2-1
With Commander Adama fighting for his life after being shot by the Cylon infiltrator Sharon, and President Roslin languishing in the Galactica's brig after losing the power struggle with Adama, Col. Tigh is thrust into the unfamiliar role of the sole leader in a time of crisis.
The situation worsens quickly. First, Tigh sends Lee to the brig for siding with Roslin against Commander Adama. Then an emergency jump to escape an incoming Cylon force goes wrong, leaving Galactica alone in space, separated from the rest of the fleet - and from the medical help needed to save Adama's life.
As Tigh struggles to come to terms with this crisis, he thinks back on his relationship with Adama, who saved him from oblivion and from his own fierce temper, and tries to tap into some of the wisdom that his old friend offered him.
It soon becomes clear that to reconnect with the fleet, Galactica must jump back into danger over Kobol and network its computers, a highly risky move that will make the ship vulnerable to attack from both the Cylon fighters and their crippling computer viruses.
Meanwhile, on the surface of Kobol, Chief Tyrol and the rest of the downed Raptor crew fight for their lives against an unseen enemy while Vice President Baltar seeks solace in his visions of Number Six, only to find those visions turn dark and haunting.
Light-years away, on Cylon-occupied Caprica, Kara and Helo must find some way to bring the Arrow of Apollo back to the fleet - but first they have to get it back from the avatar of Number Six who has found it in the Delphi Museum.
Valley of Darkness:
2-2
The Galactica has succeeded in reuniting with the fleet, but it has paid a terrible price: A Cylon computer virus has penetrated its computers, robbing the ship of power, and Cylon Centurions have boarded the Galactica and are battling their way to the ship's vulnerable centers.
Lee Adama, in the brig with President Roslin, persuades some marines to release them. He orders Billy and Vedder to take the president to the sickbay disaster shelter, where she'll be safe, and heads off with a squad of marines to defend the ship's magazines.
In the CIC, however, Col. Tigh knows from bitter experience what the Cylons are planning. The Centurions aren't going to blow up the ship; they're going to kill the crew by venting the ship's air and then turn its guns on the rest of the fleet. And only Lee - whom Tigh despises for his "disloyalty" to Commander Adama (i.e., support for the president) - and his small squad of marines are in position to stop the Cylon boarding party.
Meanwhile, on Cylon-occupied Caprica, Starbuck and Helo break into her old apartment and fire up her old pickup truck.
Light-years away on Kobol, Chief Tyrol and his crew return from their risky mission to get medical supplies for Socinus, only to realize that the wounded man isn't going make it. Number Six warns Baltar that Socinus won't be the last of the stranded Raptor crew to die - and that of all the humans, Baltar alone will live to see Earth.
Fragged:
2-3
As Doc Cottle works to save Commander Adama's life, Col. Tigh is beginning to realize that there's more to being a leader than giving orders. The press is clamoring for answers, everyone wants a decision now, and he feels himself being drawn to his old friend and enemy, the bottle.
Worst of all, the Quorum of Twelve has arrived on the Galactica and is demanding to see President Roslin. Tigh resists, but his wife Ellen convinces him that the president has lost her mind and that letting her meet with the Quorum will only cement Tigh's power.
The plan backfires: Roslin's odd behavior was only a symptom of chamalla withdrawal, and when she meets the other leaders she has recovered her composure. She condemns Adama's action and announces that she is the leader, spoken of in the Scrolls of Phylia, who will lead the people to Earth. Livid, Tigh orders the Quorum off his ship.
Meanwhile, Lee Adama leads a search-and-rescue mission to find the Raptor crew lost on Kobol, unaware that the Cylons have set up a missile battery in anticipation of such an effort. It falls to the beleaguered survivors on the ground to knock out the Cylon artillery before Galactica's rescue team flies into the trap.
Unfortunately, Chief Tyrol has serious misgivings about Crashdown's plan to destroy the missile battery - and about the lieutenant's ability to lead a team of non-combat personnel against high-tech killing machines.
Vice President Baltar has even graver doubts - because Number Six has warned him that one of their number will betray the others on Kobol..
Resistance:
2-4
Col. Tigh's imposition of martial law threatens to split the crew and the fleet. He's thrown Chief Tyrol into the brig on suspicion of being a Cylon and his dismissal of the Quorum has provoked the other ships to refuse to send fuel and other supplies to the Galactica. His judgment blurred by drink and the goading of his ambitious wife, Ellen, Tigh sends armed troops to one of the ships to take supplies by force, a move that ends in disaster when civilians are killed.
Amid this chaos, Lee schemes to free President Roslin to establish a democratic opposition. He makes a break for freedom with Roslin, while Roslin's close aide Billy chooses to stay behind. Tigh threatens to shoot down the Raptor carrying Roslin away from the Galactica, but he can't bring himself to kill his friend's only surviving son, and Lee and Roslin escape into the fleet at large.
