Yeah yeah yeah, I guess we only need one thread per show.

Eaassssyyyy TIGER!

I totally agree with this, but have come close to being banned from other boards for saying so.
Television shows have become more about the social event for some people than about the actual show. Understanding the show's place in our culture is interesting, but not worth forfeiting your chance to experience an amazing work of art.
As I said earlier in this thread, each episode thread in the Scifi.com forum featured people giving a play-by-play of the episode so that people in other time zones or countries could "keep up," as if it was some live sporting event.

I find that really surprising! Most of the people I interact with would rather sew my mouth shut than listen to me espouse spoilers. Maybe in the pre-DVD era this practice would be acceptable (got to get caught up somehow!) but now I can't see much justification for it. Play by play for TV drama is a hilarious concept, however.

I was ill and was drifting in and out of sleep while i watched the last episode, was the whole "13th tribe are advanced cylons who left the colonys then we forgot they were cylon, and even where they went" thing explained?

I'm re-animating the deadest of the dead horses here, but with Season 4.5 finally out on DVD there may be some others who are interested...

First, to those that haven't seen the show (like Moovy1), I encourage you to have a look (the entire series is available now as a box set). This is easily one of the better shows I've ever seen on television...except for the final episode which managed to be both good and dreadful.

I'd say my disappointment is similar to that of the erudite Adam, who unfortunately no longer seems to post here. Anywho, about that finale...

Did anyone else notice the similarities with The Restaurant at the End of the Universe? Probably coincidental, but they did have a guy in CIC soaking in a tub...

I loved most of the first hour. Except for most of the flashbacks. Some things in the end were well done. For instance, Adama on the hill was really nice. The music was great, but then it always is.

I found the decision to discard all technology totally ridiculous. I'm surprised that everyone supported it. I suppose flying around for years in a tin-can will do that to you, but the decision was really short sighted. How will they survive? They could've at least kept their medical technology. There's a good chance that disease would obliterate most of them. How will they eat? Okay, Baltar knows how to farm and Athena claims she knows how to hunt but even if you buy into that how will they preserve the food? Those tribal people lived short lives and they grew up in that environment. They could've at least kept one raptor around for checking in on the people who are spread around the world.

And what of Hera? Why is she important again? Because she's Mitochondrial Eve. How? This is either an oversight because there are loads of humans who can also have children or it means that all the colonists died quickly and Hera had lots of babies with the tribal people (a point Tuco first raised). Is the latter really what the creators of the show were going for? I could be wrong, but I doubt it.

I didn't care for most of the answers to the big questions either. I'll add that I would normally be alright with not getting answers at all, but the show is guilty of hyping these answers. "What is Kara Thrace", "All Will be Revealed" over and over. If the creators didn't place such a big emphasis on these things I wouldn't either.

Kara is apparently the "Harbinger of Death". What does that mean? It was never explained. And what is she? Apparently an angel of the one true God. Really? Kara Thrace an angel of a monotheistic religion? The same Kara Thrace who believes in the old polytheistic Gods so much that she defied orders and jumped to Caprica so that she could recover the Arrow of Apollo?

The explanation that Head-Six and Head-Baltar are angels I can buy. Still, it seems a bit hokey that the angel explanation is so prevalent. Don't know what to do with the character? Just call them an angel.

Caprica-Six and Baltar ending up together was a nice touch, but way too rushed. Just a few episodes back she was in love with Tigh and carrying his child, while Baltar was enjoying his harem. No repercussions there, they just killed that story and moved on.

The whole opera house vision was another massive let down. What was the use of that vision? To tell Baltar and Six to walk a few feet and enter the CIC? Why the hell did Athena and Roslin even share that vision? Athena even killed a Six for holding her child. All that for nothing.

The entire two Earths storyline is a cheat too. The scorched Earth looked identical to ours. I'm sure I saw the continents. Are we to believe that there is another planet out there with continents that look exactly like our own? If you do something like that at least try to give an explanation. I'd even accept some kind of accidental time travel.

