Pegasus

Mark here... we're watching episode 10 of Season 2 of Battlestar Galactica, "Pegasus".  This episode aired as sort of a finale of season 2.5 of the show and so this episode was a cliffhanger until 6 months later when the next episode aired.  With that in mind, we are going to end this round of Battlestar Galatica  reviews on the cliffhanger...

On to the episode...this one was a doozy, one of my favorite as it harks back to the original series.  In this episode the Battlestar Pegasus shows up.  All the other Battlestars were assumed destroyed when the Cylons attacked but apparently the Pegasus survived.  Not only that, but when we meet the crew, Admiral Cain, who commands Pegasus, outranks Adama.  I had Laurel take note of the point when everyone meets because Cain shakes hands with Adama and clearly takes the overhand dominant role, however when she meets Roslin they shake hands as equals...Roslin being unwilling to submit and Cain not knowing her/Roslin's role.

In any case, the episode is really an exciting look at the road not taken, had Adama not had Roslin.  Cain is a military commander at war.  She takes control of the fleet and ignores the civilians.  She has a Cylon prisoner who is tortured (a 6 model), clearly as an allegory to the effectiveness of torture (she's recovered no useful intelligence). Pegasus' version of Col Tigh, the XO tells awful stories of Cain's command.  Adama, to his credit, dismisses this, saying they also had to make tough decisions aboard Galactica in uncertain times.

The episode ends on a cliffhanger after Helo and Chief stop Pegasus' interrogation officer from raping Sharon, by accident killing him in the process.  Cain decides they deserve to die for this and Adama launches fighters against the Pegasus to get them back....

Laurel here...I just wanted to emphasize Mark's point about the road not taken...Both fleets have been under duress for a long time, and you can see the context of how both fleets have gotten to where they are, but they have ended up in such different places.  Adama, who would have gone the purely military practical route has ended up in a more humanitarian place because he has had Roslin's opinion to consider the whole time, which I feel like has tempered his decisions (rightly so) to be a little more compassionate than an unchecked military commander would have chosen normally.  Cain's decisions have gone unchecked for months so her ship has been run like a military state.  The humanitarian concerns have been ignored.  I don't blame her because there is a context to why she has gotten to this place...but hence the decision to torture the Cylon prisoner, and execute the two Galactica offers who killed her officer by accident.