Sometimes a Great Notion

"Sometimes a Great Notion" is the eleventh episode in the fourth season of the reimagined Battlestar Galactica. It aired on television on Sci Fi and Space in the United States and Canada respectively on January 16, 2009 and on Sky One in the United Kingdom on January 20, 2009. This episode is the first after the mid-season finale of the fourth season ("Revelations"), which aired in June 2008. The episode title is a reference to the novel of the same name, written by Ken Kesey. The episode was also the last to be written before the 2007–2008 Writers Guild of America strike. It received a Nielsen rating of 1.6 and was received positively throughout. The episode continues from "Revelations", where both the colonial fleet and the rebel Cylons finally found Earth, only to find it devastated by a nuclear holocaust at least 2,000 years before, and the discovery leads to despair all across the fleet. The episode was not given an opening title sequence, but the survivor count for the episode was 39,651. Plot Both the Human fleet and the rebel Cylons are disillusioned after finding Earth devastated by a nuclear holocaust, which occurred at least 2,000 years before the events of the episode. The Cylons and Dr. Baltar (James Callis) conclude that bodies they exhume are not human, but Cylon. The rebel Cylons say the mechanical Cylon remains resemble older Centurions of theirs, but are of a kind unknown to them. They postulate that the thirteenth tribe consisted of a different kind of Cylon which existed over 2,000 years ago and moved from Kobol to populate that planet, calling it Earth. Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) withholds this theory when he addresses the fleet, leaving them to believe that the thirteenth tribe was human. Meanwhile, Samuel Anders (Michael Trucco), Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) and Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) receive memories showing they had lived and died on Earth 2,000 years ago. Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) has Leoben (Callum Keith Rennie) help track the origins of the beacon. However, what they find is a crashed Colonial Viper, containing a corpse with Starbuck's dog tags. After Kara recites what the Hybrid has told her, a shaken Leoben retreats, with Thrace wondering what she is.