Battlestar Galactica (2004 TV series)/Headscratchers: Difference between revisions
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** It was explicitly stated in the pilot miniseries that the only ships that were not falling victim to Cylon hacking were ships that were either being refitted or were older models. Presumably a few other ships were being refitted, remained active, and were able to fight back, but got overwhelmed by the Cylons.
** A fairly large number of Battlestars were immune to the hacking. They got listed fairly early on, but the Pegasus and Galactica were the only two that didn't attempt a head on confrontation with the Cylon fleet.
* They might have been strapped for resources while making ''The Plan'', but recognizing the Middle East (more specifically the Persian Gulf), the Vancouver urban area and Europe in orbital views of Caprica is a bit unnerving. And so is finding the ''[http://skyscraperpage.com/cities/?buildingID=84 Emirates Office Tower]'' in [https://web.archive.org/web/20130625170937/http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/6/63/Impending_Doom.png the Caprican skyline].
* Small but irksome - you're telling me Baltar and Six never had sex doggy-style? That he never once looked at her back when she was feeling hot and heavy? Human spines do not glow red during sex no matter how turned on the individual, and apparently the effect with Cylons is quite noticeable. Seems like this is a big hole in the idea of Cylons being exactly like people, and something that should have rooted them out.
** This glowing backbone thing kind of disappeared after the first season, didn't it? I don't remember seeing it after that.
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** It seemed to me that their spine only lit up during orgasm, so it's likely that doggy style could still be used without detecting anything. Cylons would just have to switch positions before achieving orgasm. (Makes it a lot easier to know if she's faking it though.)
** It also happened when Helo has sex with Caprica Boomer. I personally would have just written it out as canon discontinuity if it weren't for that.
*** And Helo must have been really good at whatever it was he was doing. She had her pants on and pulled all the way up to the waist in what was (I'm assuning) supposed to be penetration.
* Whatever happened to Kobol? It looked like a fine place to settle down and start over.
** The Cylons knew where it was so it could never be considered safe. Also maybe at the time too many were hesitant to try settlement there for religious reasons, plus they had found the map to Earth, such as it was, and thus had a safer destination in mind which the Cylons were, at the time, unaware of.
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** The key word here is encephalitis, which is an inflamation of the brain. The download process is meant to preserve the mind of the individual Cylon at the moment of death. By the time the disease killed the Cylons, their data would have been corrupted. Apparently the Cylons believed that this would spread via the resurrection network and infect everybody, thus transforming a biological virus into a computer virus. This is pure conjecture on the part of the Cylons, however, as we later learn that resurrection is not their technology and they don't understand it very well.
* "There are many. And they have a plan." Why didn't the Cylons HINT at the plan outside of "It's the will of God?"
** Lots of it is due to [[
** [[Word of God]] claims that the "plan" was [[Executive Meddling]]. This doesn't appear to have stopped the show creator from making a TV movie called "The Plan", however.
** 1st note- they DID have a plan- kill all the humans. Any military strategist will tell you, though, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. 2nd note- somewhat executive meddling, somewhat "new viewers" issues- one of the staff suggested the idea for the intro shots to help new people roll in with the story, and it stuck.
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*** Except that wasn't what he was talking about at all and instead referring to what happened on New Caprica. There's nothing blindingly obvious about it.
** Finally we have an answer on this. He didn't fight in the war, those memories are fake. He did, however, stop it.
*** This doesn't explain why Galen has memories of his parents, including his father who was a Priest of sorts. Granted, they could have been programmed as well, but the ''only'' character with an explicit "last survivor" mention was Sharon. [[
**** Galen's backstory works as false memories, since he and his family were conveniently estranged. More problematic is Anders, who's backstory beyond being a sports star is never really explained, [[Fridge Logic|but one has to think]] that some sports reporter would have started digging into his background for a profile piece or what have you and realized something didn't add up.
