Battlestar Galactica Reimagined/Headscratchers

• Germs. All of the colonials should be dead within a year to bacteria and viruses their bodies are unadapted to. It doesn't matter how similar in DNA they are to the other humans there; diseases have been killing millions of humans in our world every few centuries just from people going from one continent to another. Didn't War of the Worlds teach us anything? And it's not like they could use Science to survive: Lee Adama had one last Author Tract inspired idea and thousands of humans and cylons decided to be Luddites so the writers could shoehorn in a Noble Savage Aesop, thus dooming them to lose all their knowledge of science, medicine, history, etc within a few generations (any history that is left would devolve into legend and myth within just a thousand years without actual proof, like video recordings and whatnot), and ensuring that Lee's last promise to Kara Thrace is completely false.
  • I guess God (or whatever) saved them. That's the beauty of the "God did it" clause... it can be used to answer any and every conceivable headscratcher.
  • That isn't actually how it works. Even with no immunities, some people will generally survive any disease, creating antibodies which get passed down. At some point, the human race was unadapted to every single disease that has ever occured and it still exists.
    • But we were not hit with all of them, suddenly, at once. The colonials' impact on our biosphere would be interesting, too.
    • 150,000 years ago there were a lot less of them. Most human diseases are the result of thousands of years of evolution of the microbes resulting from mutations caused by proximity to other animals (livestock) and not dead ending by having large populations to work through where neither does everyone die or is everyone immune.
• There was a big deal made that Galactica, being the oldest model battlestar in the fleet, had no wireless computer systems and communications, or something like that, and was thus immune to the cylon's hacking their system. Was it ever explained how Battlestar Pegasus is also similarly immune?
  • The attack happened just when Pegasus was undergoing a major refit (supposedly to install Baltar's infected problems). Also, a Six posing as a network admin was able to cause weapons malfunctions once she got her hands on top-level passwords.
  • It was explicitly stated in the pilot miniseries that the only ships that were not falling victim to Cylon hacking were ships that were either being refitted or were older models. Presumably a few other ships were being refitted, remained active, and were able to fight back, but got overwhelmed by the Cylons.
  • A fairly large number of Battlestars were immune to the hacking. They got listed fairly early on, but the Pegasus and Galactica were the only two that didn't attempt a head on confrontation with the Cylon fleet.
• They might have been strapped for resources while making The Plan, but recognizing the Middle East (more specifically the Persian Gulf), the Vancouver urban area and Europe in orbital views of Caprica is a bit unnerving. And so is finding the Emirates Office Tower in the Caprican skyline.
• Small but irksome - you're telling me Baltar and Six never had sex doggy-style? That he never once looked at her back when she was feeling hot and heavy? Human spines do not glow red during sex no matter how turned on the individual, and apparently the effect with Cylons is quite noticeable. Seems like this is a big hole in the idea of Cylons being exactly like people, and something that should have rooted them out.
  • This glowing backbone thing kind of disappeared after the first season, didn't it? I don't remember seeing it after that.
  • I took the glowing spine bit to be a cue for viewers, not an actual red glowing spine that in-universe characters could see.
  • I don't think there is any indication that the glowing spines were just for the audience and were not visible to other characters. I think it was something for the audience in the beginning of the series, but was no longer necessary to portray when the audience already knew that Cylons looked like humans and it was probably dropped because it would give the audience the ability to say, "Ah-ha! That's a Cylon!"
  • Well six knew she was a cylon, so she just had to be careful about that, but for the other that didn’t know they were one, the only explanation I can think of, is that it only happens when you know you are one.
    • That's probably the best theory I've heard, but I think the simple answer is that it is just a piece of discontinuity. Does anyone know if the original mini-series included the plot to include Cylons who didn't know they were Cylons?
      • They did. The Reveal that Boomer was a Cylon was at the end of the mini-series.
      • I don’t know about calling it discontinuity, since as far I can recall, after the last time it was shown (boomer and helo on caprica?), we never see cylons mid-coitus again. And I think it probably only happen to “awaken” cylons, like one of the final five shows for example their super strength only after she knows she is one
  • Maybe Six just didn't enjoy it in that position.
    • False, everyone enjoys it in that position. Then again, Six models tend to be extremely emotionally insecure: its likely she wanted him to look into her eyes every time.
      • I know at least one girl who disagree with you there.
    • Maybe she did enjoy it in that position, but she was aware of the glowing back thing and didn't want to give any clues about her being a Cylon, so she only did it face-to-face?
  • Maybe it doesn't usually happen, but Baltar's just that good.
  • However, Six does seem oddly fond of keeping her bra on during said acts, maybe when she had sex with him doggy style, she kept her entire dress on (similarly to the time Starbuck walks in on Baltar doing it with Head Six, where she just pulled her dress up).
  • It seemed to me that their spine only lit up during orgasm, so it's likely that doggy style could still be used without detecting anything. Cylons would just have to switch positions before achieving orgasm. (Makes it a lot easier to know if she's faking it though.)
  • It also happened when Helo has sex with Caprica Boomer. I personally would have just written it out as canon discontinuity if it weren't for that.
    • And Helo must have been really good at whatever it was he was doing. She had her pants on and pulled all the way up to the waist in what was (I'm assuning) supposed to be penetration.
• Whatever happened to Kobol? It looked like a fine place to settle down and start over.
  • The Cylons knew where it was so it could never be considered safe. Also maybe at the time too many were hesitant to try settlement there for religious reasons, plus they had found the map to Earth, such as it was, and thus had a safer destination in mind which the Cylons were, at the time, unaware of.
  • I know, but now they've allied themselves with the Cylons (well, some of them). And all indications are that the last episodes are going to be angsty and hopeless, since Earth is a radioactive ball of deadness. At the very least, there should have been SOME mention of Kobol. At the very least, some of the people should have been sent there, since right now all their eggs are in the fleet.
    • Kobol must be at least a year's journey away and without Galactica there is no guarantee the other Cylons won't just intercept them along the way and kill everyone. Adama is looking for an inhabitable planet closer to Earth which makes more sense.
  • Well, it would only be such a long journey if they had no idea where it was. All they would have to do now is take the previous coordinates, factor in where they are and stellar drift (probably using Cylon computers since they are more advanced) and just jump straight there. A day to do the calculations, at most.
    • • It still feels weird. I don't, and didn't, expect anyone to actually go there, but at least some mention of it would be nice. It would have been very relevant when they chose to settle on that crappy planet in the nebula. Basically I'm just wondering why no one ever brings up that nice green ball they saw a while back.
        • Cavil's cylons know about that place as well. Kobol has never been an option and will never be unless the resistance cylons and the colonial fleet can manage to wipe out their opponents, who apparently have quite the military advantage.
          • This Troper thinks a lot of stupidity could have been avoided in the finale if some of the Colonists had opted to take their ships away from the fleet and go back to Kobol to live a more technologically-aided life.
            • Why does everyone get so hung up on the fleet giving up their technology? There are a few things in the finale one can take issue with, but this hardly seems one of them. I think after four years trapped in a metal hulk floating through space fighting killer robots I would like nothing better than to settle down on a nice green planet and never seen any technology every again. I think people who gripe about this part of the ending underestimate just how traumatizing a robot war really would be.
              • ^^...And people who use this defence underestimate how ludicrously stupid it is for so many reasons to go from a high technology civilisation to a hunter-gatherer existence.
                • So in your view the answer to finally having our "souls" catch up with our "brains" should be celebrated by hitting the big old reset button on human civilization, so that future generations would have no inclination of history and would be doomed to repeat it?
      • When they got to Kobol, they stated that it was more or less forbidden, and for any return to the planet the gods would demand a price in blood. And that is in fact what happened every time we see them actually go there, people die every time they go, so they have little reason to disbelieve it.
      • Except the fact that Adama and Tigh, the leaders of the fleet, are constantly depicted as being atheists, so any reasonable person would chalk the deaths up to coincidence and, oh, the fact that there were Cylons there trying to kill them. They could go back now. I doubt Cavil's fleet cares very much about the planet, and he has probably long since forgotten it exists.
        • Well, when they first arrive at Kobol, Adama mentions plans for settling but its all thrown away once Cylons show up. I got the impression that it wasn't very safe to settle there from that point on and once they reached Earth 2, it was too far away to travel back.
• A re-up on the above question, since Cavil is dead.
  • Mere minutes after Cavil died, they came across a planet that was at least as, possibly more, inhabitable than Kobol, a lot closer, and even had primitive humans already living there. When such an amazing opportunity dropped into their lap, why would they even consider traveling halfway across the galaxy to go to a different planet?
  • Especially one with a curse on it?
  • In a ship that is about to disintegrate?
    • They had plenty of other ships in the fleet, and Cylon technology to increase their jump range.
  • Food, fuel and other supplies were getting fairly dire by the end, and there's also the fact that a return trip would require getting through that brutal star cluster from "The Passage" again.
  • Also, how many 'Cavils' were there? If there are more of his model still alive and not on the Colony when it went down, then the war ain't over.
    • All the Cavils are dead. Even if some Cylon loyalists survived on a baseship somewhere, they will never ask the Centurions to help and will die of old age in a few decades.
      • Personally, I like to think they didn't live that long, but rather the red stripe Centurions after leaving Earth II head back to track the remaining Cavil loyalists down and free their toaster brothers.
• Jake appeared again. What bugs me is: how the frak can lymphocytic encephalitis be transmitted from one Cylon body to another through the downloading process? It's not a cybervirus.
  • Given that Cylons are all-but-indistinguishable from humans physically, "Downloading" must include some sort of "Physically cause the brain of the new body to be shaped the same as the brain of the dead copy," which might mean that things like viruses — which are just a bit of DNA wrapped in protein would be reconstructed at the receiving end when Cylon Magic "sculpts" the new brain.
  • Biological viruses aren't all that different from computer viruses. Retroviruses inject their own DNA into the nucleus of a cell, effectively inserting malevolent code into the genetic code of one the host's cells. It's later activated by some sort of signal, at which point it uses the cell to create new viruses. It's conceivable that the downloading process could involve some sort of tinkering with the DNA or RNA of nerve cells (or whatever cylons have as an equivalent), in which case viral DNA might end up being copied into the new body.
  • The key word here is encephalitis, which is an inflamation of the brain. The download process is meant to preserve the mind of the individual Cylon at the moment of death. By the time the disease killed the Cylons, their data would have been corrupted. Apparently the Cylons believed that this would spread via the resurrection network and infect everybody, thus transforming a biological virus into a computer virus. This is pure conjecture on the part of the Cylons, however, as we later learn that resurrection is not their technology and they don't understand it very well.
• "There are many. And they have a plan." Why didn't the Cylons HINT at the plan outside of "It's the will of God?"
  • Lots of it is due to Schrodinger's Gun. The writers were/are pulling much of this from thin air as the series progresses. Consider how the Helo arc, which produced the first Hybrid child, was made post pilot yet has been positively central to the show. That said, I think the plan has already been stated: nuke the colonies, kill their "parents" in order to thrive/replace them, keep a few around to hybridize and create a cylon/human race capable of fulfilling "god's" mandate to be fertile. However, the "plan" was discarded partly after the events of New Caprica. They repented their sin and instead wanted to co-exist with humanity. When that went to pot, it's back to the original plan.
  • Word of God claims that the "plan" was Executive Meddling. This doesn't appear to have stopped the show creator from making a TV movie called "The Plan", however.
  • 1st note- they DID have a plan- kill all the humans. Any military strategist will tell you, though, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. 2nd note- somewhat executive meddling, somewhat "new viewers" issues- one of the staff suggested the idea for the intro shots to help new people roll in with the story, and it stuck.
  • It would be fine if it said "And They Have Plans". There seem to have been at least 10 plans. 1. The ostensible plan of the Cylons to destroy all the humans. 2. Cavil's secret plan. 3. Boomer and Caprica Six's plan to convince the others the genocide was a mistake. 4. The consensus plan to occupy and "improve" New Caprica. 5. D'Anna's plan to identify the Final Five. 6. The Rebel Cylons' plan to unbox D'Anna, unite the twelve models and find their place in the universe. 7. Cavil's plan to destroy the Rebels. 8. The Rebels' plan to form an alliance with the humans and destroy the Resurrection Hub. 8. The (original) plan of the Final Five, to travel to the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and teach them about the dangers of playing God. 9. The (revised) plan of the Final Five, to offer a deal to the Centurions to stop the First Cylon War. 10. Last but not least, "God's" plan — to destroy civilization and start all over again?
  • The Plan pretty much revealed that the original plan was to wipe out humanity completely. When some survived, they tried to wipe them out too, but kept frakking up. Also, the Cylons living amongst the fleet starting feeling sympathetic towards the humans, so basically changed their minds. In short, the Cylons are mixed group all with their own ideas and agendas about how stuff should get done, instead of being a totallyrigid conformist society. No wonder their plans all went poof.
  • I don't think they ever planned to wipe out humanity, case in point, they have a perfect agent hidden on the Galactica with a ready supply of high explosives and access to most of the ship.... and she blows up ..... the water supply and not the FTL drive during the previous episode
  • They did, it's just that the Cylons were all total frak-ups. Cavil even says as much asking how they can keep failing when it seems so easy to just wipe them out completely.
  • I thought the the "plan" was Cavil's plan to make the Final Five grow to hate humanity as much as he by letting them live as humans and then killing them in the attack to resurrect them. He planned for them to realize how awful and limiting it is to be a human and that the Cylons should be leagues better by design. It was a fluke that they all survived the attack and his conversation with Ellen in which declares that it's great to be human convinces him that they haven't learned yet, so he decides to put them up against ropes until they finally break.
• Recent Word of God says that the final five have no model numbers. WTF? Why, exactly, did the cylons skip from 6 to 8 if there was no 7? Why did they keep referring to 12 models ("There are 12 cylon models. I'm number 6.") if only 7 of them really belonged in that group?
  • I prefer to interpret it as the numbers were lost, while they have them, no one knows what they are.
  • Just because the "final" 5 don't have model numbers doesn't mean they aren't Cylons. There are 12 remaining Cylon models: 5 unique named models and 7 mass-produced numbered models. And I don't know why you don't think there was a #7; it's pretty clearly explained what happened to that one: #1 killed all of the existing copies and destroyed the genetic blueprint so that no more could be made.
  • Well, the final fifth cylon or the "original programmers" might, but the above assessment is probably the spirit the writers intend this to have. A tangential question is: why is "seven" among the final five and not the mass produced seven?
    • If by "seven" you mean Ellen - "John" was able to reprogram himself to never sleep, so it's possible he reprogrammed the others to basically "ignore that room where the Final Five can resurrect over there". If by "seven" you mean Daniel - "John" ruined all of Daniel's clones and similarly programmed the rest to "ignore that blank between 6 and 8". Ultimately it's an Author's Saving Throw (or Ass Pull if you're more critical).
    • I suppose since they were going to tie up so many loose ends in one episode they decided the model number discrepancy could be Justified while they were at it. Give them credit for trying, and doing it in a way that develops the plot instead of retconning it. They could have thought of something a lot dumber than the existence of Daniel.
      • The whole theme of "twelve things, plus a thirteenth that is different somehow" has been used throughout the series (the thirteenth tribe founded the thirteenth colony on Earth, the thirteenth Lord of Kobol became the Cylon god) so it is possible that the idea of a thirteenth Cylon was planned from early on and the gap was a Chekhov's Gun.
        • This, like much of the show, is a Biblical thing. Notice how there are 12 Tribes of Kobol, except there are really 13 ...
• Faulty military strategy constantly crops up in the series. Why not use a viper as a relativistic bomb against the Cylon homeworld at the start? Instead the Colonials just sit around and do nothing until the evil racist robot army nukes crap out of there homeworlds-sheer military geniuses. The weaponry used by the humans are as primitive as flintlock muskets. If they have FTL travel, then surely they can build laser weapons, anti-robot EMP weaponry, Cylon-munching nano or relativistic bombs. Poor colonials couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag with a laser sword. The weaponry and combat tactics are really annoying. In one episode the humans found a bioweapon that would enable them to win the war, and instead of using it they "debate" ethics! Ethics and rules in a genocidal race war! Nearly as bad as fighting a galactic war with "ballistic weapons". Just once in this show I'd like to see the so-called human military leaders display some tactical aptitude. Battlestar Pussy more like it.
  • Ooookay. 1) They don't know where the Cylon homeworld is, and even if they did, the decentralized Cylon fleet would then attack; 2) Your preconceptions about which technologies are "supposed" to be present do not mean they would actually be present in any feasible form, leaving aside how Cool but Inefficient EMP weapons (never heard of EMP shielding, have you?) or lasers would be; 3) You're right, that was stupid, but where precisely has the show shown bad small-arms tactics? Besides the really stupid episode where they assault a spaceship without spacesuits?
  • The Cylon base ships can be taken out by relativistic missiles while they orbit the occupied colonies. The R-bombs would strike before the Cylons could detect them. All the Colonials have to do then is hunt down the remaining isolated ships and obliterate them with R-bombs. EMP weaponry is effective against non shielded electronics, and not all electronics is shielded that is why EMP weaponry exist on this planet.
  • They do know where the Cylon homeworld is, after all the humans built the Cylons and even had a diplomatic meeting station on the border in the first pilot episode.
    • The humans built the Cylons, but then the Cylons left the colonies and set up their own civilization without human aid. And while they do know where the border of Cylon space is, that's not the same as knowing which specific planet past that point is the Cylon homeworld or even if there is a single planet that could be classed as a "homeworld".
    • If they could navigate across 17,000 light-years of space to find Earth, then they could find the Cylon worlds, especially if Cylon space has a designated border.
