I get the sense I've been told porkies and have been let down. This turns interest and excitement into disinterest and hate. Can't say it's a road I want to go down but there you go. I really don't care what Ron says any more. It's entertaining TV. I'll watch it to the end but beyond that will drop it and wait for something else to plug the gap. It has happened before. It will happen again. *sigh* This isn't necessarily a comment about the show, just expectations and delivery tripping over themselves. It's a perspective of where I'm at. Nothing more (or less). Such is life.

The Plan looks like more of a marketing gimmick than anything else, and it's being retconned as we write these words with leaks suggesting that the plan wasn't some cool unanimous and coldly executed thing but a general lurch with a whole bunch of Cylon office politics behind it. Then there's the Final Cylon who was supposed to be in there from the start. Perhaps, but that looks a bit weak now especially in the light that Ron nearly went for the hybrid in Razor and only clicked on the back of an emergent decision over the other four.

Ron's also retconned his earlier comments about clues. All that stuff about dropping hints and the Last Supper picture look like a load of waffle. He had folks chasing their tails over that for months. Yeah, the schedulers refusing to air this last episode so they had a hook to keep people hanging on for the rest of series, and all that 'viral marketing stuff', might play well with egos and suits but it leaves me feeling disappointed, angry, and abused. It's too late and nobody will put themselves in the firing line for it but it's shitty.

Couldn't be bothered to read beyond the first quarter of the interview. I hit the non-event horizon so just skimmed it.

I am not sure I get it - what is it some of you are so angry about?
Why do you feel so let down or made fool of?

Admitedly, some ideas here and on other blogs are much more interesting and more plausible than the direction the show seems to be going in, but still, there are 9 (or 11) more episodes to go. Let's wait and see how it all plays out before we make the final judgment, eh?

Why do my comments always get flagged as potential spam?
Now, there's something to be miffed about. ;)

I understand why you are mad, but it is silly. So what if they retconned the story, so to speak. So the guessing game wasn't based on something you could see in the show. Big deal. Watch the show and enjoy the story. You never know how it is gonna turn out. The point of the show wasn't a whodunnit. This is about character. The characters aren't dead...yet.

RDM and Co intended to produce a piece of work that would make the audience feel what the characters are feeling and they succeeded. I think however since they were so successful I’m not in the mood to forgive the technical blunder the set on Cinder Planet represents. After 2000 years none of the metal, wood or shadows on stone would exist. The article in the Chicago Tribune doesn’t help because they go on about production budget issues with the extravagant Cinder Planet set when they would have been better off shooting in any old empty field. So they succeeded in evoking an emotion and now I’m going to use that feeling to call them on their mistakes and wonder what else they’ve messed up. The time line seems shot, or the characters are really bad at dating artifacts like the beacon with the disease being 4000 years old, the Temple on the Algae planet being 4000 years old and the 2000 year old Kobal ruins that actually looked right. One possibility I’m seeing for the Cinder planet is what this guy on the Sci-Fi forums who says that the Star Patterns at the Temple on Kobal and the Cinder Planet don’t match real Earths star patterns but they are close. He presented evidence with computer analysis and I didn’t look too hard but perhaps he was right. He also contended that the sight of the Cylon Civil war battle was in our Solar System and the planet was Jupiter because the star patterns did match at the battle site where Starbuck found the damaged Baseship. So is the star the Cinder planet orbits one of the Stars that make up a system like Alpha Centari which is a Trinari system 4 light years from Earth's sun. Starbuck talks about such a system when she said she was at Earth. Adama at the end of Sometimes a Great Notion orders Geata to find the closest Star system of the types with habitable zones. I’m sure this is SOP for the RTF but it’s the first time the order makes it in a scene that I recall so does it have significance? It’s said in the show by Tigh and the interview with RDM that the 13th tribe of Cylons moved to the Cinder planet and called it Earth. Does the wording mean something? Why don’t they say the 13th tribe moved to the planet called Earth. I’m thinking the guy with the Star pattern analysis is on to something. As far as I know the only time we’ve actually seen what we would recognize as being Earth was the end of season three. They've been at the Cinder Planet two episodes now and we have not seen any continents or the moon and any shot or scene. So I’m now really disappointed and confused and hope they didn’t botch the whole thing like they botched the set on the Cinder Planet.

I did find the reaction of some of the Cylons interesting. Everyone is going to go on about Dualla, Adama, Roslin, Tyrol and Tigh but this is what I noticed more.

