Because Apollo was in charge and he’s a dumb-ass? Starbuck would have handled it differently, I’m sure.
Starbuck wouldn’t have missed with the first shot, becasue she is, say it with me, “The Best Shot In The Fleet.” 
That seemed pretty clear to me. They made a big deal in the previous episode about the strange new model of Cylon fighter, and not knowing what it was. Seems reasonable that the Cylon raiding party aboard would be equally new and different.
Tigh’s summary of the raiding party’s objective was very good for a couple of reasons. As levdrakon says, it’s a nice way to show that Tigh, despite being a bad top leader, a drunk, and kind of a jerk, is actually militarily competent when there’s a clear and simple objective at stake. It’s also nice to have a tactical situation that makes sense (the Cylons want to commandeer the ship and turn its guns on the fleet), in contrast to the ridiculous stuff we typically get on Star Trek and its ilk.
Although this raises a question in my mind, following from last week, about what the Cylons actually want to accomplish. Did they really want to destroy the fleet? Or are the speculations about herding humanity to Earth correct? We keep hearing the same ideas over and over, without getting much of a clue to their larger meaning, but which suggests that the writers do know where the story is headed, or they wouldn’t keep underlining these touchstones. In this ep, for example, Number Six says “all of this has happened before, all of this will happen again” for the umpteenth time. There’s a new implication, though, that it doesn’t point to the specific situation, like a time loop, but rather, considering the human sacrifice revelation (assuming she can be trusted) that humanity will never be able to escape its dark side. “All of this” may not mean specifically “war, escape, flight to Earth,” but rather “humans suck.” Which seems to connect to the religious mission the Cylons are apparently pursuing, and which I hypothesized in the last thread had something to do with driving the Colonial survivors to Earth to reunite all the discrete threads of creation for some reason.
But the toaster boarding party seemed pretty driven to accomplish its goal. Is it possible there’s a schism? Could the humanoid Cylons have one objective in mind, and to achieve it are keeping their thumbs on the mechanical Cylons, who have a different goal? Could the two factions be working at least in part against one another? Maybe the mechanicals are cooperating, giving the humanoids enough leeway to prove their plan makes sense, even though they’d really rather just wipe out the survivors and get it over with, and they keep going right up to the edge of it, hoping they’ll “accidentally” go too far. “Oops, we weren’t supposed to actually kill them all, but, oh well.”
Sure would be interesting to have a bad guy with internal divisions, instead of the monolithic villains that predominate in TV SF. Not saying this is what’s happening. Just saying it’d be interesting.
Hmmm.
Oh, and Cally’s “motherfracker” was very cute and sweet. Nicki Clyne is not at all the physical type you’d expect to see in a military role, but she’s really quite adorable in the part, isn’t she?
Grrrr…^ :dubious: ^
Quite an assumption. 
You mean like the Xindi?
I find it difficult to speculate about the Cylon purpose when I don’t believe Ron Moore has the purpose thought out.
However…“It will happen again”; then what the hell is the point, unless it is to destroy humanity? With that and this episode in mind, I would tend to agree with you about factions. Yet if the Cylons are networked and controlled by a central god, computer or demented child, there couldn’t be factions. I have a headache. I’m going to go cut down more privet hedge and make the world safe for satellite television.
Do you think the skeletons Baltar saw were real? It seems improbable that they’d be there still be there put together and not crushed up when out in the open like that for a couple thousand years. Surely they would have been dragged away by animals or broken down by the elements in that time. I suspect they’re just another halluciantion of Baltar’s.
I love the sound effects of the cylon raiding party on Galactica in the scenes where the marines & Apollo or the Pres & gang could hear the mayhem but didn’t know what was going on. They were just loud enough and ominous enough to be truly scarey without being too loud or too gorey. I was surprised at how fast the toasters moved. For some reason I imagined them as being slow and plodding. These toasters were lightening quick! Not sure if I like the Freddy Kruger claws. I think the machine gun arms are enough. Claws seem over the top. It did shock me when they eviserated the one pilot though. I expected them to be ambushed–but I didn’t expect that.
This show does not shy away from having female characters get the crap beat out of them! The various Boomers have certainly been clobbered (Six beat up Caprica Boomer and Galactica Boomer just about shot her own face off, then Tigh slugged her). Starbuck was really hurting this episode.
