I didn't end up feeling anything for any of the characters except for the Asian pilot. And even then, not much.

I enjoyed BG much more than I thought I would - but more than anything it just made me nostalgic for the old series.

I had kind of forgotten about Baltar and really liked the actor they chose (where is he from - something very familiar that I can't place).

So far, Starbuck annoys and agreed, ita, I liked Boomer (the Asian female pilot) as well.

But they got me - I will watch the rest.

Apparently, the actor played Bridget's friend Tom in Bridget Jones' Diary -- aha!

That's right!! He was fantastic in Bridget Jones.

Thanks sumi.

Boomer was good, as was her REO. I liked the chief, too. Apollo and Starbuck were jerks.

And after all, it was so visually plain. The design and style were boringly traditional. (I'm sure the effects were super-cool, but they were in service to not-so-cool visual logic.)

I'm not sure I know what you mean about the visual logic. I'll take boring and traditional if it looks real, and I had no trouble believing people could live in the new BG universe. The interiors on Galactica looked good. It's supposed to be an old ship, so it's traditional by design. I thought the scenes on Caprica were great. It actually looked like a lived-on world. I liked the design of the transport ship, too. I'm not looking for whiz bang. I'm looking for believable.

I liked the way the show looked -- it seemed real to me. Not like the weird antiseptic look of the Trek verse.

I'll take boring and traditional if it looks real

Reaction Control Thrusters!!! How cool was that??

It looked waaay too much like now-here-on-Earth to me. This isn't another human culture, it's our North American culture transplanted seven hundred lightyears away, or whatever.

The bit that really bothered me was when wassername, Mary McDonald, was meeting with the doctor, and the lamp and the chair were right out of any doctor's office in middle America. It threw me right out of the moment.

The acting was fine, the dialogue inoffensive, but the editing and pacing seemed very odd to me. It was ponderously slow and pretentious, and then all of a sudden there were nuclear bombs falling and the government had been vaporized. The hell?

The characters? Eh. Fairly predictable all around: from six seconds in I could tell Apollo had Daddy Issues, without his even saying a word. I did like that they spaced the maintenance guys, and the crew chief's reaction. That was impressive, and believable.

But the colors are grim and dark and grey, I don't find the cinematography or production design interesting, and I already know where the story's going. t yawn

The opinions coming in so far seem to be about 50/50, and kind of falling on "like it, but not overly enthusiastic,*" or "not liking it, but not spewing bile at it," camps.

(*My excitement over the ships using RCTs notwithstanding)

It looked waaay too much like now-here-on-Earth to me. This isn't another human culture, it's our North American culture transplanted seven hundred lightyears away, or whatever.

That's what I meant. The fighter spaceplanes looked like Starfuries, or like X-Wing fighters. I'd seen it all before in other series, and those series had never particularly convinced me of their realness, and BG seemed to be presuming on context to make me believe in realness rather than establishing it themselves. Like, they didn't even attempt to go back to the problem, What would life in space be like? They just copied everybody else's answer and decided that would be good enough.

I thought the plotting and characterization were thin and, on occasion, exceedingly lame, but it was the lack of deep thought on the part of the world-design that turned me off first.