Battlestar Galactica: HOLY FRAK!!
My PVR somehow pooped out on me last week, and when I sat down to watch BSG on Sunday morning, it read "Battlestar Galactica -- 0:00." Awesome. Luckily, I know someone who was able to get me the episode (BSG eps are next to impossible to download), and now I can watch the rest of the season.

But nothing prepared me for these two episodes. WHOA. (Please stop reading now if you haven't yet seen episodes 3 and 4.)

Last week's episode, "The Ties That Bind," is one that will haunt me for a long time. Cally has noticed a change in her husband, and she's starting to go bonkers. Their constantly crying baby is, well, constantly crying, and Tyrol is on call 24/7... when he's not having private meetings with Tigh and Tory. She mistakenly interprets Tyrol's emotional distance and physical absence as him having an affair with Tory, and follows him one night, only to overhear a conversation he's having with his fellow two Cylons where they admit that's what they are. She races back to their quarters, where Tyrol soon returns, and she clocks him with a wrench in a very brutal scene, grabs the baby, and heads to an airlock. At this point I was holding my breath. Cally has a hatred of Cylons unmatched in anyone except maybe Tigh, and the thought of sleeping with one, and giving birth to a half-Cylon child is too much for her. Just as she's about to commit her murder/suicide, Tory catches her, and kindly convinces her she'll be okay. She tells Cally to hand over the baby so the two of them can return to the quarters and talk about it, and when Cally falls for it, Tory knocks her back so hard her head hits one of the rails, and Tory leaves with the baby, closes the airlock, and -- horrors -- shoots Cally off the ship. In a pseudo-2001 moment, we see a close-up of Cally's face, frozen and dead. It was horrifying.

The last thing Tyrol remembers is her trying to kill him with a wrench, so on this week's episode, he goes on a rampage about what a horrible person she was, and how he'd settled for Cally anyway, preferring Boomer, whom he wasn't allowed to have. Tory's stepped up the evil, Tyrol is making "mistakes" and isn't sure if he's subconsciously doing it on purpose, and Tigh is visiting with Six and hallucinating that she's his wife.

So here's my question: Do you think something has been triggered in the new four Cylons that is suddenly making them evil? Or did they have it in them all along and now they're giving in to it? Or, have they spent their lives believing that Cylons are evil, and now that they are Cylons, they are simply acting out, subconsciously assuming this is how they're supposed to act? I'm thinking the third... after all, isn't the series about how we perceive a race of beings to be evil, when in fact we're no different? The scene where Six holds out her arms to show Tigh that she has blood and veins just like anyone else was particularly poignant.

Meanwhile, Baltar has his own cult of worshipers, and Roslin is attempting to have their gatherings suppressed. Apollo, smarting after a bit of verbal abruptness on the part of the president (when he praises her in front of the others, she tells him she doesn't need his approval), has decided to side with Zarek and challenge her at every turn. Who is right? Should Roslin be trying to suppress Baltar's cult? After all, she's saying it's just this one-time-deal, but isn't that how these things get started, and the next thing you know, freedom of speech is out the window? I love when the show presents these moral conundrums.

The funniest thing so far this season was in this week's episode, when Six is trying to get Baltar to challenge the guards to prove his point and become a martyr to his cause, and he's begging her out loud to let him stay on the ground. When she picks him up, so his shoulders are raised and his feet are barely touching the ground, all anyone sees is him, not Six actually doing the lifting, the result was hilarious.

Roslin and Adama are growing ever-closer, as he's reading to her while she's taking her chemotherapy treatments. And Starbuck seems to be on the edge, simply raising everyone's suspicions that she's a Cylon. But because Sam is already one, who is he to judge? Therefore, he fraks instead.

I love this show.