Ditto on the Tyrol love. I liked his initial reluctance to give his fellow soldier the morphine (did I hear correctly that they call it “morpha”–that I didn’t like; it sounded like some kids toy) then deciding that he would give the fatal shot. Dude lives up to his responsibilities.
I’m now having “is she a cylon” thoughts about Dualla. It seems odd that all those people were killed while she was lucky enough to have been in the head.
Question for people who know more about computers and networks than I (probably everyone on this board): is it possible for a virus to make all the computers shut down/malfunction at the same time when they’re no longer networked? I know the virus got in while they were connected (and supposedly copied itself), but how did all the various computers that were no longer connected cooperate enough to simultaneously wreck havoc?
If you simply wanted them all to shutdown/malfunction at the same time then yes. Each one is simply checking the local clock on the computer that it is running and you would assume the clocks aboard a military vessel would be in sync.
However, if it’s not time and a command is needed to initiate failure then no, they would have to still be networked in some fashion.
The chief is my favorite, I wish he had a more prominent role. Apollo is too big of an ass to like so far and that’s a shame. He was neck in neck with Star Buck in TOS. I’m warming up to Star Buck, but if she goes down in a blaze of Glory on some episode for shock value that would be ok with me.
Baltar’s lost it. I’ve always been sure that Baltar had a Six chip in his head, but wasn’t sure if he was also crazy. Now I’m definitely thinking Six chip or not, he’s crazy and some of these images he’s experiencing may not even be Six anymore. He’s just going nuts. Coo-coo for Cocoa Puffs. He’s turning into a delusional paranoid schizophrenic. He’s going to see himself as some sort of god-like messiah or something, with humans out to get him. Six may eventually lose control of him, if she’s even still in control.
I was surprised to see the one Cylon take a flying leap through the air. That was cool. My roommate likes zombie movies, but there’s a basic rule he needs to not get all freaked out. Zombies can’t run. When he sees a zombie move where they can run, he freaks. This episode was like that. They broke the scary monster rule! They can run! They can jump! Gah!
I also liked the Freddy Kruger claws. One of the things I don’t understand about the usual human vs. robot story is why robots would limit themselves to the human form. You’re made of metal. You can have any form you want, why not take advantage of it? If I were a robot, I’d be covered in sharp pointy things.
I was wondering if they’d show that. Last season started out totally gender role reversal. Women beat up men. Men get their ass kicked. Then they showed Doral smacking Boomer. But he only hit her once, then Six delivered the real beating. “Well that’s Hollywood acceptable,” I thought. Then they showed Starbuck punching Apollo and Apollo punching her back. Thank goodness they didn’t wimp out of that one. I was curious if they’d allow a man to punch Boomer, and they did. It’s like when they had Starbuck torturing Leoben. They had male marines delivering the actual torture, but Starbuck was the one directing it. I was curious if and when they captured a cute female Cylon, if the producers & the audience could handle it. Boomer still hasn’t gotten tortured yet though, the way Leoben was. If they do get around to it, it doesn’t look good for Boomer. Tigh isn’t the type to mess around, and the President’s not there to stop things from getting too inhumane.
BTW, did we see Galactica Boomer at all this ep? I thought maybe the Cylons would have been trying to recover her for intel purposes or something.
I wonder if that wasn’t a commentary on recent American political debates about assisted death.
The Galactica’s computers were networked via cables, yet the moment they were networked the Cylons started hacking their way in wirelessly. Makes no sense. I’m not thinking about it overmuch. “Just trying to tell a good story” as Ron Moore would say.
They deducted the one person that died on Kobol in the first episode; presumably, the episode 3 credits will have a much larger deduction after the Cyclon ripped through the ship.
We already know that balter is truely a weakminded little man. He swallows everything Six feeds him without question lately.
The way I see it is that the only computer that can receive the Cylon virus is the one in control of intership communications. It’s the only one capable of receiving communications wirelessly from outside the ship. Ordinarily, on the Galactica, this computer is isolated from all the others, leaving the virus to rot inside the communications computer system. When they networked the defense, navigation, and other systems together, the virus saw its chance and tried to escape. By pulling the network plug before it spread to the last system, they prevented it from spreading all the way through. I assume the next step would have been to shut down and restore from backups (making me wonder whether the writers had been collaborating with the SG: Atlantis crew), but they didn’t get a chance because of the boarding party.