Leobin was beside himself when a dead Starbuck is found. He was so convinced he was on to something all through the series. I was never sure of what it was and now it seems he’s as confused by his nonsense as I always was.

D’Anna went from protecting the last darn three in the Universe and threatening to nuke the fleet for the final four to completely giving up over dead Cylons on the Cinder Planet and finally staying behind. I wonder why she never told Tigh who the fifth was? She could have really yanked his chain with it.

Anders asked the ultimate question and I wonder what significance it has. How is it possible that the war that killed them on the Cindar Planet in a prior incarnation could have been 2000 years ago? Perhaps he saw the history channel show, “Life after People” in a prior life and now he’s got his doubts.

There’s to much confusion and disappointment.

I don't think we can believe a single thing RDM says at this point and that's fine. I'm just going to sit back and be entertained. BSG got some real hardcore Science Fiction fans interested and those fans expected it to make sense on several levels. These are the people who are going to pull out the star-maps etc. and look for real scientific explanations for story elements. That's part of the fun for Science Fiction fans, but BSG isn't holding itself up to those standards and the backlash is due to this gap in expectations. Wasn't it Sackoff who early on said something like the show was not really Science Fiction, but a drama in space (like Dallas?).

So who else thinks Ellen is going to mysteriously show up in Tigh's shower?

SERIOOUSLY! You are takign your theories and speculations too serious! There are 10 more episodes more to go, why don't pass judgement afterwards? I thought "sometimes a great notion" was totally awesome and excellent, and really pointing in the right direction (for me at least).

Just remember, RDM said that the Thirteenth Tribe settled on this planet and christened it Earth. This planet who we never saw from space. So it might not be OUR Earth. There are more revelations yet to come. One way of looking at it is this- today's Cylons want to imitate their masters. Who's to say the 13th Tribe of Cylons didn't imitate the people of Earth to the point of finding their own planet and giving it the same name?

Brad, I think you have been making a big mistake counting on Hollywood writers' knowledge of science. An even bigger mistake is assuming that even if they're scientific wunderkinds (which the writers are not) that they would hold true to science for the sake of the story

Listening to RDM- 95% of what he says about developing the series is about character, not science. This show may make fewer mistakes than others, but it doesn't explain how this low-level society has artificial gravity and FTL, because those are necessary for the show. For example, in another post where I pointed out that they have made mistakes in the past (the algae planet orbiting a star going supernova, when those stars don't live long enough for habitable planets to develop). You pointed out it was likely intended to be a nova, that they used the cooler term, and that it had to be a nova because the neutrino burst would have killed everybody, etc... missing the point, because it's likely the crew of the show doesn't know about that, or likely decided to ignore it.

The often quoted Q & A from RDM about reconciling the concept of the original show with evolutionary theory:

"The question I would really like to see addressed is how to reconcile the underlying quest of Battlestar Galactica with actual scientific plausiability. The quest of Battlestar Galactica is to find Earth, the 13th Colony. However, it is a basic and well-substantiated tenet of science that human life here on Earth evolved slowly from a primate ancestor. Attempts to deny evolution based on the notion that human kind deserves a far more worthy origin than what evolution details, are a diservice to the pursuit of scientific truth and endeavors in our own world. There was always that reactionary sense to the original series, which drove it away from a secure standing as *science* fiction. How will the new series avoid this pitfall?"

RDM: I don't have a direct answer for this question yet. There are a couple of notions rolling around in my head as to how we reconcile the very real fact of evolution with the Galactica mythos, but I haven't decided which approach to take. However, it was a fundamental element of the orginal Galactica mythos that "Life here began out there..." and I decided early on that it was crucial to maintain it.

This quote, seemingly the one that gave you hope that they would accurately acknowledge human evolution, is the one that worried me that they would do the opposite, thanks to the last sentence, even though I know the quote in the new series was delivered from a Colonial perspective. And who's to day he decided to go ahead and keep it?

Anyway, in regards to the timeline- the important events are all based around disasters and exoduses, so we can assume that they were able to keep accurate records in the tumult, so any mistakes can be chalked up to that. And dating finds on the show with the equipment on the show- basically whatever they happened to have on hand in any of the fleet ships, allows a retcon in terms of the stated timeline.