Meanwhile, Baltar uses Sharon's love for Tyrol to intimidate her into revealing how many Cylons are lurking in the fleet.
On Cylon-occupied Caprica, Kara and Helo find themselves in a standoff against other humans. Cooler heads prevail, and the pilots meet their new allies: a group of 53 survivors, led by Anders and Sue-Shaun, members of a professional pyramid team that survived the nuclear holocaust because they were training in the mountains. Kara enlists their help in her mission to get off Caprica.
The Farm:
2-5
Commander Adama returns to a hero's welcome and an unenviable task: In order to maintain control of the fleet, he must track down his son, Lee, and President Roslin, who have escaped (with Tom Zarek's help) into hiding somewhere in the fleet. Adama orders all ships in the fleet searched.
Meanwhile, Lee and Roslin prepare to send a message to the rest of the fleet seeking popular support. When the time comes, however, Lee can't bring himself to publicly condemn his father.
With no other choice, Roslin plays "the religious card" to save the human race. She declares herself to be the voice of the prophet Pythia. Her announcement sends shockwaves throughout the fleet's population.
Finally, unable to hide any longer, her ship makes the jump back to Kobol, where she plans to seek the road to Earth. To the surprise of many on the Galactica, and to Roslin herself, nearly one-third of the fleet follows her to Kobol.
Far away, on Cylon-occupied Caprica, Kara goes on a recon with the resistance fighters and is wounded in a firefight. She finds herself being nursed back to health by Simon, an attentive doctor who tells that she can better serve the human race by having babies than by fighting Cylons.
When Kara awakens with a new scar, though, she begins to suspect that neither Simon nor the hospital are what they seem. Sneaking out of her locked room, she discovers that Simon is a Cylon, and she kills him. Making a bid for freedom, she stumbles upon a chilling sight: a room full of women, including resistance fighter Sue-Shaun, wired up by the Cylons to serve as baby machines.
Home (Part 1):
2-6
Following the lead of President Roslin and Tom Zarek, more than one-third of the fleet has split from the Galactica and jumped into orbit around Kobol. Tensions arise within the rebel ranks on the Astral Queen as Zarek and his security chief, Meier, face off with Lee Adama.
Those tensions increase when Kara and Helo return from Caprica with Sharon, who is now pregnant and a dead ringer for the Cylon who tried to assassinate Commander Adama. Roslin orders Sharon put to death, but after meeting with her, she learns that the Cylon might be their best hope for finding the Tomb of Athena and the route to Earth.
Doubt nags at Roslin, however: Is Sharon motivated by love for Helo, or by a desire to betray her captors? Regardless, she's a key player in Roslin's team as it lands on Kobol. With Zarek and Meier plotting fresh treacheries, the prophecies continue to unfold in bloody fashion.
On the Galactica, Adama and Col. Tigh weigh their losses and rebuild the air group's chain of command, which has been plunged into disarray by the defections of Lee and Kara. Adama selects Lt. George "Catman" Birch to replace Lee as CAG (Commander, Air Group).
Birch's first day on the job begins with a harrowing mishap during a Viper-pilot training exercise, then he turns a routine refueling operation into a near-disaster.
Following an uncomfortable meeting with Dualla, Adama is forced to admit that there is no substitute for the people the fleet has lost. He orders a Raptor be prepped to take him and a small team back to Kobol, so that he can find Roslin and Lee and put the fleet back together.
Home (Part 2):
2-7
Following a firefight with Cylon Centurions and the death of her spiritual advisor Elosha, President Laura Roslin treks onward with her confederates in search of the Tomb of Athena. Heavy rain and Kobol's rugged terrain make the journey difficult for all except the tireless Sharon.
Tom Zarek again butts heads with Lee Adama, inspiring Zarek's henchman Meier to consider drastic measures that will clear the path to power for his old friend.
Meanwhile, aboard the Galactica, Gaius Baltar questions his sanity as Number Six toys with him, and Commander Adama mounts a rescue mission to Kobol.
Adama enlists presidential aide Billy Keikeya to join his quest for peace with the rebels. After discovering Elosha's grave on Kobol, the Galactica landing party continues its search and finally intercepts Roslin and her group. Putting aside old conflicts, Adama opens the door to peaceful reconciliation for all.
Meier, however, sees the détente between Adama and Roslin as a renewed threat to the rightful power of Tom Zarek, and he conspires with Sharon to murder Adama, Lee and the president.
Finding the ransacked tomb, the unified team struggles to unlock its secrets with the Arrow of Apollo. Before they can do so, however, Meier and Sharon spring their ambush, leaving everyone's fates uncertain as the triggers are pulled....
Final Cut:
2-8
Now that the fleet is reunited, old conflicts reignite. Criticism of the military reaches a fever pitch in the aftermath of the massacre on the Gideon. During the period of martial law, a team of Galactica's marines, led by pilot Lt. Palladino, had opened fire on civilian protesters aboard the civilian freighter.