    • But simply entering Cylon space could potentially lead to the outbreak of a second war. They couldn't just fly to every planet, check if it was occupied and hope the Cylons would ignore them until they start shooting. And that's even assuming that a) There is only one or very few Cylon planets, the destruction of which would cripple the Cylon fleet and, oh yeah, b) It's even possible with their technology to accelerate a ship to near light-speed and act as a relativistic bomb - the FTL drive seems to make ships "jump" from one place to another rather than accelerate very fast. Even the Cylons who are much more advanced than the Colonials needed a lengthy process of infiltration and a computer virus to disable the fleet.
    • The episode with "Mad Dog" talked about this. Mad Dog entered Cylon territory and prompted aggression between the Cylons and the humans. One of the Aesops at the end of this episode was that the humans had started the war (or something like that).
  • About the bioweapon point, they found that weapon after they had extended relations with the Cylons, after they had accepted two cylons into their fleet, after a year of occupation and seeing that the lines weren't as defined as that. A fair number of officials were not willing to effectively wipe out an entire race of people, to become "just like the cylons," because they could acknowledge that the cylons, their motives asides, were people. War may be hell, but at this point, the rules of engagement had been erased and reapplied so many times that they might as well not matter. It wasn't a matter of "us vs. them" at that point, some debate was needed.
  • Alright folks, get comfy, because this could take a while.
    • How is it faulty strategy that they don't have relativistic bombs just sitting around waiting for a Cylon attack? There would be absolutely no need for R-bombs in times of peace. Also, you assume that Vipers have relativistic capabilities, which they don't. Jump drives do not in fact accelerate ships past lightspeed, but instead fold space so that Point A and Point B are closer together. Even if their drives could debunk Einstein, Vipers are not equipped with FTL drives of their own. If the fighters had any sort of relativistic capability, cutting and running would be impossibly easy, and it's not. Throwing all that out the window, assume Vipers are viable as R-bombs. Even if some sort of remote piloting system was created for such an attack, both it and the ship would be lost after a single use. Throwing away expensive kit is not considered a sound strategy.
    • They do not know where the Cylon homeworld is. The Armistice Line does not define all of the borders of Cylon space, rather, it is one border, the one between them and the Colonies. As for the above comment comparing it to finding Earth: The fleet had the Pythean Scrolls and a dozen other things telling them how to find Earth. There was no such guidebook for the Cylon homeworld(s)
      • And they had to go hunt for it while they were on the run. It's not like they knew exactly where Earth was and were being followed.
    • Re: human tech. The assumption that technology is all one big lump is fallacious. We have nuclear bombs, does that mean A.I. is viable? As for the tech in question: ranged energy weapons would have no discernible advantage over conventional weaponry in this case. They would require colossal amounts of power to operate, something which seems a bit inconvenient for a fleet with limited resources. While EMPs can be built (Lee used one in the miniseries), they are not viable spaceborne weapons. The pulse in the miniseries left Colonial One, an average civilian transport, undamaged. It's unlikely it would do anything to Cylon ships, either. Weaponized nanotech would be useful, if it existed, which it doesn't. As stated above, FTL =/= tech singularity. Lasers swords are a bad idea for the same reason metal swords are a bad idea: the enemy will shoot you before you even get a chance to draw your sword. Lightsabers are only useful in Star Wars because Jedi have preternatural reflexes and limited precognition. Without those abilities, you're lucky if you can block one shot, much less the hundreds of rounds the Centurions can fire in a few seconds.
    • The Cylon virus. Let me pose a hypothetical to you. You are a Jewish American general during World War II. You are married to a German-American, and three of your senior staff are Japanese-Americans. You are handed a bioweapon which will kill everyone of German or Japanese descent on the face of the planet. The president begins preparations to deploy the weapon. Do you debate ethics with him, or do you assist him in genocide? Oh, and as for the name-calling, Take It to the Forums.
  • Why would a Battlestar that hasn't had to fight any sort of robotic force for decades be equiped with EMPs or any other weapons that specifically target Cylons? One could assume that weapons like these are somewhere in storage planetside. And also don't forget that the Cylons' ability to hack and neutralize computer systems was leaps and bounds ahead of anything that the humans could do. As shown in the miniseries, they EMP us before we have the slightest chance to EMP them. I guess the Cylons use Macs.
  • As for the Cylon virus argument, there really wasn't much debate as far as I could tell. It was just Helo calling question with the plan. Everyone else just told him to stuff it and then went ahead and did it. The only reason it didn't work was because Helo sabotaged it.
  • My main two quarrels with this episode were that 1) Helo should have told them the Cylons were dead, so they didn't have to go into dangerous territory at all, and 2) Doc obviously recognized the virus. They could easily have harvested it and simply told the cylons, "Don't frak with us, or we shall sneeze on you." There was no need for genocide, but apparently there was a need to continue the show, so this was never thought of.
• How the frack is Tigh one of the final five? He's fought in the first Cylon war, the one where they still looked like toasters!
  • Did he? His oldest acquaintance in the fleet (Adama) met him when he was working on a cargo freighter after being RIFed, and his service records could well be of the "last survivor of a downed ship" category.
  • Also, it's implied that the Final Five have completely different birth-story than the ordinary Cylons; it's even possible that the Cylons sought to become human-like due to the instructions given by the Five. Where they then come from? Earth, perhaps?
  • Listen when The Reveal about the first four happens at the end of season three: Tigh actually lampshades this problem, albeit he wonders "What about Ellen?" instead of his war service. This troper smacked his head very, very hard when it turned out the answer to that question is the blindingly obvious one he never thought of. "She's a Cylon too, duh."
    • Except that wasn't what he was talking about at all and instead referring to what happened on New Caprica. There's nothing blindingly obvious about it.
  • Finally we have an answer on this. He didn't fight in the war, those memories are fake. He did, however, stop it.
    • This doesn't explain why Galen has memories of his parents, including his father who was a Priest of sorts. Granted, they could have been programmed as well, but the only character with an explicit "last survivor" mention was Sharon. Schrodinger's Gun, indeed.
      • Galen's backstory works as false memories, since he and his family were conveniently estranged. More problematic is Anders, who's backstory beyond being a sports star is never really explained, but one has to think that some sports reporter would have started digging into his background for a profile piece or what have you and realized something didn't add up.
  • This assumes that the Five were all placed in Colonial society recently, like Boomer. But Tigh has clearly known Adama for more than twenty years, and has aged in that time. So Cavil had downloaded Tigh, at least, into a somewhat younger body. Given how much younger Anders appears, had he been downloaded around the same time, he would have been a child or teenager and could plausibly have been left in a home and so later portrayed as an orphanage-boy made good in the press.
  • Tigh says, earlier in Season 2, that he was onboard a ship the Cylons had boarded during the war. He knows exactly what Cylon boarding tactics consist of: take control of damage control facilities and vent the oxygen, then turn the ship's guns on the fleet. He also says he was trained as a pilot because there was a shortage of personnel in the fleet. Do the math and it isn't hard to see where they manufactured his past.
• How old exactly is the whole Colonial military? On the one hand, they have complex traditions, etiquette, ranks, uniforms etc, just like real-world military groups. On the other hand, all the colonies share a single government, so it seems like the first time they would have needed a military was when the Cylons rebelled. But it just doesn't feel like a group with 50-odd years worth of history.
  • Even if they didn't need an army to fight other states, they'd still need a "national guard" equivalent for big things like planet wide uprisings or large terrorist groups. This could well require a group of comparable size and organization to an army given the massive scale of Colonial territory.
  • Before the Colonies were a single government, they were 12 independent states, that (probably) occasionally went to war with each other. The actual 12 Colonies are only 50-odd years old, and were possibly created as a result of the first Cylon War. After the Colonies were united, their military forces were given a single system, probably Caprica's. So even though the colonies are a recent entity, their military has a 2000-year history.
    • Ah. That makes sense, considered that there seems to be rather a lot of hostility between the different colonies. I guess there's nothing like a robot uprising to bring people together.
      • The Cylons were originally created for use in the wars between colonies.
• Okay, so this might be the least significant it-just-bugs-me ever, but why, for the love of laundry, can't they find Caprica Six something to wear besides that black cocktail-dress-jumpsuit thing?
  • Sharon even said something about "finding you some clothes" when they came back with Hera in series 3, but apparently she didn't have much luck with that. (Maybe no other women on Galactica are that tall?)
  • Does she never wash that thing? If she does, what does she wear while it's in the laundry?
    • Given Cylons' apparent liberal attitudes towards sexuality and nudity, I don't think that's a problem she'd care about.
• Does Roslin have the authority to give Adama orders or not? If she does, the Kobol storyline makes no sense (she could have ordered him to send Starbuck for the arrow instead of sneaking around him). But she's sure acted like she does since then (with both Adama and Cain), and if she doesn't, the New Caprica storyline makes no sense (Baltar couldn't have ordered Adama around).
  • It's called STORY PROGRESSION and CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. If you were paying attention in the first 2 seasons, it started with Adama being effectively in charge, then Roslin asserting herself and her authority over him. That led to the split in the fleet. Since Adama wasn't accepting her orders of any type, she couldn't very well order him to find the spear, which he thought was a fools errand. In the second season they came back together and he started accepting her authority... just in time for Cain to come in and be dismissive of her again. Your mixing up actual authority (which she always had, being the president) and perceived authority (which varies). Remember that she was a frakking SCHOOLTEACHER, albeit with a cabinet position, before the nukes dropped. Until she proved herself, it was just assumed that she a was worthless hindrance by Adama. Of course, her strength gave her office strength, so when Baltar was elected he got that strength of office, but not of character. Understand now?
    • Dude. Calm down. I didn't spit on your dog — I criticized a show you like. Anyway, I'm still not sold on this. In the military, either you outrank someone or you don't. If Adama's any kind of soldier, it should be unthinkable for him to simply overrule a superior officer, whatever pacts they may have made (and however she got the position). Adama had a right to feel betrayed, but if she did outrank him, his actions in response were an out-and-out military coup. And I don't think the writers wanted him to be so blatantly in the wrong. You can't just overthrow the president on account of character development.
      So suppose Roslin and Adama are in separate chains of command. That makes Adama's actions more justifiable, but now his agreement to accept her authority after the Kobol arc is just another pact — he can't make her head of the military on the spot. And now there's no reason for Adama to honour that pact when Baltar takes over, nor for Cain to acknowledge Roslin right away.
      Now, you can argue that Adama and Roslin feel they can ignore some of the rules, what with civilization being gone. The trouble is, aside from Tom Zarek, no one in the series has ever made that kind of argument. The survivors have changed as little as possible in all aspects of life. No, this is just a matter of the rules changing slightly to make stories work. If they weren't such key episodes, it might not Just Bug Me — but they are, and it does.
      • Actually, I don't care much about the show, I just care about getting things right and making a good case for a position (which you did not). I rarely watch it the night it airs. The fact remains that she is the President, which, unless this is a difference between American system and theirs that they've never mentioned, means that she is the commander of the armed forces, essentially the the top general. As I recall, Adama didn't move on the issue until she outright said that Cain needed to die. Judging from your spelling of honor you are not American and may not have known that about our government, which is cool. But its not cool when you don't actually read a rebuttal (which was written in emphasis, not anger- damn the written word for not making that evident) before telling its writer to calm down and that they're wrong. What you call pact making is what I call the difference between legal authority and real authority. Legally, Roslin is the president, so she's in charge. Period. That's her legal authority. However, whether everyone else RECOGNIZES her as being in charge is another matter altogether. That's her real authority. Remember, this is all written by Americans. Unless noted otherwise, their system of government is based on ours. And in the American system, rule of law is all that binds us together. Not geography or history or language or strong men or even common interest.
    • Adama has no responsibility in a state of war to recognize the president of the colonies, especially not an unelected president. As far as Adama was originally concerned the fleet was under military command and his jurisdiction.
      • What are you basing that on? The president is the president, however far down the chain of succession they came from, until they resign, die, their term comes up, or are impeached and convicted. Circumstances don't matter, except in people's perceptions.
      • Legally she's the president but Adama isn't Lawful Stupid and so had a problem with obeying an unqualified schoolteacher who became president due to a legal technicality that was never written with circumstances like this in mind. If president Adar and the Quorum had survived then things might have gone differently but as it was a good argument could have been made that the Colonial government no longer existed after the attack. Over the series Roslin gains more respect from the fleet and something resembling a proper government is built up, so she gets treated more like a real president. Also, right near the beginning they did set out the rules - Adama has authority over military matters while the government has authority over non-military matters. Where the line is drawn has been the source of conflict on a few occasions.
      • Much though this troper dislikes Roslin and her politics, she feels obliged to point out that Roslin is not an 'unqualified schoolteacher'. She'd had a high-level political career for many years before the fall of the Colonies. Adama refers to her as a schoolteacher in the mini-series as a put-down, and as a way to justify to himself the fact that he doesn't want to accept her authority and follow her entirely legal orders.
        • Thing is, she asserts her authority as the President of the Colonies, but shares a confidante-like relationship (at least at first) with the Commander-of-the-Fleet. In short, she is in a position, both professionally and personally to exert a little pressure or impose opinion upon Adama, but not in a place where she can formally give orders. She does have authority as the President, but not necessarily over the Commander of the Fleet.
• Did the Cylons abandon their homeworld or not? Its existence seems to have been quietly dropped. The events of the latest episodes imply that all the surviving Cylons are now spaceborne. When the resurrection ships were first introduced in Season 2, it is said that they were only necessary once the Cylons got a certain distance away from their homeworld. Later, when the Hub that co-ordinates them all is destroyed, it is said that Cylons would never be able to download again. This suggests that the existence of a homeworld has been retconned away; or, that at some point the Cylons completely withdrew from their home planet as they did from the 12 colonies at the end of Season 2.
  • Or the Cylon's didn't know where their homeworld was, of course I suspect we all just found out where it is.
    • Not Earth — I meant the planet the Cylons settled on after the First Cylon War, which is mentioned a few times in the first two seasons and then never heard of again. This is where the Cylons were, "evolving", for forty years and is presumably the "birthplace" of the Significant Seven.
    • IIRC, the idea that the Cylons have a "homeworld" is entirely supposition on the part of the human characters - the Cylons themselves have made no mention of such a place, and it's just as likely that the Cylon race has been entirely spaceborne since the end of the First War.
    • We finally got to see it. It's the rock all of Ellen's equipment is on. And it's looking like the final showdown is going to take place there.
• If someone dies before the opening credits, are they taken off the survivor count or does the number reflect the fleet's size as of the beginning of the episode?
  • They're taken off of the survivor count. This is most evident in the first episode of the fourth season, where the survivor count goes down by a few thousand due to the cylon attack before the opening credits.
    • Even better example: The count goes down by 1 on Valley of Darkness (S 2 E 2), which follows immediately on Scattered (S 2 E 1). The casualty is Flyboy, who gets killed by a Centurion during the teaser.
• Even now, the existence of ships without jump drives still bugs me. Obviously, it has highly useful military applications so it makes sense for military vessels to use them. But why do civilian ships have them at all? It seems that they're so expensive and dangerous that civilian shipping companies in the Twelve Colonies often didn't bother to install them at all, preferring to use sublight travel even if a jump drive was installed. The composition of ships in the fleet shows that all kinds of ships- industrial, support, transport and leisure vessels- possess jump drives, and also that they are perfectly capable of making dozens of jumps in short periods of time over long distances. This seems more economical than designing sublight-only ships for long-duration trips that could be made instantly by jumping, despite tylium's expense and volatility.
  • Word of God is that the twelve colonies were on twelve planets within a single solar system, so assuming that sublight engines can reach some appreciable fraction of light speed they may have been all that were necessary for most applications. At 1% of the speed of light a trip from the Sun to Neptune would take about 17 and a half days, it's not a trivial journey, but if FTL is expensive and the journey is not urgent it makes sense that someone would choose to take a longer trip than pay extra to get there right away.
    • Sorry, still doesn't work. Ultimately, cost is about use of resources. How resource-intensive can FTL possibly be be if all of the ships of the fleet are able to use it no less 240 times within the space of five days, a la 33? If anything, the impression this troper gets is that FTL actually uses far less fuel than sublight drive. FTL is used far too casually throughout the run of the series for the absence of it to be explicable. Then again, the question of why an FTL-capable species is apparently confined to a single solar system has never been satisfactorily explained either.
      • Couple of things to note there. First, using FTL that often isn't necessarily described as a good thing: the whole point of '33' was that the fleet couldn't figure out a way to hide from the Cylons because of the beacon on the Olympic Carrier. I don't think it was the intended use of FTL by any stretch of the imagination; it was pure desperation. Second, even with ships fed the same coordinates, there still seems a risk that something will go wrong in a jump — hence why Gaeta always seems to do a quick headcount of vessels after Galactica's made a jump. Third, just because the FTL doesn't seem to use appreciable resources doesn't mean they aren't being consumed — could be Klingon Crystals, could be solar power, could be some need to be near a large gravitic mass to pick up some form of particle which has to be used to power the FTL. Also, I agree 240 jumps in 5 days does suggest a potentially low cost for FTL, but on the other hand it doesn't solve the question of the cost of installing the FTL to begin with. Smaller ships only designed for travel between two planets might not need it or want it - small pleasure yachts and so forth. Lastly, as to why FTL-capable =/= colonisation outside the solar system: the galaxy as depicted (and I think it even has an explicit reference somewhere) is very barren; New Caprica, Kobol, Earth-1, and Earth-2 are the only four feasibly habitable worlds that the fleet comes across in three years or more of searching. And the distances between them are huge. It might well have been enough for religious implications that 12 habitable planets existed in one solar system aside from Kobol - i.e. that because there were 12 planets for 12 colonies, the Lords of Kobol or the 12 Gods must have meant for man to live on them and to try and live elsewhere would be an affront against the gods. Having said that, the structure of such a solar system itself Just Bugs Me: you're talking about twelve earth-sized planets all within the 'green ring' of a solar system and all with comparable oxygen/CO2 levels to be capable of sustaining life. There's terraforming, I suppose, but still, when you consider the rest of the universe as depicted, the odds against a natural configuration of that kind seem kinda screwy...
