Hotdog and Starbuck flying CAP on day four of a refueling mission that keeps fracking up with the valve failures and whatnot, down near a blue-sky planet with "synchrotron radiation," which of course we all know what that is, so whatever. Realizing they're going to be out there for hours, Hotdog starts namesaking around, flying upside down and doing whirligigs and I don't know, loop-de-loops. Frotsnoozes. He laughs and admits that the sky is like the only thing he misses about New Caprica. Even just a dip in the upper part of the atmosphere makes him happy, and that makes me happy. It makes Kara happy too, until she spots a Raider flying across the sky, at an angle not unlike that of the day she said she'd fight until she couldn't anymore.

"Galactica, Starbuck. Showtime. Bogey, my right-one. In the soup at 45. Committing." Hotdog radios that there's no such bogey, and they say pilot things like "press" and "wilco," and Adama takes her at her word, aborting the unrep (?) and getting everybody ready to jump. Dualla takes the flight school vocab section of the quiz a tad far when she issues the order to "cease all underway replenish ops." If this whole part of the episode weren't like that, hyperactive with the shoving of these words in all over the place like an episode of ER in the sky, I'd call her an asshole. Gaeta can see Starbuck and Hotdog on dradis, but not the Raider, and Tigh and Adama talk about how being able to hide from Cylons with the atom stuff happening also means that the Cylons can hide from them. Which you'd think would be self-evident, but Season Three is pretty much based on that principle, and I think the whole show. Starbuck tells the CAG about the Raider in some kind of obvious diner code that Tigh fully translates for us, like even he is irritated by the script at this point, and how it seems to be peeing its name in the snow suddenly: "One heavy Raider, no fighter escort." Which is still not on dradis; Tigh joins Adama in believing Starbuck versus the evidence of his own eyes. I mean, "eye." "Alert the Fleet to stand by for an emergency jump," says Adama, and down in the clouds, diving further toward the planet, Hotdog's blind: no visual on Starbuck, no visual on anything. Nothing but the rain.