How did they conclude that all the skeletons were Cylon? Didn't they say that the Colonial side verified the results? Up until now, besides Baltar's "Cylon Detector," I thought the Colonials couldn't tell.
The best explanation right now is that the cylons know how to tell themselves from humans, and that now they're working together it's not a problem.
I'm a little disappointed at how little Baltar's role as a supposedly brilliant scientist has seemed to matter since, I don't know, he realized how to cure Roslyn's first cancer. Certainly, the show was originally a little more oriented around "tangibles" at the beginning - water, fuel, low gravity, nuclear power and fallout on Caprica. I miss that because it grounded the show more firmly in "hard science fiction" instead of what seems to have become a more "spiritual science fiction." Granted, as an adaptation, exploration of the spiritual is part of the reinterpretation.
I thought this episode, "The Oath," was pretty good. From the writer of "Black Market" it could even be considered amazing. The action kept going (it had a nice cliffhanger), and it was nice to see the revolution set up in the last episode come to peak so quickly. BSG was originally never very concerned with "runners," those tiny scenes in tv that remind us that something is going on but don't do much else. I remember being super impressed in Season 1 with Boomer's suspicion that she was a cylon - they introduced it early on and I thought it would take the whole season to develop, but they cut right to it in the second episode of the season when Boomer "wakes up" in a storage locker drenched in water with a bag full of plastic explosives. That was suspenseful tv.
On the other hand, while Gaeta had reasonable motives to want to stop the cylon alliance, the episode seemed to go out of its way to assure us that he deserved to die by giving him all sorts of reprehensible decisions to make. I thought it would have been more interesting if Verheiden, the writer, would have taken more pains to "convince" us of the rebels' point of view.
Unfortunately, the simple fact that only minor characters, evil personalities from the show's past, and unknowns make up the bulk of the rebellion (besides Gaeta himself) guarantees that they will be quickly thwarted, and many of them killed.
I'm not sure I understood the point of Roslyn's decision to stop being the President for just a little while. I guess, plotwise, it was to allow the government to spiral out of control and to give her a chance to cosy up to Adama outside of the tensions of their jobs. It just goes to show how so many decisions get made in Galactica: plot first, a clean arc for its characters and a natural pace second and third. It's part of why Galactica's characters seem to play musical chairs with their jobs: one day Lee's a viper pilot, then a statesman, then a commander, then a lawyer, and now he's a statesman again. In this episode he got to play soldier once more, which honestly is where he seems to fit best. It was nice to see Starbuck get back to those roots, too.
There haven't been any real disappointments yet this season, and to be honest this was the episode that I was most worried about. I predict a steady increase in quality until the end. The wildcard would seem to be the episode after next, which will be written by a green writer, Ryan Mottesheard, who according to imdb has never written a produced screenplay before. He's been a script consultant of some kind for much of the show, but BSG appears to have been where he got his break. Quite exciting, I hope!