And one more thing- based on what RDM has said, you cannot look at ANY prop, and piece of clothing, any line of dialogue as dating BSG at any point in our past, present, or future. From a frak party podcast RDM took part in:

And then that stuck with me, and I've— as early as Season One, I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower" playing in a jukebox, in the background, not in the familiar Hendrix version, but just a Galactica version of "Watchtower", as a way of saying to the audience that there is a tie between this show and our reality. That, essentially— y'know, you've heard us say, over and over again throughout the series, that "all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again", and there's a sense of the cycle of time, that certain of these events are preordained, and that there's a cycle, there's truly a cycle. If you remember, in the episode "Flesh and Bone" in Season One, Leoben, the Cylon, is talking to Kara and he says that "there's a cycle of time. And maybe the next time through the cycle, I'll be the interrogator and you'll be the prisoner", and that the story is the same, but the players swap positions. And the idea that there was a song or verse that transcended that cycle, that certain things repeated themselves— I mean why do they wear ties, why do they speak English, why are there certain phrases— there are phrases from Shakespeare sprinkled throughout the series. And there's a certain idea that all these things repeat themselves in certain ways for certain reasons, and so I wanted to use "All Along the Watchtower", something that would grab the audience to go: "Wait a minute, how the fuck could that be?! How could they possibly know what that is? Does that mean the show takes place in the distant future? Does it take place in the distant past? And what are the connections of that?" So it is a clue towards the larger explanation of what Galactica says the cosmology is, and so—

And the finding of Cylon Centurions in the ruins proves this. Not just that they built robots, but that they built ones physically so similar to the Centurions that attacked the Colonies in both wars. So looking at our own society, based on the quote above, we're gearing up for the beginning/end of another cycle because our own civilization is so similar to the

After I heard the above, I decided that it would take the name of a city or location on Earth to accurately determine when the show takes place. Add to the fact that they have left the planet the 13th Tribe christened Earth and are looking for a new home planet, and

MILD MYSTERIOUS SPOILER...
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A casting call went out for (I'm paraphrasing from memory) Athletic extras willing to have their hair braided and must be comfortable waring a bathing suit. I imagine they might be referring to primitive loincloth wearing humans they find on the real Earth. IF the show is in the past, it's hard to understand why they would bother with an intermediary stage in post show history between then and now, taking time to show the RTF's caveman descendants. From JAmie Bamber to TV Guide: Jamie Bamber says, "Who's to say the cinder planet the audience saw was a look ingo Earth's future? Maybe it's the far, far past. It could be prehuman. That question will stand until the climax of the show."

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/02/0216_050216_omo.html

If the show keeps the homeworld as Earth idea, there may be room in humanity's 200,000 year history for a space-faring civilization to travel to Kobol and start the history we know from the show, and their EArthly cousins could have been wiped out by an even akin to the Sumatra supervolcanic eruption. 50,000 years is more than enough time for all of its remnants to vanish, according to "The World Without Us."

Brad, I like you, your ideas, but I've been postulating so much I may have buried my main point. For good reason, as it may sound rude to sum it up in one or two sentences. No rudeness is intended, so here it is: The show might be in the past. Prepare yourself for that possibility and deal with it if it comes to past.

http://www.hulu.com/watch/53331/battlestar-galactica-sometimes-a-great-notion-commentary#s-p1-st-i1

Episode Commentary from RDM. Early in the episode he again says the 13th Tribe came from Kobol and settled a planet they called EArth.

It is Earth. At least it is the Earth talked about in the scrolls and the one Roslin and Co. have been following the trail to. How do you know? Gaeta confirmed the star charts from the Tomb of Athena. Whatever planet they found is the one that has the star chart inside the Tomb of Athena. Is this is ONLY Earth? Obviously not. I think it is pretty apparent at this point that Earth and Cylon are the same word just in different translations. Wherever the people who lived on this planet fled to is also gonna be called Earth/Cylon. One thing people assume is that there are distinct human and cylon races. There aren't. There are different evolutions of the same race. Whatever the biological construct is that was first created by the original humans, so to speak, was enough human genetically that they could breed with their creators. All the people are different variations of interbreeding between these species.

If RDM states that he isn't ignoring the fact that we evolved here on Earth, than the show it completely pointless! If not just pointless, it's stupid and senseless. Humans evolve separately on 2 different planets, they culturally evolve a long the same lines on 2 separate planets, the alien humans, unknown to them, use the terrestrial human names found in Greek and Roman for Gods and planets, they have the same names for the constellations... The show was based on the premise that human life began somewhere else, and migrated elsewhere, that we are directly related to them, and for the past 3 seasons RDM didn't stray from that premise, so it would ridiculous to suddenly say that humans evolved here.