<p> What do you do when you don&#39;t remember what you&#39;ve done?</p> <p> There are real incidences of people committing murder while in a somnambulistic state. Can you imagine what that would be like, to wake up and find that you&#39;d done something you had no memory of, that you would never have chosen to to? Even in the world of BSG, your first thought would not, could not be, &#34;I must be a Cylon.&#34; To doubt your own identity at that level seems unthinkable. In a way, I think Boomer (and the Chief) don&#39;t go quite crazy enough.</p>

<p> Way to ratchet up the tension.</p> <p> If the second half of the mini-series seemed like a little bit of a let-down (and I&#39;ve not yet got my commentary on it up, so this is a spoiler), this first episode of the actual series kicks things right back into high gear.</p> <p> Even if I find it implausible that the Colonials are able to even pretend to function after 130+ hours, medicated or not, the actors do their considerable best to give the impression that these are people who are beyond even working on autopilot. Even the best of them have moments of staring off into nothingness as their minds are unable to keep going.</p>

<p> This is some insanely taut storytelling, and while it tries to be clear what is happening at any moment–it&#39;s only about the jump cuts during space battles, which is probably an appropriate place to do that–it&#39;s happy to wait until later to reveal to you the implications of what you saw. Which I regard as a good thing–not assuming your audience is stupid is still refreshing.</p> <p> As an example, we see Six on the space station, seemingly destroyed, and then we&#39;re shown the same person with Baltar, and although we get that this is a signal that she is probably not one of the good guys (not to mention the incident with the baby–which I still can&#39;t decide whether to interpret as mercy or as the equivalent of pulling the legs off a spider<sup class="footnote-reference"><a id="footnote-reference-1" href="#footnote-1">1</a></sup> just to see what happens), they&#39;re happy to wait half an hour to let us know that they can upload their consciousness–and we&#39;re <strong>still</strong> not told whether the one on Caprica is the same one as on the space station.</p>