Holy crap! I didn't expect them to pull the trigger on half of what they did. I didn't think they'd have the nerve. To have Col. Tigh essentially execute his wife for treason in the opening minutes was fantastic. It's what his character would've done, no doubt, so that wasn't a surprise. What was amazing is that the writers were allowed to follow through with it--Ellen Tigh was such a great, over-the-top, scheming and divisive character that I still find it hard to imagine the show's runners letting go of her.
Then came the Galactica's warp into New Caprica's atmosphere, launching a squadron of Vipers as it plummets landward as an atomic fireball, jumping back into space again only scant kilometers above the ground. Sure, Star Trek had some clever twists in their various conflicts, and Babylon 5 made reversals a core part of the series. Farscape revelled in the unconventional actions of its characters. But having Adama order his battlestar to do something that is simply beyond the warship's physical ability to survive (atmospheric flight) and actually getting away with it... wow. And to think that it came at the midpoint of the episode.
As for the death of the Battlestar Pegasus, I remain oddly neutral on the subject. I've felt from the moment the Pegasus reappeared in this incarnation that the show was going to dispose of it eventually. As seen in the episode "Resurrection Ship," having two battlestars makes things somewhat easier on the fleet. As fresh and clever as jumping the Galactica into New Caprica's atmosphere was, "Pegasus to the rescue" was essentially a color by numbers exercise. When Galactica lost manuvering thrusters and the jump drive went offline, I told my brother "And here comes the Pegasus." Sure enough, Pegasus blazed into the battle, hell bent for leather. I knew then that one of the battlestars wasn't going to survive, and it sure wasn't going to be Galactica that bit the dust. Even having Pegasus ram the Cylon base star at the end seemed to me an exercise of cliche. All that was missing was Apollo ordering, "Ramming speed!" Part of the problem comes from the fact I never got the sense the Pegasus was as shot to hell as the Galactica. When the Galactica was done for earlier in the episode, you saw it in Adama's face. He'd run out of tricks. Contrast that with Apollo, who'd left all the Pegasus' Vipers behind to guard the civilian fleet: "He knew this was a one-way trip," says Adama. The defeatist approach of Apollos is one where he expects to lose his ship, if only to save Galactica. Adama's attitude was to pull out every trick in the book to save those conquered on New Caprica, and even though he knew he'd probably die, he wasn't accepting of his death and loss of Galactica as inevitable. The vibe I got at the end from Apollo was, "Okay, Galactica's gone, so we can abandon Pegasus to her fiery doom and simplify things for the writers again." Up until the end, I'd held out some hope they'd pull a Farscape and scatter two fleets, one headed by Pegasus and one by Galactica, alternating episodes for most of the rest of the season before rejoining the two and then doing away with the Pegasus.
Ultimately, my gripe isn't so much with the destruction of the Pegasus itself--which came as no surprise--but with how they did it. Again, as fantastic as the writing is on this show by and large, once again they take the easy route and it irritates me to no end.
Now Playing: Billy Joel The Nylon Curtain
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