Rating: ***1/2

Written by: Dawn Prestwich & Nicole Yorkin

Directed by: Sergio Gezzan

Now that the Cylon boarding party has been disposed of, Doctor Cottle (who has a slot cut in his surgical masks for his ever-present cigarettes) has finally made it back to the Galactica to get a look at, and operate further upon, Commander Adama, who is still out like a pinched candlewick.

No, there’s no suspense about Adama’s ultimate recovery from his wounds, and “Fragged” isn’t about that. But as Colonel Tigh whispers to his unconscious form at the end of the hour, when the “old man” wakes up, what he finds is going to make him want to go right back to sleep again.

You talk about characters’ actions having consequences. If nobody ever seemed to have to pay a price for mistakes or impulsiveness on Voyager or Enterprise, on this series they not only pay, but through the nose and in installments, like a thirty-year mortgage and prime plus two percent.

Let’s get back to Colonel Tigh. We know that he’s a spit & polish, no nonsense hardass. Now we know why he never got his own command: unlike Adama, who doesn’t like the political aspects of command but accepts their necessity and deals with them as and when he has to (or did before overthrowing President Roslin), Tigh has neither the capacity nor the willingness to put up with them at all. In his mind he figures he’s in command and he can solve any problem by just snapping off an order to a subordinate. Given that he is content to look upon dumping any situation he doesn’t want to deal with on somebody else as tantamount to “solving” it, it’s not hard to see why he thinks this way. It’s a very self-reinforcing delusion – essentially “out of sight, out of mind.”

What Tigh is learning is just where the buck stops. And this episode he learns very quickly, and it propels him back to his old friend Jack Daniels.

From the opening act you can see him wound tighter than a champagne cork and just as ready to pop. He prowls around the bridge bellowing redundant orders, interfering with Captain Apollo’s planning session for the mission to rescue the stranded Raptor party on Kobol, then yelling at them to “get back to work.” Only takes ten seconds or less to deduce that he’s back on the juice, and not much longer to see the suspicion confirmed when he bends over in the corridor to pluck his flask from his right boot.

But that was just the beginning. Soon Tigh has an even bigger problem to deal with: politicians. Specifically, the Quorum of the Twelve, which has arrived on the Galactica and is demanding to see President Roslin.

Now, to be fair to ol’ Saul, he didn’t create this situation. Adama did and then left Tigh holding the proverbial bag. But as the old saying goes, “Things are never so bad that they can’t get worse,” and the XO’s utter lack of political acumen bears out that adage with a vengeance.

Still, it’s not as though Roslin was sitting in her cell like the cat who ate the canary. She has begun exhibiting unignorable symptoms of chamalla withdrawal, which make her look and sound like she’s, to put it kindly, “gone ‘round the bend.” This is a double-whammy from a PR standpoint because if the public perception is that Roslin has lost her marbles, she’ll obviously be considered unfit to continue in office, while if it gets out that she’s strung out on hallucinogens, even if it’s for her breast cancer, that’s hardly much of an improvement. And, of course, she’s been concealing it all for months anyway for just the aforementioned reasons.

Ellen Tigh, Saul’s devious and ambitious nympho wife (and also, don’t forget, Tom Zerick’s accomplice) gets a look at the babbling Roslin firsthand, and it gives her an idea that she thinks will boost both her husband’s prospects and those of her partner in crime: let the press see her, let the Quorum see her, let everybody see her. Destroy Roslin politically and leave the path open for either of Ellen’s men (or both, as long as she could manage it) to make the most of the president’s demise.

This was a reversal of sorts for the XO. He’d been holding the Quorum at arm’s length, first through subordinates and then, finally, face to face, where they promptly got up in his and started shouting demands. Tigh’s retaliatory curt sarcasm did little to help defuse matters. He felt like Roslin was deposed and in custody and that was that. The military was running things now, and that meant him. These politicians were irrelevant as far as he was concerned.

So when wifey comes to him with her idea, it seems like the perfect solution: let ‘em see the demented old hag and how she’s gone cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs, and they won’t be interested in her anymore and will leave him the frak alone. At the very least, once Apollo gets Vice President Baltar back, the latter can take the political stuff off of his hands and leave Tigh free to just command the Galactica until Adama is back on his feet. Then he can quit sneaking belts from his boot and crawl back inside his bottle for a nice, long swim.

Unfortunately for the Tighs, their timing is just a little bit off.

Roslin’s guard, of all people, proves to be religious, and thus sympathetic to the woman who may be the leader foretold in the Scrolls of Phylia that will take humanity to Earth. Feeling helpless, like a leaf in a tornado, and wanting to help the president in any way he can, the guard helps Special Assistant Billy secure a hit of chamalla for her, which she ingests just in time for the onslaught of Colonel Tigh, the Quorum, and the press.

Semi-lucid once more, Roslin wields all the political audacity that Tigh lacks but thought he had borrowed from Ellen. Instead of offering up denials or double-talk, the president lays it on the line about her breast cancer, how long she has to live, her belief in her personal fulfillment of the prophecy in the Scrolls, and that she is still very much in charge – though, very interestingly, leaves out the part about her chamalla addiction. The Geminon representative (apparently they were the “religious” colony) is immediately won over, and the remainder are swept along more by the unprecedented situation of a de facto military coup than anything else.

