Despite the different titles, The Oath and Blood on the Scales are two halves of a nerve-rattling two-parter that aired in the second half of the fourth season. After finding Earth to be nothing more than a radioactively charred cinder in Revelations, morale in the fleet, and even aboard the Galactica herself, takes a sharp nosedive. Roslyn, wracked with guilt at leading everyone to a dead end, has given up on her job, as well as her cancer treatments. Meanwhile, Adama and Lee are trying very hard to get the rest of the fleet to move on, literally. They've launched a plan, with help by Tyrol and the rebel Cylons, to install Cylon technology aboard the Galactica and the other ships in the fleet. The Cylon tech will increase the FTL drives by three times their normal capacity. But there's a major problem: many in the fleet are adverse to the idea of even working with the Cylons, much less allowing them access to their ships to install the alien tech.

After Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch) is jailed by Adama for charges of sedition, Felix Gaeta--who has slowly been building up resentment for the Cylons in his midst--visits Zarek in his prison cell aboard Galactica. Between the two of them, a coup is launched. After Gaeta frees Zarek and gets him off of Galactica, he returns to the CIC and scrambles the Galatica's communications from his console, which enables his fellow mutineers to freely move about and seize control of key areas of the Battlestar-all while feeding Adama, Tigh and the others in the CIC a false story about a fire in one of the sections. Soon, people like Athena, her husband Karl and their daughter Hera are herded up by the armed mutineers and thrown into a cell with the captured Caprica Six and Anders. The plan is going smoothly for Gaeta, with all of his opposition falling like dominoes--with the exception of Starbuck, who wisely keeps a pair of guns and plenty of ammo in her locker.

Katee Sackoff's Starbuck, who has been morose and unsettled since her still-unexplained return from the dead, more than rises to the challenge of the mutiny, as she deftly rescues Lee in a thrilling sequence that shows that the sassy fighter jock that we know and love is back. Watching the scenes of Lee and Kara racing around the bullet-strewn corridors of the Galactica, like a pair of soldiers negotiating the dangerous streets of a war-torn city, is especially fun to watch. Yet despite how well these episodes are done from an action/thriller perspective, there's the underlying truth--which Lee even points out to Tigh in one scene--that the rebels actually have a point. The Cylons destroyed their civilization and made them refugees in a ragtag fleet in space, where they were summarily hunted down like animals, and yet the survivors of this slaughter are now supposed to just forget all that came before and make peace with their enemies?

And while it's not surprising to see the always-scheming Tom Zarek as one of the leaders of the munity, it's particularly gut-wrenching to see sympathetic characters like Gaeta, as well as Racetrack and Skulls, become "bad" as it were, by siding with the mutineers. Indeed, it's a credit to the writers, directors and the actors in this two part story that the whole civil war that was spurred on by the mutiny still feels so tragic, as we witness the devastating loss of life on both sides--which winds up being a major loss for humanity overall, since there aren't too many of them left now. Leave it to BSG to not just give us a rousing pair of action-filled episodes, but still feed us some food for thought, as well.