Survivors: 41420

Air Date: December 8, 2006

When the fleet's food supply becomes contaminated, everyone is in danger of starving to death. In a daring exploratory mission, Sharon discovers a planet teeming with edible algae — but it's on the far side of a massive star cluster. Flying around the cluster will take too long, and flying through it will expose the unshielded civilian ships to intense, deadly radiation.

Admiral Adama decides that the radiation-shielded Galactica will shuttle groups of civilians through the cluster. Simultaneously, the shielded Raptors will each shepherd a civilian ship, empty except for a skeleton crew, along the same route. They'll have to make five trips of two Jumps each to transport the entire fleet to the far side. The journey's midpoint, when the ships emerge into real space in the center of the cluster, will be the most dangerous part. There, disoriented by blinding starlight, the Raptor pilots must each establish the exact location of their civilian ships and transmit Jump coordinates to them before they can move on.

As civilians board the Galactica, a man named Enzo confronts pilot Capt. Louanne "Kat" Katraine. She dismisses him, but he pursues her, warning her that she can't deny her former life forever. As Kat runs away from her old identity, Gaius Baltar, still far away with the Cylon fleet, searches for a new one. With D'Anna's help, he tries to discover if he's one of the five human-form Cylons whose faces have never been seen. The clues he finds, however, lead him instead toward another rendezvous with the humans he has betrayed.

Back at the star cluster, the first group of ships Jumps away. At the journey's midpoint, one civilian ship, the Adriatic, is lost forever amid the glaring starlight and deadly radiation.

Later, on the fourth trip, Kat also loses the ship she was assigned to guide. With only one trip left to make, she and her fellow pilots are heartsick and weakened by radiation exposure. Enzo resurfaces, and Kat argues with him. Then Starbuck corners Kat and demands an explanation for the fight. Kat finally confesses that she used to be a drug-runner; Enzo was her supplier. She lied about everything — even her real name — to become a pilot aboard the Galactica.

Now burdened by Starbuck's disgust as well as by radiation sickness, Kat embarks on her fifth passage through the cluster. To prove herself worthy of her honorable new identity, she'll risk everything to ensure that her final trip succeeds.

-The story, written by series newcomer Jane Espenson, was inspired by a talk given by Dr. Kevin Grazier, a scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The producers brought Dr. Grazier in to address members of the production team. He explored the problems and solutions of navigating through space, and reaching a particular location in the universe, such as Earth.
- When Baltar and D'Anna/Number Three talk about Jupiter, the closed-captioning subtitles refer to Zeus instead
- In this episode, two civilian ships, the Adriatic and Carina, are lost in the passage through the star cluster.