In order for this “gotcha” to work, the public had to see the president as the wreck that Ellen saw earlier. Instead they saw a strong, confident, capable leader embattled by an “out-of-control” military of which Saul Tigh was the worst imaginable public face. However unpopular Roslin had been before all this went down, now she is more entrenched than ever, her backstabbing of Adama via Starbuck’s mutiny and the “arrow of Apollo” relegated to a historical footnote. No wonder Tigh’s last line to Adama was, “I really frakked things up for you, Bill.”

There wasn’t any update from “Cylon-occupied Caprica” this week. Maybe fans should start taking bets on how long it will be until Starbuck is riding Helo like Lance Armstrong barreling up the French Alps.

On Kobol, meanwhile, the pressure of command in microcosm is proving even tougher for Lieutenant Crashdown than the big picture version is for Colonel Tigh.

Having incurred the responsibility for the unnecessary deaths of two of Chief Tyrol’s men, that guilt and his unpreparedness for a ground combat command is causing Crashdown to really feel the heat. Again, just like Colonel Tigh, he is of the oversimplified impression that command means giving orders and receiving unquestioning obedience, rather than commanding the situation and adapting as necessary. Which, as a practical matter, means being willing to listen to subordinates’ suggestions. And he has a valuable and experienced subordinate in Chief Tyrol, who has all the command ability that Crashdown lacks.

The castaways reconnoiter the Cylons on the nearby valley floor and discover that the “toasters” are constructing an anti-aircraft battery with which to shoot down any would-be rescuers from the Galactica. So Crashdown reasons, linearly, that if they’re going to be rescued, it’s up to him and his dwindling band to take out all the centurions and that anti-aircraft battery.

There’s just one small little problem: his dwindling band isn’t exactly Force Ten from Navarone. The “LT” and Chief Tyrol are the only trained soldiers present. The rest of their number consists of two women and Vice President Baltar, who might as well be one in these circumstances.

Tyrol tries to explain this to Crashdown in private as vehemently as staying this side of insubordination will allow. He also points out that there’s a radar dish nearby that is far less heavily guarded that they would have realistic chance of taking out, which would accomplish the same purpose without throwing all their lives away – the rescue of which is supposed to be the central premise of this harebrained scheme.

But the LT won’t hear of it. He thinks being in command means getting his own way, even if his own way is insanity that will get them all mowed down into daggit chow.

When Crashdown lays out his banzai charge…um, his plan of attack, Baltar tells him the same thing Tyrol did, only not in private and at about three or four times the decibel level. Then a funny thing happens – Tyrol cuts him off and backs up the LT to the hilt. Even though he disagrees diametrically with Crashdown’s plan, he still respects the chain of command, and that that respect must be universal. Which is a rather stark contrast with Adama’s military coup that helped create this whole mess, but I digress.

In this week’s Number Six sequence, she tells Baltar that one of their party will turn on the others. This situation quickly manifests itself when Crashdown orders Callie to expose herself as a decoy to draw Cylon fire away from the SAM battery. But she can’t do it. Not that she won’t; she can’t. Why, I’m not certain, since she seemed to handle herself quite well last week when she and Tyrol were pinned down by Cylon fire on their way back from retrieving the second medkit. Maybe she just reached her stress limit. But here and now, she cannot do what is being demanded of her.

An experienced and wise CO would recognize that this was not insubordination but a misuse of personnel and would either have somebody else take her place or alter the plan accordingly. Crashdown tightens up instead, forgets all about the mission, and becomes instantly obsessed with forcing Callie to carry out his orders. He shouts at her, berates her, and finally pulls his sidearm on her.

Any of you who didn’t exclaim at this point, “This dude’s crazy!”, you’re lying, because I know you did.

Tyrol, dumbfounded at this turn of events, pulls his own weapon on Crashdown to try and at least buy some time to talk this tin soldier in off the proverbial ledge. But the situation is already out of hand, and the LT gives Callie to the count of three to get shot by the Cylons or by him.

Just as he reaches three, a shot rings out. Only it’s Crashdown that slumps against a nearby tree trunk with a hole in his torso. And Tyrol didn’t fire.

Who did? Vice President Baltar.

Did this make sense in terms of what Number Six told him? As always, it’s hard to say. Crashdown didn’t threaten to shoot all of them, just Callie. And Baltar could be said to have turned on the LT just as surely. What is unambiguous is that once again he did what Number Six wanted him to do. And that cannot be an unmitigatedly good thing.

When Apollo and the cavalry arrive – naturally, at the same instant that Tyrol takes out the Cylon radar dish, only to have Apollo return the favor by vaporizing the centurions that had been pursuing him and the others – Baltar conceals the true nature of Crashdown’s demise when Apollo asks, and Tyrol doesn’t correct him. All in all, it gives the viewer the feeling that such situations are not new to the history of military combat. And also that Baltar has a new ally whose manipulation may come in handy in the episodes and seasons ahead.

Of a more stomach-turningly ominious nature is Colonel Tigh’s final act announcement that he’s declaring martial law. Something that he specifically told the Quorum members that Adama had ruled out, which places Tigh’s pickled ass even higher in the PR sling, since now he looks like a Colonial Napoleon. From the frying pan straight into the fire.

Off-camera, you can just see Tom Zerick, smiling from ear to ear.

Next: Metastasizing insanity – Tigh as military chieftain, Apollo and Roslin leading a counter-insurgency, and it looks like Tyrol and the Boomer in the brig reunite. Hell, do we even need the Cylons anymore?