You want the honest answer? Here it is:
I don’t care, really.
Yeah, okay, since you asked, I’ll agree that it’s kind of a dopey idea. Doesn’t make a heckuva lot of sense, and there doesn’t seem to be a good reason for it.
But, see, the thing is, for every dopey idea on the show (and there are a few), there are fifty good ones. The flight deck converted to a museum. Using the old names (Apollo, Starbuck) as call signs instead of actual character names. The tension between civilian and military leaders. The discrepancies in ship capabilities leading to difficult choices about leaving people behind. The low-tech design of everything. And so on. And so on.
So I find myself unable to hold the relative minority of dumb notions (beyond the glowing spine, there’s the apparent glide path of incoming vipers during landing) against the show. This is in stark contrast with Enterprise, where I regularly rake the show over the coals because the good ideas are frequently matched or outnumbered by the dumb ones. I nitpick that show to death because I’m trying to get a handle on why it doesn’t work more often than it does, and to make sure I’m on the same page with everybody else about it. The fact that my criticisms are generally well-received, and seem to be consistently applicable episode after episode, tells me I’ve pretty much pegged the show. I keep harping on the same points in the vain hope that these observations will get some traction in the collective psyche, and the evidence of this past season, more or less, is that they have. Too little too late, as it turns out, but there it is.
With Galactica, on the other hand, I feel like I can acknowledge the occasional stretch into implausibility or the infrequent dumb idea, but I can’t get worked up about them because there’s so much solid gold drama putting things into perspective. A good example would be the Adama-Apollo moment mentioned by JCorre above: “If it were you, we’d never leave.” That gave me chills, and I meant to mention it; thanks for calling it out.
Now, for anyone who’s not able to look past the dumb ideas to see what the show’s really about, I can’t really blame them. De gustibus and all that. I mean, it’s too bad, because I think those people are missing something amazing, but I’m not going to say they’re wrong, exactly. I’ve gotten hung up on less; I gave up on Desperate Housewives midway through the pilot, for example, because the tone seemed off to me. Was I right or wrong to feel this way? Not a valid question, in my opinion, and I’ll cut those who feel the same about Galactica the equivalent slack.
But for myself, I look at the handful of questionable elements, and I compare them to the massive stack of successful choices, and, well, the latter outweighs the former in my mind. And as such, I find myself all a-tingle with anticipation when I sit down to watch the show every week.
Anyway, that’s my answer, and I’m sticking to it.
