For those who feel nuGalactica failed...

[JLTucker]

Here's a hint-some of us want SciFi shows to be about ships in space and awesome battles and shooting things down, not heavy-handed social commentary or dysfunctional characters getting on each other's nerves. It's a TV show. Its purpose is to entertain me. If it doesn't do so, it failed, at least as far as I'm concerned. I suggest you reread the threat title. 'For those who feel nuGalactica failed'. That's not a blanket statement that nBSG objectively undisputably stunk, it's asking for people's personal opinions. Yours is no more correct than mine or jollyreapers.

And personally, I feel he was overly generous. I was rooting for the Cylons halfway through s1 and the stupid religion angle sure as hell wasn't an improvement to the series.

I want to thank you for outlining that all of our opinions are subjective. I had no idea that was the case and from here on out I will preface my views with "In my opinion" and other such variants.

In my opinion, the religious angle is quite interesting because it too shows that in the face of tragedy, millions opt toward religion. Baltar had a hard time reconciling his role in the attacks and sought religion for peace of mind. Roslin did that too with her desperate attempt to save the fleet. It's not unheard of. And this brings me to Stark mentioning The Wire. It successfully blended two subjects (politics and law enforcement) for its first few seasons. I am of the opinion that BSG acted as a hybrid with many of its different subjects in a satisfying manner as well. The religious themes are an example. The political aspects are another.

[Stark]

Its easy to understand many of the criticisms; after all, I considered the mini series so fucking stupid I couldn't stomach even starting the show itself. People who changed view partway often appear to do so because while there were enough flashing lights and tactical grimdark they could just ignore how retarded and awful the plot was. Obviously toward the end the plot had to come to the fore, and this sadly forced people to internalise that it was a hat full of shit.

Maybe if the same themes were presented in a different way people would have engaged with them directly, instead of just voting 5/5 for BATTLEPRONZ and then being amazed when wow where did all this religion stuff come from???

[JLTucker]

Maybe if the same themes were presented in a different way people would have engaged with them directly, instead of just voting 5/5 for BATTLEPRONZ and then being amazed when wow where did all this religion stuff come from???

What I find funny is that the themes were mixed in with the battle porn yet people still hated it. There's an example where kat, a pilot, is overcome with such a superiority complex that she fucks up and causes Kara to crash on a planet. Kat was also hooked on stimulants because she was being overworked. I think this stuff is gold and I preferred it to the huge battles with the Basestars and other Cylon aircraft. There's a limit to how much battle porn you can take.

[Batman]

Here's a hint-some of us want SciFi shows to be about ships in space and awesome battles and shooting things down, not heavy-handed social commentary or dysfunctional characters getting on each other's nerves. It's a TV show. Its purpose is to entertain me. If it doesn't do so, it failed, at least as far as I'm concerned. I suggest you reread the threat title. 'For those who feel nuGalactica failed'. That's not a blanket statement that nBSG objectively undisputably stunk, it's asking for people's personal opinions. Yours is no more correct than mine or jollyreapers.
And personally, I feel he was overly generous. I was rooting for the Cylons halfway through s1 and the stupid religion angle sure as hell wasn't an improvement to the series.

I want to thank you for outlining that all of our opinions are subjective. I had no idea that was the case and from here on out I will preface my views with "In my opinion" and other such variants.

You should, because so far, all your comments on jollyreapers posts scream 'I'm right and you're wrong'.

And I have yet to find the limit of how much battleporn I can take (and the nBSG battleporn was pretty meh for the most part to tell the truth).

[JLTucker]

I want to thank you for outlining that all of our opinions are subjective. I had no idea that was the case and from here on out I will preface my views with "In my opinion" and other such variants.

You should, because so far, all your comments on jollyreapers posts scream 'I'm right and you're wrong'.

When it comes to art, I always operate on the assumption that everything I say and others say is all opinionated.

My beef with jollyreaper's opinions is that they aren't well grounded. They have flaws, so I respond accordingly.

[Skylon]

It never did for me, personally, however I would say Galactica, stayed consistently excellent in quality up until "Exodus" part 2, the final episode of the New Caprica arc, and yes its season 3 and I will stick by it as the best episode of the series. Then season 3 started to meander. The stuff with Baltar on the baseship was interesting, but things felt adrift with the show. The mid-season "Eye of Jupiter" two-parter came back to the Cylons and the search for Earth, but was riddled by damn Starbuck-Apollo-Anders-Dualla-angst and then the second half of season 3 really dragged.