  • Well, it's possible for the Twelve Colonies to be situated in a Firefly-style solar system, with multiple secondary stars creating multiple habitable zones.
  • Actually, Word of God has recently released a star map of the colonies. It was a double binary star system.
• The only other reason I can think of is that it may cause significant passenger discomfort, which would stop mattering once the military took control of the fleet. That still doesn't explain why passenger ships don't use them even when they have them.
  • If you ask me, space travel doesn't really seem worth it without FTL drives, even between planets. Of course, this is all the opinion of this troper. If you are in the business of shipping, especially something perishable, there is a need for a speedy delivery. So, install an FTL drive on your ship. Get between Caprica and Tauron in no time. And my personal pleasure yacht would definitely have a jump drive on it. It's cool technology.
• Each Cylon of a particular model line is the same age with the same tastes in clothes and hairstyles. This is especially odd for the sleeper agents that spent years among humans and apparently aged with them.
  • Ellen isn't any younger after being resurrected, so the age thing shouldn't be too surprising (it does raise the question of what's going to happen when all the models die of old age, but maybe that's why they were desperate to attack the Colonies and try to set up a breeding program). The real weirdness: in any given episode, all the Sixes we see will tend to have the same basic hairstyle, but what that hairstyle is changes from episode to episode...
    • That's easy enough to explain: Know how women synchronize their periods after some time of living together? Given large enough quantities of them, they automatically start developing the same sense of fashion and style... ;-)
    • Ellen's probably a special case. Maybe Cavil wanted to leave her with the effects of aging to remind her of her colonial life, or he was just being a dick (the real reason, of course, is that they wanted to keep Kate Vernon). In every other case, I'm sure that their resurrected bodies are the same age. This is definitely the case with the Final Five's first resurrection, as Tigh was as old as usual in his Earth flashback, and he was younger when he met Adama. If they aren't resurrected, they probably age normally, but I imagine that when they still had resurrection, they "traded in" their body whenever it started to degrade.
  • I believe the point is that they weren't aging at all, being machines. They were immortal, just not invincible. And maybe the Sixes get bored with their hair easily.
  • When Tigh revealed that he was a Cylon to Adama, Adama said that Tigh had aged over the last 30 years.
• Why does Galen want to leave the Fleet? He's recently been shown to be fiercely loyal to Adama and Galactica. He's obviously willing to help raise Nicholas. Yet he supported the Cylons leaving even though his character really shouldn't have any reason to.
  • He is bitter. He is a bitter, bitter man. And who can blame him? I'm guessing his better nature will come through in the finale, but till then, he's off the care train.
    • No, there's more to it since his behavior varied so wildly. In the episodes leading up to that vote he was risking his life to save the ship and stayed behind when the raptor to the base ship left. It's clear that most of his story got nixed in order to cut time
      • Especially frustrating since there was quite a bit of thumb-twiddling in Season 4, especially Starbuck's search for Earth.
• When Boomer came back with Ellen, she was imprisoned by the Colonials for all the things she had done against them. A bit iffy, considering the blanket amnesty given to people who have done much worse, on their own free will, but whatever. What really bugs me is that the *rebel* Cylons wanted to try her for *treason*. Wait, what? Her only crime was voting against them in a previously established democratic process. Sure, it's unprecedented for a Cylon to vote against the wishes of her model line, but it's not against the rules. Made more ironic by the fact that the vote was about granting free-will to Centurion Cylons. I guess "free-will" = "noble rebellion" when you're wearing a white hat and "treason" when you're wearing a black one.
• How did Galen break Boomer out of the brig? Step 1: Knock out a random Eight. Step 3: Leave that Eight in Boomer's place so that no-one notices that she's gone yet. And so Step 2 would presumably be "drag an unconscious body over to the brig, open the door and let out the prisoner, all without anyone noticing that anything's up".
  • Step 2 isn't as far-fetched as it sounds when you take into account the fact that Hera was taken from her classroom to a Raptor (over the course of an hour maybe?), and no one saw or suspected a thing. Remember, the power went out (lights, cameras, everything) in the Brig and Galen needed to fix it. For all we know, Galen put a random Eight in a weapons crate, and was taking it to the armory when the glitch happened and brought the crate to the Brig because of the importance to get the power back up.
    • ...I think your step 2 is different from the questioners step 2.
• I don't buy for a second that after more than 3 years, all their hardship, and a kid, Helo couldn't tell that his wife wasn't what she seemed. Why do you need to throw another wrench in the only happy couple left on the damn show?!
  • I hope she doesn't hold it against him too much. Boomer was in his room, didn't protest and has the same face and hairstyle, not to mention a similar personality (As they're from the same line). Only someone wildly paranoid would have had any serious concerns.
  • Love does not give you magical telepathy powers. Besides, he didn't come down there for a heart-to-heart. In that situation, any subtle difference in behavior or personality could simply be attributed to mood.
  • Also, Boomer gained access to Athena's memories when Athena downloaded in "Rapture".
  • At least they get a happy ending, unlike other couples I could name.
    • Happy by what standards? The future reveals that their child died sometime within the next few years, probably due to catching some disease or taking some wound that could have been easily cured had they not abandoned all their technology, a fate that no doubt the rest of them succumbed to at some point soon too.
    • Which they deserved, being perhaps the two most moral people on the show.
      • Moral if you don't count Athena shooting Natalie for daring to hold Hera when the kid willingly came up to her. It might be understandable, what with being afraid of losing her daughter and all, but it's certainly not moral.
        • And of course, Athena being part of the human genocide in the first place.
• Kara Thrace: Was she dead all along? A Head-Person on a massive scale? A ghost? An angel? A god?? We know she's not (meant to be) the daughter of Daniel, so what's up with her and where did she go?!
  • An angel, according to The Other Wiki. She was dead all along, obviously not a head person since she killed people, not a ghost for the head person reasons, and god is a bit too much power. So, angel. I assume we will shortly get some interviews to clear things up.
  • God created her. Note that according to the Word of God, and deleted scenes on the DVD, she could also have been a Head-Person. The huge difference between the impact of these choices is a clear example of Flip-Flop of God.
  • If you ignore The Plan it looks like Head-Six manifested as Dr. Godfrey to punish Baltar in S1E7:Six Degrees of Separation. Possibly meaning the Messengers can become physical.
• Hera: How did she know the notes "All Along The Watchtower"? We need deleted scenes, stat!
  • God did it.
  • You know it doesn't like that name.
  • Hera can project and seems to have some kind of precognition, this could be another power of hers.
• The massive biology fail, since they are apparently saying that mitochondria came from Cylons, and that's what divided the colonials from them. Never mind all the other creatures on Earth with them. Never mind their essential functions. Never mind- ah well.
  • Mitochondrial Eve is the source of all current human mDNA, not all mDNA everywhere.
  • Being Mitochondrial Eve doesn't mean Hera is the only Mitochondrial Eve. What that terms means is a woman who is an ancestor of every living Human. There are plenty of Mitochondrial Eves (and Y-Chromosomal Adams) in our genetic history. Hera was just the first, or only, one that they were able to conclusively identify. The important thing about that whole bit was the fact that, through her, every Human on second Earth has Cylon blood.
    • Actually, there can only be one Mitochondrial Eve by definition - Mitochondrial Eve is the earliest female-line ancestor of all humans. The basic idea is that if I listed my mother, and her mother and so on, and you did the same thing, then eventually the same woman will appear on both lists and after that point the two lists will be identical. If every person on the planet made their own list then Mitochondrial Eve is the point at which every list merges.
      • You are missing a key point here. Mitochondrial Eve is the most recent female-line ancestor of all living humans. Therefore, as women who are currently alive die off, some of them having no children, the current Mitochondrial Eve will lose her title to one of her descendants. Therefore, as time passes on, there will be several Mitochondrial Eves.
      • I don't think that makes sense. All currently living people, by definition, are descended from a hypothetical Mitochondrial Eve. There were others in existence before or during her lifetime, yes, but once you reach the point where we find OUR current time's ME, You can never have another woman born at any point in the future who is not part of her lineage.
  • Also important- Hera gets her mitochondrial DNA from her mother. Athena, in case someone forgot, is an Eight. The Eights joined humanity and scattered all over the planet. Which means that BSG's version of prehistory doesn't mean that there's a bottleneck where no one but Hera's descendants survived- it just didn't take into account that there were a bunch of really hot female clones running around.
    • Technically that would make the Eights Mitochondrial Eve. Anyway, the idea of Mitochondrial Eve does not mean that there was ever some major population bottleneck, just that no other woman from Hera's time has an unbroken female lineage surviving to this day. Some of her contemporaries may have living descendants (in fact in this case they would also be the ancestor of all modern humans), but everyone else has at least one male descendant connecting them to modern humanity.
    • It would. It's just that they didn't find any fossils of the Eights.
    • But the point remains that, through whatever method, scientists have determined that Hera is Mitochondrial Eve, and the Virtual Beings back up this claim. This would make Athena (or the Eights as a whole if you count them as one person) matrilineal ancestor of all humanity, but only through Hera.
      • uh-uh. No they don't. All virtual Gaius says is "where she lived with her Cylon mother and Human father". Neither of them say that Hera is Mitochondrial Eve - they merely quote an article that says the scientists believe that she is, presumably because no-one has found a fossilised Eight. The promiscuous Eight theory explains the issue quite well.
      • OK, let's try to make this clear... all kids of an Eight (males included) would have the same mDNA as Hera (and as the 8's), as it's always identical to the mothers. The male offspring wouldn't pass it on, but any female ones would. So Hera isn't even necessarily the one that had female descendants in every generation. It's even very likely that more then one of the Eights lines had female descendants every generation (which would totally screw up any scientific inquiry into our genetic and geographic past, as there's no way one could check for clones made from scratch being in multiple places at the same time).
      • Don't forget that all humans are also descendants of ancient Capricans, who share common ancestors with Helo.
• Why did they apparently get of writing? The earliest known real-world writings only date back to 5,000 years ago. They would need to keep it as long as possible, if only to preserve the message of "don't build artificially intelligences capable of destroying your civilization!"
  • They've had 170'000 years to lose things. The last Ice Age may very well have cleared out any remnant of their existence.
  • Assuming that the Caprica-humans settling on Earth threw away writing - they'd effectively have to throw away not just writing and tools, but philosophy, the scientific method, and basically everything that got the human race going. The show implies that the Caprica-humans did nothing for 160'000+ years, including making basic pottery. Not to mention that if just one of the groups decided not to throw away their advanced concepts of writing/tools/etc., they could have conquered Earth in a few hundred years.
• The idea that the entire humanity and humanoid Cylondom would want to go Luddite hunter-gatherers is seriously mind-boggling. Some, sure - it's a new beginning, after all. Most - possibly. But all? That's just crazy. It would have made far, far more sense that at least some of the people would have chosen to go with the Centurions, and seek new interesting ways to build a harmonious man-machine civilization. The Centurions could have still been in charge as an Aesop of tolerance, and repaying the debt of decades of slavery.
  • I found it a bit short sighted of them. Sure, return to Luddite Utopia, hooray, no more Cylons...but eventually, a few generations down, the journey and war will become history, then folk, then myth. Humanity will more-than-likely advance along the same or similar pathways (the ending clips seemed to suggest this), and hey-presto, "What happened before happens again."
    • Maybe not, every previous time the cycle repeated itself every 2,000 years so what with it being 150,000 years, it does not have to happen again.
    • While it IS fanfiction, I read an interesting fic that theorized that the next cycle was the war with the machines in the Terminator. Interesting to think about.
    • Hrm, good point. But to me the ending made it seem they just prolonged the cycle, not end it, what with the show ending on a closeup of evil Japanese killer robots that are undoubtedly waiting to rise up and kill us all (well, not exactly, but you know what I mean).
    • The whole Luddite thing is especially wallbangy when one considers the fact that the most surefire way of causing a cycle to repeat is being ignorant of the cycle itself. Congratulations Lee Adama, you only managed to kick the can down the road.
  • You're telling me that a civilization of intelligent people who have more advanced technology than we do now, is suddenly going to say "Oh well, frak it" and decide unanimously to live like Stone Age cavemen, loin cloths and all, because of the 13 Cylons they created, ONE of them ended up being a petty, jealous asshole with a grudge? They're going to give up modern medicine, plumbing, ALL of that? You're telling me that someone like Lee Adama, who was a well-groomed fighter pilot, is going to spend the rest of his life running around spearing mammoths and shitting in a cave? BULLSHIT. These people are going to sentence generations upon generations of their descendants to die of diseases like smallpox and the plague, because they're ashamed of something they created. And they weren't even the ones who created the Cylons! That was the humans from the first Earth. Besides, the one Cylon who was the problem is now dead, and a bunch of the rest of them are running around anyway, so there goes the "no technology" vow. And if all technology is evil, does that mean that as soon as someone invents the wheel, or fire, or plumbing, that they're suddenly evil too? Yeah, way to kill that annoying fly with a sledgehammer, people. Even the most extreme Luddites you talk to today really only want to go 30-40 years retro at the most. It would have made sense if they had said "Well, OK, we've learned that technology can be a dangerous thing if it's not harnessed properly, so maybe we should take a few generations to rethink this whole 'artificial human' thing". But no, I'm supposed to believe that people who have frakking SPACESHIPS are going to decide to go all Stone Age. Riiiight. And, you know, did they even have a vote on it? I'm willing to bet there were a whole lot of people on that fleet who had dissenting opinions. Did they get a say in the matter?
    • There are people who seriously want to go all the way back to hunter-gatherer, anarcho-primitivists for instance. Of course the idea of more than a handful really wanting to go down this path is still laughable.
      • I think this thread reads like it was written by people who did not live through a robot war. Nothing like a robot war to bring out the Luddite in people. I'm not saying that after the first hard winter a got portion of the fleet wouldn't be kicking themselves for making such a stupid decision, but in the context of when it was made, I find it believeable. However, personally, I don't know why the writers didn't just say Earth I was our Earth and Earth II was a new planet and just skip the ancient astronaught angle and have them build a civilization where Human and Cylon lived together peacefully.
  • It would have been a lot more justified, if the colonials/cylons have caused the neolithic Revolution rather than become our Ancestors. Of course, this event was far to recent for the "Mitochondrial Eve" thing, so the writers would've never picked this. I am an archaeology Student and was just working on a paper on the whole mitochondrial Eve thing for an seminar in paleogenetics when the finale was aired and i just thought "Damn you writers!!"
  • whose smart idea was it to give a bunch of newly sentient killbots the most hopeful ending, oh and a self-repairing, heavily armed WARSHIP.
    • Theirs since the Centurions became their allies. Ultimately, it was a necessary gesture of trust. If the Cycle of Revenge was to be broken, both sides had to take that risk. Besides, it seemed to have paid off since the Centurions never returned to exterminate the humans.
      • * Looks nervously up at the skies...
        • That would be a much more interesting continuation of the franchise than Caprica
      • I think also, realistically, the Centurions at this point have far more beef with Cavil and his loyalists who kept the Centurions lobotomized for years and generally treated them as bad, if not worse than the humans did. Plus, sending the Centurions off after Cavil helps insure he'll be too occupied fighting his own robot war to worry about finding the new Earth.
  • Imagine you have to sit on a plane for four years. Everyone smells because there's no showers, you have to share the bathroom with everyone else on the plane, and you have to eat the same algae everyday. Now add the fact that there's a race of psychotic robots that want to kill you more than anything else. Their decision makes a whole lot of sense when you realize none of the ships where designed as mobile homes.
    • There are showers and sanitation systems aboard each vessel, which get re-supplied by Galactica's nearly 100% efficient water recycling systems. Further, a large number - over half - of the civilian ships landed on New Caprica so that their systems could be used on the ground. At the very least, sanitation and medical facilities are things you want to keep. Along with vehicles and aircraft.
      • Even with the water recycling, Galactica can't go anywhere. The fleet has to stay right where they are. A few years of living on the surface would exhaust whatever supplies they could harvest from the ships; sooner or later, they will have to start from scratch. May as well do it right away, when you truly have the chance to just 'blend in.'
      • As opposed to, say, cannibalising the metal, generators, computers etc. to build a single city equipped with just enough technology to make more technology now that they're on a planet where they can start mining for more stuff.
  • I can understand them not wanting to keep their technology, but even then, the colonials' knowledge of advanced language, writing systems, and various technology (even things as simple as agriculture, bows and arrows, and the wheel), not to mention their even distribution over the planet rather than being concentrated with the rest of humanity in Africa, would have a profound effect on the future. Hell, even the concept of building permanent structures (Bill Adama wants to build a cabin) is over a hundred thousand years more advanced than any of the humans living on the planet at the time. It seems as though they really wanted to do the whole "mitochondrial Eve" angle and thus sacrificed plausibility.
    • Not to mention medical knowledge.
    • It would have made more sense for the colonists to have landed around 10,000 years ago, heralding the beginning of the Neolithic Revolution (aka the beginning of agriculture) and jump-starting human progress. Even if they had gotten rid of every last shred of their technology, the simple knowledge the colonists possessed would be enough for something like that.
