So Captain Obvious and company settled in for our favorite Friday night activity - Battlestar! After last week’s sharkjump-worthy Oprah fest we were happy to see things getting back on track for Adama and company. Namely the potential for explosions, death or at the very least some actual space travel and Cylon activity.

Now sure, it’s not like we’re counting but we haven’t seen a Cylon raider in weeks. We haven’t seen anyone threaten the fleet with a stolen nuke in even longer. Episodes nowadays are all about emotions and shit, something that was blessedly absent from a lot of the first two seasons. But this is the new Battlestar where interpersonal relationships are far more important than, oh, actually trying to get to Earth so we’ll take what we can get.Imagine the smiles across our faces when in the first 10 minutes we see more Cylon plot than the previous week in entirety! And it keeps getting better, too. Turns out the humans are running out of food and finding algae from some planet on the other side of a radiation-plagued star cluster is their only hope to a good meal. Problem is navigating through, as they can’t do it in one jump so they decide to have the pilots lead the ships with raptors, first having them jump into the life-threatening cloud, finding the next jump coordinates and then jumping back out. Unfortunately they’ll be blind in the cloud, not to mention the whole ‘dying from radiation poisoning’ thing so time is of the essence.

The subplot this week is discovering Kat is actually a drug runner named Sacha. Her dealer Enzo recognizes her which tips off Kara who busts her on it. Turns out she stole the Louanne Katraine name during the Cylon attack to escape. She begs Kara not to go to Adama with the news.

So Tigh returns to the bridge to keep an eye on things. In the end they only lose a couplefew ships and Kat, torn between her old life and the new one she’s fabricated decides her true identity is the viper pilot and sacrifices her health to ensure the civilian ship’s safety. She emerges from the star cluster all flavors of fucked up and collapses on the flight deck after returning to raucous applause from the crew.

In Cylon news, Baltar has figured out Xena’s plan of killing herself over and over to gain insight of what exists beyond death. Turns out she sees the other 5 Cylon models in that gray area so Baltar encourages her to keep doin it so he can find out if he’s a Cylon afterall and not a traitorous piece of shit with neither morals or a conscience. Captain Obvious thinks he can be both without issue. It’s a lot like playing Grand Theft Auto and trying to launch yourself into orbit on a motorcycle. You keep dying but you gotta keep at it, just to see if it can be done. In the meanwhile Baltar and Xena accost the hybrid stealing a scene from Minority Report in discovering a clue to finding Earth, Jupiter’s pasties in a cow’s eye or some shit. However brief, those were the Cylon developments for the week.

Back on the Galactica Kat is in sickbay the medical unit dying. Kara swings by for a second to tell her she’s all brave and to give her a bunch of sleeping pills to kill herself with. Then Adama swings by and tells her she was like a daughter to him, something he’s also told Kara. Makes you wonder if that’s just some line he whips out when he has nothing better to say. He makes her honorary CAG and she croaks, bringing to a close another retarded conflict for Kara. Now she only has personal fights with Lee, Anders, Tigh, possibly Dee and Adama to resolve.

But that can wait for next week, when we see a return of Al Brother Cavil and the first actual Cylon/Human conflict in weeks!