Battlestar Galactica: You hit like a girl!

Spoilers for "Battlestar Galactica" just as soon as I have some of what Adama and Roslin were smoking...

The Gradually Expanding Flashback is one of my least favorite narrative devices. Everybody uses it, and they rarely use it well, either giving away the big secret long before they show it or ruining whatever interest I had in the secret by forcing me to watch the same fractured scenes over and over and over again. And as "Unfinished Business" was at the halfway mark, I was getting frustrated. Obviously, Apollo and Starbuck had sex on New Caprica, obviously one of them immediately ran back to his/her official partner, obviously there was a lot of bitterness. Skip to the end already, I thought.

Then we got to the end, and even though things played out almost exactly as I had figured, Katee Sackhoff and, especially, Jamie Bamber sold me on the pain of it. Getting to the climax didn't make me see the earlier flashbacks in a new light, but the performances sucked me in, anyway.

I've always been intrigued by how Moore and company have handled the Unresolved Sexual Tension between these two, keeping it deep in the background and acting like it's something they may or may not get around to resolving one of these days. I don't know that they're soulmates, but there's some chemistry between the actors and some very twisted history between the characters, so I could see that clinch at the end leading to some kind of dysfunctional relationship. If nothing else, Anders and Dualla are out for good, it seems.

(Also in the "we'll get to it when we get to it" category: Adama and Roslin. Watching them get baked on New Caprica was just lovely. It's so rare to see Adama enjoy himself.)

This was definitely the strongest episode in several weeks, maybe back to "Collaborators," but it had a couple of problems. First, Adama's speech didn't work at all, nor do I think that the speech would overpower the crew's image of their unstoppable leader getting whupped by Chief Tyrol. Everybody calls him "The old man," but he's always presented himself to them as the most badass old man ever, and that first punch aside he got absolutely torn apart by the deck chief.

Also in the category of ruining a carefully cultivated illusion: Katee Sackhoff can't throw a decent punch. She and the producers normally do a great job at presenting Starbuck as the ultimate warrior, such that it doesn't matter that she's not built like Lucy Lawless. But she looked really out of her element in the ring, and the fight with Hot Dog in particular was very awkwardly staged.

What did everybody else think?