No, this isn’t a zombie thread that someone revived from limbo, we’re Netflix users with no TV reception so we see stuff like this several ticks behind those of you who have cable.
We watched the miniseries and season 1 and 2 and enjoyed it, and then just these last couple weeks did 2.5.
[hijack: WTF is with their weird numbering scheme? Season 1 was all bollixed up with the miniseries being relabeled Disk One of the disk set “Season One” making Disk Two be, literallly, “Disk Two: Disk One of Season One”. So now we’ve got Season 2.5, for petesake? Not to mention at least one disk with Episode 0 on it, which was a repeat of the last episode from the previous disk? They’re doing this on purpose, right?[/hijack]
Anyway: we (“we” being my girlfriend and I) were starting to feel like the series was running out of steam. Turning towards more and more violence to generate the entertainment. The huge long overlay of plot development not getting developed much any more, and increasingly looking like no more than a backdrop against which to have an infinite number of episodes, soap opera in space, projected, without explaining much or taking the overall story-line anywhere, really.
THEN came the episode where the “Number 6” cylon gets rebirthed in the tank. Hold everything, now this is getting interesting again:
• Ha! She’s haunted by Gaius just like Gaius is haunted by her! If it doesn’t quite finally reveal explicitly what or who she is in her visiable-only-to-Gaius incarnation, it does at least shed a whole lot of light on it.
• We finally see the cylons interacting with each other with no humans around. We finally get some sense of who and what they are, as opposed to whatever impressions they might be intentionally trying to create among humans.
• Way cool: so it’s true, the “Sharon” cylon and the number 6 cylon (at least these specific incarnations) really do have complicated mixed alliances, and ethical concerns, and whatnot. And now they’re going to try to affect the opinions of the cylons in general?! Hello, this definitely kicks the whole series wide open again. Will we finally get some backstory on why the cylons decided to wipe out the humans in the first place? Were they badly mistreated by the humans back in the day?
So on to the next episode and… pfui: :mad: 
• The preacher (Stockman) cylon says the “Sharon” and the number 6 cylon have already convinced the entire cylon world that trying to extinguish the humans is inappropriate, and they’ve decided to call it off. Uhh… so we don’t get to see any of the interactions between our two reformist cylons and the rest of the cylon world? We’re just going to cutscene to the outcome thereof?
• Gaius wins the election and the screen on short order says ONE YEAR LATER. Hello?! Getting bored, are we? All the episodes up unti this point have been detailing events tightly packed into a few short weeks after d-Day on Caprica. So all of a sudden you’re saying “Well, ya know, same old same for another year, yadda yadda”, and here’s Gaius and the Presidency after a year thereof…" ??
• And now the little tent-city known as New Caprica is being invaded by, umm, cylons. Not doing the genocide thing but just taking over as conquerors. WTF?
This isn’t the pleasant feel of being thrown for a loop by an unexpected plot twist. This is the nasty whiplash of being thrown out of the car by a plot pretzel. It’s hard to imagine sufficient good episode-writing and plot-development that can go back and recap what happened between Sharon-cylon + No.6 and the rest of the cylons, fill in what-all happened during the course of a year of President Gaius, and settle things back to the point that I have some sense of what the fuck’s going on. Mostly it feels like bored screenwriters who decided to hit the reset button: “I don’t feel like writing any more episodes where they’re trying to escape from the cylons in space. Let’s do a bunch where they’re under the heels of cylon conquerors, that would make a good series.”
On the other hand, they have generally been very good about knitting long slow undulating waves of plotline together, so maybe I should not give up on them just yet.
What say you, those of you who’ve already been past this point: is this a kind of “jumped the shark” moment for the series, or ought we to go rent Season 2.85 or whatever the heck it is that comes after 2.5? Without asking for details or anything else in the way of spoilers: If I really want to see more of things experienced and/or explained from the cylon point of view, am I going to be disappointed?