Battlestar Galactica Mid-Season Premiere

We watched the mid-season premiere of Battlestar Galactica tonight. Okay, that’s a strange concept for me, but I understand that at least some it had to do with last year’s writer’s strike. Either way, I was eager to get back into the show, and was looking forward to the premiere.
The SciFi Channel did a good thing by leading up to the premiere with the episodes the preceded it. That let Victoria get caught up on the story behind the series, and I was happy to see them in sequence for a change. That was a big improvement over the hit-and-miss way I’ve soaked up the story so far.
Anyway, I’m not going to make any big pronouncements about the episode. As is usual with Battlestar Galactica, a lot was revealed even as a lot of new possibilities were presented. Personally, I’d made up my mind that Starbuck was the final Cylon, but I’m not surprised that she wasn’t. That would have been too obvious, wouldn’t it? But I was mildly disappointed that the final Cylon was revealed to be Colonel Tigh’s wife, Ellen. I suppose that ties in well enough with her collaborating with the Cylons on New Caprica, but it felt to me like a convenient slight-of-hand on the part of the writers, being that she’s dead and all and the one character most people new would have thought about. It’ll be interesting to see how they tie this in. Assuming they do (it could get brushed off as Colonel Tigh’s misguided opinion).
I took a lot of questions away from this episode. Which is par for the course for Battlestar Galactica. Who or what are the four hidden Cylons, exactly? They died on Earth? What’s up with that? And what’s this business about all the skeletons that were found belonging to Cylons, not humans. And if that was Starbuck’s body that was found in that crashed ship, who the hell is the Starbuck that’s running around now?
It’ll be interesting to see how this all plays out. Personally, I think it’s likely that the Cylons were the original race, that the humans broke away from them, and then turned around and re-created something that already existed. Pure conjecture, I know, and not something I’ll put any money on. I’ll just be interested to see what comes of all this. All in all, while it was a little pedestrian in its pacing, setting up the rest of the final episodes and all, I wasn’t disappointed in the mid-season premiere. And I think Victoria liked what she saw enough that we’ll move likely be watching this every week until the end of the series.

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