** This assumes that the Five were all placed in Colonial society recently, like Boomer. But Tigh has clearly known Adama for more than twenty years, and has aged in that time. So Cavil had downloaded Tigh, at least, into a somewhat younger body. Given how much younger Anders appears, had he been downloaded around the same time, he would have been a child or teenager and could plausibly have been left in a home and so later portrayed as an orphanage-boy made good in the press.
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*** Not really. Galactica ''is'' a warship. And a pretty damn big one considering the size of her crew - she's not short of storage space. And she was built to fight a fairly bloody war. Creepy as it may seem, a storage room containing a few thousand flags for the express purpose of conducting funerals isn't out of the question
**** And as I recall, as the serise goes on, they start forgoing coffins, and just drap the corpses with flags, so the fridge logic here seems sound.
*** What bothers me is that they've got a fleet that is chronically short of all kinds of supplies, so why are they throwing away perfectly good biomass packed full of all sorts of recoverable materials, chemicals, minerals, and proteins?
**** We bury our dead.
* Why for the love of the gods did it ever occur to Adama that removing Roslin from office at the end of Season 1 was a good idea? Even if he's pissed at her persuading Starbuck to return to Caprica for the Arrow, he knows that Tom Zarek -- ex-con, ex-terrorist, up-and-coming politician -- would just love to jump on this kind of issue to gain power. And how does he not anticipate resistance in Season 4 when he decides that {{spoiler|they really need to install Cylon FTL drives in every ship in the fleet? Without giving people a chance to get to trust the rebel Cylons, whose last attempt at peaceful coexistence resulted in the debacle of New Caprica?}}. At some point, you'd think the man would accept -- perhaps reluctantly -- that the civilian fleet is not going to follow all of his orders without question.
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***** ^^ I also noticed this, but it led me to another thing that bugs me. Anyone who has ever been aboard a ship knows how fast gossip and rumor can travel among tightly packed and bored people. Now, given the number of people who have witnessed Baltar talking to his imaginary friends, about how long would this have taken to spread across the fleet? Days? A week at the outside? However, I realize the reason this was never followed up on in the show was because the civilian population knowing that he talked to an imaginary person would have made Baltar's candidacy for president utterly implausible (as it was implausible enough to begin with).
****** And how often are wild-sounding rumors about a political candidate completely ignored by all their supporters, because they're obviously just slanders being spread by their opposition? That only happens ''every election cycle'' around here. Yes, even the true rumors.
* The case of Galactica's missing ventral turrets. Do they exist or don't they? The strange disappearance of the ventral guns makes me think their canon status is debatable. They're clearly visible in the Miniseries several times as well as in [https://web.archive.org/web/20130626113517/http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/File:BSG_Ortho_Top_%26_Bottom.jpg this] Zoic rendering, but were never depicted in the show. Dialogue in "Resurrection Ship Part II" may have referred to them, but usually only the eight dorsal turrets were shown in action, though the batteries located on the fore- and mid-bow made some easy-to-miss appearances as well. These weapons were probably destroyed during the attack on New Caprica, but they were never illuminated like the other 14 turrets are, except in the Miniseries. They also don't appear in [
** It may also be worth mentioning that the ''Galactica'' is an awesome-looking ship from all angles, except from below it, where it looks downright ridiculous.
* Could they at least try to make Caprica not look like Vancouver?
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** I always got the impression that that Basestars weren't meant to take hits because, when they were being designed, the Cylons assumed that any confrontation with the Colonials would involve some heavy nuke spamming on both sides, so they there was no way to up-armor them enough to make a difference, and it was better to cover it in missile launchers and raider slots, giving the ship both a strong antimissile screen and the ability to do plenty nuke spamming of its own. This didn't end up happening, because the Cylons used up the vast majority of their nuclear arsenal in the attack on the Colonies, so they were down to very few left to deal with Galactica and Pegasus. The Colonials, on the other hand, seemed to have rejected nuke spamming for one reason or another, or else simply kept Pegasus and Ragnar way under-stocked. If Galactica ever had run into a Basestar (and her raiders) carrying a full load of nuclear missiles, she'd have been very quickly destroyed.
