"Right, then, so when we left off last time, most of our dear friends the Colonials were occuppied with being reduced to their constituent atoms in a rain of nuclear hellfire courtesy of the Cylons. Those Colonials who didn’t happen to be busy dying were in the middle of preparing their yearly tax returns, which tended to make those people think that the ones who were getting blown up were the lucky ones. Except that meant all those ex-Colonials would also miss that evening’s broadcast of Colonial Idol, which promised to be a real barn-stormer, what with the tight competition between the man who could walk and chew bubblegum at the same time and the woman who could count from ten to twenty-one simply by removing her shoes and socks. I tell you, that Colonial talent pool is just bottomless.
"Anyway, about the time the Cylons had managed to slaughter a quarter of the Colonial Fleet and reduce most of the population to fond memories, Bill Adama decided it was about time to get his ship, Galactica, into the fight. The first thing he did was give a rather stirring speech to his crew, reminding them that they had all trained for war, there was a job to do, and that they had to depend on each other if they were going to fight through to victory. Unfortunately for Bill, there were two fatal flaws with his plan. The first and, in comparison, pretty minor one, was that by never drilling his crew or maintaining any kind of discipline on board his ship, they couldn’t fight their way out of a piss-soaked paper bag. The second was that he had blown up all their ammunition the day before. Oops.
"It was at this point that Kara Thrace managed to pick the lock on her cell down in the brig, and decided to pop by the CIC to ask Bill what all the fuss was about, since all the ringing alarms and people running in circles screaming ’We all gonna die!’ hysterically had ruined her beauty sleep, which everyone could agree she was desperately in need of. ’We’re at war!’ Bill told her. ’War?’ Kara asked, stumped by the concept. ’Yes, war,’ Bill said. ’The opposite of not being at war.’ ’Oh,’ said Kara. ’Well, gee, I’d really like to help out, and so would the other twenty pilots who are still on board because, obviously, they’re so good at what they do the Admiralty decided to strand them all on board a decommissioned ship, but we don’t have any aircraft left.’ ’That’s funny,’ Bill said, ’I seem to remember that we have a whole squadron of obsolete aircraft set up as static museum displays down in our starboard hangar bay.’ ’Wow,’ said Kara, ’no wonder they made you the Commander.’ So off she went to gather up the pilots and the aircraft, leaving us to marvel at the fortuitous chain of events that allowed a ship being turned into a museum to still have the fuel and aircraft ammunition on board to turn a bunch of museum displays back into fully-capable combat aircraft. Such a pity no one thought about that for the ship’s ammunition, but we can’t have everything now, can we?
"Pretty soon, Kara and the rest of the pilots who had been stranded and forgotten on Galactica were zooming off into space, looking for some Cylons to kill. Good thing for them, then, that the cranky robots decided to show up and start shooting at them and the ship. Bad thing for them, though, because the Cylons decided to shoot nuclear weapons at the ship. This is where we were introduced to that marvellous invention known as the ’radiological detector,’ a device that could, as the name implies, detect nuclear weapons, but which also had the bad habit of only seeming to work when the writers remembered that the Colonials had one of those. Anyway, the radiological detector went off, providing everyone on the ship with enough time to tearfully kiss their asses goodbye . . . but all hope was far from lost. In what has to be one of the neatest dramatic twists of all time, and a shining example of gritty and realistic writing, the very same kind of nuclear weapons that had already destroyed much of the Colonial Fleet and reduced the Colonies to smoking ruins hit the ship and failed to do much of anything at all except start a few fires. But, just to make the fires really tense and dramatic, there was a fatal design flaw in Galactica in that the ship’s main fuel lines were routed through the hangar bay where the nuclear weapon hit, presumably because the hangar bay was nowhere near the ship’s main engines which, of course, would need that fuel. Again, Colonials, not smart.