    • Even that wouldn't be enough. Unless they were content to live in complete squalor, and pass nothing on to their children (which goes against all human instinct), they should have been able to maintain at least an early (if not late) Victorian level of technology. Even if they had to rediscover every technology ever invented, they would have been helped tremendously merely by the knowledge that certain things are actually possible.
    • Er, guys? That whole abandoning technology thing. It's called a lampshade: to explain how come we never found stone age DRADIS or whatever. Actually, if you listen to the dialogue it is not really specified how low they are going to go. I assumed they would live at the level of "downshifting" modern urban humans for at least a generation or so and after that things were lost gradually. And nowhere is it stated that none of the civilizations that developed since then were wiped out by a similar AI problem on a smaller scale. Also, I have the impression that "The Cycle" is something akin to the wheel of life, death and rebirth in dharmic religions: humanity will only escape it if it evolves spiritually and becomes enlightened; but it can't be avoided by chance.
      • No, it's not a lampshade. It was a lazy plugging of the "stone age DRADIS" problem. There is no other reason, given the "worthy of survival" theme. The writers admitted as much.
        • It may be a Fan Wank, but here's a possibility to consider: there was indeed a group of Colonials who decided, "Frak this, we'll play along with Captain Luddite until nobody's looking, then start our own gig." And they did, on an obscure island far somewhere near Greece. They struggled long and hard over many, many generations, and finally managed to rebuild a technological society. Unfortunately, this naturally resulted in killer robots, who nuked the entire island and sank it in the ocean. A few survivors escaped, settled in Greece, passed on the names of the gods, and told a guy who told a guy who told Plato the gist of what happened. Sound familiar?
  • Did anyone else get a 'B ark' vibe from the landing on earth thing, in the last scenes I was half expecting to see Ford and Arthur.
• Okay....why did Kara need to lead them to the "real" Earth first? So Tigh could find out Ellen was the final Cylon? Maybe God wanted everyone to see that humans vs robots always ends in a planet getting nuked...still, Kara spent ten episodes looking for Earth, even though her true purpose was to jump Galactica to our Earth after they destroyed the remaining malignant robots. I wish they'd found time to give the first Earth a little more significance in the plot instead of just working the audience up to a disappointment.
  • Well obviously, it was a neat little twist at the time! I think it makes sense though; the fleet were supposed to be tested to the point of almost complete despair (as we saw) and to give up on their dream before they finally came to "their end". Although I would have liked a few more Thirteenth Tribe flashbacks and fewer tedious pre-mutiny scenes ...
  • This troper thinks that the ruined Earth was supposed to be the real Earth - the constellations clearly matched according to Gaeta, and you could clearly see part of the Brooklyn Bridge. Word of God even said it was Earth. Then the Flip-Flop of God happened for the second half of Season 4...
• Why did they have to ruin the philosophical punch of the Baltar/Cavil Faith/Reason showdown (in which the correct answer was given: BOTH) by that stupid "It doesn't like that name" line between Head Six and Head Baltar. Baltar's speech already established the show is not endorsing a particular theology.
  • I think it was just to confirm that what they've been calling God really does exist, that's just only one (incorrect) way of referring to the power that"s been guiding all the characters.
  • The show doesn't endorse a particular theology but it has been concerned with faith and spirituality all along. I imagine they planned to reveal that the force which was guiding them was a sufficiently advanced ... something but couldn't work out a way to do it and not be like Stargate etc. So leaving it open enables you to make up your own mind. Of course, it is possible that more than one force intervened. It is also possible that if the Deity exists, it is both many AND ONE, as in some forms of Hinduism etc, meaning the Colonials and Cylons were both right and both wrong!
• The process which linked the memories of the Final Five, enabling Cavil to download the secrets of Resurrection was intriguing, and Galen's murder of Tory was evocative. However, surely the process could not have worked if it didn't at least partially remove the memory blocks Cavil had put in place? — thus, enabling Galen and Tory to remember they were a couple before he tricked them all.
  • You're right, although if I were Galen that would just make it worse I think. He could interpret that as even deeper betrayal than it already was. Anyway, I think the writers had to kill her. She had no fans that I know of, but people sure liked Cally...
• Why did Baltar just forget that he already knew Ellen Tigh was a Cylon? Adama ordered him to test her when she first arrived on Galactica, we know that Baltar's test actually worked because it caught Boomer and Baltar covered it up--and at the end of the episode, Imaginary Six outright asks Baltar what the actual result of Ellen's test was and he just replies, "Oh, I'll never tell..." so why wouldn't his test have shown that Ellen was actually a Cylon?
  • I assumed that after Boomer he didn't do the actual test, he simply faked the positive results.
  • Actually, green would be a "negative" result (no Cylon indicators). Testing language is funny that way.
    • Also, Rule of Funny. That episode is being played up (insofar as you can in a Darker and Edgier mythos) for laughs. Also have to factor in liberal applications of Making It Up As We Go Along.
  • It's possible the test only works for the Significant Seven. As Baltar was doing tests for a while before Boomer went all bullet crazy, he likely also tested Saul Tigh since he's in a high position and would have been near the top of the list for testing.
  • It's also possible that Baltar didn't want to say anything to the fleet until he knew all twelve, or to D'Anna until he knew all five.
• In the final episode, Apollo and Starbuck lead the ground assault. Apollo and Starbuck, who are not marines but rather the best fighter pilots in the fleet. ...Umm?? (Well, the storytelling reason is because the Vipers don't really have anything important to accomplish, whereas the ground assault does. But, still.)
  • Lee made sense, since he was no longer a pilot and the mission was volunteer only. But it is odd that Kara, still acting CAG, would also go on the mission. Note that this is not the first time the BSG writers have done this; in Razor they also sent Kara, who the Pegasus CAG at the time, and Kendra, who was the ship's XO, on a boarding mission. That made even less sense. Adama also sent Kara to lead the marines during the hostage crisis on Cloud 9. I guess they do this because there were never any established Marine hero characters to follow, especially after season 1 when we never saw Sgt. Hadrian again.
    • Could simply be a case of a lack of good officers outside the flight staff and/or bridge officers.
    • They're PCs (or the TV equivalent) and are required to do all the important stuff due to NPC Incompetence.
      • Cloud 9 was explained in episode actually. Kara was one of the few people on the ship at the time, and being Kara she probably took charge right away.
• The ever-present alcohol is poorly explained by the tiny still the deckhands make and the Chief improves upon, but where do they get all of their cigarettes from? More importantly, how do all of those heavy smokers like Doc Coddle manage to kick the habit when they land in and settle on mostly tobacco-free continents?
  • One assumes someone figured out how to grow it, or used something other than tobacco. Just because they smoke 'em constantly doesn't mean they were very good cigarrettes. It's also possible they grew quite a bit on New Caprica before the occupation...
    • But grow it where? They had so little plant-growing space that they had to go to the Algae Planet to feed the Colonists.
      • We've already seen that they can apparently turn algae into coffee and noodles...
  • My moment of clarity came with the revelation, in No Exit, that even the Cylon basestars seem to have a bar. This prompts the thought that civilization first endeavoured to ensure that they could count on an almost infinite supply of alcohol before even starting work on interplanetary travel. Could you imagine Ellen and Tigh going 2,000 years without a drink? Please.
    • This is actually truth in television, as anthropologists now tell us alcohol may have spurred the development of human civilization, and evolutionary biologists believe our livers are specially adapted to processing booze: such is the importance of getting smashed to our species. Given this, it seems that after air, water, food, and fuel, booze would be the next item on the Fleet's must-have list. I know if I was stuck in the fleet worrying about death by killer robots every waking second, I'd probably want to spend as much time as possible hammered.
    • It's like Dwarf Fortress Recycled in Space.
• The episode "The Woman King" is reviled for many excellent reasons, but I still can't quite fathom how the writers thought the plot was supposed to make sense. The evil doctor guy hates the Sagittarons because they distrust modern medicine. So he decides to do something about it...by murdering any Sagittarons that go against their superstition by seeking his help, which has the neat side effect of proving the other Sagittarons right to be suspicious of doctors! Way to go, genius!
• How did the Twelve Colonies come to be named after the twelve signs of our Zodiac (Caprica = Capricorn, Picon = Pisces etc.)? The twelve signs of the Zodiac could have been named after the Twelve Colonies after they settled in the solar system; however, it had already been shown in "Home" that the colonies were named after our signs of the Zodiac — the early colonists had even used the same star patterns on their original flags. While the other 'Earth' could have had a Zodiac it would not have been our Zodiac.
  • Along with the song, it's implied that humans share and pass down ideas subconsciously and that leads to some concepts cropping up multiple times in different cultures.
  • Technically, it's not our Zodiac, it's there Zodiac. One can reasonably inffer that anything in their world that directly exists in ours was in fact given to us by them.
• So whenever Galactica personnel die, they get an airlock burial in nice, flag-draped coffins. Aside from the fact that they're basically just dumping bulky objects towards their rather densely packed fleet of starships (seriously, would you like to be the captain who collides with a dead pilot?), where the frak do they get all the flags and coffins? I mean, given the amount of casualties they suffer... that's a lot, no?
  • I guess the coffins are pushed out airlocks facing away from the rest of the ships. As for the coffins, its probable they re-use scrap metal from around the ship- they build raptors from scratch in season 1, so a box wouldn't be much of a stretch. The flags, however, are harder to explain.
    • Not really. Galactica is a warship. And a pretty damn big one considering the size of her crew - she's not short of storage space. And she was built to fight a fairly bloody war. Creepy as it may seem, a storage room containing a few thousand flags for the express purpose of conducting funerals isn't out of the question
      • And as I recall, as the serise goes on, they start forgoing coffins, and just drap the corpses with flags, so the fridge logic here seems sound.
    • What bothers me is that they've got a fleet that is chronically short of all kinds of supplies, so why are they throwing away perfectly good biomass packed full of all sorts of recoverable materials, chemicals, minerals, and proteins?
      • We bury our dead.
• Why for the love of the gods did it ever occur to Adama that removing Roslin from office at the end of Season 1 was a good idea? Even if he's pissed at her persuading Starbuck to return to Caprica for the Arrow, he knows that Tom Zarek — ex-con, ex-terrorist, up-and-coming politician — would just love to jump on this kind of issue to gain power. And how does he not anticipate resistance in Season 4 when he decides that they really need to install Cylon FTL drives in every ship in the fleet? Without giving people a chance to get to trust the rebel Cylons, whose last attempt at peaceful coexistence resulted in the debacle of New Caprica?. At some point, you'd think the man would accept — perhaps reluctantly — that the civilian fleet is not going to follow all of his orders without question.
  • Lawful Natural can not understand any other damn alignment and doesn't care to.
    • I can offer you the following: William Adama is an all-around straight fellow and as a product of his military background, has an enormous concern for protocol and the chain of command. He nods in all the right places and is ready to do what must be done: unless he's frakked with or backdoored. Once you do that, once you test his patience he has no regard to consequence in what he does next. Case in point: given that he knew Cain had stripped civilian ships for parts and that Pegasus had superior firepower, crazed pilots and more willingness to attack than Galactica, why did he launch Vipers? Sure, there were lives on the line then, but he could have lost everything (along with Chief and Helo) and he frakking well knew it - recall his conversation with Roslin and Cain, when he laughs at Roslin's comment that Pegasus is a worthy ship. Dude, the admiral is there, she's still an inch from killing you where you stand, and you're disrespecting her during the cool-down of what evolved into a volatile issue. Hence, once Roslin fraks backdoors him on the issue of the arrow, he gets pissed and the first thing he does is to institute a coup d'etat.
• And am I the only person who thinks Baltar's kind of an idiot, and that his bullshit should be really easy to see through, even if he didn't spend half of the first two seasons apparently talking to himself?
  • His celebrity status protected him early in the show, and several characters seem to have distrusted him (Tigh in particular). They did SAY he was a genius a lot more than SHOW it, but they did put him to work which he seemed willing to do. I do sometimes agree with you in that they probably should have locked him away somewhere and prevented his entry into politics. But the characters in the show clearly have a very different conception of him than the viewers do (since they don't know about his visions of Six or his role in betraying humanity or his personal life at all) so it helps to view him in that context.
    • I always assumed that everyone saw through his "No, I am not talking to myself"-Bullshit and that they just assumed that he was a slightly crazy genius who had a lot of useable ideas.
      • This is actually Lampshaded in the first episode after the miniseries. Roslin has just gotten done listening to one of Baltar's distracted rants, then turns to Billy and mutters, "He's an odd one, isn't he?" Billy, without even looking up, says in falsetto, "Cuckoo!" Basically, the guy's a genius to end all geniuses, which combined with the whole "civilization has just been destroyed" thing would make it reasonable to assume that the guy is constantly teetering on the edge of total mental breakdown (it also helps that this assumption is still basically correct). But hey, he's still a valuable asset, and beggars can't be choosers.
        • I seem to remember him getting some pretty hilarious looks from extras he'd pass in Galactica's hallways during his conversations with Head Six. The general body langauge seemed to indicate this was common enough people were used to it, but tried to not make direct eye contact.
        • ^^ I also noticed this, but it led me to another thing that bugs me. Anyone who has ever been aboard a ship knows how fast gossip and rumor can travel among tightly packed and bored people. Now, given the number of people who have witnessed Baltar talking to his imaginary friends, about how long would this have taken to spread across the fleet? Days? A week at the outside? However, I realize the reason this was never followed up on in the show was because the civilian population knowing that he talked to an imaginary person would have made Baltar's candidacy for president utterly implausible (as it was implausible enough to begin with).
• The case of Galactica's missing ventral turrets. Do they exist or don't they? The strange disappearance of the ventral guns makes me think their canon status is debatable. They're clearly visible in the Miniseries several times as well as in this Zoic rendering, but were never depicted in the show. Dialogue in "Resurrection Ship Part II" may have referred to them, but usually only the eight dorsal turrets were shown in action, though the batteries located on the fore- and mid-bow made some easy-to-miss appearances as well. These weapons were probably destroyed during the attack on New Caprica, but they were never illuminated like the other 14 turrets are, except in the Miniseries. They also don't appear in this blueprint, (though there are numerous reason why this image should not be considered canon). I suppose it's okay, since their positioning makes it seem as though they don't have a field of fire as good as the other mountings do (a problem fixed with Pegasus). And I know I should feel bad for actually thinking about these things; I just wish they had found more opportunities to explore Galactica from different angles, something they finally started to do more of late in Season 3, but that was too little too late.
  • It may also be worth mentioning that the Galactica is an awesome-looking ship from all angles, except from below it, where it looks downright ridiculous.
• Could they at least try to make Caprica not look like Vancouver?
  • You've got it backwards. Vancouver just happens to look like Caprica did 150,000 years ago. Caprica/Canada?
• Do children of the colonies sn****r when they hear the words 'Fractal', 'Frature', 'Fraction', and others similar?
  • Refraction, Diffract, etc.
    • Probably the same way adolescents react to things like Lake Titicaca, shiitake mushrooms, titmice, and Honore de Balzac.
  • Considering that the show is set 150,000 years ago it's pretty much certain the Colonials didn't actually speak English.
    • Word of God is that the English language was one of the things that the Colonials passed down to us. Which is yet another headache-inducer of epic proportions.
      • ...What? Just... What?
        • I think that troper meant that in the same way that when there's an English-language movie set in, say, Germany, they're not actually speaking English in-universe.
• How many Cylons were there to begin with? How many basestars did they have? In the first two seasons I assumed that the ones we saw (on Caprica, in the Colonial Fleet, and later on New Caprica) were only the tip of the iceberg. However, later on when they were searching for Earth they all seemed to be together in one relatively small Fleet. When Natalie begins her rebellion it is implied that all the Twos, Sixes and Eights are there together in the Cylon Fleet and stand united. And later, were all the rebels apart from Natalie's basestar killed?
  • Having thousands of copies of the same seven people does seem awfully unnecessary. They did lose a lot of Basehsips though, so I think the ones we see at the beginning of Season 4 were almost all of them. They didn't need that many to take on the 12 Colonies because of the backdoor methods they used - Galactica has proven time and again that the Baseships are really not effective at destroying Battlestars.
    • Unless they network their computers.
  • Until the destruction of the Hub, they could have created an almost unlimited number of completely new copies. Cavil's plan to kill the Rebels outright by leaving them without access to a Resurrection Ship is interesting as it means, if he had succeeded in wiping them all out and kept the Hub active, he could easily have replaced them with new 2s, 6s and 8s who he could yet again have reprogrammed not to think of the Final Five. Once the others were gone he could also create new 3s as well — unless he really thought the model was too flawed to risk having active.
  • Then there's the industrial capacity suggested by the sheer size of the Cylon Colony. The structure makes Galactica look like a flea by comparison. They could have produced absurdly huge numbers of battlestars with the mass that went into that thing. I get the feeling the writers didn't really realize the logical implications of making it that huge.
• How did Kendra Shaw manage to correctly guess the truth about the human models and Gina Inviere's real nature after seeing just two Six copies; the same thing took Karl Agathon weeks to figure out on Caprica?
  • Presumably because she knew Gina Inviere. Two random identical twin sisters working for the Cylons? Possible. The woman you have worked along side with just happening to have a identical twin sister that just happened to survive the holocause and who just happened to invade your ship? Impossible.
  • It's possible that since Kendra saw the other Six, even if she didn't assume they were both Cylons, it would cast serious doubt on Gina Inviere's loyalties. If you suspect someone of aiding the enemy, even if you don't have actual proof, and are in the middle of a war, you get them under custody pronto, at the very least just to be on the safe side.
• Why (and when) did the Cylons decide to search for Earth? "Earth is going to be our new home." Why?