* The series finale ''Daybreak'' [[Did Not Do the Research|didn't really seem to have done the research]] when it comes to what ancient Earth was like. Earth 150,000 years ago is depicted as being basically just like Earth today minus civilization. In reality [https://web.archive.org/web/20080116122058/http://www.esd.ornl.gov/projects/qen/nerc.html there was a major ice age 150,000 years ago], so the climate would have been different and the coastlines would have been different because the sea level was lower (the orbital shots and map shown in the show depict modern coastlines). This is particularly problematic because [https://web.archive.org/web/20061016035754/http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Galen_Tyrol#Notes apparently Word of God says Galen Tyrol settled in Scotland] when 150,000 years ago Scotland would have been both part of continental Europe and ''buried under a glacier''. The closest place to Scotland he could have feasibly survived is southern England, and again Britain wouldn't have been an island in this period. There are problems with the anthropology too. The Colonials are supposed to have settled all over the planet, but there's no evidence for ''Homo sapiens'' outside Africa until tens of thousands of years after the events of ''Daybreak'', and the fossil record is pretty consistent with humans having spread out from Africa over the past ~100,000 years, not suddenly appearing all over the planet 150,000 years ago. There's also the idea that Earth natives had no language, which is somewhat dubious. The fact that we have specialized neural and vocal machinery for speech doesn't make much sense if it was suddenly introduced from outside instead of something we evolved over time (for comparison, chimps have been taught to sign, but teaching them to speak is another matter) - although possibly this could be the result of interbreeding with Colonials - and there's some evidence that Neanderthals had a capacity for language (they had human-like [[wikipedia:FOXP2|FOXP2 genes]] and [http://sjohn30.tripod.com/id1.html hyoid bones]), and they diverged from us long before the Colonials arrived. In fairness, the Colonials apparently concluded Earth humans lacked language by observing one small group from a distance for what probably couldn't have been more than a few hours, so it could be a case of [[Unreliable Narrator|in-universe did not do the research]].
* Why has Caprica City (for example) recently been depicted as being basically a hybrid of American and European cities, complete with cars that really wouldn't look out of place on our roads? It wasn't like that in the miniseries, in which it seemed like a far more futuristic place. This is a civilisation with a grasp of artificial intelligence, artifical gravity and even faster than light travel!
** The production team always wanted to drive home the idea that the Colonial culture was just like ours whereas their technology was much more advanced. However, in the miniseries it was important to establish that this was still a 'futuristic' world of a sci fi show. Later they discovered that the audience was perfectly able to comprehend the dichotomy and so dropped the non-essential sci-fi trappings. And, obviously, its cheaper!
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* It was clear that, one-on-one (or even two-on-one) Basestars were no match for a Battlestar (even one as run down as Galactica). So why couldn't the Cylons have at least tried to come up with some sort of dreadnought that could go toe-to-toe with Galactica. Hell, they'd only need one, with a couple of Basestars as backup.
* Why Why WHY did they think the Pegasus was a good trade for Galactica? The Pegasus was twice the size, much more heavliy armed, had fighter fabrication bays, simulators, and wasn't falling apart. If anything, Galactica should have bitten the bullet for Pegasus to live.
** Because the name of the show is ''
*** That seems to have been the original plan - Galactica and her airwing go down fighting whilst the refugee ships jump out and RV with Pegasus to continue the voyage - unfortunately for the plan, Pegasus returned to New Caprica to join the battle and, without her airwing to protect her, was shot to pieces - IIRC she was all but disarmed and barely answering to the helm when Lee Adama gave the order to abandon ship.
** As I recall at the introduction of the Pegasus, it was pointed out that it was designed to have more firepower with a smaller crew. Which implied that it could hold less passengers. Given the Galactica had long been carrying a substantial amount of civilian passengers, Lee may have felt that firepower was less important than living space.
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*** Besides, planets that can support human life are ''extremely'' rare in the universe. For instance, besides Earth there are no planets yet observed by humans that can plausibly sustain life at all, let alone human life, without massive terraforming.
