylon Number 6...
Laurel again...I just wanted to add that Mark and I have been talking about how much we appreciate the diversity of the show. It's the future so it's easier for them to portray complete diversity without the complexity of the social contructs of the present day, a la Star Trek. Women seem to be on completely equal footing to the men...not to say that the women on the show don't have a feminine side, but femininity is treated as an asset and not a weakness (outside of Starbuck's denial of her femininity, which I still don't understand). Also many races and lots of mixed race people seem to be represented as well. We haven't seen any gay stuff yet but Mark assures me that comes later. I would like to see a person or two with a disability as well but you can't have it all I guess. Anyway it's super refreshing to watch a show that can just put all this stuff out there and not have to deal with any of the politics that a show would have to address if set in the present day. Although I guess they are pretty racist against robots at this point...
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