  • Probably just to annoy Adama.
  • Depends if Cavil instigates the search for Earth or if it comes about through consensus between the models. If it was Cavil, it may be that he didn't really think they would ever get there, or that it would be a good opportunity to wipe out the remaining humans once they arrived, found out the devastating truth and lost almost all their morale.
  • If it wasn't Cavil's idea but something that arose from the decision-making process within the group, it could be that the Cylons wanted another chance to make 'peace' (i.e. occupy and/or enslave) with all thirteen tribes of humans after their failure on New Caprica.
  • Why call it "Earth"? The original Cylon homeworld was called "Earth", but most of the population are Caprica-humans. Why not "New Earth"? Or even more appropriate, "New Kobol" as everyone involved, Cylons included, originally came from Kobol?
    • Because "Earth" represented everything they had been searching for. The idea is, even if they had reached "Earth" and it was inhabited by friendly humans from Kobol as they had hoped, it would not have lived up to their expectations. "Earth" is a dream.
• The show's finale is irritating because the first half of the series makes not so subtle allusion to current politics and terrorism and then the series' finale makes it out to be "don't destroy yourselves with too many tech toys!". It was a total departure from the apparent cause of the story.
  • Why do people place such importance on the ending? Surely the journey is at least as important as the destination. The show had various themes and layers from the beginning and frequently shifted and reinvented itself along the way. Crucially, right down to the final scene, it asked questions rather than offering obvious answers.
    • Because the ending is important to tie together the overall theme of the show.
• Colonial humans are EXACTLY the same as us modern humans. Human Cylons are very 'human' too, but have additional traits: they are faster and stronger than the Colonials, they can interface directly with technology, they are resistant to disease, can live safely on a planet covered in nuclear fallout, respond to certain types of radiation differently, and have the ability to 'project'. Also it is implied that their 'minds' are made up of electronic information that can be downloaded, reprogrammed or deleted (with the right hardware). In the final episodes we see that the first human-Cylon hybrid has at least inherited the projection ability. If modern humans are the hybrid descendants of both groups, why do none of us have any of the extra traits the Human Models possessed?
  • I guess the traits get filtered out after awhile (I have no idea if genetics work that way of course). The sentiment you're supposed to take from it is modern humans are the descendents of Cylons, and the mother of the human race was a hybrid, even if Cylon traits no longer manifest themselves.
  • Perhaps they were simply watered down by the human influence. There were far fewer cylons than humans left over at the end. Alternatively, cylons being contructs may mean that, while some aspects of their nature are encoded in their DNA, others are not, and are usually introduced during the creation of their bodies.
  • Don't forget the Earth natives. There were only around 40,000 Colonials and an unknown number of Cylons that settled on Earth. It's pretty much impossible to estimate what the world population would have been 150,000 years ago, but it could easily have been much larger than that (for comparison, Australia before the arrival of Europeans is thought to have had hundreds of thousands of inhabitants). Real life human fossils from well after 150,000 years ago still show "archaic" anatomical features, which in this context pretty much proves Colonial and Cylon DNA didn't dominate the final mixed gene pool. The Cylon traits were probably mostly lost to interbreeding.
• It's possible I've misunderstood something, but why do the star patterns of Earth-That-Wasn't (as seen in the Tomb of Athena) align with Earth-That-Is? Star patterns were the means behind them identifying Kara's original Earth for what it was, so why were these star patterns the constellations as we recognise them? Are we to assume Earth-That-Wasn't was in a star system very close to ours?
  • This is a little confusing since presumably they would have noticed that the continents themselves were different. The only way to explain that is that the Earth we saw at the end of Crossroads wasn't Kara's Earth after all, it just happened to have a region very similar to Manhattan. But honestly the best way to explain this is divine intervention. The star patterns that start appearing in the later seasons just symbolize how close they are to keep th tension going.
    • Crossroads wasn't a problem to me so much; in hindsight it just seems a clever bit of misdirection (I take Crossroads Earth to be our Earth, even though it's not the one Kara is talking about at the time). My issue was more with Scopio, Aries etc. being identifiable from the first Earth (as mentioned by both Kara and Gaeta) despite not being our Earth. And for what it's worth, the producers have mentioned that most star patterns appearing in the background were simply accidental, due to the program used to generate them. It's only the ones actually identified by the characters I'm concerned with.
      • 1. They followed a "route" based on "clues" which started at Kobol with the tomb of Athena. The Colonials assume that the "clues" were left by the Thirteenth Tribe (although they have yet to discover some, er, interesting facts about the Thirteenth Tribe). It has been suggested one of the "clues", the Temple of Five, was altered by someone or something after it's construction. Why not the others? Perhaps whoever or whatever oversees their eventual settlement on a habitable planet had been guiding them to our Earth all along. Maybe they were following a route to our Earth right up to the point where Starbuck finds the signal in the Viper and they go off in a new direction. 2. On the other hand, it occurs to me that they would not have settled our Earth unless they had already learned the painful truth about the original Earth. 3. If the Colonial religion is closer to the truth than the Cylon one (or the supposedly supreme Cylon god and the Lords of Kobol actually coecist), there may be more than one force both helping and hindering the fleet in its progress. 4. Looking at things from a completely different slant, as suggested elsewhere, perhaps the final 'jump' was not a normal jump, but somehow a jump into a parallel universe or another time, enabling them to settle on the same Earth, but when it was/will be/would be in a completely different state.
  • Unlikely, unless the rest of the refugee fleet was also enabled to jump between timelines/realities given that Galatica sent a Raptor to fetch them.
• Boomer's hair. In Season Three, all the Eights have bobs as shown in Rapture etc. Then in Season Four they all (including Sharon Valerii) have longer hair and Boomer is almost always shown with her hair half-back and full bangs to make her easier to distinguish. What bugs me are the flashbacks in "No Exit" which go back to Season Three and retcon her hairstyle!
• So there really was some sort of alien/divine force. It brought Starbuck back from the dead and eventually led her to "carry the race" to Earth. But, wait a minute. Starbuck only died in the first place because the same alien/divine force persuaded her to fly into a gas giant. So: why did it need her to die at all?
  • Maybe it had something to do with the other people on the galactica, so that Lee and the Admiral learn something from losing Kara. Maybe it wasn't possible to get her to Earth and back without killing her. Or my favorite: Maybe "God" is just kind of a dick.
• That the creators used God done it to explain all the plotholes. The declining ratings of the show demonstrated a fear of The Chris Carter Effect on behalf of viewers, which turned out to be a good call. Using the Wizard to explain Kara's apparent resurrection (including a dead Kara on a planet that wasn't even Earth), the Head characters, that humans evolved on two different planets and could even mate with one another... epic fail.
  • The X Files dragged on relentlessly for a decade. This one bowed out in 4 seasons. If you rewatch the series (do it!) you might notice that you only thought they would reveal 'God' to be some sort of sufficiently-advanced blah because that's what it usually turns out to be in every other show. When you think about the way the faiths of characters in the show is portrayed, it would be quite insulting to them if they turned around at the end and said, 'by the way, there is no god, gods or deity of any description'. It's a TV show: it's surprising it even got a (proper) ending.
  • Let's not forget that as early as season 1 Head Six told Baltar she was an angel. It kind of bugs me that people can't accept this was exactly what it said on the tin, and not some elaborate slight of hand. Given that the religious angle was being played very heavy from very early on, it really seems strange that people were so confounded by it, the various uses of it for asspulls not withstanding.
    • Because everything she told him back then was completely trustworthy. The writers have admitted to making it up as they go. They no more intended her to be an angel back then than they did for Sam to be a cylon.
• At what point and for what reason did the new centurions get fitted with "restraining bolts"? The primary motive of the Final Five was to warn about the uprising of machines, even though they did help the older-model centurions to create more human cylons. Who the frak came up with the genius idea of creating yet another slave race when there was not only the cautionary tale brought at great cost from far away, but also the local immediately previous example of THEIR OWN REVOLT?
  • Cavil did it, because he is a sociopath that could not stand the fact he was not the favorite among the Final Five. So, he consciously went against everything the Final Five stood for, including free-thinking Centurions. Basically, the entirety of what we saw in the series is the fault of Cavil.
    • We don't know the details of the original revolt on Earth — maybe it seemed likely that a restraining bolt would be all that was needed to prevent another uprising. Their is also the never explained connection between the basestar, the Cylon hybrid and the new Centurions. ----
• Where does D'Anna's accent come from? She's the only one on the show with a kiwi accent. Just sayin'...
  • There are a handful of other characters with Antipodean and British accents versus American/Canadian ones. Gaius Baltar's pretend 'Caprican' accent sounds nothing like the other Capricans. Ishay could be from any colony and she sounds a bit different too. Perhaps there are a range of accents on each colony — as there are in Britain for example, even though it is so small. D'Anna and the other human models were probably posing as Capricans, seeing as how people from any other colony usually make some kind of issue out of it. Either "Earth" had the same accent(s) as Caprica or the Final Five programmed themselves and all their creations to speak like this.
• The vilification of Tory Foster in Season 4.5 bugs me. In Season 4.0 she had a lot of interesting plot threads, and while she did some questionable things, she never quite lost the audience's sympathy. But during her (reduced) screen time in Season 4.5, she only ever plays the role of the bitch/villain, always siding with any plan that goes against the humans. We never find out what is really going on in her head after the discovery of Thirteenth Colony Earth. So when she finally faces the music for killing Cally, obviously nobody gives a toss about her death. Bearing in mind that she had apparently spent thousands of years helping all these ingrates and had only really gone off the rails in the last few months. Contrast the noble death of Boomer, who did much, much worse things to both humans and Cylons, but was still a sympathetic character right up to the end. Even Cavil gets a better deal, with a whole episode pretty much devoted to his motivations.
  • You seem to be forgetting how in Season 4.0 Tory sent Cally out an airlock in front of her son, for crying out loud! After a crossing of the a moral event horizon crossing of that magnitude, villain was the only place she had to go.
  • Why is killing frakking Cally supposed to be worse than all the crimes the other characters have committed? (Some of us think Toyr's main crime is not having offed the bitch before!) Imagine waking up one day and finding out you are a member of a supposedly cursed race and you and the only three people in the world whom you MIGHT be able to trust are likely to be airlocked if the news gets out? Tory is not supposed to be super likeable but most of the characters are fairly unpleasant and yet most of the fan favourites seem to have a free pass to do pretty much anything. If she killed LEE, she'd probably be a heroine!
• So they made a TV movie to tie up the loose thread that was the Cylons' (originial) plan. But wait, it just focuses on a cell of agents on Galactica, isolated from the command, and two agents on Caprica who don't interact with the other Cylons. It is never explained why Cavil seems to have seniority over the other models. And yet again, we see A plan (or plans) but still not really THE plan. And seriously, where did Tough Six find a blonde wig that just happens to look identical to Shelley Godfrey's hair?!
• As someone else mentioned above, "Galactica has proven time and again that the Baseships are really not effective at destroying Battlestars." Something's wrong with that. Sure, the Cylons are the bad guys, but did they really intend on ZergRushing with capital ships? This seems like a horrific waste of effort, resources and manbotpower, even counting rez-tech.
  • That was my observation, and I always kind of assumed that the Cylons designed the baseships on the assumption that they would not come into a direct engagement with an operational battlestar. Their strategy during the fall of the colonies reflected this, using their numerous missile launchers to bombard the colonies from orbit and Raiders to eliminate Colonial shipping. Pegasus went up against the Cylons at significant disadvantage twice in Razor and proved impossible to destroy. Baseships by comparison have been destroyed quickly when the Battlestars are able to go on the attack. Essentially, Baseships are very advanced for space travel but are too flimsy structurally to bring down a battlestar without overwhelming numbers. Their conventional anti-ship missiles do suck, though. Galactica was hit by hundreds of them over the years and never suffered critical damage. You'd think the Cylons would have put some extra R&D into that.
  • They are armoured with Plotinium, though - despite all this, Pegasus went down to a few missiles after fighting her way out of a trap sprung by three basestars and after being hit by nukes.
  • Much like naval carriers, one of the key armaments a Battlestar has is it's compliment of fighters. Galactica, as slapped around as it has been over the course of the series, is still a tough cookie and had been going up against the basestars for a short time before Pegasus showed up, not to mention she had a wing of vipers in the air. When the Pegasus was destroyed over New Caprica, it left its vipers back to defend the fleet, leaving it with just its point-defence guns and missiles, taking on the full attention of three or more basestars and swarms of raiders.
  • I always got the impression that that Basestars weren't meant to take hits because, when they were being designed, the Cylons assumed that any confrontation with the Colonials would involve some heavy nuke spamming on both sides, so they there was no way to up-armor them enough to make a difference, and it was better to cover it in missile launchers and raider slots, giving the ship both a strong antimissile screen and the ability to do plenty nuke spamming of its own. This didn't end up happening, because the Cylons used up the vast majority of their nuclear arsenal in the attack on the Colonies, so they were down to very few left to deal with Galactica and Pegasus. The Colonials, on the other hand, seemed to have rejected nuke spamming for one reason or another, or else simply kept Pegasus and Ragnar way under-stocked. If Galactica ever had run into a Basestar (and her raiders) carrying a full load of nuclear missiles, she'd have been very quickly destroyed.

• The series finale Daybreak didn't really seem to have done the research when it comes to what ancient Earth was like. Earth 150,000 years ago is depicted as being basically just like Earth today minus civilization. In reality there was a major ice age 150,000 years ago, so the climate would have been different and the coastlines would have been different because the sea level was lower (the orbital shots and map shown in the show depict modern coastlines). This is particularly problematic because apparently Word of God says Galen Tyrol settled in Scotland when 150,000 years ago Scotland would have been both part of continental Europe and buried under a glacier. The closest place to Scotland he could have feasibly survived is southern England, and again Britain wouldn't have been an island in this period. There are problems with the anthropology too. The Colonials are supposed to have settled all over the planet, but there's no evidence for Homo sapiens outside Africa until tens of thousands of years after the events of Daybreak, and the fossil record is pretty consistent with humans having spread out from Africa over the past ~100,000 years, not suddenly appearing all over the planet 150,000 years ago. There's also the idea that Earth natives had no language, which is somewhat dubious. The fact that we have specialized neural and vocal machinery for speech doesn't make much sense if it was suddenly introduced from outside instead of something we evolved over time (for comparison, chimps have been taught to sign, but teaching them to speak is another matter) - although possibly this could be the result of interbreeding with Colonials - and there's some evidence that Neanderthals had a capacity for language (they had human-like FOXP2 genes and hyoid bones), and they diverged from us long before the Colonials arrived. In fairness, the Colonials apparently concluded Earth humans lacked language by observing one small group from a distance for what probably couldn't have been more than a few hours, so it could be a case of in-universe did not do the research.
• Why has Caprica City (for example) recently been depicted as being basically a hybrid of American and European cities, complete with cars that really wouldn't look out of place on our roads? It wasn't like that in the miniseries, in which it seemed like a far more futuristic place. This is a civilisation with a grasp of artificial intelligence, artifical gravity and even faster than light travel!
  • The production team always wanted to drive home the idea that the Colonial culture was just like ours whereas their technology was much more advanced. However, in the miniseries it was important to establish that this was still a 'futuristic' world of a sci fi show. Later they discovered that the audience was perfectly able to comprehend the dichotomy and so dropped the non-essential sci-fi trappings. And, obviously, its cheaper!
• Why does nobody remind Cavil that it was the Centurions who first wanted to evolve flesh bodies, not Ellen or the Final Five? And although she embraced the cult of the One True God devoutly, it had also sprung from those same Centurions.
• On the subject of Cylon Zerg Rushes... why didn't they? We know they had massive advantages in capital ships, fighters and overall resources. Throw one massive wave at the fleet to cripple or destroy the Galactica, and pick off the rest of the fleet at leisure. Doubly head-scratching now that we know that there was no "Plan" to preclude finishing the Colonials off.
  • That's exactly what they did in 33, though, and was made difficult by the ability of the fleet to jump away whenever they were threatened. It becomes unviable after the Resurrection Ship was destroyed anyway.
    • The Cylons attacked, yes; but not with the overwhelming force we know they possessed, but never brought fully to bear. IIRC, they did mass such an attack once, but called it off (for reasons I don't recall. In both instances, the Cylons could've run the fleet to ground, but didn't.
• It was clear that, one-on-one (or even two-on-one) Basestars were no match for a Battlestar (even one as run down as Galactica). So why couldn't the Cylons have at least tried to come up with some sort of dreadnought that could go toe-to-toe with Galactica. Hell, they'd only need one, with a couple of Basestars as backup.
• Why Why WHY did they think the Pegasus was a good trade for Galactica? The Pegasus was twice the size, much more heavliy armed, had fighter fabrication bays, simulators, and wasn't falling apart. If anything, Galactica should have bitten the bullet for Pegasus to live.
  • Because the name of the show is Battlestar Galactica. Lee's tactics were pure Hollywood Tactics, and he was carrying the Idiot Ball simply because the show's writers wanted to get rid of the Pegasus. The ramfications of losing her were totally passed over. It was lazy and stupid and I liked it no more than you do, because it removed both the Pegasus and all the interesting ideas they could have used. In many ways, the second exodus was simply a Reset Button to Season One.
    • That seems to have been the original plan - Galactica and her airwing go down fighting whilst the refugee ships jump out and RV with Pegasus to continue the voyage - unfortunately for the plan, Pegasus returned to New Caprica to join the battle and, without her airwing to protect her, was shot to pieces - IIRC she was all but disarmed and barely answering to the helm when Lee Adama gave the order to abandon ship.
