GALACTICA

No one on the show, including Chief Tyrol himself, seems to remember that not too long ago Tyrol killed a human to save a Cylon, and somehow managed to avoid being executed for murder and treason.

Wow, did Tigh give his wife poison to drink?

Baltar still seems completely out of character. He was a guy who cared what other people thought of him. He reveled in his reputation for being humanity’s most brilliant mind. Even if Baltar didn’t really care about his fellow humans, his goal as president would be to go down in history as a great leader just because it would feed his ego. Baltar would not have become a drunk who lets everything go to hell because he’s too busy having sex with his harem of women.

How did Laura Roslin become president again? I thought she was voted out of office. If anyone has a claim to the presidential ship, it’s Tom Zarek. Wasn’t he Baltar’s running mate? I’ll have to go back and rewatch that episode.

So the little kid wasn’t Starbucks’ after all. Just goes to show you that you can’t trust a Cylon. How do you know when a Cylon is lying? When its lips move. So I guess we're supposed to believe that Leoben's motivation for keeping Starbuck hostage was simply because he had the hots for her.

I’m glad the whole Iraq/New Caprica arc is finished with.

Interesting how Ronald Moore is once again tying in events in the new series to the original series. As in the original series, the Pegasus is destroyed charging into Cylon Basestars, leaving its Vipers behind to add to the Galactica's forces.

The next major arc from the old series is the Ship of Lights. It will be interesting to see how Ronald Moore is able to integrate that into the new series.

I'm glad to see that the writers didn't touch on the suicide bombing theme any more. New Caprica looks less like Iraq this week, as Adama prepares to rescue the humans.

Roslyn has more lives than a cat. Once again, she survives what should have been certain death. The Cylon robots who were supposed to gun down the prisoners looked like the Cylons from the old series--totally inept soldiers who are easily destroyed by a much smaller number of human warriors.

Baltar's character remains undeveloped this season. Too bad, I miss the old Baltar who used to be the most interesting character on the series. Too bad the writers had to ruin him by making him like Saddam Hussein so they could make a left wing political point.

I don't think the little girl's "accident" was accidental at all. The Cylons purposely injured her so Starbuck would feel guilty and bond with her.

What's the deal with Sharon the Cylon siding with the humans now? I think the writers are trying to make the point that even the most seemingly evil people can be redeemed if only they are treated the right way. This ignores the assumed fact that the human-looking Cylons were genetically engineered by evil machines for the purpose of following orders and destroying the human race.

I previously supported Baltar for president. Of course that was based on the Baltar from Season 1 and early Season 2. How could I possibly know that the writers of the show would totally change the Baltar character in order to make a left wing political statement?

Now of course we all know that Baltar is a psychologically flawed individual (assuming he's human and not a Cylon). But is the scene at the end of season 2.5, showing him as a completely corrupt, womanizing, possibly substance abusing tyrant, really a logical result of a year of Baltar's leadership?

The Baltar of the first two seasons is a weak willed and cowardly individual. But we never saw him take advantage of his position as Vice President and the most brilliant mind in the fleet in order to get cheap sex. That was Lee Adama's thing.

Baltar was very conscious of how others saw him. He was a flashy dresser and was always trying to get people to see him as brilliant. President Baltar would try to get people to like him, which is inconsistent with the Baltar we saw at the very end of Season 2 when the Cylons took over.

What happened to Tom Zarek? We assumed that he would be pulling a lot of the strings behind Baltar's presidency, and he seemed like he genuinely cared about the freedom of the people.

When Roslyn did dumb stuff, Adama stepped in to stop him. If Baltar was letting New Caprica go to hell, why didn't Adama step in?

It seems to me that the writers didn't care at all about the consistency of the characters. Because they had a political point to make. They needed Baltar to be as much like Saddam Hussein as possible in order create an analagous situation. The United States took over Iraq in order to liberate the Iraqis from Saddam Hussein. The Cylons liberated the humans from Baltar. If the humans had a well functioning democratic government, then the similaritiy between the two situations would be a lot weaker.

Baltar's fall is just one of many things the writers did that don't make sense so they could make the Cylon occupation of New Caprica as close as possible to the U.S. occupation of Iraq.

The writers of Battlestar Galactica clearly went out of their way to twist the plot of the show into as close a possible an analogy of Iraq, except they make the humans, who we think of as the good guys, the Iraqis and the Cylons the Americans.

