Totally frakked

Lt. Hoshi (Brad Dryborough)'s plea to rescue his missing crewman and boyfriend Lt. Felix Gaeta makes Col. Tigh (Michael Hogan)'s heart grow two sizes too big.

What would you do if you had 20 hours left before all your oxygen ran out?

The second installment of the “Face of the Enemy” webisodes, which premiered Dec. 12, has our characters deal with this question. It then also introduces us to what seems to be a secret in Felix Gaeta’s recent past.Webisode 2 opens with our Raptor occupants still reeling in shock over their jump far away from the Fleet. In fact, they’ve jumped so far, they’ve apparently gone past the red line. Therefore, Galactica has no idea where they are, and they have no idea how to get back.  In the middle of everyone arguing about what exactly has happened and how they’re going to fix it, Crazy!Eight beams down beatifically at Felix, asking, “Don’t you recognize me, Felix?”

And here we have one of my favorite pieces of acting in this installment: The extremely guarded, vaguely freaking-out look Alessandro Juliani gives her in return is so loaded, you can just see Felix’s mind whirring like crazy. Whatever she’s got to say, you can pretty sure Felix is not happy to hear it, and maybe even a little terrified.

Who is this Crazy!Eight? I think they’re trying to make us wonder if it’s Boomer, but the other Eight should have recognized her as such if it were. Did Felix have some kind of previous relationship with this Eight, on New Caprica? That would be a pretty weird retconning of his character. Gaeta was pretty clearly not feeling positive towards any of the Cylons that we ever saw. (In fact, I’m shocked the Cylons never kicked him out of Colonial One for those violent doodles on his notepads during their meetings.) Did an Eight fool Felix into thinking she was Boomer and lure him with an unrequited attraction he might have had for Boomer? (There’s little evidence for that, but Gaeta has had a few moments in the series which could be taken as Felix being friends with her or having some kind of attraction to her.) Did he have just a plain old moment of weakness with a random Eight on New Caprica?

Meanwhile, on Galactica, Hoshi’s been begging Tigh for the last two days to give him a Raptor and a pilot (Unlike Felix, Hoshi’s got no wings.) so he can go in search of Felix. Unfortuately, they have no idea where the missing Raptor could be, so Hoshi’s crazy plan appears to be: jump more or less randomly in various sectors of space in hopes of finding it. I have to say I agreed with Tigh’s rationality about Hoshi’s pretty insane request: I mean, aww, he’s in love with my favorite character, so he gets big points for that, but really, Hoshi’s impassioned but kind of silly speech about the universe more or less wanting him to find his boyfriend was saved only by Brad Dryborough’s totally straight, earnest and even mature delivery.

But I did love the perhaps unintentional winking critique of the search-for-Earth plot inherent in Hoshi’s logic, as if Hoshi’s thinking: “We got to Earth on frakking WHAT? The drug-induced visions of a dying woman using ancient scrolls that everyone acknowledges are kinda all messed up and notoriously unreliable, not to mention the ravings of a Cylon hybrid interpreted by Baltar, a guy who is universally believed to be a Cylon collaborator? How’s my plan any crazier?”

And then comes my other favorite moment of acting in this installment. Michael Hogan (with eyepatch on, no less) does a great job letting us see it dawn on Tigh for the first time that Hoshi and Gaeta must be a couple. Like an interstellar Grinch, Tigh’s hardassery melts a tiny bit at this realization, and that’s when he relents and agrees to run the request by Adama. Awww! I think Tigh just turned into a Gaeta/Hoshi shipper.

Meanwhile, two days apparently have passed unseen on the Raptor, and we abruptly find out that it has only 20 or so hours of oxygen left. Our heroes decide they’re going to try and sleep as much as possible to use up minimal oxygen. The ECO (a new character that Battlestar Wiki identifies as Ensign “Easy” Esrin) warns in a Cassandra-like fashion that with that little oxygen, people could fall into dizziness, memory loss, even irrational behavior. (Um, foreshadowing much?)

In other words, they’re kind of, well, frakked.

Two more days folks, until the real fun starts in webisode 3, which premieres on December 17. See you then.