Galactica Recap: Hero

Note: Spoilers below if you have not seen this episode.

Battlestar Galactica continues to produce excellent episodes week in and week out. This week's installment, Hero, led the series in an unexpected direction: backward.

Guess who helped start the Cylon ambush on the 12 colonies? That's right: Admiral Adama. We've been allowed to believe for two-plus years that the Cylons' return and resulting annihilation of the colonies were completely unexpected. Apparently not, as this episode reveals that the military leadership for the colonies, known as the Admiralty, suspected that the Cylons might be regrouping prior to their attack.

I had two reactions to this discovery. The first was, "Wow, that makes me look at so much of the story differently." The second was a feeling that this revelation was a little clumsy. I'm willing to forgive a lot on this series because it is so excellent nearly all the time, but I couldn't completely shake the feeling that this was a recent addition to Adama's past, not something that the writers have hidden from us all along. Lt. Novacek's arrival seems a little too perfectly timed to me, even knowing that the Cylons let him escape.

I still generally like this plot development, but I wish it could have been introduced more gradually. Wouldn't one of Adama's first responses after the attack have been to feel remorse at not doing more before the Cylons arrived to destroy civilization? Still, this new piece of knowledge makes Adama's miniseries speech that much more powerful: “The time comes when you can't run from the things you've done.”

Galactica: Hero

What would it be like to spend decades in captivity by a ruthless enemy? We may get a glimpse tonight, as Battlestar Galactica introduces a character from Admiral Adama’s past: Lt. Novacek (above) was apparently presumed dead following a secret mission, but it turns out that he’s been in the Cylons’ clutches since the original war nearly 40 years earlier.

Gaius Baltar was irrational long before arriving aboard a base ship, and his sabbatical has only made him worse. Who knows if Baltar was reasonably sane prior to encountering Number Six on Caprica prior to the holocaust, but we can safely assume that decades of imprisonment and isolation have left their mark on Lt. Novacek.

It appears that tonight’s episode will explore a common theme on the show, one that Adama mentioned during the show’s miniseries: “The time comes when you can't run from the things you've done.” Did Adama miscalculate in sending Novacek to his fate, or did he err in assuming that Novacek was dead?