I honestly felt season 4 picked things up again then, maybe not to the consistent level of seasons 1 and 2, but the Cylon Civil War, and Mutiny Arc I felt were high-points of the show.

[Stark]

I have watched Exodus, because of the huge orgasms it gave people, and I have to agree the second part was simply amazingly weak. People loved it, though, because it was full of hard men making tough decisions and flame decals.

[Themightytom]

Honestly I think the show failed when they decided there'd be twelve models of Cylon. it seemed implausible and it inevitably led to the creators deciding between planning to use existing characters as surprise Cylons, and just using brand new characters. Sharon on Caprica was mehhhhh because we knew she was a Cylon. There was some tension with when Hero would figure it out but really I was just watching all that shit for Posit Apocalypse Colonies footage. At least pull a walking dead, with disposable characters that are ticked off one by one, I would have enjoyed meeting some of the people chasing the raptor, seeing them try to survive but fail, with the fleet as a counterpoint, the Cylons weren't interesting enough just showing up and watching every now and then. Limiting the Cylon models to twelve hemmed in just how interesting the enemy could get, at least for me.

Where it failed is not where I lost interest mind you, I watched for other aspects of the show. I ws pretty pissed about Cain being shot at the end of Pegasus, because I was expecting a few more episodes of tension, and maybe the Pegasus trucking off because the fleet wouldn't play ball, Cain hardly needed the fleet, and maybe Adama could have reached her over time.

The fast forward to New Caprica was just the next cop out because it seemed the Cyolons just weren't interesting enough as villians. They had to make the villians conflicted, to add dimension, and they did it WAY to abruptly. Baltar's trial was intriguing, the ridiculousness that followed was not. Again, Cylons, ho hum, characters in the fleet, done to death, they were just playing with BALTAR to carry the show. The final five and the civil war just seemed desperate. Starbuck's plot was a total failure in my mind, not making her a Cylon, making an offscreen missing model her possible father was just stupid, all to set up a bait and switch with Earth and then a leap through time?

If they hadn't painted themselves into a creative corner to no particular purpose, they'd have had a lot more options.

[Darksider]

I have watched Exodus, because of the huge orgasms it gave people, and I have to agree the second part was simply amazingly weak. People loved it, though, because it was full of hard men making tough decisions and flame decals.

I think some people sort of latched on to Exodus because it was really the first major on-screen space battle anyone had seen in a good long while. The discussion thread was full of posts like "ZOMG a million times better than Endor!" and "Best Space Battle Ever."

[Scrib]

Here's a hint-some of us want SciFi shows to be about ships in space and awesome battles and shooting things down, not heavy-handed social commentary or dysfunctional characters getting on each other's nerves. It's a TV show. Its purpose is to entertain me. If it doesn't do so, it failed, at least as far as I'm concerned. I suggest you reread the threat title. 'For those who feel nuGalactica failed'. That's not a blanket statement that nBSG objectively undisputably stunk, it's asking for people's personal opinions. Yours is no more correct than mine or jollyreapers.

And personally, I feel he was overly generous. I was rooting for the Cylons halfway through s1 and the stupid religion angle sure as hell wasn't an improvement to the series.

I want to thank you for outlining that all of our opinions are subjective. I had no idea that was the case and from here on out I will preface my views with "In my opinion" and other such variants.

In my opinion, the religious angle is quite interesting because it too shows that in the face of tragedy, millions opt toward religion. Baltar had a hard time reconciling his role in the attacks and sought religion for peace of mind. Roslin did that too with her desperate attempt to save the fleet. It's not unheard of. And this brings me to Stark mentioning The Wire. It successfully blended two subjects (politics and law enforcement) for its first few seasons. I am of the opinion that BSG acted as a hybrid with many of its different subjects in a satisfying manner as well. The religious themes are an example. The political aspects are another.

The religious themes were fine when they were ambiguous, but then we started getting weird mysterious shit that had to be real, the writers then had to have a reason. But they didn't. It's one thing for Roslin to be religious, that provided conflict and movement, but for the universe to be with little explanation for the copouts was a bit disappointing.

Its easy to understand many of the criticisms; after all, I considered the mini series so fucking stupid I couldn't stomach even starting the show itself. People who changed view partway often appear to do so because while there were enough flashing lights and tactical grimdark they could just ignore how retarded and awful the plot was. Obviously toward the end the plot had to come to the fore, and this sadly forced people to internalise that it was a hat full of shit.