There is absolutely nothing to write about here except for the Iraq analogy. The only other subplots which only have a few minutes of airtime, are that Lee Adama is fat, and Kara Thrace is held captive by a Cylon for unknown reasons. She keeps killing him and he keeps coming back. This demonstrates the whole absurdity of the main suicide boming theme. The Cylons are infinite in number and they don't care about dying. The humans number fifty thousand (maybe less by now), so losing even a single human to kill hundreds of Cylons who will just reincarnate again seems like a bad idea. Having suicide bombers kill other humans is a geniunely suicidal tactic if the goal is the survival of the human race.

The suicide bombings going on in the Middle East actually makes a perverse sense in the logic of fundamentalist Islamics, because they take advantage of the moral abiguity of the west. Insurgents can be put down with hardline tactics. Saddam Hussein kept his country orderly because he had secret police and executions of dissidents. I don't know why the human resistence think that Cylons would be sensitive to these issues. The Cylons just killed twenty billion humans. Based on the past behavior of the Cylons, the obvious conclusion is that pissing off the Cylons seems more likely to result in the destruction of everyone on the planet rather than any sort of victory. Maybe the Cylons have some strange mysterious "plan" which makes them extremely reluctant to destroy the planet, but Tigh and the resistance can't possibly know about that.

Some people, defending the show around the web, says it's making people "think." But, as a commenter on a forum explained, this is not true at all. A show that makes people "think" makes both sides think. The third season of Battlestar Galactica gives leftists nothing to think about at all, instead it just gives them the opportunity to feel smug in their opposition to George Bush, as demonstrated by the gleeful liberal reaction.

Apollo is fat. (That's fat and not phat). I like fat Apollo better than buff Apollo.

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Has this show jumped the shark? The writers are using current events in the Middle East as the source for their material, but putting the humans in the position of being the terrorists. The humans even resort to suicide bombings.

Terrorist tactics only work against the United States and Israel because we're too good to wipe all of them out. The Cylons, on the other hand, had no problems with destroying twenty billion humans, why wouldn't they destroy the remaining fifty thousand?

Terrorism also requires that the side being terrorized cares about dying. But the Cylons don't care if they die. They just get reincarnated into a new body.

Why are people so pissed if the Cylons "massacre" two hundred humans? Hello McFly! The Cylons already massacred twenty billion.

I don't think this storyline works at all.

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Colonel Tigh looks good with a beard.

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Do you think that Laura Roslyn is dead finally?

The Others have a file about Jack's life. The obvious assumption is that the Others have contact with the outside world. Maybe the same people who gave the Others the file also dropped the supplies outside the original hatch in Season 2? Is the contact two ways?

We assume that the Others do know how to leave the island, because they gave Michael instructions on how to leave. Unless they lied to him. You should all know enough by now not to believe anything the Others say.

There are some alternative theories on how they got the dossier on Jack:

(1) Ben/Henry overheard it all while he was prisoner.

(2) They injected Jack with truth serum (notice the needle mark in his arm) and interrogated him, but Jack doesn't remember it.

(3) They have psychic powers and were able to compile the information from reading his mind.

People also have noticed that the Others have a nice middle class existence on the island when they are not doing mysterious Others stuff. Where does their electricity come from? Presumably the same source as the electricity in the hatch.

If the Others really know what's going on, why didn't they take control of the Button? Surely the wouldn't allow something so dangerous if unpressed to be watched over by mentally unstable people who might think that Button doesn't really do anything and therefore fail to press it.

It has been a long time since I posted, but I'm back. I watched the webisodes. (The quality, although better than the average YouTube video, still sucks.)

The webisodes are clearly setting us up to view the humans as Muslim terrorists. They hide their weapons in the religious temple. Sounds like the Muslims who always use Mosques as military bases because they know that the U.S., being the good guys, will never bomb the Mosques. The Cylons, on the other hand, don't seem to have any problems with this, they attack the temple and kill ten humans.

But Colonel Tigh is actually happy about this outcome. The violence is helping to rally the people around the cause of the resistance. Once again, there's another parallel with the Middle East. They say that whenever we kill a bunch of terrorists, it only causes more to join their cause. Israel's invasion of Lebanon was said to actually help Hamas because now they can recruit more people.

Before letting this make you feel sympathy for the tactics of Muslims in the Middle East, one should note the two major differences between Cylons and the United States.

(1) Cylons massacred billions of people, leaving only fifty thousand left alive. The United States never exterminated 99% of Muslims.

(2) Cylons are machines and not humans (except for the human Cylons who aren't really machines, but rather life forms genetically engineered to be like humans except they are genetically programmed to help the machines destroy all of humanity or whatever the machines' hidden "plan" is).