Battlestar Galactica episode "Murder on the Rising Star"

"Murder on the Rising Star"


Adama mentions that they will observe Earth before just landing and scaring the hell out of Earth. For these last couple of episodes, Adama is speaking into his microphone as a sort of Captain's Log, and we watch the words come up on the screen sort of like Doogie Howser.

Starbuck and Apollo are in some kind of Triad tournaments on the Rising Star. That's that game that's a cross between basketball and racquetball. It is much more physical than we saw before, with punches and elbows.

Starbuck and Ortega fight and get kicked out of the game. (Apollo tells Starbuck, "Go take a turbo-wash and cool off." Don't you just love it when they make a new name for common things? Turbo-wash = shower.) Ortega winds up shot to death in the locker room. Starbuck is seen running away from the scene, nervous. Adama wants Starbuck's laser gun checked. The laser has been fired. They run a laser ballistics check and prove that Starbck's gun killed Ortega. (Although, the test measured the laser power the body took and how much Starbuck's full laser gun expended. I just wonder if that's accurate on absorption and wouldn't a laser gun fire the same amount every time? Maybe I am just looking for something to pick apart--it's not like there's a laser science or that I know anything about it, but I just doubt the "laser absorption" that we were meant to buy.) Starbuck is arrested.


Apollo and Boomer get a lead on some dude named Charybdis. Starbuck makes a jailbreak but Apollo talks him out of running.

Charybdis is some other guy named Proteus, Baltar's pilot and electronics expert, the man responsible for sabotaging the defense computers on Caprica. He is supposedly dead. How the hell do they know of Proteus? How would they know he was dead? I guess they may have coerced some info out of Baltar in the brig.


So Apollo questions Baltar in the brig. They get another lead back to a gambling table on the Rising Star . The dealer is the same guy who found Ortega's body. We find out that his real name is Rifkis. He bribed his way onto the Rising Star when it was excaped from the devastation on Caprica, taking some child's place. Ortega was the bribe-taker. There were also two others who bribed themselves on board and now Ortega was blackmailing them. One of them is secretly Charybdis. (One of them is Ferris Bueller's father!) I wish here that there was more on this. It's a sad and evil little story on the hearts of men. Almost like they didn't really want to dive into that story because they were afraid of upsetting viewers. But that would be cool to concentrate on.


Apollo plays Baltar against Charydis. There's a confession, of course, listened to at Starbuck's trial. Starbuck is let off. Question #1--How the hell does Apollo get Baltar, public enemy #1 for genocidal treason remember, out of the brig? Even if he says it is for the trial, even on Apollo's word, there is no way he would be alone on a shuttle with him.

It's not a bad episode really. The new BSG could really give this a refresher.