Just curious: what did you find so stupid about the miniseries?

Where it failed is not where I lost interest mind you, I watched for other aspects of the show. I ws pretty pissed about Cain being shot at the end of Pegasus, because I was expecting a few more episodes of tension, and maybe the Pegasus trucking off because the fleet wouldn't play ball, Cain hardly needed the fleet, and maybe Adama could have reached her over time.

Yeah, I liked the drama that Cain provided. Instead she was quickly cut out so that things could go back to normal. Of course, not until they'd made a statement about humanity and all.

Season 3 should have been "Robots Win, now what?" instead the Cylons were handed an idiot ball and told to run with it as far and as long as they could go. And they never put it down even up to and including the end of the series.

They definitely shouldn't have written themselves into the hole with the spaceships but I do think that Season Three showed the idiocy of the Cylons on purpose. Basically they have a failed society. A society where the words of two war heroes can overturn an entire war effort is a failed society. Even worse a society that cannot withstand two people going outside of it without having those two people turn it inside out is going to fail. Basically Cylons that interact with humans tend to come back with very radical ideas. Too radical. And because they expect homogeneity (one cylon votes for everyone else) this fucks them. NEw Caprica was about Boomer and Caprica Six's pipe dream of living together with humans. If it wasn't, they would have followed Cavil's advice and bombed the humans back to a manageable number like 3000. Or gotten rid of them altogether.

It would have been interesting to see a long ass occupation but I think that would have moved too far away from space ships pew pew.They could have stayed longer though, it would have been more interesting.

Dualla's death was a stunt. They decided on the spur of the moment that they needed consequences for the Earth fallout and decided she should suicide. Now of course in real life we don't have access to inner monologue. What we see as out of character could be us not knowing the person. But fiction has to make send or else we don't buy it. There's no resonance.

How does this not make sense. The promise of Earth was what was driving some people. The promise was false so those people had to confront the fact that it was all PERMANENTLY fucked up. These people weren't driven by the knowledge that they'd have to restart the human race they were driven by the hope that they could find the rest of humanity.

[JLTucker]

Dualla's death was a stunt. They decided on the spur of the moment that they needed consequences for the Earth fallout and decided she should suicide. Now of course in real life we don't have access to inner monologue. What we see as out of character could be us not knowing the person. But fiction has to make send or else we don't buy it. There's no resonance.

How does this not make sense. The promise of Earth was what was driving some people. The promise was false so those people had to confront the fact that it was all PERMANENTLY fucked up. These people weren't driven by the knowledge that they'd have to restart the human race they were driven by the hope that they could find the rest of humanity.

This is probably the funniest thing jollyreaper has posted about the show. Dualla's suicide makes sense when you couple what you mentioned along with her failing relationships and overall shitty life on Galactica. I think we can all conclude that he's finding any way possible to make this show look downright horrible. I just wish he was convincing so it would be more work for me to post refutations.

[Stark]

Like other people, I just found the premise too retarded. It was clumsy and forced and rushed, and rather than showing the audience interesting stuff and then blowing up the world, it showed the audience a bunch of tryhards and retards who were destroyed because magic plot wands being waved all over the place.

I don't think the show could have recovered from the first minute. If I'd seen it with that missing, I probably would have been more open to it.

[El Moose Monstero]

I think mid S3 for me as well, the transition from 'oh ho! is it something mysterious or just coincidence' and the amount of bullshit thrown at you to get you to accept the final five and all the random plot shit that came with that was too sharp. During the rewatch with my gf, who was non-scifi and non-soap opera, but seemed to get into it anyway, I was rewatching it knowing how it ended to see if that criticism was still valid - to see if knowing about angels and God from the start made a difference. It didn't, it still felt like too sharp a transition into a 'oh shit, how do we end this?' makeshitupathon.

However, even once we accepted that shift, I think S4 has been the hardest to slug through for us, despite the fact that I remember there being some really good episodes here and there. Basically, I think S4 is a mess and lacks focus, and our big complaint was that there hadn't really been anything to smile about or find hope in, whereas even in the early days of S1, there were still moments of humanity.

