"All we need is strength! And true strength comes from within… and also from guns!"

I'd argue more for Helo than Lee being the white-hat of the show, but Adama was definitely treated as a hero. At least twice I can think of times when the show had everything go totally, irredeemably gone to shit, and then had Adama appear, and I instantly felt like daddy was home and everything was going to be all…

Well, it never came up again. They thought about playing with it in the season 4 webisodes (you'd see the red light reflected on a wall instead of the actual special effect of the spine itself), but changed the sex scene to a make-out scene. I thought the shot sounded neat, it's a shame they didn't go for it.

He has one scene in "Bastille Day" and then is never seen again. He's in deleted scenes from about half the episodes, all the way up to the season finale, so it took them a while to read the writing on the wall and give up on him.

It's interesting how "The Ragged Edge" was their prototype for how to do a planet-of-the-week premise with Crusade without looking like Star Trek's single-stage, cyclorama planets. The reach definitely exceeded the grasp most of the time, but there were a couple episodes where they were more conservative, and were…

I'm always fascinated at what it says about fictional depictions of reality that people are often more bothered by the things that are straight from actual lived experience than the stuff that's dramatic convention and broad invention.

Don't forget, that was only a year or two after she married a baby-stealing jackass with a jackass name like Franz.

The Lurker's Guide speculated that the reason the waiter was being a wise-ass might've been related to Garibaldi's habit of drunk-dialing that restaurant to have pizza delivered (which doesn't seem like it would be in Fresh Air's wheelhouse, but I guess they put a high value on customer service).

Aside from the way Sheridan did the time-travel/prophecy variant of the "I know he knows I know he knows" logic trap in Z'ha'dum, there's also the fact that Sheridan has no context for his vision.

If you want some more what-might've-been Doctor Who animation, there's a barely-coherent montage of an anime Third Doctor story some guy did. It's pretty nuts. https://www.youtube.com/wat…

So, the obvious answer to "Why is Kenya not dead" is that Stahma didn't dose her with a fatal poison and… I don't know, put her in a greenhouse to be used for extortion when it became reasonable.

I'd say the Votanis Collective / Earth Republic pre-war warmup was established in that episode with the war criminal / weapons designer. Pol Maddis and Nolan's buddy were both of the opinion that a second human vs. alien war was inevitable, so the services of a crazy bomb-inventing psychopath would be in demand by…

I also thought the traveling salesman last week might've been a castithan/irathient. The partially-white hair and post-industrial manner gave me the idea, but the latter was explained by him being raised by humans.

No, he was wearing armor. Nolan found a plate, dented from when he was shot. The kidnapper escaped with his buddy on a dirt bike.

Before STID came out, I assumed Kirk was ordered to save the planet. There was precedent in the original series, in the episode where Kirk hits his head and becomes King of the Indians. I think I could've gotten him off with a slap on the wrist for the PD violation. He saved the planet, and the locals only saw the…

It really does delight me. Same reason the mind-fuck at the end of season 3 just made me laugh and laugh. I couldn't wait to see the hate-watching crowd explode all over the internet.

I always thought it was interesting that the Xindi arc started off as seeming like a pro-Bush allegory for Iraq and 9/11 (a terrorist attack on Earth! George W. Archer leads his Coalition of the Willing deep into the Delphic No-Fly Zone to find the Xindi Weapons of Mass Destruction!), but then in the last third, it…

I never thought it was as bad as everyone said (and apparently history has vindicated me, since it's been years since anyone brought it up to me), but "Archer" and "Big Captain's Speech" just clicked one relay in my mind.

Everyone always forgets "The Alternative Factor," which has the twin sins of being boring and incomprehensible. Which Lazerus is the good one? Which Lazerus is the evil one? The episode can't remember, so how can I?

The "Rise of the Federation" novels are way, way better than the Romulan War books. Christopher L. Bennett is a bit limited by some of the stranger decisions in the prior novels, but he managed to retcon out some of the sillier stuff, and even makes the (good Christ) "secret agent Trip" stuff work.