BSG returns in full force

Complete with violently unexpected twists and mind-binding conundrums, the new season of Battlestar Galactica is off to an impressive start. The new episode, Sometimes a Great Notion continues where the show left off during the writer's strike last year. Warning, this article contains spoilers, so head on over to Hulu and watch it.

The strangest part of the new episode is the evidence that Starbuck has visited earth before and died there. Kara first finds her own ship's emergency transponder, then a piece of scrap metal carrying her ship's wing designation, culminating in her discovery of the flight module, containing one stinky decomposing Kara, complete with dog tags and her ring.

Now there's only so many possible resolutions for such a contradiction, and most can be grouped into one of the following explanations:

1. Time travel

2. Cloning

3. Starbuck is a Cylon

4. Starbuck is not human or Cylon

I'll be impressed if the real answer is not among these (knowing BSG, it likely isn't). But if it is, my money's on number 2. We know she's prophesized as the angel of death, something she is quick to bring up while freaking out but there has already been at least one explanation for why such a prophesy was foretold.

And keeping faithful to BSG's completely unexpected and totally jarring gunplay, Dee kills herself after a seemingly joyous date with her ex-husband. From a literary perspective this is golden: the viewer is put into a very positive mindset, observing the rekindling of their once troubled love (further amplified by the contrast to the new discovery of a charred and desolate Earth). Lee and Dee (whoa, a rhyme) part ways and Dee heads in to her quarters. Looking very content and love-drunk, she has a brief conversation with Gaeda before he leaves. She carefully places her ring on a hook with some of her other personal effects, then pulls her gun and shoots herself in the head. I didn't think BSG could pull off the shock gun trick again but the circumstances were such that it played excellently.

Although hardly remarkable when first seen, it becomes apparent that the earlier scene in which Dee finds the jacks in the dirt on Earth might have some relevance to her decision to blow her brains out. Throughout the episode some of the cylons have flashbacks of former lives on Earth when it's armageddon occurred which opens many questions about how they remember it and how they got from point A (Earth in a Cylon society, apparently 2000 years before the events of BSG) to point B (the Colonies, thinking they were human and having no memory of those years). Dee's encounter with the jacks may have inspired a similar flashback which either instilled just enough melancholy or just enough knowledge for her to say fuck this shit. We won't know until we see the next one. I can't wait.