Say what you will about Howard the Duck, but it's got one of the most bizarrely inspired monsters you'll ever see.

Yep, "1984" could have easily made the list. Not only is it one of the most depressing "mainstream" (as far as those things go) movies ever made, it deals with day-to-day institutional poverty, where new razor blades and coffee and sugar are very, very hard to come by. Cable TV was free, though.

Comrade Stalin - Your avatar choice makes that an intriguing idea.

Tron - Agreed. The writers wouldn't have opened the Daniel can of worms if they didn't have the idea that it would lead to something. But Starbuck's Dad may have just been used as a way to get her to play the song and bring the Final Five back together. We may have seen the last of the Piano Man, but the Daniel…

Alurin's right. Otherwise, it wouldn't be Galactica. Some good shoot-em-ups first, please!

Comrade Stalin - Yep, it sounds too good a story to be true. The history professor who told it qualified the story by saying that while it probably wasn't true, it illustrates how even abject poverty can be subjective!

Contest
Judging by a lot of the comments made about Fox manufacturing DVDs without extras for the rental market, I'm just waiting for a slew of posters outraged that they should have to take the time to enter a contest to get a free copy of the DVD. This kind of thing just forces people to torrent it and watch it on…

A probably apocryphal story:

Verdoux was from the 1940s and dealt more with post-Second World War issues, but it does deal with grim issues. Not his best movie, though.

The "worthy of survival" theme of the series is an interesting one to me, and I'm not entirely sure the show has proven its case one way or another.

I'm not too sure Daniel is going to end up as Kara (or even the other way around). I think Kara's "destiny" has to be a bigger deal than that (i.e. not just one of the 12 models). There's something else going on.

FTL Missiles & Damage Jumps - Maybe the jump damage was so alarming because they now know Galactica is at this point ready to collapse in on itself like a straw house. And it's already been mentioned that she took at least one Nuke, plus a load of other punishment. I still like the idea of turning an FTL into a…

No big deal, magnus.

Yep. Jupiter was a nice touch - in the same way that they long ago ended an episode zooming in on Earth - with our continents visible beneath the clouds - but didn't reveal the continents of what turned out to be extra-crispy radioactive "Earth."

Along with the "Do we deserve to survive?" theme.

The same thing came up awhile back after Sometimes a Great Notion, mentioning the fact that a certain actor did not have a contract for the last half of the season, and so wouldn't be showing up again. I don't check IMDB about casting, so I didn't know.

Nothing I've predicted has come true so far. Still, what else do I have to do? Even Nostradamus got it right 00.003% of the time.

Agree with the point about the music. A bit too "Hollywood" at times lately. The Japanese-drumming/Eastern chanting style set the mood for the series at the start, and music that actively tells you how to feel can be a bit like a laugh-track - in other words, unnecessary.

Funny that right after this week's episode ended, I flipped over to the History International Channel and caught a documentary about the Tibetan Book of the Dead. I kept thinking, "This is the perfect philosophy for the Cylons…"

Shit! Don't tell me that!