"Anyway, this led to a nice moment between Saul Tigh and Chief Tyrol who, instead of being down on the hangar deck attending to the duties that his title of ’Deck Chief’ would imply, was up in CIC handling Damage Control and bitching about how ’his people’ were busy being burned alive because they were all apparently too stupid to run away from fire. This prompted Tigh to remember about the inconveniently placed main fuel line, and order the compartments being burned vented to space. Tyrol, naturally, objected to this course of action, because his crew were still hanging around down there wondering what to do and probably toasting some marshmallows to a delicious, golden tastiness. After all, who cares about the ship blowing up, he wanted to save his people . . . Be that as it may, Tigh prevailed, the compartments were vented, the fires were put out, and Tyrol decided to go and sulk over the injustice of it all and gent bent out of shape over an event he completely forgot about by the next scene and which never bothered him again.
"With his ship now safe, at least for the moment, it occurred to Bill that he might have been a little hasty when he blew up all the bullets, and that it might be a good idea to actually be able to shoot back at the Cylons. So, after talking it over with Tigh to ensure he wasn’t making another mistake, he decided to take the ship to the nearest fleet replenishment point. Tigh, of course, pointed out that that would be a three day journey and, what with the Cylons zipping around all over the place, they might object. But Bill, being Bill, had an answer for that, and pointed out that the ship had FTL engines and could just jump to where they wanted to go in no time at all. Literally. I mean, since we’re tossing Einstein and E=MC2 right out the window, why not have a ’jump’ drive that can move you from Point A to Point B in zero time? Tigh, however, felt compelled to point out that since the Colonials apparently never felt the need to go anywhere with this fancy FTL drive, no one had used it in over twenty years and just now might be a really bad time to find out that it wasn’t working like they all thought it would. ’Nonsense,’ said Bill. ’What’s the worst that could happen?’ ’We could jump into the middle of a star,’ replied Tigh. ’Spoilsport,’ said Bill. ’Let’s jump anyway.’
"Meanwhile, all of Galactica’s real pilots, who had taken all the real airplanes and were winging their way through space to somewhere else, were busy dying courtesy of the Cylons. It seems that the dirty, sneaky, underhanded robots showed up and, emitting an electronic signal that completely shut down all of the avionics equipment on the Colonials’ aircraft, thus causing the pilots to lose control and the aircraft to go off course and start colliding with each other because, you know, there are just all sorts of crazy winds in outer space that would make aircraft do that, wiped them all out. The only two to survive were Sharon Valerii, the robot Asian girl, and a guy named Karl ’Helo’ Agathon, who was a big dope. They managed to run away and land on Caprica, where they had to fix their aircraft and, incidentally, run into a bunch of survivors, among whom was Gaius Baltar. Apparently, sheltering in the crotch of a hot blonde woman is a sure-fire way to survive a nuclear explosion. In any event, it was decided that they should take some of the survivors with them when they attempted to find their way back to Galactica, so they held a lottery to pick the lucky few. When that was done, Helo decided to prove just what an idiot he really was by deciding to stay on the fatally irradiated planet and allowing Baltar to go in his place. It was here that we were all looking forward to Helo dying a slow and gruesome death but, alas, that was not to be . . .
"Elsewhere in the exploding Colonies, Lee Adama was escorting Laura Roslin’s ship back to Caprica, and still pouting about how unfairly Bill had treated him. It was no secret that Bill Adama thought his oldest son was a bit on the emotional side, but to call Lee the daughter he never had was really a bit unfair. Lee’s latest bout of self-pity and angst, however, was cut short when the Cylons showed up and fired a missile at Laura’s ship. Pity of it is, the Cylons apparently never stuck around long enough anywhere to actually make sure that their weapons hit anything, and Lee came up with a brilliant ploy to save Laura’s ship. He drew the missile off the transport and got it to lock on to his fighter, which, of course, left him with the problem of facing imminent death because the weapon was no after him. But he solved this problem by out-running the missile because, you know, that always works. Anyway, after successfully running away from the missile, Lee found out that he had run out of fuel and, in what can only be classified as the greatest mistake since allowing the Cylons to bomb the Colonies into oblivion, Laura Roslin decided to pick him up. How that was done, of course, was never explained, since in order to get his aircraft into the transport’s landing bay, Lee would have needed some gas in order to maneuver, but now we’re really nit-picking things . . ."
Next time: The tragic consequences of using Colonial Priceline . . .
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