Fracking hippies. Ha! Can't believe I remembered that wrong.

I loves me some closed captioning, I do!

Man, I was so tense through most of that. I totally thought that Helo was dead.

I was thinking that there were some things that might be explained in "The Plan" - for example - who it was that 6 greeted when she left Baltar at the beginning of the miniseries.

Maybe we'll find out more about Daniel.

I can't figure out how I feel about it all.

Oh yes, "The Plan". That will be interesting. i hope it gives some closure to a few things that really bugged me...

The action, well, the action gets an A, maybe an A- if I want to be mean about some of the shaky CGI lighting on some of the centurions, especially the old ones.

The plot? Maybe a C+. Nope, not satisfied. The opera-house sequence payoff wasn't anywhere near as meaningful as it should have been. Hera's presence should have meant something - perhaps by having her be the one who put her hand in the hybrid's water to interesting effect - but instead her presence there was only important because everyone decided she was important. Her being the first true hybrid had very little bearing on that scene beyond what we already knew - that both sides wanted her.

The unanswered questions are what really are the buzzkill for me; the accuracy of the scriptures, the 'angels', the nature and intentions of 'god'. Essentially this divine plan turns out to be exactly that, a divine plan. I suppose the fact that these things were exactly what they said they were could be conceived as a plot twist by virtue of confounding our expectations that they were anything other than what they seemed, but that's not exciting writing. It's also anti-climatic as the nature of Baltar's visions and what 'god' actually was were important questions that have hung over the series since the beginning.

Some of the emotional payoffs were good though. Though it turning out Kara Thrace really was some kind of divine messenger was just another frustratingly vague closure.

I hope when the DVD is released, some of that extra footage explains why they felt it wise to dump their fleet into the sun, when the lessons of New Caprica make it clear you're not safe until every last Cylon is dead. After all, there had been Basestars seen jumping in and out from the Cylon colony so it has to be assumed there are still Basestars out there that want some payback for the colony's destruction. The destruction of the fleet seemed to be a plot device that aided the series' closure without making any internal sense for the characters.

So, not enough answers for my taste. Good action, good emotional resonance but it's all squandered by not actually wrapping up key segments of the plot that have been with us since day 1.

Ho hum. It was fun, but it was popcorn masquerading as a filling meal.

Finally mostly caught up, and the only thing that's sticking out is the horrible wig Lee wore throughout most of the ep (or the stylist ruined his hair with too much product and over-blow-drying).

Not impressed with most of it.

What tickles me is that I was making "Galactica is B Ark" jokes waaaaaay back in S1 or S2. And I was right! Bwah!

I could have done without the "Science is BAD" lecture and proto-Cylon montage at the end, but you know, I think this show has earned it. Not the scene specifically, but the right to be a little indulgent in the end.

(And speaking of indulgent, the 45-minute denoument played much better with commercials than it did at the screening. Since we didn't have a clock to pace ourselves by, pretty much every time they faded to black on Earth, we thought it was over. It was like RotK times A MILLION.)

Ron Moore - about Daniel:

What exactly was Kara, and were people chasing down a rabbit hole when they assumed her father was Daniel, the missing 8th model cylon?

Ron Moore: Daniel is definitely a rabbit hole. It was an unintentional rabbit hole, to be honest. I was kind of surprised when I started picking up [that] speculation online.

For those of you who don’t know, there was a deep part of the cylon backstory that had to do with one of the cylons that was created by the final five [called Daniel. Daniel] was later sort of aborted by Cavill… it was always intended just to be sort of an interesting bit of backstory about Cavill and his jealously. A Cain and Abel sort of allegory. Then people really started grabbing on to it and seizing on it as some major part of the mythology. In couple of interviews and in the last podcast I tried to go out of my way to say “look, don’t spend too much time and energy on this particular theory,” because it was never intended to be that major a piece of the mythology.

Moore: Kara is what you want her to be. It’s easy to put the label on her of “angel” or “messenger of God” or something like that. Kara Thrace died and was resurrected and came back and took the people to their final end. That was her role, her destiny in the show… We debated back and forth in the writers’ room about giving it more clarity and saying definitively what she is. We decided that the more you try to put a name on it, the less interesting it became, and we just decided this was the most interesting way for her to go out, with her just disappearing and [leave people wondering exactly what she was].

From a Discover Magazine interview with Ron Moore and David Eick.

Yeah, I feel that way too.

I know too much about non-tech subsistence living to believe they're going to be happy for very long, especially without medicine and, oh, guns and just about everything else.

At least Baltar does know about farming, which explains why at least Hera may live long enough to procreate.

Personally, I'd like to think that Sam was smart enough to say, oh yes, I'll take the fleet into the Sun, park it all on the far side of the Moon and then monitor when each of the mini-colonies starts to get really miserable and decide that living on the land without technology really really sucks and they're sorry about the whole idea, then he send down a shuttle with some medicine and an invitation to come back and live in a brand new comfortable Basestar that he's been building with the help of Centurions who with their newly installed free-will decided they still want to serve skinjobs.

Also, Roslin and Dualla, Zack, Boomer, and a couple others get resurrected just like Kara and there's happy reunions all over.

As long as I'm asking for stuff, I'd like a pony. Failing that, a small goat for my backyard.

From a Discover Magazine interview with Ron Moore and David Eick.

Heh - that was from the panel on Monday. (Questions from the audience, not Discover magazine.)

I know too much about non-tech subsistence living to believe they're going to be happy for very long, especially without medicine and, oh, guns and just about everything else.

I figure that's why Hera specifically is "mitochondrial Eve" - nobody else lived long enough to have more kids.

The feeling among the group I watched with was that the reason everyone agreed to the "let's split up and live off the land" plan was that nobody was really listening past the "let's split up" part. After 4 years cooped up on those ships, I'd probably jump at the chance for my own continent too, whatever my chances for survivial were.

Yeah, I'm sure the idea of as much space as possible was extremely appealing - particularly in the bright light of day and in summer.

Come winter and/or the first large predators - I'm sure that changed pretty quickly.