I think most of the problems stem from the fact that resolutions weren't properly thought out at the beginning leaving the writers scrambling to come up with them later. "And they Have a Plan" sounds cool, but what was the Cylon plan? I know the writers didn't have one but I wish they did because everything before that disappointing finale was fantastic. Makes me think I should start watching Babylon 5.

I hope at some point in The Plan they tell us who gave Adama the message that there are 12 cylon models. That I've been dying to know since the miniseries.

I found the decision to discard all technology totally ridiculous. I'm surprised that everyone supported it.

I assumed it was because everyone who would NOT have supported it was dead. I thought it was part of gods plan.

And what of Hera? Why is she important again? Because she's Mitochondrial Eve. How?

Again, im assuming that her decendants were more suitable/got lucky/favoured by god and so became the domminant race.

The entire two Earths storyline is a cheat too. The scorched Earth looked identical to ours. I'm sure I saw the continents.

If your refering to the "zoom out zoom in" scene at the end of the season, you are right, because that WAS our earth, we didnt go there first however.

REGARDING SERIES FINALE.

The significance of Hera and the Opera House visions struck me as a little bit weak. Still, I got goosebumps watching it unfold. The apparent existence of God in the whole saga (with virtual 6 and Baltar being actual angels) kinda hit me strange as well, but it definitely is an underserved trick in Sci-Fi writing.

What I did enjoy, that I think most fans would not, was the redundant cycle of human civilization playing out--evolving on Kobol, then the Colonies, on Original Earth, and then 250,000 years later, on Second Earth (ours). "This has all happened before, and will happen again." It reminds me of the ending of Artificial Intelligence, where the mechas look back to humans to find the meaning of life, while humans look back to the ancients, who looked back to a hoped for god or realm of deities to explain the mysteries of life. It's a Sci-Fi buzz killer for many, but something to truly contemplate. BSG made the emergence of AIs an inevitability in human civilization, just as they made the evolution of human beings an inevitability in very stable life-supporting environments (ref: they found DNA-compatible homo sapiens on the Second Earth in a remote part of the universe where no humans had ever been known to travel).

There was no real happily ever after, which pleases me. H.E.A. writing is mediocre creativity. I like dissonant music, flawed heroes, and studying failures as much as victories. The BSG humans and 3rd Generation (final five-created) Cylons merge to create Hera, whose offspring blend with the indigenous 2nd Earth humans, from whom we all descended. So the civilizations we watched for five seasons went extinct, getting utterly lost in pre-history. Extrapolate the story from where it left off. We're now creating androids and artificial intelligence. In 100-200 years we too self-destruct (if we don't manage that sooner) and a remnant of humanity might luckily colonize another world and start the cycle over. Whee.

No matter what anyone thinks of the existentialism and pseudotheology of BSG, it was hands down some of the best and most original television storytelling I've had the pleasure of experiencing. Some parts were trying, but I've never had a TV series take me on such an incredible journey. I'm a black belt at guessing plotlines. I absolutely love HBO series (Rome, Deadwood, Six Feet Under), but I frequently guess not only story twists, but even word-for-word dialogue as it unfolds. Battlestar Galactica, however, kept me spinning until I finally learned to shut off my plot radar and ride along.

One HUGE sigh of relief, however, was that Hot Dog (Bodie Olmos, son of E.J. who plays Bill Adama) was NOT one of the Final Five. Before the start of Season 3, I was trying hard to obtain BSG action figures, and for some reason Hot Dog was not only included in the collection, but available long before most of the major characters. Furthermore, Bodie Olmos was always FIRST in the ending credits. WHY? These mysteries had only two possible explanations: (1) Hot Dog would end up being either (a) one of the Final Five, (b) an angel of God, or worse (c) God himself; or (2) Edward James Olmos took a significant pay cut to get his boy a role-billing-merchandising package. Thank Zeus, Ahuramazda, and the Lords of Kobol that it was Explanation #2.

I could say too much more about the whole series, but I will now shut up and express my gratitude to James B. and all the readers for their indulgence.