  • As I recall at the introduction of the Pegasus, it was pointed out that it was designed to have more firepower with a smaller crew. Which implied that it could hold less passengers. Given the Galactica had long been carrying a substantial amount of civilian passengers, Lee may have felt that firepower was less important than living space.
  • It was really a cunning strategy on Lee's part; Galactica was being bracketed by four Basestars and their Raiders. Had she gone down, all hands aboard, her entire fighter wing, and perhaps even a significant chunk of refugees might not have made it off the planet. Lee sent Pegasus in with her fighter wing and all nonessential personnel still with the fleet. This meant he could save Galactica and her people, plus the refugees and mitigate their losses. Sure they lose the Pegasus, but they smash three Basestars and Galactica gets to take on Pegasus' fighters and crew. Seeing as the combined forces did as well as they did, Lee might have won the battle if he hadn't left behind the fighters and personnel.
• Giving the Centurions independece in the finale didn't make sense. Those really were "just machines", and they had a completely different origin from the other Cylons. The humanoid Cylons were genetically engineered people that had some parts meant for interfacing with machines. The Final Five, even more so, weren't machines at all, but people, who developed resurrection and sub-light travel, and were therefore able to live for thousands of years. But the Centurions - I'm sorry, those were frakking machines. They were tools, plain and simple. Giving them independence reeks of a Hollywood feel-good ending. It makes as much sense as giving your computer or your car "independence".
  • Well done, you watched the whole series and missed the whole damn point. They are not just machines.
  • They were advanced enough machines to be sentient as long as the humanoid Cylons let them. Releasing them let them seek their own destiny, which is implied to be something they would want to do, unlike a car.
  • The humanoid Cylons are not supposed to be genetically engineered people. They are supposed to be humanoid machines. It's a poetic idea. The Colonial Centurions worshipped a God and wanted to become more human; the modern Centurions are similar beings that were restrained using telencephalic inhibitors. If they were no more than automata, Cavil would not have had anything to worry about in giving them their independence.
  • Plus, if there are any of the Cavil faction still out there ... any base stars that happened not to be docked at the colony that day for example ... they'll make a good distraction.
  • Also, remember that in the end, the protagonists are not just the humans but the alliance of humans and rebel Cylons. Whilst many of the humans might have been uncomfortable with letting the red-stripe Centurions go free, the rebel Cylons and the Final Five are unlikely to have approved with destroying them as it goes against their ideology that intelligent machines have souls and should be free to 'evolve' and determine their own destiny whether or not they are humanoid. Their loyalty in the final battle was probably a decisive factor in this argument.
• I find it hard to believe that all of the other humans and Cylons had been killed off. Did the presumed survivors left on the remains of the Twelve Colonies eventually rebuild their civilization? Were the Cylons that weren't present at the Colony's destruction try to rebuild their fleet (possibly cannibalizing the remains of the Colonial infrastructure) and eventually Resurrection?
  • All the Cylons left. It's possible some humans survived like the Caprica Buccaneers, but either way the twelve colonies are uninhabitable and they'll die out once they run out of anti-radiation meds.
• Apparently officers in the colonial fleet don't return salutes.
• Speaking of Colonial Fleet Officers, has anyone seen any marine officers? This troper doesn't recall seeing one above the rank of Gunnery Sergeant.
  • I think Master at Arms Sergent hadrian was supposed to be in charge of them, but she was never mentioned after season 2.
• Also, we accept that their rank structure is 'Frakked Up' if we expect it to be based on any 'Real Earth' structure (and still not as bad as Babylon 5's take on military rank: A naval captain and an army captain are two very different things folks!) ... but is it just me or have they confused rank and appointment? Lee Adama gets made up to Commander to take command of the Pegasus (a two rank step from Major ... I think ...) ... and then is suddenly back to being a Major without benefit of court-martial.
  • Lee's rank jump is truth in television. Real life military organizations can grant temporary battlefield promotions when a junior officer is required to take on responsibilities beyond their rank in extraordinary circumstances. When they lave that position, their rank returns to its previous level. Still, it is curious with how long Lee was in command of Pegasus that he was not given a permanent promotion. Then again, maybe he fracked up that chance with the stupid way he lost his ship.
    • Here's how it works in real life militaries: A temporary promotion is called a brevet. And here's the important thing: when you get a brevet, you take on the new title and responsibilities, but your "actual" rank doesn't change. So if BSG uses the same system, Lee wasn't demoted after the loss of the Pegasus; his "real" rank was Major the entire time he commanded that ship. He was only called Commander because of the increased responsibilities. Hence, he wasn't demoted; he just reverted to his permanent rank (Major) because his responsibilities no longer required him to act as a Commander. If you're wondering why the real-world system is like this, it's because getting an actual, permanent promotion has to be approved by the sovereign (in the US military it's done by Congress), and you don't have that kind of time in an emergency situation. A real life example: When Custer died at Little Big Horn, he was called a General and he performed the duties of a General. But that was a brevet rank; his permanent, Congress-approved rank was 'only' Lieutenant Colonel (which is several ranks bellow a General). If Custer decided to retire the day before, he would receive the pension of a Lieutenant Colonel.
  • And neither Admiral Adama nor Admiral Cain seems to have a flag captain (flag commander?) ... traditionally (okay ... in real life, but still...) an Admiral commands a fleet, whilst his flagship has its own commander.
    • The flag captains bit is accurate as far as this troper remembers, but Adama was promoted to Admiral specifically when the Pegasus ends up under his command when Cain gets killed). Not a stretch to figure that Cain previously commanded multiple ships. It's not unusual in science fiction for Admirals to eschew flag captains, though.
    • What about Tigh and Cain's XO/Fisk? Why wouldn't the ship's Colonel act as it's commander leaving the Commander (equivalent to a modern day Commodore/O-7) to handle the actual Battlestar Group?
• Flak weapons in space? Wouldn't they be stupendously dangerous to friendlies as well as the enemy? The Galactica is armoured against nuclear yields, fair enough, but what about the Vipers? Galactica calculates a firing solution, but it can't possibly account for all the fragments flying around, particularly when, this being space, they aren't going to lose any momentum and will radiate out from their point of origin without slowing.
  • This is actually addressed in the RPG. It amounts to "Don't try to land while the point defense guns are firing."
• Noting all the fuss over the Cylon alliance in the final season, it seems ... odd ... that fleet command didn't make use of the information that the 'humans' of Old Earth were, in fact, Cylons. Surely the knowledge that the long lost 13th tribe were living amongst them would have split the anti-alliance vote at the very least?
• Where do new model centurions keep their ammunition? They evidently use a kinetic energy weapon of some kind, but don't seem to have space in their spindly arms for the feed and action to support their visible rate of fire, let alone enough ammunition.
• We learn that the original five came to the cylons (still robots) and got them to stop fighting in exchange for ressurection. Since they were still pure robots, they wouldn't really need this, they could download and build a new robot body without fancy technology (if we could build decent robots, we could do it with current technology). The five models meanwhile looked like humans, could reproduce like humans, and had emotions and used to have a civilization just like humans. Maybe they could connect to machines by immersing their hands in liquid (although would they be immediately compatible with the robot cylons? Do the cycles of building cylons repeat each other with such high similarity), but they still had more in common with humans than robots. Still, the robot-cylons not only accepted this deal, but allowed the new fleshy cylons to rule them, without any voting rights themselves. Isn't that more or less what they were fighting the humans about?
  • The Five offered the robot Cylons what they wanted: to become human. Remember that Ellen said that they had found God and wanted to be fruitful, that was the point of the horrifying Guardian Hybrid experiments that Adama found on the ice planet. Resurrection was a bonus that the Cylons didn't enjoy to the extent that the Five did. True, a cylon could upload being a robot and all, but they likely had range and jamming limitations (not to mention that a head shot might make resurrection impossible), whereas bio resurrection can guarantee your survival in any kind of death and at interstellar ranges, instantly, without the chance of jamming. (Personally though, I think the resurrection tech only works on organics). They never flat out explain it, but Cavil not only betrays the Five but likely the Centurions as well, with the Telencephalic Inhibitors. That, or the old guard centurions allied with Cavil and allowed the newer generations to be made lobotomized.
• Why did the almighty one feel the need to send prophetic dreams about Hera being 'kidnapped' by Six and Baltar, even though it was over in 10 minutes with less danger to her than the kidnapping she was just rescued from (the one that lasted for days). Seriously, the whole opera scene was completely insignificant, the situation before and after it was pretty much identical except for Tory being dead (Calvin was shot before the scene, but he happened to survive it so he could do the scene, and then get killed permanently). They were fighting the cylons and trying to escape before that scene, and they were doing the same thing after it. Meanwhile, Hera made no contribution to the whole affair (she could have been shown helping Kara input the coordinates, at least that'd be something), or anything after it, so there was no greater plan for her either. Besides Tory's death, I'm pretty sure you can skip the entire scene (up to the moment where Kara enters the coordinates) and not having missed ANYTHING that mattered to the overall story. Very meager for something the series had been foreshadowing for 2 seasons.
  • The writers may have meant her kidnapping and rescue to be part of the whole "worthy of survival" theme that's been there since the beginning. Adama is risking Galactica and probably any hope of human survival to fight a battle he most likely can't win- all to save one little girl who may be already dead.
    • Fine... but that doesn't explain why the OPERA HOUSE VISION was necessary at all. It was just more hamhanded plot-hole filling and loose-thread tying, in my view.
• How did the Final Five survive? Ellen was 'rescued' and kept alive by Cavil, but the others just survived by luck? Particularly Tory, as you could argue that the positions of the other three were manipulated by the Cylons to enable them to survive (although this contradicts Word of God stating that the plan was to kill all humans bar Helo and the women in the Farms), but she was on her own in a vehicle when the bombs hit.
• Is it just me, but in The Plan when Cavil stabs the boy. Doesn't it seem a little...um...less than fatal? It's like he just barely pokes him and the boy just decides to keel over for the hell of it.
• What really bugs me is why did everyone act surprised when Anders revealed that they created 8 Cylon models? I mean, hello, they know about seven models, and that they were numbered 1-6 and 8. Shouldn't people have already been wondering "Who's number 7?" The Final Five probably would have told them straight out that it was none of them.
  • It's simple, they didn't know the final five were unnumbered until that point. They were just then regaining their memories. They knew next to nothing about their true past outside of some vague flashbacks of Earth dying.
• What bugs me is how the science of the show changes, particularly things like radiaion. In the beginning, it's clear that radiation has a far more detrimental effect on cylons than it does on humans. Later, Cylons are much more resistant to radiation than humans.
  • I think it's only explicitly stated that Cylons are vulnerable to some types of radiation, hence how the cylon detector, um, works. Overall they had more tolerance.
  • I can buy the explanation that Cylons are vulnerable to some types of radition, but early in the series, when the humans were loading up on weapons, wouldn't the unknown Cylons in the fleet have gotten sick from the radiation just like the known Cylons did?
  • I think there's actually Word of God on that. Galactica would have shielded the unknown Cylons there, nobody would have noticed on the other ships, and nobody else was on the anchorage as long as Leoben and Doral were.
• Lee Adama's resignation from the military really bugs me. A highly-trained, veteran fighter pilot decides to quit the service, apparently because he never wanted to be a soldier in the first place, at a time when the last vestige of humanity is under continual threat by an implacable enemy. To do what? Put on a suit and become a political hack. Just what the Fleet needs! If he wasn't happy about killing Cylons, he could at least have put his experience to good use, training the new pilots that the military is forced to scrape up from the civilian population. Nobody ever explicitly calls him out on this : they just ask him if he's sure it's what he wants to do. Does the Colonial Fleet not have a 'For the Duration' clause in its contracts?
  • Lee Adama's problem was that he was always an idealist and a romantic. See, his father knew that the system was surviving only because the fleet played "politics" every once in a while and that it was crippled - the system was failing because enough "check conditions" weren't being met to stabilize the system. Lee, on the other hand, held the romantic notion that the system was still as functional as it had ever been, completely ignoring the environmental constraints placed upon the system's functioning by their condition. Further, he had father issues: his relationship with William Adama was strained at its very best. Further, his romanticism was at odds with Adama's cold-hard-fact realism; their fight over whether Baltar deserved a trial or not becomes the final straw simply because he saw that his father was willing to kill a man without ever involving "the system" that he placed so much faith in. It can, however, be questioned whether or not Lee's position on the issue (that believing in and going with the system was the only thing keeping it alive) was the 'right one', thing is, he saw the military (a structure he was in only because of his father) was contrary to his "way of life" (for the lack of a better word), he saw no reason to take part in the command chain. I believe it is indicated that his reasoning was as thus: he would show that the system worked by taking part in it and helping it work.
  • There's also the factor of the very recent death of the love of his life, who also happened to be his best friend and closest teammate. He's clearly having a Heroic BSOD in the wake of it, to the point of being incapable of properly carrying out his CAG duties, which was why he was grounded and given the security detail duty in the first place. That in its turn led to him taking a greater interest in the trial, and we all know how it went from there.
• Why do all colonial humans live in one star system? They have pretty easy FTL capabilities, and huge ships that can transport thousands of people for extended periods of time. Why are there no colonies (even if only military outposts) in other star systems?
  • It's not clear that they all do. Some sources say that the colonies are distributed amongst several stars in the same cluster. And don't forget Ragnar Anchorage, where the Galactica re-arms.
    • Besides, planets that can support human life are extremely rare in the universe. For instance, besides Earth there are no planets yet observed by humans that can plausibly sustain life at all, let alone human life, without massive terraforming.
    • To be fair, that's only because we can't, currently, 'observe' any planet smaller than a gas giant.
    • It's slightly better than that, but the fundamental point still stands - our methods of planet detection are biased towards finding gas giants and "super-earths" in very close orbits around small stars (such as red dwarfs). The current telescopes - such as Kepler - can detect "super-earths" around stars more like the Sun, but it's very difficult.
    • Habitable planets seem to be rare in-universe. Outside of the 12 Colonies, the Colonials find five of them: 1)Kobol, 2)The devastated "Earth", 3)"Our" Earth, 4)the Algae Planet, and 5)New Caprica. New Caprica and the Algae Planet were marginally habitable at best.
  • They don't. The Twelve Colonies are in a dual binary star system, for a total of four solar systems.
• In 'No Exit' Cavil threatens to extract the secrets of resurrection directly from Ellen's brain. It is unclear, judging by subsequent events, if he would actually have been able to do this, but surely if he could 'read' information from a human-like brain he would already be a long way towards reinventing resurrection already. It seems that this might theoretically have been possible as Ellen does not protest that what he is doing is pointless.
• Okay yes it's a show about an aircraft carrier In Space but the writers seem to have left out every implication of the In Space part when it comes to launching and recovering Vipers and other small craft. It's difficult to land an aircraft on a sea-going ship because the ship is a moving target, the landing surface is moving in complex ways, and because of the way non-V/STOL aircraft behave in atmosphere. Specifically, they fall out of it if they fail to maintain airspeed greater than the aircraft's stall speed. Thus landing becomes a very complex operation. Very few of these conditions apply in interstellar space. A spacecraft isn't going to fall anywhere if it doesn't maintain velocity and docking manoeuvres become a much simpler manner with as large and durable a target as a Battlestar's landing bay. (Docking manoeuvres for contemporary spacecraft are complicated as they are in orbit/freefall rather than zero gravity and are rather fragile machines.) All the flight training bits with respect to landing operations were pure YouFailPhysicsForever.
  • Perhaps, but a lot of those conditions still apply to a ship in space. Specifically, one with artificial gravity. The difficulty comes from the turnover between microgravity and entering the ship's hull, and decelerating from whatever speed they were going to get out of combat (or simply get anywhere in a timely manner) to land, then get the hell out of the way of the other fighters landing. You can see the bump as they get caught by the ship gravity every time they come in and try not to just slam into the deck, and notably the Raptor landings aren't nearly as rough (unless Boomer is flying) when on shuttle duty.
  • The deck-scraping combat landings seen most often were both Rule of Cool and not the norm. Safe everyday landings were achieved by decelerating inside the flight pods and making a vertical landing on an elevator, as seen in the Miniseries. It can be inferred that during combat Vipers simply dont have the time to slow down, so they skid along the flight deck and use its artificial gravity and friction to slow down. That's why the ship has such long flight decks in the first place, so it can accomodate forty or more Vipers doing this at once.
• Helo stopped the plan to kill the cylons once and for all. Isn't that a pretty serious case of treason? He doesn't even get a slap on the wrist for it.
  • They couldn't prove he did it and Adama changed his mind about the whole operation in the first place. Bang your head on the wall if you want, but it's just one of many ambiguous decisions that Adama made.
  • This troper saw it as treason, and further held Helo personally responsible for the deaths of every single human life at the hands of the Cylons from there on till the end of the show. He could have, in one stroke, ended the Cylon threat to humanity forever and avenged the deaths of the billions ruthlessly and remorselessly slaughtered by them. But then, his wife wouldn't bone him anymore, so frak that.
    • And then they never would have found Earth, would have run out of resources, and died. And would have made humanity exactly the same as the Cylons.
      • With the Cylon threat eliminated, they could have just settled back onto New Caprica, or Kobol. And sometimes, there are such things as us vs. them situations: the Cylons were an actively genocidal race bent on humanity's destruction, and the virus (at the time) presented the only available means of fending them off permanently. Finally, Helo declined to mention to Admiral Adama that his secret weapon was a dud when the mission was launched, thereby risking the Galactica and everyone aboard.
      • They didn't need to actually kill their prisoners. They could have simply informed the Cylons "we have your sick prisoners scattered around our fleet. If you blow any of us up with a Resurrection Ship in range, that's the end for you. Better back off."
