And, hopefully, it will be better than this one, too.
In thinking back over this episode, one storytelling oversight jumped out at me:
Helo’s on Caprica. He unexpectedly runs into his flying partner Boomer, and is surprised and pleased. They run around for a few weeks, with much hiding, shooting, and moist thrusting. Then — BAM! — he finds out Boomer’s a Cylon. His reality is pulled out from under him and his level of trust in the situation goes to zero.
And then Starbuck mysteriously reappears, and Helo immediately accepts her as the real Starbuck he knows, instead of drawing the much more obvious and reasonable conclusion that she’s another Cylon.
“But, but, he just saw Starbuck kill the blonde Cylon chick!”
Yeah, and Boomer killed at least one o’ those also, plus herself. Well, another of herself. You know what I mean. Anyway, the point is, Helo obviously still doesn’t trust her.
It sorta just went past in the episode and I didn’t think about it at the time, but in retrospect it seems like kind of a weird glitch. Maybe it would have been better if the scene had gone like this:
Starbuck pulls herself off Six’s body. As she looks up, Helo appears. They’re stunned to see each other, but just as Starbuck starts to grin, Helo pulls his gun and aims it at her. Beat.
Starbuck: Dude, what the frak?
Then Boomer comes up behind Helo. Starbuck looks at her blankly. Blinks. Then it clicks, and she pulls out her own weapon and points it at Boomer. Beat.
Helo: That’s what the frak.
…Then they can move on from there.
(Maybe I’m just overly amused at the thought of Starbuck saying “dude, what the frak.” :D)
You’re preachin’ to the choir. Actually, I can kinda understand why they have sub-light ships. Maybe FTL is expensive? It’s cheaper to haul dry goods at sub-light? Seems a lot of FTL ships have large landing bays on them. Maybe it’s just cheaper to tool around your own colony with a sub-light, and when you really need to get to the far side of the system, you just dock with an FTL and it takes you?
I just hate it when I have to go all fanboy in order to rationalize these things, when Ron Moore could easily have worked this stuff out beforehand. And my biggest peeve is, what kind of people with FTL wouldn’t have explored at least a significant portion of their local star systems? That makes no sense.
Moore said in one of his podcasts that he has a BSG bible. I fear it mostly contains character backstory and not a lot of science stuff.
Baltar had made it pretty clear he didn’t want to be a father, at least with Six. Hopefully he’s still lying on the ground near the crash site and hallucinating the whole thing. Or playing along with Six, while that multi-tasking brain of his is trying to figure a way out of the whole mess.
That would be preferable. Actually, if it’s just a director’s comments, and not confirmed in the show, is it canon? Maybe the colonies could be spread out.
It takes four days to get to our moon, and between six months and a year to go to Mars. The ship the President is in has seats like an airliner. I can’t stand those things for two hours, let alone six months.
The vipers can accelerate quickly enough to hurt the pilot, maybe there is some really quick sub light civilian engine; you’d still pull a lot of G’s, though.
Hell, there is probably is a Poetic License Sub Light Drive.
PLSLD ™.
Idle speculation about why the Cylons might not care about the destruction of the basestar by G-Boomer:
- Maybe each basestar is dedicated to the production and/or transport of a single type of humanoid-Cylon, and this one happened to be the Boomer ship.
- The insides of the ship was kind of womby-looking, suggesting that it might support the propagation of organic life. This would also explain why the Boomers were as naked as the day there were born…well, because they just were born!
- We’ve already heard Six comment that the Boomer model has flaws; so losing the ship that makes them would be considered a way to get rid of the majority of these failed models and it’s faulty production line.
- The finale episodes begin with G-Boomer attempting to commit suicide, perhaps because of her flawed programming (and we’ve seen other attempts to blow herself up in previous episodes). Her botching the lead-swallowing attempt saves her for the ultimate sacrifice that’s yet to come: causing the suicide of her entire failed production line. The nuke being stuck wasn’t an accident…she intended to have to sit in the basestar with the nuke when it went off. But…
- Meeting the nekkid-Boomers on the basestar locked-in her programming and resolved her to not go down in Cylon history as a failure. She completed the mission and went back to Galactica and scored one for the team, shooting Adama the first chance she got.
- The baby that Caprica-Boomer is carrying represents Boomerbot 2.0, a new, improved model. No need to have all those faulty Boomerbot 1.0 models running around anymore.
Damn, methinks I think about this stuff too much… :o
The PLSLD is Tylium powered, so that works. As for pulling massive G’s, they’ve got “sophisticated” inertial dampeners & artificial gravity.
Just how fast can you go at sub-light before relativistic effects kick in, and stray hydrogen atoms start making dents in your windshield?
Must be a weird dampener if Starbuck still has to pull 6g’s (9g’s?) with her lil’ feet (she’s got the best feet in the fleet!).
-Joe
Six called the contents of the crib “She”, and Baltar didn’t disagree. Could be the literary “she”, though, like anthropomorphizing a boat.
Comm could be FTL - if they can jump a ship, maybe they can jump a packet of photons. If not, it might be easy to make little comm pods with recording devices, transmitters, and their own little jump drives, with the little oscillation overthrusters all spun up and ready to go. Tell the pod “Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you’re my only hope”, hit the jump button, it goes back home and transmits via ordinary radio.
I wouldn’t read too much into when G6 was on-screen and when not, given the editing and pacing of the show.
Cervaise, Helo saw Starbuck getting her ass kicked by C-6, and that may have convinced him she wasn’t a Cylon. I’d still like to know why he, C-B, and C-6 all arrived at the museum at the same time Starbuck was there, though - seems too hokey.