Now, when you look at everything that happens in S4, the theme could be 'what happens to society when you just can't take any more' - reflecting Baltar's comments way back in 33 that there are limits. But it never felt like that was the theme - it just felt like they were throwing shit at the wall to generate drama and character angst, rather than it coming naturally. Thinking about it, the reveal that Galactica was starting to die could have come a lot earlier and would have been a trigger for the despair that they seemed to want to revel in. It would have been a better, perhaps, trigger event (e.g., for Dualla's suicide) than the pointless fakeout over Earth and 'Earth'. Knowing that you only had 4 or 5 jumps left in Galactica and that you didn't know where Earth was - sort of like standing at the back of the queue on the Titanic, knowing that there won't a lifeboat for you - do you carry on queuing? Do you find another way? Do you accept your fate like the captain or the guy who built the thing? That would sort of justify a lot of the dramangst that felt pointless and unfocused.

We haven't actually finished the rewatch of S4 yet - currently sitting a couple of episodes before the coup. I'll be interested to see what I feel like in the build up to the finale.

[Scrib]

Like other people, I just found the premise too retarded. It was clumsy and forced and rushed, and rather than showing the audience interesting stuff and then blowing up the world, it showed the audience a bunch of tryhards and retards who were destroyed because magic plot wands being waved all over the place.

I don't think the show could have recovered from the first minute. If I'd seen it with that missing, I probably would have been more open to it.

I still don't see the particular thing that set you off. What, the characters were assholes? What magic plot wand? The virus?

All I remember from the first minute is the Cylons blowing up that base and killing that little girl. *shrugs*

This is probably the funniest thing jollyreaper has posted about the show. Dualla's suicide makes sense when you couple what you mentioned along with her failing relationships and overall shitty life on Galactica. I think we can all conclude that he's finding any way possible to make this show look downright horrible. I just wish he was convincing so it would be more work for me to post refutations.

I'd be surprised if he was making the show seem horrible, because when I jumped on the Gaeta rebellion not too long ago, it seemed to me that he was defending it.

[Stark]

I think talking about how regular people take scifi stuff is a good way to put aside the nerd expectations a lot of us have in scifi. My wife and I are watching Gundam 00, for instance, and she's all over the heavy duty themes, the drama etc, but it's about to get deeply silly and I expect she will lose interest. What's the motive to 'slog through' something that isn't fun anymore?

I think the central ideas of nBSG could have made a great show. It just didn't, and the huge support it got early on clearly sent the wrong message to the creators. Like 'we don't care about utterly contrived and hamfisted plotting' and 'OMG WHO KNOWS WHO IS A ROBIT'.

[El Moose Monstero]

The thing my g/f was digging, anthropologist that she is, were the episodes that were exploring the logistics and how people were dealing with it in what was essentially a new society - finding food, water; dealing with jobs, castes, religion; unions, elections, democracy etc. She found them refreshing as they aren't things that most shows can engage with. She did however often come up with way more nuanced solutions to the problems - especially the abortion episode. She decided it was a false premise in that the way to promote population growth did not require to ban abortion, but to promote parenthood with extra perks, better quarters etc.

Anyway, the S3 final five transition point was the point where she was asking me if there were good episodes still to come and if it was worth carrying on watching or not. My response was yes, but only because I want to see how she feels about it all when we finish the series. Once she accepted the new shift, she got into it again for a while, and she still wants to see how it ends, but it's not the 'oh my god, I will kill you if this is a cliffhanger and you leave me hanging until you're next back in the country again' that it was in S1 and S2.

[Stark]

That's what I think is interesting, because regular people just see the scifi stuff as trappins rather than an end the way nerds can. Sherry is all about how the world changes to face a new threat and how war changes people and produces generations of suffering... And not so much the color coded robits. Quirks of plot and theme are given more importance than 'how many gigatons' or 'tensile strength of e-carbon plz'. If you removed the engaging characters and strong themes but kept the BATTLEPORN FIVE GIGATONS it would only appeal to a small audience.

I guess this is a shame because nBSG tried to sell changing characters.

[Scrib]

Yes. The fact that the show took time to sit down and dela with the logistics and minutia of surviving gave a lot of people hope that it wouldn't be a silly copout show.

I disagree on the abortion thing though. Whether or not there are better methods is irrelevant just as it is irrelevant to a conservative today. The issue is a moral one. A baby is here today, someone is killing it. Roslin may want to deal with incentives in time, but at that moment she has to deal with the public outcry.

