It's still not the kind of show I'd recommend without qualifiers, but the episode last night was quite atypical for the show and did an excellent job introducing a core (I assume) character in an interesting way. As for the season so far, I liked the episode with Summer Glau and the one from last week with the high HSQ ending, but the rest of them left me rather blegh. So, still a bit of hit and miss for me, but if they go anywhere creative with the plot thread developed last night, it might become interesting.

the short-lived but greatly-liked-by-me Good Vs. Evil

By me, too. Anybody who posits the Mod Squad as a police force negotiating the Manichaean split wins points, and double when the Mod Squad rides in something that looked like an orange Dodge Dart.

Also, Robinette in an Afro. It was very deadpan retro-cool.

Anyone watch the SciFi channel's Tripping the Rift? I've never seen it, but it has a sexy android chick named Six. Sortal like BSG's sexy android chick named Six.

What's up with that? Probably a coincidence. But then there was that Star Trek android cyborg chick named 7 of 9....

Numbers are so sexy!

I think Tripping the Rift predates BSG (the new one, anyway), and that their Six is a reference to Seven of Nine.

DH got the S2 promo on DVD over the weekend, but it looks really, really, really bad. I sprained my face cringing over the plot synopsis.

the short-lived but greatly-liked-by-me Good Vs. Evil

I LOVED G vs. E. My favorite moment was Robinette being held prisoner in a room with a very hot floor, so he had to keep hopping up and down to keep his feet off of the floor. He sang Matthew Wilder's "Break My Stride"

ain't nothin' gonna break-a my stride
ain't nothing' gonna slow me down
Oh no.
I got to keep on movin'

Nutty -- Hm. To me it seems like there are already qualifiers like "tends to" and "sometimes." And I don't know if it's fair to expect a summation of the history of SF in various media just to provide background to a behind-the-scenes piece about a TV show. If it bugs you because you don't think the show merits the praise, I do understand how that is; I still flinch when I read some claim that Buffy subverted horror clichés, because even at its best I don't think that's remotely true. But if the writer qualified every opinion with "some say" and "it could be argued that" and so on, that would be even more annoying.

If you got someone very clever to design a TV show just for me, you'd wind up with something very much like Battlestar Galactica. I'm wondering if it is ye olde plot vs. character issue again, because... I can see how the characters aren't all that likable, but that's not something I care about, so it doesn't even occur to me as an issue. Stargate could have the most fantastic, lovable, interesting characters ever devised in the history of mankind, and it still wouldn't appeal to me.

...the short-lived but greatly-liked-by-me Good Vs. Evil, which featured Richard Brooks (AKA Jubal Early) and wackiness.

THAT'S where I knew him from! I always had a nagging sense of recognition about the actor, but the lack of 70s hair fooled me into thinking I'd just seen him in guest roles.

But if the writer qualified every opinion with "some say" and "it could be argued that" and so on, that would be even more annoying.

Both of those phrases scream "I am reporting gossip as fact!" to me, so yes. Still, opinion reported as fact, without supporting data, is basically in the same category as gossip. And anyway, the point to me is that the article in question didn't need to make debatable assertions. It was a perfectly good article chronicling a difficult process of interpersonal and corporate negotiation, and very interesting, with a few unnecessary and distracting opinions thrown in.

If it bugs you because you don't think the show merits the praise

Well, that's not really it. It bugs me the way that "Madame Bovary is the first novel" bugs me -- it's not really fair to the history of the novel to make such an assertion, and if you're going to make that assertion, there are lots of novel-specialists who will really really want you to explain why you think so. (N.b. I have heard this assertion, and argued with it strenuously. It turned out she meant "the first modern novel, where 'modern' means exploring the interiority of bourgeois boredom," but it required fighting words to get to the refinement of her original thesis.)

I think there could be a lot of things to like about BSG, but there are a lot of things to unlike, and I can't get past those. For example: if you have an enemy captive, and want to know what makes him tick, and have no compunction about doing cruel things to him, why not run him through a standard battery of psych and neuro tests? Especially if there is such powerful interest in a differential test that will prove human from non-human.

(To answer my own question, the show doesn't want to expose aspects of what cylons are like yet. But, that's not a good reason for the characters not to think of it.)

(I mean, you could have a nice gruesome scene in which a cylon is stuffed into an MRI for a brainscan, and is promptly torn to pieces by its magnetic field. Talk about your traumatic research!)

When we've got Cylon on the ceiling.... (dah, dah, da-dah!)

Oh what a feeling / When we got Cylon on the ceiling