The Cylons seem to have been trying to fully activate G-B right from the get-go, but, as an inferior model, she was misfiring somehow. The visit by the Nekkid Boomer Basestar Brigade was what it took to clear the error. C-B’s baby looks like her own idea, the product of her too-human emotions, but the G-6/Baltar hybrid has a purpose.
Thereby setting up the whole future conflict of the series: The Chosen Child and the Fallen Child. Biblical much? 
I wish the NBBB would visit me!
But when we go to the moon or Mars, the craft spends most of it’s time coasting. If you had a constant acceleration 1g (9.8 m/sec[sup]2[/sup])drive, you could get to Mars in 2 days when it’s at its closest (80 million km), and around 5 days when it’s at its farthest (230 million km, but you’ve got to go around the sun). Maximum velocity in the 5 day case would be around 0.007c, so relativistic effects would be small, but measurable.
We know they’ve got artificial gravity, since the direction of acceleration of the passengers is at right angles to the direction the engines appear to be firing, so a constant acceleration ship for tooling around the system seems quite feasible.
Ye Gods, you’re right. I do hope we’re not going there.
And I wish I’d called it the Bareass Boomer Basestar Brigade (B4) instead - woulda been more alliterative.
Do we know that for sure? The only reason they made short jumps in the beginning was because they were “going beyond the red line”, i.e. they didn’t have anything plotted for a jump beyond that.
The very *first * jump was beyond the Red Line, the longest any of them had ever made. I didn’t see any clue about the lengths of subsequent jumps, which seemed pretty much random, but maybe they had to conserve their dilithium crystals.
There did seem to be some surprise on Adama’s face when he heard the Raider could reach Caprica in a single jump, and Roslin used that as an example of superior Cylotech when inciting Starbuck to mutiny.
So let it be written; so let it be done! B4 it is, from now until the end of time.
So say we all!
That’s true. And we do know that there are other ships in the fleet that can’t make large jumps, which obviously limit the entire fleet as a whole. I’d guess the surprise look was because it was such a small ship that was capable of going so far.
Either way, it’s pretty insignificant unless it comes up again.
Seems as if GB wanted to disable Adama, not kill him. At short range more lethal shots and a larger number of shots would’ve been possible.
I find it extremely interesting that the first thing K6 said after Baltar said “you saved my life” was “care to return the favor?”
Baltar said he remembered the ancient ruins. Seems the uber-plot will involve circular time.
The thing protruding from C6’s chest after the fall was a broken length of rebar- steel rods imbedded in reinforced concrete.
Am I the only one who saw all those Boomers (btw, I love “Bareass Boomer Basestar Brigade (B4)” … beautiful!) and thought:
Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer
Helo Helo
Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer
Helo Helo
Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer
Helo Helo
Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer Boomer
Six! It’s a Six! Oooooooh, it’s Six!
… just me, then?
I watched every single episode of the BSG first season. My DVR caught them all and sometimes it took me a while to get around to it, but I did watch them all.
I didn’t want it to suck. I really didn’t. It came so close to being a good show. I can look past a lot of absurd stuff that doesn’t make sense. Star Trek was filled with it. But, BSG just went to far. Towards the end of the season, things needed to start making sense. Instead, everything just got worse.
How does a terrorist suddenly just get respectable and almost become elected president? How does the scientist get trusted with everything when he’s constantly talking to himself and masterbating in public?
The glowing spine of passion?
The pilot back on Caprica. This entire sub-plot just makes no sense. Every Cylon on the planet is scouring the city looking for him and he can escape by simply walking in the sewer? What do they even need to toy with him for? Strap him down, grap a needle and you can have all the sperm you want.
Just what is it that the cylons want from the humans? If the little cylon fighter is capable of jumping all the way back to Caprica, then they obviously have the capability to jump in and kill the fleet whenever they like. The whole season, it seemed as if they were toying with the human fleet for some reason, but we get absolutely no explination except the completely obvious baby stuff. You could see a pregnant cylon in the plot coming from a hundred miles away.
The acting is bad. The charisma of the characters is horrible. Starbuck just needs to get killed of immediately. The dialogue is wooden and stiff. The only thing this trainwreck had going for it was the shock value of the plotlines, and the general coolness of the subject matter. But, it just wasn’t enough to carry the show. Adama being shot won’t be explained in the next season. Why would they bother to explain it? They haven’t explained anything else. You don’t need to expain everything or have every action of the characters make perfect sense. However, you can’t just have everything be completely unexplained either.
It’s a shame. I hate to say it, but it sucked. It sucked bad. We’ll see if next season is any better. 
I dunno. How do you expect civilization to react when 99.9999% of it has been blown up and you’re stuck in a ragtag fleet led by a flying museum? Maybe glom onto the nearest charismatic figure who makes nice-sounding promises?
Who else are they going to trust? Every supergenius I’ve ever met has talked to himself (and Baltar has never been seen masturbating in public).
So? We’ve seen it three times in what, 14 episodes? Let it go.
Of course it doesn’t - it hasn’t been resolved yet! Are you one of those people who is constantly talking during movies asking their neighbor what’s going on instead of waiting 5 minutes for it to be explained?
Are you so sure about that? If they’re toying with him, they’re not exactly looking for him, are they?
What makes you think all they want is sperm?
Therein lies the big question, doesn’t it? Do you really think that is something they’d answer in the first season? Plus, from every conversation that Boomer had with Helo, and every converstation Six had with Baltar, it seems that Cylon emotions and a sense of faith are high on their priority list, along with getting humans to understand these emotions and faith.
I don’t think you understand how big space is.
Frankly, I can’t agree with you at all here. I don’t know if you’re one of the people all hung up on the fact that Starbuck is a woman, or what, but if you don’t like it, turn it off. I’ve watched a lot of bad television in my life, and I have to say that the writing and dialogue on this show is very good. Not spectacular, not great, but good. I can’t think of too many shows where that was the case during the first season.