“Are Cylons man or machine?” Kara Thrace discovers her own humanity in the most ironic place after she’s ordered to torture a Cylon who claims he’s put a bomb aboard a ship in the fleet.

President Laura Roslin has just awakened from a nightmare – of the Cylons Leobon is chasing her through the woods – when she is informed that a Cylon, also Leoben, has been captured aboard the Gemenon Traveler, a civilian ship. It seems the decision to go public with their knowledge of the Cylons has paid off, as Leoben was identified from photographs that were passed around the fleet. Commander Adama wants the Cylon executed immediately. But Laura demands that the prisoner be interrogated, a request that Adama reluctantly agrees to, though only if Kara Thrace (Starbuck) is the one doing the questioning.

Before sending Kara off to the Gemenon, Adama gives her the report from his run- in with the Leoben model. (Adama killed Leoben in the mini-series.) Adama also gives Kara a stern warning, that ‘it’ (Adama refuses to refer to Leoben as a ‘he’) is cunning and manipulative and will exploit any weakness he can find in Kara’s psyche. Kara takes this under advisement but she is still slightly unprepared as to Leoben’s true danger.

Kara arrives at Gemenon flanked by a couple of marines and is briefed by the captain. With determination to punish one of the destroyers of humanity, Kara is determined to used no mercy. She peppers him with questions – What is your mission? Why were you hiding aboard the Gemenon? – all of which Leoben dodges. Leoben tries to draw her in, even guessing her by her call sign ‘Starbuck’, which unnerves the ace pilot. Then Leoben tells her that he is planting a nuclear warhead aboard one of the ships and it will go off in 12 hours.

Kara calls and apprises Adama of the bomb threat. While he’s convinced it is just a Cylon mind-game meant to buy Leoben time, he can’t take any chances and orders an intensive search. Laura tells Kara to keep trying to get Leoben to talk and to unfold his web of lies, especially now that the lives of the fleet depend on it. Kara returns to the storeroom where Leoben’s being held, determined to take the hard-line approach with him.

Speaking of Cylons, the two Sharons continue to play their role in the Cylon plan. The Sharon on Caprica has succeeded in getting Helo to fall in love with her and they’ve had sex, an important step. But her Cylon conspirators, especially Number Six (who expressed disdain for Sharon’s human behaviour) warn that unless Helo falls in love with her, they will have him killed. This triggers something in Sharon, and she runs back to Helo, full of fear for his well-being, and tells him they must run.

Meanwhile, the Galactica Sharon knows Tyrol suspected her of being a Cylon sleeper agent, something that she has wondered about herself. She thinks that if she can prove otherwise, they can rekindle their love. She goes to Dr. Gaius Baltar and asks if he can test her on his Cylon detector. He insists it is still a prototype, not yet ready, but she begs him to do it, if only for her peace of mind, and he agrees. The test comes out positive, but Number Six convinces Baltar to lie about the results (for fear that discovery could unleash her violent latent Cylon nature).

Back on Gemenon, Kara’s hard- line stance has quickly become full-on torture. When she tried to play nice and get answers from Leoben, he only wanted to talk about God and the meaning of life. Kara knows that Leoben, as a machine, can switch off his pain threshold anytime. She also knows if Leoben turns off his pain, it will mean he’s not human…something the Cylons pride themselves on. But as her methods become more extreme, so do his, and he succeeds in getting into her head, touching on the nerves of her unhappy childhood and painful relationship with her mother. It is at this moment, where Leoben has broken through to Kara and appears to have the upper hand when Laura Roslin walks in, wanting to know what is going on.

With less than an hour to go on Leoben’s ‘bomb threat’, Laura decided to see this Cylon face-to-face. She had already glimpsed him in her dream of course, something she still can’t figure out, but now she finds Leoben battered and bloodied and Kara still without answers. Laura acts compassionate toward the prisoner, ordering him cleaned up and unchained. She gets on Leoben’s good side and he admits that the bomb threat was a lie.

He embraces her suddenly, and whispers in her ear: ‘Commander Adama is a Cylon.’ Laura is taken aback, then she orders Leoben thrown out the airlock, announcing to Kara that she had lost perspective, and that the Cylon goal was to sow disharmony, a weapon as bad as nuclear warhead. Kara watches in disbelief as Leoben is sent out into space to die. She has been greatly affected by her experience. Later, she prays to her favourite gods to watch over his soul.

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