It’s no surprise that the follow-up to last week’s episode of Battlestar: Galactica dealt with empty spaces. After all, last week ended with Cally ending up in the vacuum of space. And in the aftermath of Cally’s apparent suicide, everyone onboard the Galactica were dealing with their own personal vccuums. Their voids.  And how they faced those voids, coupled with how they chose to fill them, made up the bulk of this week’s installment.

A quick snapshot of all those instances:

Admiral Adama

Reading “Sea Rider Falcon” to Roslin, a book he claimed to have never read, but seemed to know by heart once Roslin fell alseep. The book speaks to Adama’s fear that he’s too far emotionally removed to truly mourn the loss of his best friend.

Roslin

Feeling the time ticking away, clad in a wig to mask her hair loss, she ponders the substance with which she should fill the emptiness inside: justice or compassion.

Baltar

With the nudging of both Tory and Sox, he finally solved the seeming irony of such an imperfect man as the vessel of God’s will by realizing that such imperfect is in fact the source of God’s love. Which, admittedly, is a pretty convenient realization. It would be semi-akin to me realizing God loved those who crave buffalo wings all the time. But I digress.

Tyrol

“Fill ‘er up on self-loathing and a general sense of nihilism, please. Nah, don’t bother washing the windshields. Those are frakked, too.”

Tigh

Still haunted by the murder of Ellen on New Caprica, he sought to quell his own aching soul via Cylon-inflicted punches to the face, perhaps in the hope that one of those punches would turn off the switch that allowed him to feel anything at all.

***

And that in a nutshell served up the two roads faced by all this week: to embrace emotion or to essentially turn into a, well, robot. In the beginning of the episode, Tory and Tigh fight over which way Tyrol should go. Tory’s already embraced her destiny, seemingly, via Gauis’ words/thoughts, which were fed by Six, the same Six whom by the end of the episode is punching/smooching Tigh, which lends a wonderful circularity to the proceedings.

And this notion of “perfection” that Baltar talked about, that his disciples so willingly embraced, is of course the exact same train of thought that led the Cylons to the civil war unleashed last week. That’s the point, of course: to draw such parallels. Baltar’s speech appeals to those who face the abyss and seek meaning in an existence such as theirs. They feel the same as Tyrol, who, in a marvelously written/acted scene at the tavern, spoke That Which Hath Remaineth Largely UnSaideth: that everyone left is “stuck with the best of limited options.”

That could be said of the Galactica itself, its crew, and those left to reform society as a whole. They are simply what’s left, and those still living make the best of what they can given the limited options and limited opportunities provided in a world that once numbered billions of people living in relative peace, now 30,000 people running in divided fear. After all this time, the frays along the edges have worn too thin, and what we’re seeing now are those strands breaking off and splintering those whose limited options are simply too limiting at this point.

Which is all a way of saying that yes, this is the final season of Battlestar: Galactica, and that’s fantastic because honestly, how much darker could this show go without running completely off the rails? Season 5 would essentially be a weekly 42-minute viewing of characters impaling their genitalia against sharp, rusty objects at the rate they are going. So let’s all be sad that this is the last season, but also rejoice at the fact that Earth’s coming soon.

Least that’s one thing we can all agree upon, no?