First, I hope you got better. Second, yes, the 13th tribe went off and colonized "first" earth, developing their own advanced humanoid Cylons (who did know they were Cylons), and in their self-destruction, only five models survived, thanks to their last-minute development of a functioning resurrection methodology. The "final" five were therefore the only survivors of original earth. In seeking a new home, they encountered the 12 Colonies' Cylons during the tail end of the Colonies' Cylon War, and united with them. As the Cylons were silent in their corner of space, the Five created seven more models in large numbers (the Cavils, the Sharons, etc.). The original Cavil was their first, and essentially the highest-ranking and most influential outside the Five, and it was his sinister plot that caused the following:

#1 - Subdued the Five and suppressed their memories, replacing them with implants of being humans from the Colonies, he did this to help convince the Five by forcing them to live as humans that humans deserved destruction; #2 - Forbid the discussion of the Five among the entire Cylon population (who apparently had no idea the Five were placed among the humans, along with sleeper agents from among the other seven models); and finally #3 - Persuaded the other ranking Cylons to wipe out human beings as revenge for the Earth Cylons and the Colonies' war against Cylons.

It was Cavil's hope that when the Five met their fates among the humans, they'd resurrect among the Cylons and tell him how right he was, and that he was a very good boy. When Mrs. Tigh popped in and told him the opposite, it just made him angrier, and when the resurrection technology was destroyed, he became obsessed with abudcting Hera, the only instance of "natural" Cylon procreation, to study her for a solution to prevent the extinction of the Cylon "race."

That's the long answer.

"The Plan" comes out on DVD and Blu-ray today. It purports to give us insight into the Cylon's side of things during the first season or so of BSG.

On the whole, it's not that impressive. I thought it felt very much like a clip show, despite the new scenes. The whole narrative is disjointed and there’s very little suspense since we know all of the characters’ fates. It’s almost like a fan fiction story, filling in the gaps that the real show didn’t have time for. I think it could have worked better as webisodes or a comic series.

I also question the need for gratuitous nudity (which will be edited out for the Syfy broadcast). The camera made me feel guilty as it and I leered at the naked breasts that had no purpose whatsoever for being shown other than that it didn’t have to be edited for television.
The writers missed an opportunity here to have a pre-attack Caprica City television broadcast in which they say the made-up word “f*ck” because the censors wouldn’t allow them to say “frak” on TV!

That said, it’s not without its bright spots. The back story on Anders is quite interesting–although it might be telling that the most interesting part of the film is a part that doesn’t directly involve the cylons’ plan. The way the cylons learn from the humans is also intriguing, but the retrospective humanizing of them feels a bit forced given their brutal actions as we first saw them in the series (apologetic even). The brilliance of the series was how it showed the shifting loyalties and shifted our perceptions over the course of several years–to have that happen chronologically all during the first season also runs contrary to the series.

Full review (**1/2 out of ****)

You liked it a whole lot more than I did. It seems that the writers themselves never had much of a plan and The Plan is their attempt to retcon some of the events of the series (who Six spoke to on Caprica, who left the note for Adama etc.). Normally, I'm all for some female nudity, but here it felt totally out of place and I suspect it is nothing but a cheap attempt to get fans to purchase the disc.

The 100 or so minutes dragged for me since I often felt like I was watching deleted scenes from seasons 1 and 2 rather than new footage. The only bright spot were the attacks on the various colonies and some of Cavil's story.

Yep, deleted scenes is exactly how it felt to me too. And such scenes are only interesting to dedicated fans as extras on a DVD.

I had hoped for something more though. The Razor movie, for instance, also touched upon the holocaust but still managed to tell an interesting and original story. I suppose I had hoped that The Plan dealt with the Cylons on their baseships rather than the Cylons hidden inside the fleet and elsewhere. Either way, the series was a fun ride.

Just watched the Miniseries last week. Never seen a single episode. Any one know a good website where I can start with Season 1?

Afaik, you can't stream the series online for free. At least not legally. DVD might be your best bet.

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