Written by David Eick & Ronald D. Moore
Directed by Jeff Woolnough
“Would you stop being crazy in there!”
Well…that was the season finale that wasn’t.
Home-Part 2 is the accumulation of all the major plot threads of the first season…it simply took this long to bring closure to the fleet…and to the audience. I should be irritated by the wait…luckily, the wait was worth it!
Most of the closure comes at the beginning and the end of the episode. The opening acts are a reunion of family and friends, and a statement of where people stand. Watching Bill and Lee Adama’s reunion will bring a tear to the eye of any curmudgeon. It’s a scene where words simply aren’t necessary…and love manages to speak volumes through powerful silence. It’s followed by the reconciliation between Commander Adama and President Roslin, in a scene where they stop second-guessing each other once and for all, and communicate the respect that they’ve always had for each other.
Then there’s Cylon-Sharon’s near murder by Adama…but he gets over it. 
It’s a scene that needs to be watched…words can’t do it enough justice…and it has a powerful coda…
But I digress…
The concluding act gives us a restored President, and a reunited fleet with a new, stronger purpose: Earth is real, and it’s out there for them to find. The scenes inside the Tomb of Athena go from run-of-the-mill exploration of ruins…to a sudden, sensory-blowing shift into the night sky. Amidst the tall, breeze-blown grass of a meadow, they look up at the constellations…and discover that they are standing on Earth itself! It’s a stunning, gorgeous triumph for the characters, and for the series. It will take your breath away…just as it did Starbuck’s.
But Home-Part 2 isn’t content to sit idly on its laurels. Even as it beautifully ties up many of the loose ends of season one, it manages to lay out the flight plan of season two with savage, giddy abandon!
Baltar doesn’t have a chip — it’s his bloody subconscious! In the span of an hour, the entire Gaius/Six dyanmic changes forever…and his realization that the Human/Cylon baby Sharon is carrying is the one Six prophesied sends his head — and our plot expectations — spinning! James Callis has one of his most magnificent outings here, only to be topped by Tricia Helfer’s Six, who’s appearance as a pony-tailed cheerleader/valley girl is a sudden, gut-stomping twist of epic proportions.
But Grace Park manages to keep up…with an amazing final confrontation with Adama. She hands him her gun and tells him that she is a free person, who makes her own choices. She won’t be dictated to by people, other Cylons, or her own programming. Which now leaves us with a second, equally powerful plot line to carry us through the rest of the season…
As if a machine being pregnant wasn’t enough!
Home-Part 2 is a bloody, brutal, beautiful & bodacious masterpiece! It’s one of the two or three best episodes of Battlestar Galactica’s entire run, and easily the biggest triumph of the season thus far. Based on the law of averages, it’s impossible we’ve made it this far without a clunker of an episode. May we continue to beat the odds.
10
