Starting at the top, Chad and Multiethnic Barbie’s sexy time is way more boring than sexy time with Dichen Lachman has any right to be.  He also gets some loving from Grace on the beach, which would be sort of interesting if Chad’s privates didn’t immediately negate my interest in anything they touch.  Sorry Grace, you have sexually transmitted whogivesashit.  What’s that?  One time you cheated on thewhogivesashit.  It spreads just that fast, see.

The good news is that this is the only real dead spot of the episode.  The rest of moves along pretty well and introduces some interesting wrinkles to the island situation.  For instance, I thought Booth the baddie was killed last week, but I like that they kept him  around to be a thorn in Marcus’s side.  And the twist of his “actual” mission is enough of a corker that I choose to take it at face value rather than question his honesty as much as I probably should.  He’s (allegedly) part of the splinter group that wants to maintain the Colorado’s mutiny in order to continue to discredit the ailing president.  Of course, the situation is too incredibly dangerous to leave as is, so the whole BZ thing was undertaken to remove its nuclear teeth and install Sam as a more stable figurehead.  The deal he offers, of blanket amnesty once the new administration is established and can hail them as heroes, does sound like the most plausible route for the sailors to come home that we’ve been presented with thus far.  In the real world, it would be very tempting for Sam, but of course he won’t go for it and sour he’s the bromance at the core of the show.  But it’s good to see the political situation back home that’s driving so much of this come into a bit more focus.

Kylie and Christine are chugging along with their counterintelligence efforts, apparently never having considered the possibility that her house is being watched or bugged, since they do the bulk of their plotting in her kitchen.  I suppose this makes sense, as they’re only trying to combat a conspiracy launched by the president of the United States, which has gone to the lengths of sending in an old friend of her husband’s to seduce her under false pretenses.  I’m sure they don’t have time to do that and plant a bug/surveil the house.  But I’m just being bitchy about it to amuse myself at this point, because mostly I’m happy to see that plotline moving along.  Yeah for forward momentum!

The big revelations tonight, though, are based around my girl Cortez.  Not sure how I feel about revealing that she was not really raped by Serrat.  My initial read was that it was meant to take the stink of it off Julian, so we’re not just automatically cheering at whatever abuse the soldiers or newcomers heap on him (of which he gets more tonight, from Chaplin and the COB, indirectly).  He does stand in for the native islanders somewhat by default, as he points out to Marcus, so at a certain point having him just be a one-dimensional punching bag starts to take on a broader, ugly implication about how the heroes view occupied population.  But it’s still hard to ask the audience to take the side of a guy who raped a sympathetic character.

His method of retaliating against the COB is pretty ingenious, though.  He gets to torment him physically, which has to be satisfying, while also leaving him dependent on Julian in a way that will force him to lay off his McGruff the Crime Dog routine.  Knowing that he had a painkiller habit in the past also humanizes COB a bit, as he can occasionally feel like a sentient set of blues, someone who emerged from the womb a 20 year veteran.

But back to Cortez.  She is our mole, and is currently in possession of the launch key.  I don’t know how I feel about this, as Cortez the steely soldier was one of my favorite characters.  This is a theoretically intriguing turn, but I’m skeptical that Cortez the sexy Donnie Brasco is going to do as much for me.  We’ll see where it all goes after Thanksgiving, I suppose.  Have a good one, folks.