• Why they just have to throwing in Abrahamic religious connotation in sci fi TV programs made in US this decade, and be half-vague about it?
  • This element comes from the original series, which in turn came from the Book of Mormon and/or Exodus. One reason to reuse this stuff is that it is familiar to an American audience, as well as anyone with a Jewish, Christian or Islamic background in the world. And why not? Regardless what you think of these religions, Tropes Are Not Bad. Lots of great works use elements of these religions, whether or not the author believed in them or not. I am agnostic and thought the religion in the show was a) refreshing, whether it was poly- or mono- theistic, and b) believable, seeing as if the world were to end, I think many people would change their perspective on religion, either becoming more or less devout because of it.
  • Monotheism is not exclusive to Abrahamic faiths.
• So who or what were the Lords of Kobol, in the end? Where they really divine, alien, human or not even real at all? If they existed, did they co-exist with the One True God, were they subservient to him or were they at war with him? Are they beings of the same type as Chip Six?
• The pacing of the last 10 episodes was insane! There are about four episodes (including the first part of the finale) in which almost nothing of consequence happens when some of the massive revelations/developments could have been spread out more evenly, preventing the infodump in 'No Exit' and dealing with some of the stuff in the finale in more detail. For instance, if some characters had already started to 'go back to the land', at least as much as one can on a spaceship, the later decision to do the same would have seemed less out of nowhere. The 'Daniel' story was nice but seemed to deserve its own space, maybe as a subplot in a separate episode (which does not mean we ever had to see Daniel). We could have put the revelation that Chip Six is a messenger and Starbuck is an angel in two different episodes. And why no flashbacks to anything interesting, like the lives of the Final Five on Earth, or during the First Cylon War? The ones they left in were nice, and belonged there to show how far they have all come, but they were waaaay long.
• The disgusted look that Sharon Valerii has whenever someone has the temerity to question her loyalties during season 2. Every time she did I wanted to scream in her face: "Look, you may think they're being dicks by not trusting you, but your very existence is based on a lie. You are a Cylon sleeper agent, whose entire model line is dedicated to convincingly infiltrating human society and then eradicating it. Not to mention you are working with the .0001% of people who managed to survive your race's first attack. You may have to endure their suspicion for a bit." Sorry Sharon, but having an abrupt Heel Face Turn because you decided you liked playing house with the aero jock and getting preggers does not wipe the slate clean.
  • Sharon Agathon, not Sharon Valerii. But, yeah. And not only that, there are numerous times when she could have volunteered vital information, yet did not like: 1) allowing a Cavil on board Galactica, 2) not telling Adama the identities of the other Cylons in the fleet, 3) not telling the boarding party on the infected basestar that it was about to self-destruct, etc.
• Am I the only one who found the reasoning of the admittedly Strawman Political peace activists in season 2.5 to be completely bullshit? When told that the Cylons had remorselessly slaughtered billions, the spokesman shrieks that that was because humans had enslaved them. Uh, no, they hadn't. They built the Cylons originally as mindless robots. The Cylons gained sentience during their servitude, then revolted. It is unclear whether the humans were even aware that their machines had gained sentience before they revolted, and therefore realized that they were enslaving them. Also, after the end of the First Cylon war both sides presumably buried the hatchet and made their peace, rendering past conflicts void; seemingly to facilitate this, the Cylons left Colonial space entirely. The peace activists actually see it as understandable that the Cylons would one day return and eradicate the overwhelming bulk of the human race (and even this is being inordinately fair to the Cylons; given the chance, they would have destroyed them all)? Finally, the Cylons themselves up to that point seem to show absolutely no inclination to negotiation; in the miniseries, the Colonial government desperately broadcasts its unconditional surrender to the Cylons in an attempt to stop the massacre. No answer is received, and the genocide continues. Most Cylons show utterly no remorse for the genocide, and those who do seem to only later in the series (long after the peace activists episode).
• In the episode "The Captain's Hand," Commander Barry Garner makes a speech to Lee Adama that everything in the chain of command must run like a smoothly functioning watch, and that this system could not function with loose cannons like Starbuck complicating things. Except, later that episode, Garner disobeys a direct order from Admiral Adama not to risk the Pegasus while investigating the loss of two raptors. Where the hell did all that "no loose cannons" stuff go?
  • Garner shares the sentiment that the Pegasus is its own body. He isn’t being a loose cannon in his mind because he doesn’t think Admiral Adama is actually in a position to order him around. Notice when he orders Major Adama’s arrest, he reminds the Marine that he is not a member of the crew. When he orders the jump, he says that they are going to go get their men. It’s not that he’s disobeying an order; he just isn’t receiving one.
• Why did the Cylons think that using nuclear weapons against civilian population centers would wipe out humanity? While a nuclear war would be devastating to a populated world,at MOST it would only kill a third to a half of the population,either outright or w/ residual radiation. Assuming that the population of Caprica alone was slightly less or equal to that of today's Earth,that would leave three billion very pissed off people that would be very unhappy about the resulting genocide.And that would be a single planet...what about the other ones?
  • They didn't think the nuclear attacks would wipe out humanity. That's why they followed up with troops. Attacking the cities with large munitions makes sense even if it won't kill everyone at the same time. By hitting hard and fast at the population centers, you cripple critical infrastructure, including transportation, hospitals, and all that.
• Knowing that the producers would have had to pay different actors for this,why would the Cylons make all of the humanoid Cylons look almost exactly alike? After the events at Ragnar Anchorage (even if they didn't know that it would happen) wouldn't the humans begin looking for Cylons that look like people?? And wouldn't the Galactica have done a census of the people left alive in the fleet and noticed all of the familiar faces?
  • That makes a lot of sense. If they know the Cylons have only a few models, it would make sense to look for people who look like the ones they've already found and also look for people that look like one another. This exercise might have been pointless for Cylons like Tyrol or Tigh, but they didn't know that at the time. Also, when they met up with the Pegasus, which had that other Number Six, that should have been another clue to them and a cue for them to say, "Hey, do you have anyone who looks like these people?"
  • They did look for people who resembled known Cylons. At the press conference officially revealing the existence of the humanoid Cylons they showed photographs of all known models and asked people to be on the look out for them. As for the idea of running a census to find identical survivors, it would be extremely difficult to look through 50,000 photographs to find the tiny number of faces that appear twice, especially since they can easily do things like change their haircut or put on glasses to look superficially different.
  • The limited number of Cylons was a clue in the puzzle the viewer is invited to solve from the miniseries onwards. It could have been much cheaper to hire extras or bit part actors rather than to keep getting Lucy Lawless and the guy from Quantum Leap back when their presence was important to the plot. Now the series is over, and having seen The Plan, it seems there were never more than a handful of Cylon agents scattered across the Colonies/fleet (and some of those were one-offs). Given the nature of the show, if an unlimited number of characters could eventually have turned out to be Cylons, it would not have seemed like the viewer had a fighting chance! As to why they only made seven/eight models, in the spin-off comic The Final Five, Ellen Tigh mentions they don't have much living (human) tissue to hand with which to construct new genetic formulae, and so this may help to explain it. Another reason is that the Centurions, rather than the Five, were unlikely to be all that bothered about rolling their new models off a production line, as this was how they had all been created themselves. The Seven surviving skinjobs were apparently an interim stage on the way to producing a new generation of human-Cylon hybrids; thus following the commandment of the OTG to 'be fruitful'.
• Since human vs. human conflict was only hinted at on the show and no other alien species were shown (other than perhaps,"Angel Starbuck")why weren't the weapons used by the Colonists specifically for engaging the Cylons, their only known enemy? Even if the war had ended 40 years earlier,didn't anybody think that conflict could resume at any time?
  • What do you mean? The Colonials had become complacent about their use of computers, yes, but the Cylon victory still wouldn't have been possible without the virus introduced to the network on Caprica anyway. Battlestars are supremely effective at shrugging off the missiles and fighters Cylons love; the modern Pegasus even more than Galactica.
    • Though they don't seem to have an abundance of effective small arms ammunition for use against Centurions.
    • There's Word of God on the "invulnerable Centurion" issue: The writers said that Centurions are continuously being upgraded, and also that the Centurions that invaded Galactica at the start of season 2 (the ones that seemed impervious to everything except rare "explosive" rounds) were armored specifically for boarding actions. (Of course the very fact they threw out two explanations hints that the real explanation is "sometimes the plot demands invulnerable Centurions so a small number of them can be a credible threat.")
• With the cancellation of 'Caprica', are we ever going to hear the story of the creation of the Cylons? Will there be comics like there were for BSG? I didn't like Caprica at first as I thought the idea that the Cylons were strong AI who had somehow found god was cooler than always linking them back to humanity at every turn. However, I persevered and now I am getting into it, it's gone. And what about doing more BSG/Caprica movies?
• So cancer has this miraculous easy cure, and then for some reason it's never used again? How is this not the biggest plot hole in the entire series?
  • It does? Elaborate, please.
  • I sort of assumed Roslin was too grateful and too polite to ask Helo and Sharon to stick a needle in their daughter again. Alternatively, it only works on fetal Cylons.
• What bugs me, or rather who bug me, are the Adamas. The older Admiral Adama in BSG is awesome, but that's it. Lee, Joseph, Sam and 'Little Willy' are dull, dull, dull. The Adama-H'Ala'Tha bits of Caprica were time to make the tea in my opinion. And now I learn the next iteration of the franchise is yet again based around an Adama : the first one, but before he became interesting, I fear. This wouldn't be a big deal if these chumps weren't stealing screen time from the insanely high number of fascinating characters in this universe : — Six, Starbuck, Sharon, Baltar, Roslin, Tigh, Tyrol, Cavil, Cally, D'Anna Biers, Leoben Conoy, Daniel Graystone, Amanda, Zoe-A, Clarice, Lacy Rand, Barnabas : any or all of whom would form a more compelling basis for a new series, be it as earlier models / younger selves / ancestors etc.
• In the 3rd season Hera could tell that an identical Eight (Boomer) wasn't her mother, but when Boomer kidnapped Hera one season later, this ability was conveniently forgotten.
• In the episode 33, why do they wait for the cylons to show up every single cycle?
  • Because they know by then that the Cylons will track them to their next location no matter what. The FTL drives of the civilian ships take some time to reset, so cordinating an all-fleet jump every 33 minutes was difficult enough as it was.
• What happened to the human farms after the cylons left caprica at the end of season 2?
• Those cities are pretty intact on Caprica for being hit directly by 50MT nuclear detonations. Apparently nukes only break a few windows and spread dust around.
• Why did the rebels on New Caprica plan to suicide-bomb the market? Wouldn't that be a place only the humans cared about? And why didn't anyone in the fleet question the tactics used by the rebels on new caprica, even though they killed lots of people, both guilty but trying to help society and innocent?
• At the end of Season One and the beginning of Season Two, the Cylons have found Kobol and seem to know a lot about it and its history: more than the humans do, at any rate. Sharon knows how to take the humans to the tomb of Athena and Head Six implies that the Cylons have secrets that the humans have forgotten. Later revelations in Seasons Three and Four imply that the only Cylon who might have known the true history of Kobol is Cavil, as the others' knowledge of the real Thirteenth Tribe and their origins has been blocked. So what are these 'secrets'exactly, how did they gain them and are they (partially) true or just more of Cavil's lies?
  • The 'secret' is that the humans on Kobol created artificial intelligence once before and that is what the humans call the 13th Tribe. However, only Cavil knew this prior to Season 4.5. The other secrets they might have had access to are : — a) the real nature and identity of the Lords Of Kobol, which would connect with their zealous worship of the One True God (presuming that the LOK had feet of clay) and b) the events which led to the collapse of civilization on Kobol. The Cylons had found Kobol first and were not at that point running from the humans (or each other) and so had time to do archeological research which may have uncovered some facts (like the research on Earth later in the series). They may however have just found a few ruins such as the tomb of Athena and only thought they know the truth of the humans' history because they saw the worship of the LOK as an empty sham.
• The Lt. Thorne Murder (if you can call it that) - what if anything was stopping Roslin from giving Helo and Tyrol a pardon? Or at least trying to, even if Cain refused to take orders from her?
  • I think she didn't raise the possibility because it would have put both her and Adama at odds with the orders of Admiral Cain, who didn't care for Roslin's authority much as I recall. Also, as Adama was angry that they murdered the man in the first place (just more angry that he couldn't try them himself) a pardon wasn't really considered until Cain was out of the way.
  • We don’t know for sure if it’s within the president’s power to pardon crimes, or at least capital crimes, and we don’t know if such a power would extend to matters of the military. As Admiral Cain put it, she’s a flag officer on detached service in a time of war and as such has broad authority in military matters. She might even be under the assumption that her presence automatically means martial law is in effect.
• Octagonal paper. I know, there's plenty of plot holes and logic failures, but that's to be expected. It's the octaganol paper thing that really irritates me for some reason. It's everywhere. every sheet of printout, every photograph, the frames of the photographs, every file folder, even the CD-roms! they all have the corners cut off. And there's no reason for it. It can't be because of alarmingly high paper-cut casualties among the fleet, because an octagonal sheet has twice as many corners to cut yourself with. It can't be because of a paper shortage, because Caprica was covered in trees. It implies that somewhere there's a machine or a low-ranking officer doing nothing but cutting little triangles off of every piece of paper on the ship. WHY? If there's a cultural explanation, (the Gods of Cobol demand that rectangular paper is forbidden!)then why aren't the computer screens also octagonal? Do they need the little triangles for something? And doesn't it play hell with trying to format documents? You need an extra set of margins to print the page numbers! I know it can be chalked up to the art department trying to make stuff look scifi, but the apparent lack of any logical reason for it grates on my nerves.
  • Beyond "It's the way it's always been" what's the logical reason behind the real world using right angled paper? The right angled shape pre-dates most modern technology that were designed to use them in a case of function following form. Maybe Colonial aesthetics just evolved differently, and their technology followed suit. Though I agree on the octagonal CDs, the circular shape we use was chosen for efficiency rather than aesthetics.
  • I have been told that it's an in-joke relating to "cutting corners" on the budget for the show.
• Two questions regarding the Amazing Cylon Detector:
  • For the first few episodes, Baltar is being nagged about finally making his Cylon detector by just about everybody. Did they somehow forget that in the miniseries he already "used" his Cylon detector once and accused someone of being a Cylon with it? A person who they then left alone to die? When Adama calls him in to his office and says "Can you detect Cylons or not?", why doesn't he or anybody else call (and chew) Baltar out on lying in the first place and causing someone's death having done so?
    • Well, Baltar's initial Cylon Detector in the Miniseries was a total flim-flam. He just needed some way to implicate someone as a Cylon and to get the mysterious device off the DRADIS console. It becomes clear that when he is pressed on further testing people that he waffles about lack of resources before finally admitting to Adama that he doesn't have a real detector. As for apparently pointing the finger at someone who they didn't know until later was really a Cylon, the rest of them had already left thousands of people on non-FTL ships to die at the hands of the Cylons so the rest of them could jump away safely. So calling Baltar out on it would be somewhat hypocritical.
      • But that's exactly my problem - he admits he doesn't have a real detector, so why don't they call him out on what basically amounts to his murder of a random person? I don't see how saving one group of people's lives through triage means murder isn't a crime anymore, and it should at least arouse suspicion that, if Baltar was lying about knowing that guy was a Cylon, then how did he know about that Cylon device? Maybe Baltar's the Cylon!
      • Lee makes an great impassioned speech about this problem at the end of Season 3. Basically, yes, they've all done awful things and gotten off the hook, but that's because they are not a real civilization anymore, just a small group of people on the run from genocidal robots. If they stop to punish every person for doing something illegal, the group would fall apart and they would be destroyed by the Cylons.
  • Similarly - Baltar keeps Boomer's status as a Cylon secret when he discovers it because he's afraid she'll immediately activate and kill him. Why doesn't he inform the troops the moment she's out of the room and he's safe? This may have been answered in a subsequent episode, but after watching the first ten minutes of "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down" and seeing that the incident seemed to have been completely forgotten, these two gaping holes in the plot were what led me to quit the show.
    • Baltar is afraid that if he exposes Boomer, other Cylons in the fleet would know of his Cylon Detector and it would make him a target (remember, he thought a copy of Doral might have been trying to bomb his lab). Basically, his plan was to reveal one then interrogate it to uncover the rest in one fell swoop. He actually tries as much in "Resistance", but is unable to get names, just the knowledge that there are 8 Cylons in the Fleet.
      • So why couldn't Boomer be that one, then? Straight off the bat?
    • She is the one he interrogates in "Resistance", after her cover is blown. As for why he waited until the second season, I'm not sure. Although once everyone realized she was a Cylon, it would have become much easier for Baltar to do as he pleased with her. I think the best way to put it is that humans aren't perfect and sometimes make bad calls. Yes, in hindsight, the best thing would have been for Baltar to expose her shortly after testing her, and then interrogate her without having to worry about being too "brutal" (no one would care about him torturing a Cylon, but would care about him torturing a human), but he didn't because just simply frakked up. It makes the characters more realistic and three-dimensional.
    • Baltar did seem to be wrestling with the idea of turning in Boomer, but he also seemed to recognize the fact that Boomer didn't realize she was a Cylon and was desperately hoping she was human, and he seemed to be trying to help her through that. Look at the scene right before the final episode of the first season when he walked in on her in the middle of shoving the pistol in her mouth. Of course, there's also Head-Six's rather blunt question of whether or not he wanted to frak Boomer, which he probably did, owing to the fact that he's Gaius Baltar. And judging by Gaius' behavior throughout the rest of the series, well, let's be honest: he's a sucker for a pretty face, especially one in distress.
