What I don't get is that BSG gets ratings that the Sc-Fi channel finds inadequate (or so says the critical analysis). Do we know why?

I have a friend who likes quality SF tv who wasn't watching it because of the cheesy predecessor, even though he had been previously led to water with Buffy, and became a huge Buffy fan. I sat him and his wife down for a random episode of BSG and he said "Oh. I shouldn't have been missing this." I KNOW!

Do we know why?

Spaceship show-->expensive sets and vfx-->needs more viewers than non-spaceship shows in order to achieve "adequate" ratings.

You know, on the level of cracktastic science fiction televisory hijinks, I think this might turn out to be up there with the second-season Millennium episode that posited a plaguey, horrific ending of the world, while the transmitted images on your television began to degrade.

That was awesomely apocalypsetastic, although the show came back later and waved its hands and said, "No, that wasn't what we meant!!"

To a certain extent, the sheer balls-out silliness of it is what makes it work. The only song I can think of that would work in comparable fashion might be "Helter Skelter," and that's both overused and much more nonsensical, lyrically speaking.

Really, considering that Eric Clapton played a Jesus figure in the movie of Tommy, we should be glad that the crack ended where it did. The mystical hoodoo potential of classic rock is not to be underestimated.

signed,
no, Robert Plant, I don't think you have any idea where Mordor is.

needs more viewers than non-spaceship shows

Ahh, fuckity. Makes sense, but commentators shouldn't be shorthanding that. We got told Buffy was an expensive show to make for the size of the audience too (which didn't surprise me either).

Back to the whole "Radio with faces" problem. Gah.

And yes, crack and LSD: Four major characters on this mostly realistic space opera each saying one of the first four lines of a great-but-enigmatic pop song from the late 60s while realizing that they are fucking robots and have always been robots and then actually SAYING "We're Cylons and we've always been Cylons." Then a character returns from the dead and then there's this batshit-insane pan-out that takes in several galaxies to fix on our own planet, all in the final 10 minutes of the season. That's on a level far removed from "One Year Later"-crazy. This is wacked-out, hallucinatory madness, and I feel very justified in talking about monkey crack and LSD.

Maybe it's brilliant, too. I certainly haven't thought about much else today, but I can't decide how I feel about it, and that's usually a good sign.

Corwood, man. Turn on. Tune in. Drop out.

no, Robert Plant, I don't think you have any idea where Mordor is

Is it what's bustling the hedgerow?

Don't be alarmed, now.

I suspect that in Plant's private vocabularly "hedgerow" = "my pants."

t sits in Corwood's corner

I agree though that the circumstances were jarring. Whenever a judge on a tv show says, "I'd like to hear this" or "I'm going to allow it" my eyes tend to do a little sommersault.

Me too. Also, here, I don't care what the panel says they want to hear, once Lee stopped "testifying" and started making a summation, I would object. Just to break up the flow of that. Sheesh Colonial Attorney Who We Have Not Seen Before These Episodes, you never let a "witness" get on roll like that.

Also, how could you NOT cross Lee after that? How about asking: "So, in your view, should we pardon the person who let the Cylons through our defenses 2 years ago?" It's a legit question in response to Lee's "testimony". It also has the added benefit at being a subtle reference to Baltar's other big crime.