Picking up where we left off in the last episode, the fleet has found a source of water, but it turns out that they'll need a thousand men working in harsh conditions in order to get it up to the ship. Apollo suggests they ask a group of prisoners aboard the Astral Queen to do the work in exchange for reduced sentences; he ends up going over to the ship with Billy, Dualla and Cally, but predictably, the plan hits a snag. The prisoners are under the leadership of a man named Tom Zarek (Richard Hatch), an infamous terrorist and revolutionary, who incites them to riot and take Apollo and the others hostage. We discover that there'd been political unrest among the Twelve Colonies before the Cylon attack, and that some of the people of Sagitaron in particular considered themselves to be oppressed. Zarek asks for President Roslin's resignation, but what he really seems to want is to force a bloody conflict between the prisoners and the military troops, in order to make the government look bad for using violence against their own people. Apollo manages to work out a truce with him: the prisoners get control of their ship, and President Roslin commits to having an open election within the year. Neither Commander Adama nor President Roslin is happy with this deal, and Roslin later confesses to Apollo that she's worried about the government's future because she's dying of cancer.