[Spoonist]

I loved the miniseries, but the magic ended somewhere late S2 / early in S3. But I'd already had some massive misgivings from the S1 Caprica stuff. It was too random with no progressing story arc beyond what was cool at the moment. But looking at the episode list the last episode that "did it" for me was Flight of the Phoenix, from there it is downhill.
But I stuck with it until it turned into Hogan's Heroes. Two webisodes+first episode said crap to me and I bailed.
The first time I had a big WTF moment was the really early episode when they got their munitions and left the suspected cylon onsite - only to have the big reveal of the cylons walking in. Big palmface for me. That meant that the scene was more important than the storyarcs, ie, they didn't have a long term plan.

My wife was smarter, she stopped watching at the end of S2 predicting the downfall of plotarcs.

I don't get why one would go full apologist for nBSG, the reviewers - the audience and the advertisers all agreed. It was a sliding slope downhill. If it was that or this tidbit doesn't matter, the shift from S2 to S3 introduced a smorgasboard of things people could get turned off on.

Nielsen rating
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/List_ ... ings_(TRS)

[El Moose Monstero]

Yes. The fact that the show took time to sit down and dela with the logistics and minutia of surviving gave a lot of people hope that it wouldn't be a silly copout show.

I disagree on the abortion thing though. Whether or not there are better methods is irrelevant just as it is irrelevant to a conservative today. The issue is a moral one. A baby is here today, someone is killing it. Roslin may want to deal with incentives in time, but at that moment she has to deal with the public outcry.

At the risk of a minor tangent, it was only a moral choice to the Gemanese. Roslin was the one who made the decision, and she was viewing it in terms of population and survival (We need to start making babies) and that was outwardly the only reason she gave in to it. It can't have been that much of a public outcry to deal with, because the Gemanese were viewed as zealots, and because Gaius then stuck his neck out far enough to go against her and use it as a launching platform for his presidential candidacy. He didn't do so well after that issue went away, but he obviously felt it was a safe enough stance that he could use it to get one over on Roslin. Abortion control or incentives are both long term measures, as you'd be looking at at least 14-18 years (depending if they were so adamant to promote population growth that they lowered the age of consent or not) before anything you did now has any benefit. Incentivising parenthood would have let Roslin keep her right to choose stance and probably resolved the population issue to the same extent as any abortion ban would have done.

[Scrib]

Yes. The fact that the show took time to sit down and dela with the logistics and minutia of surviving gave a lot of people hope that it wouldn't be a silly copout show.

I disagree on the abortion thing though. Whether or not there are better methods is irrelevant just as it is irrelevant to a conservative today. The issue is a moral one. A baby is here today, someone is killing it. Roslin may want to deal with incentives in time, but at that moment she has to deal with the public outcry.

At the risk of a minor tangent, it was only a moral choice to the Gemanese. Roslin was the one who made the decision, and she was viewing it in terms of population and survival (We need to start making babies) and that was outwardly the only reason she gave in to it. It can't have been that much of a public outcry to deal with, because the Gemanese were viewed as zealots, and because Gaius then stuck his neck out far enough to go against her and use it as a launching platform for his presidential candidacy. He didn't do so well after that issue went away, but he obviously felt it was a safe enough stance that he could use it to get one over on Roslin. Abortion control or incentives are both long term measures, as you'd be looking at at least 14-18 years (depending if they were so adamant to promote population growth that they lowered the age of consent or not) before anything you did now has any benefit. Incentivising parenthood would have let Roslin keep her right to choose stance and probably resolved the population issue to the same extent as any abortion ban would have done.

What? Baltar ran his campaign on the fact that Roslin allowed the woman to have an abortion. That goes against your point. Enough people cared about that one particular girl having an abortion that it was an issue for him to run on. He wasn't running against Roslin's decision to ban abortion in general iirc.

Incentivising parenthood doesn't matter. IT's like the Big Bird nonsense. The deficit is huge but it's easy to explain X million dollars to some publicly funded broadcast group. It's simple, short term and not overly complicated like some of the other debt situations. Same thing with abortion here, it's an easy thing for people to get riled up about IN THE MOMENT. It wasn't a false set up because the choice wasn't about rational creatures trying to figure out the best way to repopulate, it was about dealing with public outrage and MAYBE using that to deal with the issue of repopulation.

The first time I had a big WTF moment was the really early episode when they got their munitions and left the suspected cylon onsite - only to have the big reveal of the cylons walking in. Big palmface for me. That meant that the scene was more important than the storyarcs, ie, they didn't have a long term plan.

Where was this? Caprica? I don't recall.