On the newer Battlestars and fighters, all the systems are networked together by design and can’t be undone. This is what makes them vulnerable to the Cylon virus.
</WAG>
At the beginning of the series (actually the mini-series) I thought the main reason all the new Battlestars & fighters were vulnerable wasn’t just that they were networked, but that they were networked and running Baltar’s new operation system, which had backdoors built into it by Six.
Adama didn’t want his ship networked, but whatever. The thing that saved them was not upgrading to the new software. That’s what I figured anyway.
The Galactica isn’t running the new software, so the Cylons shouldn’t have any back doors to break in through. Gaeta made sure of that.
Or did he?
Was it me, or were the guys at the crash site using the “flash” / “thunder” password that anyone who’s ever seen a movie about D-Day should be familiar with…cause that’s kind of stupid.
Something I noticed: in the scene on Caprica where Helo and Starbuck are walking down the road to her apartment, there’s a modern-day style octagonal stop sign as well as an X-shaped railroad crossing sign visible behind them.
Also, the license plate on Starbuck’s Hummer looked like a CA plate, but I couldn’t quite make it out. Did anyone else get a closer look? (Perhaps Moore & Co. figured that “California” looks enough like “Caprica” that they could get away with it.)
Well, it did have the virtue of being a set of sign/countersign that they wouldn’t have to explain to the viewers. Everybody would know what was meant by the dialogue. But yeah…it was kinda stupid.
The challenge/password was pretty lame. No so lame that they were using it, but c’mon. It was broad daylight, the Lt. was just standing there, and Tyrol was walking right up to him. “Flash.” “Thunder.” Uh guys, you’re standing in front of each other.
What amazes me is how the humans are still alive. Usually the evil enemy may be stronger, have more firepower, be faster, or smarter, but they have a weakness that the humans exploit.
Interestingly, the Cylons are: 1) stronger; 2) better armored; 3) have instant firepower, including built in machine guns and slashing weapons; 4) have what appear to be far superior ships; 5) have far more ships and “men;” and 6) appear to be far more intelligent and technologically superior to the humans. Yet those drunken, grossly flawed humans just keep holding them off.
Which is part of what grips me to the show. Are the Cylons letting them live? Are they just getting lucky? Or is the Cylon flaw that humans still manage to think outside the box just enough to survive?
I was wondering … Six said earlier there were human sacrifices at that place and that history would repeat itself - could Tyrol’s “mercy euthanasia” be interpreted as a human sacrifice? Then again, maybe I’m starting to over-analyze things, the figuring-out of the Cylon plan is messing with my head.
My WAG is that sacrifice is going to be some sort of theme but not in such an obvious way as putting virgins on the altar. They’ve already explored it somewhat in 33 with the Olympic Carrier (though not fully since you never really knew if any humans were alive aboard that vessell) and twice in the mini series: once when Tigh vented the burning portions of the Galactica and then when Roselyn left the ships without FTL capability behind.
Another WAG is that the toasters are just foot soldiers following orders. They don’t know the overall plan. The plan is to make it look like the cylons are out to destroy Galactica, so “destroy the fleet” is the directive given to the toasters. Meanwhile, the humanoids plan for the raiding party to be just powerful enough to put up a good, believable fight but not really large or well-armed enough to truly accomplish their mission. If it’s true, it’s a bit hypocritical of the cylons to slam humanity for sacrificing their own when the cylons are doing the same thing to their toasters.
That all assumes that the toasters take orders from the humanoids. If so, as I’ve said before, the toasters have a kind of sucky lot. They rebelled after being under human command. Now they’re just servants of (and canon fodder for) the humanoids. Poor scarey toasters. Never can get ahead!
I think if there was sacrificing going on, it was the Lt. who sacrificed Tarn to cover up his own bumbling incompetence. Telling him to go back for the med-kit, the med-kit that wouldn’t have been left behind if the Lt. had listened to Tyrol in the first place, telling him to go back for it alone, that was fraked up.
Tarn was the sacrifice, and the other guy, was yet another victim of the Lt’s self serving incompetence.