Just saw the latest on SciFi Channel tonight. First, can SciFi please not treat us like driveling idiots with their trivia questions?

Anyway, wow. Where to begin?

- The old-school Cylons were also experimenting with human/machine hybrids and built an early prototype of the current base-star design, complete with a human-hybrid driving the boat. Otherwise, they held onto their old designs for the past forty years. Nice shout-out with a view into the cockpit of a Cylon raider. "By your command." Cute.

- The new-school Cylons know vaguely about the old-school Cylons, but the two variants basically forked forty years ago and didn't interact much.

- New-school Cylons would kick the ass of old-school Cylons.

- The old-school hybrid forecast that Starbuck is going to lead the humans astray. False prophet. That sort of thing. This was before she died.

- The foreshadowing for season 3 painted Starbuck as the final Cylon plant.

Oh, and season 3 starts in March. (Hopefully. Asuming the writer's strike doesn't screw everything up.) Random speculation follows:

- We now "know" who all the Cylons are. That means we still have no clue what's up with Baltar. Given that we're now aware of (at least) two different camps of Cylons, it could be the case that Baltar was created by the other camp, as opposed to some breakaway faction. However, the old-school Cylons seemed much less adept at the whole hybrid process. Their appearance was, for the most part, a shout-out to everybody wondering what happened to the classic toasters.

- That means we still don't know all that much about the origin of the human-esque Cylon clones, or about their posthumous reincarnation, or about a lot of the other assorted dangling questions.

I just finished watching it. I almost paid attention.

I didn't really like the show that much. It was okay, but it had a hard time holding my attention. All the disjointed flashbacks just wasted time. Of course, they were all set up that way in order to make the reveal about Major Shaw, but, even so, it felt as if they stretched 60 minutes of show into 120.

I mean, there wasn't really any significant plot or character development. Since it all happened ages ago in show time, they can't really add anything new to the regular characters, which means that they can only update characters that we don't really know anything about. They developed Cain's character some, but mostly just to show that she's a psycopath, and she's dead now anyway, so, so what? They developed Major Shaw's character, but they killed her off, too. Of course, I have the feeling that she might end up being the last Cylon. Plot-wise, they introduced the old-school Cylons, and gave us (further) reason to believe that it's a bad idea for the fleet to follow Kara to Earth. I suppose they showed us how the Pegasus escaped and how Six got on board, but that took about five minutes.

Personally, I find it hard to believe that they generated old-school Cylons just to show up in this one "movie". I bet they show up again in the coming season. Also, it's worth noting that what we're calling old-school Cylons seem to be a middle ground between Larson Cylons and Moore Cylons. The heads are the same as the Larson ones, but the bodies are more like the Moore ones.

I don't think we can assume that Starbuck is the final Cylon. In fact, I think it would be dumb of us to assume so. The others were told to us without hesitation. Why would they not tell us about the final one? So that they can draw out the suspense. But they've clearly painted Starbuck as the final one. The only way that plot device pays off is if she isn't. Otherwise it's a very anti-climactic non-reveal.

One of the things that's bothered me about the whole Admiral Cain character is that she is presented, as are all other characters and situations in the show, without prejudice, in a way that allows us to make up our own minds as to what's right and what's wrong. And rightfully so. But Cain is clearly a psychopath. But it's shot as if the decisions she makes might possibly be okay. And that's clearly intentional. But it bothers me that someone might come away from it thinking that those decisions were correct. And I don't mean that it's irresponsible of the producers; I mean that it bothers me that people like Cain and those who think her decisions are defensible exist in real life.

Here's a nitpick: the whole "razor" allegory would have worked better if the cutting implement shown was actually a razor and not a jackknife.

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can SciFi please not treat us like driveling idiots with their trivia questions?

Yeah, I was confused by that whole "It's just been revealed" nonsense until they mentioned the trivia stuff towards the end. It was really bizarre.

Oh, and it's worth noting that the hybrid referred to himself as a god. That's got to be important.

I'm continuing this old thread since it's on-topic and because it's vaguely relevant to some points I want to raise about the current episodes. Okay, here we go.

At this point, we now know a bunch of crazy new facts:

- Earth really did happen, and it was occupied 2000 years ago by a breakaway Cylon colony. Then the bastards nuked themselves, yet a few of them somehow managed to be reborn in the current generation.

- And how the frak did this somehow end up in the Book of Pythia?

- We have some evidence that Col. Tigh's wife was the secret fifth Cylon. But then what the frak with the resurrection of Baltar and of Starbuck? Is there some uber Cylon human copying machine out there in the universe that we haven't seen yet?

- Oh, and the ancient Cylons (not to be confused with Razor's 'by your command' Cylons) also managed to somehow reinvent humanoid variants of themselves, except these ones had some kind of real genetic diversity, could reproduce, and so forth. This seems to be wildly in conflict with what we thought we knew, which is that current Cylons only recently sorted out how to evolve from toasters to humanoids. Either we're talking about reinventing the wheel, or the reborn ancient Cylons have been pulling strings to manipulate the current-generation Cylons.

- Oh, and Starbuck's toasted Viper, from when she blew it to smitherines, somehow showed up on Earth. What the frak with Starbuck's whole resurrection story, anyway?

I can't wait for all this fraking story to start making sense. At least all the fraked up politics are perfectly believable.