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"Time and Punishment"
Battlestar Galactica #2 (Dynamite, Vol. 2)
Written by Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning
Illustrated by Cezar Razek
Cover by Alex Ross
2013
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After the fleet vanishes, Apollo and
Starbuck become separated and are captured by different parties.
Story Summary
Lost in space after the temporal
disappearance of the fleet, Apollo and Starbuck are running low
on fuel. They find on their charts that there should be an old
Colonial resupply and ammo dump on a nearby planetoid. As they
approach it, they are ambushed by Cylon Raiders. They manage to
destroy a few of the attackers before their Vipers run out of
firepower. Then Starbuck is hit and his ship is towed to a
basestar where he is taken captive.
Meanwhile, Apollo attempts to escape the
Raiders by slingshotting around the nearby sun. His Viper is
damaged by a solar flare and he crash lands on the planetoid.
Setting out on foot to find the supply dump, he is ambushed by
human fighters who capture him and take him to their
underground guerilla base. There, he is introduced to the
guerilla leader...who turns out to be a battle-scarred Commander
Adama!
CONTINUED IN BATTLESTAR GALACTICA
#3
Didja Know?
The individual issues of this series do
not have titles. I made up the titles myself, usually based on a
concept or bit of dialog from the issue, although in the case of
this issue, I chose the title as a play on that of the classic
1866 Russian novel Crime and Punishment by Dostoyevsky
since this issue features temporal disturbance and the 1)
imprisonment of Starbuck and 2) capture by rebels of Apollo.
Didja Notice?
The issue opens with an entry from Apollo's combat log,
describing he and Starbuck left adrift in space after the fleet
and Cylon attackers vanished (at the end of
"Memorial").
On page 1, Apollo's sensors show he and Starbuck are still being
hit by space-time aftershocks and Starbuck reads tachyon levels
off the chart. Tachyons are hypothetical particles that always
travel faster than light, therefore moving backward in time
according to the accepted theory of special relativity.
After doing a grid by grid search of the area of space, on page
4 Starbuck remarks they've just burned up hours of fuel.
Shouldn't he have "centares" as the Colonial word for "hours"?
Apollo and Starbuck find a Colonial resupply and ammo dump,
referred to as a q-cache, on their charts and located nearby.
Apparently these are unmanned supply dumps left behind by
previous expeditions to provide supplies to later Colonial
ships. But how far out would these dumps be located from
Colonial space? They are in another galaxy now, after all (as
detailed in
"The Long Patrol") or maybe even in our own Milky Way
galaxy, judging from old Earth transmissions received by the
fleet in
"The Hand of God" and
"The Infidel Basestar".
Note that the fleet also discovers an old, wrecked Colonial
carrier on the surface of a planet in
"First Date", suggesting a region of space visited by
Colonials long ago; it might be argued that carriers such as this
are the ships that left behind these supply caches throughout
the explored cosmos.
On page 6, panel 1, the face of "Baltifer" is deliberately hard
to make out in the dark coloring and small scale presented.
Looking at the panel with a magnifying glass, a human-like face
with red eyes can be seen. In "Acts of Defiance" we learn that Baltifer is
Baltar fused with the IL-series Lucifer by Dr. Zee.
On page 7, Starbuck refers to a nearby sun as a hypergiant. This
is an actual term used to describe extremely bright, massive
stars that are losing mass at a high rate.
Apparently, the two temporal Vipers also still have standard
weapons capability (in addition to the now-powerless temporal
weapons) since Apollo and Starbuck blow up several Cylon Raiders
on page 8 as they approach the Colonial cache, though the
weapons' power runs out quickly.
For only the third time in a BSG story,
on page 10 a tractor beam is used, to capture Starbuck's Viper. On all three occasions,
it is the Cylons using a tractor beam, the
first being in
"Doomsday Rock", the second in
"The Rebirth of Cy". It's
possible that the Cylons have tractor beam technology, while the
Colonials do not.
This is at least the third time Starbuck has been captured by
the Cylons! He was first captured in
"A Death in the Family"
and again in
"The Rebirth of Cy".
On page 16, we see previously
unknown, crab-like Cylon tech
drones examining Starbuck's
temporal Viper after its
capture (in
"Risk and Reward", Dr. Zee refers to them as tech spiders). Starbuck remarks to his
captors that they may not want
to let their drones play around
with his ship, as it contains
some very dangerous, unreliable,
"blowing-a-hole-through-time"
stuff. Is it really a good idea
to advertise to your adversary
what your latest, greatest secret
weapons are for? |
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On page 17, a strange, gigantic Cylon head is depicted
apparently overseeing the prison on the basestar.

On page 19, notice that the human guerilla fighters wear pieces
of Cylon parts as makeshift armor.
On page 20, panel 1, Apollo is mistakenly
drawn with his holster on his right hip; he is left-handed.
Somehow, Apollo doesn't recognize the alternate Boomer, except
that his voice sounds familiar (he's revealed as
Boomer in the next issue, "Acts of Defiance")!
This Boomer is
unrecognizable just because he shaves his head?
After bringing Apollo into the underground guerilla base to meet
the boss, Boomer states that Apollo must be some kind of
Cylon trick. But if he really thought that, would he bring Apollo
to the base at all? He could be tagged with a tracking device if
he was working for the Cylons! Of course, I suppose there could
have been some kind of scan performed off-panel to check for
such hidden devices.
Unanswered Questions
Why does the q-cache have a different numerical designation in
the alternate timeline (7202 as opposed to 2702)? It's never
explained in the course of the 5-issue story. I suppose it's
just meant to indicate that things are a little different in
this timeline, but it seems odd that it's merely a transposition
of two numerals instead of a completely different number.
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