http://www.libertypages.com/clark/10732.html

The Cylons are certainly pure and single-minded, but they were modeled on Al Qaeda. Of course, that’s all changing now.

Scar was absolutely the worst hour of Galactica ever, including Galactica 1980. I was really mad that I’d stayed up to watch such complete drivel rather than getting some much-needed sleep. The whole episode could have happened in 15 minutes, they could have done some necessary exposition in the right order to fill up some of the rest of the hour, and then the rest of it could have been an interesting A-story to balance out the really lame B-story that was Scar. They really owed us a good episode after that, and the next few were only ok. They finally gave us one with Downloaded, though. That was probably the best hour of Galactica ever.

As for the story arc, there’s clearly something they’ve got in mind that they haven’t told, and I really hope it’s more than X-Files had. They seemed to make it up as they went along, and it never went anywhere. Once you got past the fourth or fifth season, the conspiracy episodes starting dropping in quality, even when the show got better by breathing new blood into it when Duchovny left. But with BSG, we do have some indication that they’re doing at least a whole season’s worth at a time. Ideally it would be more than that. It really paid off with Babylon 5′s five-year arc that had all been planned out from the beginning (though with some modifications necessary due to cast changes).

As for the negative consequences of monotheism, Moore never said any such thing on his blog. I’ve been reading his blog from the beginning, and that’s been pretty far from anything he’s said. He did say that he was modeling the Cylons on Al Qaeda. Where he seems to be taking the Cylons (and where the monotheistic Six and Baltar in each other’s heads are going) doesn’t seem to be the original terrorist direction anyway, and now we’ve seen an atheistic Cylon model. Also, Moore has come out admitting that the monotheism of the Cylons and polytheism of the colonials wasn’t even his idea to begin with. He wasn’t going to bring religion in at all until some higher-up suggested it, and I guess his good experiences with the religious aspects of DS9 attracted him to the idea.

I thought the handling of abortion was fine. They represented Geminon in pretty much the way the pro-life activists handle things in real life. They represented the president as the good secularist pro-choicer she is but who sees a new circumstance justifying a ban on abortion for very different reasons. They didn’t seem to me to indicate that any one of the characters involved was in the right, but they did a good job of playing out the moral dilemma someone who had Roslin’s views would face in such a situation. If there was any bad guy, it was Baltar, who manipulated Roslin into adopting that position so that he could come out as a the pro-choice good guy. I don’t see how that’s a negative portrayal of pro-life people and a positive portrayal of pro-choice people. It was an interesting situation with questions that many people would find tough but that would never arise in our current situation.