[Grumman]

What? Baltar ran his campaign on the fact that Roslin allowed the woman to have an abortion.

Unless he flip-flopped, this is untrue:

Every time you take away one of our freedoms, every time we restrict or curtail one of our rights, we become one step closer to being like them. As the Vice-President, I am bound to follow the administration's lead; as President, I should have no such strictures. Given the current situation, I'm afraid that I have no alternative but to announce that I am, as of now, a candidate for the Presidency.

[Scrib]

Huh. I was just reading the summary and it made it sound as if he was pandering to the pro-life crowd. My mistake.

[Crazedwraith]

When "One year later" popped on the screen. Just totally broke my suspension of disbelief as I felt sure there must be a reset button coming on the time jump but knew that would be totally out sync with the tone of the show.

Can you elaborate further on this? I'm not seeing how this broke your "suspension of disbelief." I also think you contradicted yourself. It broke your suspension of disbelief but you somehow knew it wouldnt' be a reset button? Would you mind clarifying?

The only time I'd ever seen something like 'one year later' before in a tv show was SG-1's 'Absolute Power' which <i>was</i> a dream sequence episode.

Plus there's a massive disconnect between the before and after. The time between the miniseries and that episode was ~7 months. To leap over a year after seeing those seven months left everyone so different that it just didn't feel real. Like I said even though I knew logically there wasn't going to be a reset button, I felt like there should be.

[Alkaloid]

As I recall, Roslin was anti abortion. The girl had an abortion because the doctor just went ahead and did it, and then dared them to put him in jail. And I never put Roslin far from the religious fanatics at all. Her closest advisor was the Gemenon priest, and she based policy decisions on hallucinations that matched passages in a scripture. Hardly a hyper rationalist taking nothing on faith.

A deeper truth is, I was never interested in coming up with an explanation for Why? Never. I mean, I suppose I could've come up with a sufficiently important-sounding bit of technobabble that would've made sense (you see, the Cylon double-talk sensors tracking the Olympic Carrier's nonsense drive signature needed 15 minutes to relay the made-up data wave through the pretend continuum, then the Cylon navigational hyper silly system needed another 10 minutes to recalculate the flux capacitor, etc.) but what would that have really added to the drama? How does explaining that 33 minute interval help our understanding of Laura's terrible moment of decision, or bring us to any greater knowledge of Dualla's search for her missing family and friends, or yield insight into Baltar's morally shattered psyche?

See, this just strikes me as excusing lazy writing, and falling into a common trap in bad science fiction, namely technobabble or nothing. There's no reason explaining that the Colonials deciding the ship was being tracked needs to involve the specific mechanisims involved. I liked the way the episode panned out, they came to the conclusion that the cylons were likely tracking the ship and destroyed it, but couldn't prove it, and they made it off the same evidence available to the audience. They probably destroyed a ship containing a transmitter/cylon agent or something similar, they may have destroyed an innocent but flawed ship that could be tracked or they may have killed 300 odd people who had a run of good and terrible luck for no reason at all, but whatever the answer is they will never ever be sure. But the fact that the characters didn't know isn't a reason for the writing staff to declare it irrelevant, it is, even if the only question answered is 'can the cylons track any other ship the same way yes/no.' Not even having the bare bones laid out means the plot inevitably slips because you start doing whats convenient for an episode rather than what fits with actions people have made before, and leads to character development being less making what could be a believable person and more making a burlap sack full of plot devices.

As for when it all fell apart. From the get go in hind sight, I wrote it off around the boxing episode in season 3, but had doubts before then. The boxing episode was the highlight of the shit show because a character driven show should not need to have an episode to conveniently have all our character conflicts resolved in 40 min, and then do precisely none of that.

Beyond that, the mumbo jumbo ghost people bullshit was frustrating only in that it answered no questions at all. It didn't really even give enough evidence to make a guess. I like to imagine head Six and head Baltar are actually the real Six and Baltar who achieved some sort of enlightenment and discovered the meaning of life or something, and then went back in time as head ghosts to drive the plot in the direction it went in. I think it explains the absolute contempt they have for their past selves perfectly. It's also possible I was reading far too much Simon R Green while the show was finishing. Ghost Starbuck on the other hand seemed to exist only to allow the universt to drop one final turd in Apollos lap before the show finished. Yes, it's impossible you are alive and also a corpse in a crashed viper. It's also impossible for that corpse to be the real Starbuck because her viper crashed on an entirely different planet, you silly cow.