Apparently, the aliens have several of them. The movie doesn't fully go into the structure of their society, but my guess is that they've got the fairly big fuckers from the first movie for colonizing planets, and the really big fuckers from the this one for draining useless-to-them planets dry.

Well, if you want to destroy the WTC in Action Movie FX, you have to go there. Or have a picture handy.

Comment/Avatar synergy, right there.

I can't remember if it was here or on the Avocado, but I saw someone in the last few weeks have a fairly epic rant about how clearly Will Smith enunciated that line.

Pretty much since "Independence Day" came out, Spiner and the directors all said that, if there was a sequel, the first thing that would happen would be Dr. Okun waking up from his alien-mind-rape-induced coma.

And wait'll you find out what "yes" means there.

The constellations in the Tomb were actually fairly, um, "impressionistic" on the part of the production designers, and didn't closely match with the real star patterns. If you add in the possibility that the display was literal, and you could see all twelve of them at the same time on a given night on Cylon-Earth,…

But then it turns out the Final Five only arrived 8 months before the surprise attack on the colonies?

Fairly small, unless someone did something stupid like set off a nuclear bomb or some other flagrantly obvious artificial signal. On the other hand, if you have two technologically comparable civilizations that are around for a long enough time, it's pretty likely one will eventually detect the other.

Also, the weirdly intimate scene of Adama shaving off his mustache. iirc, that wasn't in the original script, but was something that Moore put in because he liked it. Then seeing him walk through the repopulated corridors of the ship, giving quick salutes.

Since it was, nominally, a consensus-driven government, you can argue that the different Cylons could all be roughly analogous to Adama, Roslin, and Cain. I could see Cain getting drunk and saying something very similar to Cavil's crack about reducing the civilian population down to a more manageable size.

A long time ago I was doing retro-reviews of BSG on my blog (in chronological order). I made it halfway through Caprica before I got distracted. Maybe with all the shows being cancelled and retro-reviews here falling off, I'll find the time to pick those up again. My schtick was that they were spoiler-full,…

What TFA was more akin to when the Raptors jumped to planets at lower and lower altitudes, which was too risky to attempt in "Home," costly and dangerous in "Lay Down Your Burdens," and finally something they'd gotten pretty good at through practice in "Precipice."

It ended up being a behind-the-scenes joke that Baltar either never heard or forgot her name and just tried to fake it for their whole relationship (which may have been a Seinfeld episode).

I still haven't watched the season 4.5 extended episodes, because I was saving them, and then life got away from me, but out of the earlier ones, "Unfinished Business" is the only one where the shorter version is required viewing. The commentary track as much as admits that the extended version isn't edited together…

When I saw the line in the review mentioning that it was notable that the Cylons didn't just kill everyone on New Caprica the minute they arrived, I was reminded of this. One of the things that frustrates me about season 3 is that no one but Helo (and, implicitly, Adama) recognizes that, hey, maybe it's useful…

The nuke is frustrating because it was the result of a network note, of all things. Originally, Baltar was going to read Roslin's letter earlier in the episode, it was going to say she believed in him, and inspired him to redouble his efforts cure cancer. The network review suggested it might be more interesting if…

I don't think I ever saw anything where they explicitly said they redesigned Lee's fat makeup for the third season, but it seems pretty obvious looking at them side-by-side. The suit is definitely bigger in season 3, and the face work also seems more subtle in season 2, but that could just be the lighting and Bamber's…

It was a total shock. In the podcast commentary for part 1, RDM (and his wife?) teased that the finale had one of the more ambitious moves they'd ever done, but I figured he was just blowing smoke up the fans' asses. I can't believe they actually had something that could deliver.

The version of the fat suit in this episode was fine. Maybe the producers thought it was too subtle (I had trouble figuring out why Lee looked different the first time I watched), but the one they ended up on was nuts. I just keep remembering the shot of Lee saluting Adama on the hangar deck.