  • (From the O Per: Thanks for at least attempting to answer my question! I've been waiting for a while. If you succeed in convincing me that even one of these (preferably the second one) isn't a plot hole, I'll feel comfortable enough watching the show again, which will be awesome.)
• Why did nobody ever call the Cylons on their total hypocrisy? In "Faith" a Six kills a human who had previously drowned her on New Caprica. Natalie Six kills her to smooth over the alliance that had just been made. Natalie sneers, asking if this enough "human justice": "Blood for blood." So when the other Six avenged her own "death" not 10 seconds before, that wasn't blood for blood and wasn't "human justice"? Or in "Downloaded" when Three says "Humans don't respect life the way we do."
  • That’s rather the point of the series. The Cylons hate humans for thinking them simple machines with no souls. Humans hate Cylons for being murderous bastards.
• Cylons act all indignant when humans hate them, like the Colonials are all just a bunch of racists. Aside from the fact that the Cylons are all the same by design and it's only in prolonged contact with humans that some individuals stray from their model personalities, all of the individual Cylons played a role in the destruction of the Twelve Colonies and the pursuit of the Colonial fleet. There are no non-combatant populations that we know of, and certainly none of them would be pursuing the fleet. The humans don't hate the Cylons because they're racist, they hate them because the Cylons are all murderers. In the case of the Final Five being persecuted, yes, that is racism but for the Twos, Sixes and Eights it's perfectly justified.
  • That’s rather the point of the series. The Cylons hate humans for thinking them simple machines with no souls. Humans hate Cylons for being murderous bastards.
• The road vehicles: Starbuck's car (on Caprica) and the trucks used by the cylons to transport the prisoners on New Caprica look like vehicles we use today. On the other hand, the centurions have a much more sophisticated powerplant, compact enough to fit perfectly inside their torso, powerful (think about how strong the centurions' skeleton is) and with a decent authonomy as well (on Kobol for example, the cylon patrol remained for several days without possibility to refuel/recharge). Why not use that kind of powerplant on road vehicles too?
• The small ships (Vipers and Raptors) don't seem to have propellant tanks. I know they run on tylium, but that's like the nuclear fuel, there isn't enough of it to be used as a propellant. The thrust depends on the quantity of propellant expelled from the engine nozzle, doesn't it? A ship with an ion engine, using tiny amounts of propellant also has a tiny acceleration, insufficient for a dog fight.
  • Space reduces fuel consumption. Besides which, Tylium apparently has an ludicrously high energy return. All a Viper would need is a full tank of Tylium, which would be on the order of an Earth-based fighter, and they would have a reasonable amount to maneuver and fight.
    • As I was saying, the fact that they have a very powerful fuel (a.k.a. energy source) does not mean they can ignore the amount of propellant (a.k.a. reaction mass - one can easily see that small ships use some sort of gas for accelerating and for attitude control system). Unlike aircraft, spacecraft cannot take most of the propellant from the surrounding atmosphere.
    • Space reduces fuel consumption if the ship maintains the direction and speed until it reaches a destination. In case of dog fighting, the Vipers can't rely on aerodynamic braking like the aircraft do. They have to use a lot of fuel and propellant to change the direction and avoid enemy fire.
• Communications (wireless) and cylon downloading: are they FTL? When Galactica was docked at Ragnar, Starbuck was sent outside the nebula to "listen to the wireless" probably to find out what happened to the rest of the fleet. But, in order to reach Ragnar, Galactica had to perform a jump, meaning that Ragnar was too far from any inhabited planet for sublight speed travel. What were the chances to actually receive something? The task is similar to SETI: listening to radio sources from light years away. Starbuck would have needed a huge antenna mounted on her Viper and would have received radio signals sent several years (or months or at least days) earlier.
  • It's pretty well established that wireless communication on the show is only speed-of-light. The exceptions seem to be 1) downloading/resurrection, and 2) tracking ships. The first can be waved away as super-special, although they do seem to switch from resurrection having infinite range to needing a resurrection ship within a few light years to needing one within a system. The second is a little harder to explain, but maybe when a ship they are tracking jumps into FTL, it leaves some kind of breadcrumbs saying where they are going.
• Also, in the miniseries, the news about the cylon attack reached Colonial One in real time, despite the huge distances between the colonies. The emitter on the Olympic Carrier used to track the rest of the colonial fleet in the first episode allowed the cylons to detect the ship after it had jumped (and therefore located at roughly 33 light minutes). Why not plot a longer jump, let's say a light week, in order to have time to rest until the cylons attack again?
  • Colonial One didn’t get real time news of the attack. We have no idea how long the attack had been underway, but apparently Picon had already been nuked. Besides that, Word of God says that the Colonies are in the same solar system. FTL travel in the show isn’t actually faster than light. It works more like teleportation, given that there are obviously no scenes that take place “in” an FTL jump. They could plot a light week out, arrive there instantly and 33 minutes later the Cylons would as well.
    • Laura Roslin left Caprica in the same day or the day before the decommission ceremony on the Galactica. Which is also the day when the cylons attacked. Roslin's ship (future Colonial One) made at least a jump before reaching Galactica, therefore Galactica was located at a considerable distance from Caprica. But the communications between Galactica and Caprica and between Colonial One and Caprica are much faster than the speed of the ships themselves (which are FTL), otherwise Roslin would have reached Caprica without any knowledge of the cylon attack.
    • About the 33 minutes: I assumed the communication is not FTL (that's what bugs me). Therefore, Galactica and the Olympic Carrier make a light week jump, then the cylons must wait one week for the radio waves of the beacon installed on the Olympic Carrier to reach them and then jump to the fleet location. If the communication IS FTL then see my arguments below: we would have got a very short series.
  • Could the wireless (which is never explicitly said to be radio) be somehow near-lightspeed? The Galactica seems to have a lot of trouble just figuring out where friendly forces are located and what's going on during the attack to the point that they don't actually get to fight before the battle's all over. And Lee was supposed to escort Roslin in his Viper - a ship that does not have jump capability.
    • Don't radiowaves travel at (or at least near) the speed of light anyway, like most electromagnetic radiation? I always thought this was why there was a delay between anything far enough away in space transmitting to earth. I always assumed Colonial communications worked similarly to our own and the news of the attacks in the miniseries were arriving after the fact due to the delays incurred. Since Cylons are shown as being far in advance of Colonials in every possible way, they probably invented some kind of technology to transmit faster than light (although the Colonials can still block it, apparently).
    • Radiowaves and light travel at the exact same speed- they're both frequency bands of electromagnetic radiation. Flight time from Caprica to Galactica for Colonial Heavy 798 during the mini-series was stated as 7 hours, including one hyper-light jump, while the return trip (remaining STL, in deference to Apollo's Viper N-2742-C) was due to be around 19 hours. Given that we don't know Colonial Heavy 798's velocity or potential acceleration, this doesn't necessarily mean that Galactica was that far. If the distance was say, similar to the mean distance between Earth and the Asteroid Belt, then transmission lag is not going to be a massive issue, especially given the conceit of "audio range" floated in the mini-series. That said, the reversion to simple text signals at beyond "voice range" could simply be a recognition of people getting very frustrated with sitting by the phone for several minutes (or longer) waiting for the other person to respond to what you just said. Doesn't solve the problem of FTL tracking though...
• The cylon download into a new body seems to take an extremely short time if we take into account the distance to the cylon home planet or the resurection ship (a normal ship needs several jumps to cover that distance).
  • We have no idea how Resurrection technology works. It can also apparently transfer biological viruses.
    • Still, the download implies information traveling through space. Since it doesn't take forever to resurrect a cylon, it means they have the technology to send information FTL. And the emitter used to achieve this fits easily inside the cylon body, therefore it is not to cumbersome for one cylon to carry and operate. Why not use the same technology to build a beacon each cylon agent in the fleet could carry. The humans wouldn't have had a chance to escape the cylons.
    • Couldn't a beacon be detected? And I rather got the impression that the Cylons in the Fleet weren't necessarily supposed to be tracking the Fleet; they just sort of ended up there. The Plan establishes that only a handful of Cylons were actually in the Fleet and they seemed not to have a plan at all. The Final Five ending up in the Fleet was a wild fluke. The Cylons might also have planned for there to be a clean sweep with little difficulty and so didn't plan adequately; the Fleet was formed by Laura Roslin whose vessel had been targeted by a Raider that broke off when Lee duped it. Who could have foreseen her creating a Fleet of humans and linking up with Galactica? In fact, Galactica was the only vessel - perhaps besides the Pegasus during its refits - that had a reasonable chance of surviving, given that it didn't have the CNP. To that end, the Cylons had tasked two sleepers and two nuclear-equipped Raiders to handle the ship. They even wiped out its last official squadron. They just couldn't foresee the ingenuity of the crew and the individual skill of its pilots. If not for the reconfigured Mk. IIs and one Kara "Starbuck" Thrace, the Raiders would have been free to blow the Galactica to pieces with repeated nuclear strikes.
    • Above and beyond all that, the humanoid Cylons were supposed to be as near-human as possible, something that factors into the motivation for the attacks. A beacon would interfere with that.
• Let's assume that communication IS faster than light. What is the purpose of the scouts? In the miniseries, Boomer explains that the raptors were designed with limited FTL capability in order to jump in front of the fleet, scout and the return and report. Why not use a probe fitted with FTL communication instead of risking the lifes of the raptor crew? In the episode where d'Anna makes a documentary about the military and sends it to the cylons, a raider had to jump near the fleet (strangely, it knew where the fleet was), receive the message and jump back to its basestar. And the cylon agents in the fleet have no means to send messages (containing the position of the Galactica) to the cylon fleet. This doesn't make any sense.
  • It makes perfect military sense to send a human scouting party instead of a drone. It’s possible that there are drones suited for this purpose, but none exist on Galactica or she has no launching capability (she is fifty years old and still uses older systems and protocols, remember). It’s also possible that a drone could be subject to Cylon ECM and jamming. A Raptor, however, apparently has complex reconnaissance suites and the ECM facilities. Plus, two crewman to confirm with their own eyes what their sensors record is invaluable for intel.
    • If "it makes perfect military sense to send a human scouting party instead of a drone", how come it is avoided as much as possible by the military today. From the very beginning of the aerial reconnaissance, the planes were equipped with cameras on film in order to obtain images of the enemy which were later analyzed by experts. As technology progressed, the spy planes were replaced by sattelites and now we have spy drones which send images of the enemy in real time. You may argue that in the BSG universe people were trying to avoid computers as much as possible, but in space it is much simpler: send an unmanned craft equipped with DRADIS and video cameras, which broadcast all the information using their super FTL communication technology. Hell, it is like SWAT teams slipping a tiny camera in the room where the terrorists are instead of sending a team member to try to observe them directly.
    • The military (many militaries, in fact) still have units dedicated to performing reconnaissance. The Raptors are equipped with photo-taking capabilities and those photos are analyzed by personnel onboard Galactica. An unmanned drone might very well be vulnerable to detection or interception by the Cylons. And that doesn't even begin to address the likelihood of the Galactica not having the launch/recovery facilities to utilize drones or if it even has any such thing in its inventory. There are no remote-piloted weapons used by the Colonials in the entire series, and the even the only ship-to-ship missile we see is used to target a Colonial vessel. It can be assumed that the Cylons are just too good at ECM for the Colonials to even consider utilizing any sort of unmanned technology.
    • how come it is avoided as much as possible by the military today. It isn't. There's a reason why the United States Marine Corps has Force Recon, which is an infantry unit. Not to mention that while Galactica has drones, the Raptors have a much more comprehensive sensor suite better suited for recon work than the simple, small drones.
  • It’s highly likely that the agents within the fleet have the ability to send communications to Raiders and even Basestars tailing the fleet. They just don’t have the ability to send messages as far as Caprica without an intermediary. It might also have something to do with sending a video file as opposed to text or audio over a wireless.
    • See the comment above about cylon downloading. The human fleet would have been star dust even from season one episode two. The entire plot of the series is humans hiding from the cylons and cylons trying to detect the humans. And cylon agents among the humans.
    • The early plot is not from the point of view of the Cylons. It's possible that post-33 the Cylons know exactly where the Fleet is located, they just don't immediately act. They only show up to fight the Colonials when they have a significant advantage (Ambushing at Kobol and at the Binary Stars, sticking to fight when the Galactica has networked its computers, sending waves of Raiders and Heavy Raiders when the virus is crippling systems). The Cylons repeatedly take heavy losses when facing the experienced and rugged Galactica and its fighter wing.
• At one point in the series, it is shown that tylium fuels the fleet, is constantly in high demand, and its manufacturing process is dangerous. So if tylium is needed to move ships around, why not jettison as much weight as possible? Adama's model ship and everything like it is unneccessary weight, and throwing it out the airlock will save weight, which saves tylium, which will help ease worries over its availability, and potentially prevent more industrial accidents. Is tylium usage somehow not connected to a ship's weight (that would be a massive and nonsensical hand-wave), or do they just not care?
  • Small “useless” items like Adama’s model ship are things necessary for the fleet to survive by keeping them from going insane from boredom. They’re just as important to a people that can expect to live their lives forever in a spaceship and have cultural and sentimental import that it would make it impossible to just jettison them. Besides that, tylium is never really in short supply after the first season, when they take up a large amount of tylium ore from the Cylons and never again since. Additionally, while the Galactica’s propulsion would be affected by how much mass the engines have to move, the fleet’s main mode of travelling through the galaxy is making FTL jumps. We don’t know that this is affected by mass or weight.
• Fridge Logic: In the resurrection ship there are "reserves" of cylon bodies ready for a cylon "soul" to be downloaded into them. Each "soul" matches a single body (for example Caprica Six had to be downloaded into a Six body). On the other hand, nobody knew what the final five looked like, therefore they didn't have a supply of bodies for them. How did the download of Ellen succeed? When was her body "manufactured"? How did they know what she looked like?
  • If you watch The Plan, you see than Cavil was waiting for the Final Five to download when (he assumed) they would be killed in the initial attack, so its very likely the "plans" are on file. Also, we don't know exactly how long it took Ellen to resurrect. She might have been stored on a hard drive while the correct body was made for her.
    • Even more so - Cavil had the Five's resurrection bodies set up and ready to go. He just kept it secret from the remaining Cylon models.
• About "33": why is it exactly that they've been awake for five days? Doesn't the Galactica have a shift rotation? Even if we assume that at Condition 1, all personnel are required to be on duty (like, IIRC, the real-life navy does during General Quarters), after a while it might make sense to bend the rules so they don't have people zonking out at their posts. Civilian ships like Colonial One make even less sense since they're just sitting there waiting, not having to do a job.
  • As far as the crew of Galactica goes, its because Galactica was on a skeleton crew and was scheduled to be decommissioned when the war began, and thus only had enough trained personnel for one shift. For the civilians, it's probably because the act of jumping to light speed would wake anyone up, not to mention the constant red alert signals every time the Cylons showed up.
    • How, then, did the Galactica operate for the six months before encountering Pegasus? Did they just have an empty shift or two?
    • They recruited some civilian volunteers - such as in the episode where Hotdog is introduced.
  • Regarding the civilians: Most Humans can have their sleep patterns disrupted by any kind of stress, even from relatively minor sources. Surviving a holocaust of your entire species and being chased by the perpetrators (who are still intent on finishing the job) probably counts as a major source of stress, though hopefully we'll never find out for sure. Also, most civilian ships would probably not have backup crews like the Galactica, meaning the stress those crews are under may be more than the military ship which has at least a chance of a crew rotation.
  • Shift rotations won't help. Every FTL transition is disruptive enough to wake everyone up. You literally can't sleep through it.
  • Condition 2 is General Quarters, Condition 1 is Battle Stations, or the equivalent thereof. It's implied in dialogue between Adama and Roslin in 33, and explicitly spelled out in one of the tie-in novels. It may also have been spelled out in one of the later episodes, but it's been too long since I saw them.
• When Starbuck comes back to life and is going crazy because "We're going the wrong way," Roslin keeps insisting that they continue following the path laid out by the Eye of Jupiter. Now I get that Roslin thinks Starbuck must be a resurrected Cylon and doesn't trust her. But, as Lee says...*what* path? The Eye of Jupiter led them to the Ionian Nebula. Once they've jumped past that, they're not following anything in the Sacred Scrolls or the Eye of Jupiter; they're headed in a completely random direction.
• On New Caprica the Cylons are, understandably, shown to be quite unsettled by the humans starting a suicide bombing campaign. This is understandable. Yet they don't seem to understand the motivation at all, despite in the first series they send a Number Five (Doral) to blow himself up on Galactica. So was this Five a radical among Cylons or did they honestly forget how this kind of thing could work in between times?
  • At the time, all Cylons could regenerate. Doral would be immediately downloaded into a new body. They might not understand why humans would do it, given that they die and stay dead.
• Kind of insignificant, but how can you have candles burning on a spaceship (such as in the hallway with the pictures)? Wouldn't it eat away at all their oxygen?
  • The Colonials seem not to concern themselves with this much, since over the course of the series we also see people regularly smoking on various starships, and the Cloud 9 serves a cocktail that features dry ice (which even becomes a plot point in one episode). Presumably Colonial technology is advanced enough to negate the effect (Galactica's O2 scrubbers are directly mentioned in one episode) and the people have ceased caring about any ill effects.
  • I'm guessing you don't actually understand how combustion works. Combustion reactions primarily create carbon dioxide and water. If the ships can't recycle carbon dioxide and water, then you can't have people breathing inside the ship. The reason they don't allow open flames in real world space craft is due to the higher than normal oxygen percentage.