Col. Tigh, commanding officer during the incident which left four civilians dead and a dozen others wounded, receives a death threat. Shortly afterward, he very nearly falls victim to an act of sabotage. It is decided that steps must be taken to ratchet down the rhetoric, on both sides of the dispute.
Intent on improving relations between the civilian fleet and the military, President Roslin and Commander Adama offer Fleet News Service reporter D'Anna Biers unlimited access to the Galactica officers and crew. With her cameraman in tow, D'Anna interviews a series of stressed-out pilots, crew hands and officers.
Gaius Baltar, urged on by Number Six, hopes to gain D'Anna's support in his political ambitions.
D'Anna stumbles onto one of the Galactica's most explosive secrets, however, when she encounters the Cylon prisoner Sharon, whose unborn child is saved by the quick actions of Dr. Cottle following a near-miscarriage. And when Louanne "Kat" Katraine, wired on stimulants, crash-lands her Viper, D'Anna must decide whether she'll fashion her report as a hatchet job or as a more nuanced portrait of life aboard the Galactica.
The arrival of two Cylon attack ships clarifies D'Anna's thinking - as does a potentially deadly ambush that puts Tigh and his wife in the gunsights of a crazed, would-be assassin.
Flight of the Phoenix:
2-9
Commander Adama is keenly aware that morale is at a low point after what he terms "months on the run with little to show for it but casualties and deteriorating conditions."
Chief Tyrol, still haunted by his memories of the first Cylon Sharon, is in a bleak mood. He verbally spars with Capt. Lee Adama and gets into a drunken punch-up with Helo, who remains romantically committed to the current avatar of Sharon.
After sending one more dilapidated Viper to the scrap heap, Tyrol vents his frustration by attempting to build a new plane from salvaged parts. His seemingly impossible mission generates cynicism at first, then growing respect and eventually a full team effort that pulls in even the skeptical Col. Tigh.
Meanwhile, a Cylon virus penetrates the Galactica's computers. It wreaks havoc by creating dangerous power surges, an unscheduled engine ignition and a near-fatal oxygen shut-down. Once the virus is identified by Gaius Baltar as a Cylon "logic bomb," Sharon, who remains imprisoned in the Galactica's brig, is enlisted to defuse a threat that she immediately recognizes as the prelude to a Cylon assault.
Adama orders the fleet to jump to new coordinates while the Galactica stays behind to wipe the virus from its computers and contend with a massive assault by more than 200 Cylon Raiders. Though Sharon's motivations are in doubt - do the Cylons really pose a danger to her unborn child, or is she working some deep Cylon agenda? - she turns the computer virus against the attacking Cylon fleet and enables the Galactica and her vastly outnumbered Viper squadrons to win the battle without taking any casualties.
Flush with the thrill of victory, the crew's spirits soar higher still when Tyrol's lab project takes flight - as a powerful new model of stealth ship that they name the Blackbird.
Pegasus:
2-10
The mood aboard the Galactica turns jubilant when the top-of-the-line battlestar Pegasus - long thought to have been annihilated with the rest of the colonial fleet - appears out of nowhere.
The Galactica's relatively ragged crew meets their spit-and-polish counterparts from the Pegasus, among them Admiral Helena Cain; her X.O., Col. Jack Fisk; and the ship's CAG, Capt. Cole "Stinger" Taylor. Cain warmly greets Commander Adama, who chooses to yield command of the fleet to his superior officer.
In private, Adama and Cain compare notes. Cain reveals that the Pegasus crew had taken its computers offline for servicing shortly before the original Cylon assault and therefore was able to escape the nuclear genocide. Since then, the ship has been on a relentless search-and-destroy mission against the Cylons.
Each battlestar holds a single Cylon prisoner. Because Vice President Gaius Baltar has successfully extracted information from Sharon, Cain invites him to study her Cylon captive on the Pegasus - a bruised and bloodied replica of Six named Gina.
It is revealed that the Pegasus encountered the Galactica while tracking a Cylon fleet, which itself appears to have been pursuing the Galactica. Plans are laid for both battlestars to attack a mysterious vessel guarded by this fleet.
However, Adama fumes when Cain announces that, due to rampant discipline problems on the Galactica, she will be reassigning key crewmembers from the Galactica to the Pegasus. Later, sparks fly quickly when Stinger maps out a reconnaissance plan that Starbuck bluntly criticizes.
Meanwhile, Lt. Thorne, the chief interrogator from the Pegasus, sets out to "break" Sharon like he broke Gina. Learning of Thorne's brutal tactics, Helo and Tyrol rush to Sharon's aid. A fistfight ensues, and Thorne is accidentally killed.
Cain orders a snap court-martial, and both Helo and Tyrol are sentenced to death. Refusing to allow his men to be convicted and executed without a full tribunal and the opportunity to mount a legal defense, Commander Adama initiates a high-stakes game of chicken that leads to Vipers from both ships training weapons on each other.
