Mutiny on the Galactica. This is the most tense 45 minutes of TV I can remember for ages... or at least since the Doctor Who episode “Turn Left.” That one came with a built-in reset button, though -- we knew that was gonna turn out okay, even if the trip to the reset button was intense. But this... if BSG always makes me feel like anything can happen, then that feeling was doubled here. I had no doubt that the Admiral could end up executed, that Roslin could end up on the other side of the galaxy with the Cylons, that Starbuck and Lee could end up dead, that Gaeta and Zarek could win...

Or that someone like Sam could end up with a bullet in his head. All episode, I waited for the kick in the gut, and there it was. No, no, not Sam...

Irony: Kara said once that if she found out Sam was a Cylon, she’d put a bullet in his brain. Now he has a bullet in his brain, and all she can think of is to save him.

Irony: Gaeta fails in his coup because he insists on taking the time to try the Admiral rather than just putting a bullet in his head; if he had eliminated the Admiral right away, Gaeta might have succeeded. Ya gotta give Gaeta credit: he’s got balls, and he stands by what he believes in. He’s not an dishonorable man.

Zarek, on the other hand: opportunistic scum. Oh, the ache in my gut, when Zarek is talking to the Quorum and he’s trying to get them to legitimize him and it’s not working... We knew what he was about to do. Gaeta should have known it, too, and that we can fault him for: his naivete. Gaeta was lying to himself if he didn’t think Zarek wasn’t going to play it like this.

Roslin’s got balls, too, and she is chilling when she’s angry. She’s got nothing at all to lose, of course -- those are always the scariest people.

The guy Tyrol runs into in the empty weapons locker, who realizes that, so what if his old friend is a Cylon, it doesn’t matter? That bodes well for an eventual truce in a true sense, of humans being able to live with skinjobs and being okay with it. (Kara’s obviously had a change of heart about this, too.)

What’s with Gaius’s new Six groupie? Is she simple, or what? (I guess things can go wrong during the duplication and downloading process, right?)

Rampkin the lawyer turned out to be a pitbull when cornered, eh?

If you’re Adama, you have to execute Gaeta and Zarek -- you can’t not in this situation. But you gotta be careful about executing too many others, if only for reasons of preserving genetic diversity. There’s so few people left. And you need people to work, too.

“39,643 survivors at the beginning of this episode. A lot fewer at the end of it.” I wrote that about the previous episode. But we’re down to “only” 39,603 at the beginning of this episode, which is fewer casualities than I imagined. But what’s the number look like by the end of this episode?

(next: “No Exit”)

(Watch full episodes and get recaps at Sci Fi’s official site for the show.)