*** To be fair, that's only because we can't, currently, 'observe' any planet smaller than a gas giant.
*** It's slightly better than that, but the fundamental point still stands - our methods of planet detection are biased towards finding gas giants and "super-earths" in very close orbits around small stars (such as red dwarfs). The current telescopes - such as Kepler - ''can'' detect "super-earths" around stars more like the Sun, but it's very difficult.
*** Habitable planets seem to be rare in-universe. Outside of the 12 Colonies, the Colonials find five of them: 1)Kobol, 2)The devastated "Earth", 3)"Our" Earth, 4)the Algae Planet, and 5)New Caprica. New Caprica and the Algae Planet were marginally habitable at best.
** They don't. The Twelve Colonies are in a dual binary star system, for a total of [https://web.archive.org/web/20130819182717/http://media.battlestarwiki.org/images/9/98/Quantum_Mechanix_The_Twelve_Colonies_of_Kobol.jpg four solar systems].
* In 'No Exit' Cavil threatens to extract the secrets of resurrection directly from Ellen's brain. It is unclear, judging by subsequent events, if he would actually have been able to do this, but surely if he could 'read' information from a human-like brain he would already be a long way towards reinventing resurrection already. It seems that this might theoretically have been possible as Ellen does not protest that what he is doing is pointless.
* Okay yes it's a show about an aircraft carrier [[In Space]] but the writers seem to have left out ''every'' implication of the [[In Space]] part when it comes to launching and recovering Vipers and other small craft. It's difficult to land an aircraft on a sea-going ship because the ship is a moving target, the landing surface is moving in complex ways, and because of the way non-V/STOL aircraft behave in atmosphere. Specifically, they fall out of it if they fail to maintain airspeed greater than the aircraft's stall speed. Thus landing becomes a very complex operation. ''Very few'' of these conditions apply in interstellar space. A spacecraft isn't going to fall ''anywhere'' if it doesn't maintain velocity and docking manoeuvres become a much simpler manner with as large and durable a target as a Battlestar's landing bay. (Docking manoeuvres for contemporary spacecraft are complicated as they are in orbit/freefall rather than zero gravity and are rather fragile machines.) All the flight training bits with respect to landing operations were pure [[You Fail Physics Forever|YouFailPhysicsForever]].
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**** With the Cylon threat eliminated, they could have just settled back onto New Caprica, or Kobol. And sometimes, there are such things as us vs. them situations: the Cylons were an actively genocidal race bent on humanity's destruction, and the virus (at the time) presented the only available means of fending them off permanently. Finally, Helo declined to mention to Admiral Adama that his secret weapon was a dud when the mission was launched, thereby risking the ''Galactica'' and everyone aboard.
**** They didn't need to actually kill their prisoners. They could have simply informed the Cylons "we have your sick prisoners scattered around our fleet. If you blow any of us up with a Resurrection Ship in range, that's the end for you. Better back off."
***** 'Thanks for the advance warning that all we have to do is move our Resurrection Ships out of minimum safe distance and we can nuke you all we want. Enjoy the fireworks!' Yeah, the problem with making it a deterrent strategy is that you can't be deterred by something you don't know about, but if you ''do'' know about it ahead of time then nothing stops you from just taking the obvious workaround.
* Why they just have to throwing in Abrahamic religious connotation in sci fi TV programs made in US this decade, and be half-vague about it?
** This element comes from the original series, which in turn came from the Book of Mormon and/or Exodus. One reason to reuse this stuff is that it is familiar to an American audience, as well as anyone with a Jewish, Christian or Islamic background in the world. And why not? Regardless what you think of these religions, Tropes Are Not Bad. Lots of great works use elements of these religions, whether or not the author believed in them or not. I am agnostic and thought the religion in the show was a) refreshing, whether it was poly- or mono- theistic, and b) believable, seeing as if the world were to end, I think many people would change their perspective on religion, either becoming more or less devout because of it.
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