History YMMV / BattlestarGalactica2003

* EpilepticTrees: It was widely speculated that the PosthumousCharacter Daniel/Number Seven was Starbuck's father and that he taught her [[spoiler:"All Along The Watchtower".]] But this was never the plan, and the episodes were finished long before they were seen, so it wasn't going to be incorporated into the show retroactively either. Other speculations about Daniel include that he was Baltar, a pre-GenderBender Starbuck, father of [[BrotherSisterIncest Baltar AND Starbuck]], Zak, Gaeta, or responsible for the Head Characters. Ron Moore went to the trouble of using WordOfGod to dispel all these theories in a podcast near the end of the season: Daniel was invented to fill in the number gap and be the posthumous [[CainAndAbel Abel to Cavil's Cain]], and that's it. He died long before the series and is not the same character as Starbuck or her father Dreilide Thrace. It should be noted that under its superficial appeal, this theory wouldn't have actually explained anything. Starbuck teleported from the maelstrom to Earth, crashed, and resurrected in the Ionian Nebula without a Resurrection Ship or Hub, so being a hybrid wouldn't make her return from the dead any less supernatural and would only make her story ''more'' complicated, and there was no direct connection between Sam Anders and Jimi Hendrix (who both plucked "All Along the Watchtower" from the universal subconscious), so there's no need for a direct connection to Anders for Dreilide Thrace to have done the same.

* EpilepticTrees: It was widely speculated that Daniel was Starbuck's father and that he taught her [[spoiler:"All Along The Watchtower".]] But this was never the plan, and the episodes were finished long before they were seen, so it wasn't going to be incorporated into the show retroactively either. Other speculations about Daniel include that he was Baltar, a pre-GenderBender Starbuck, father of [[BrotherSisterIncest Baltar AND Starbuck]], Zak, Gaeta, or responsible for the Head Characters. Ron Moore went to the trouble of using WordOfGod to dispel all these theories in a podcast near the end of the season: Daniel was invented to fill in the number gap and be the posthumous Abel to Cavil's Cain, and that's it. He died long before the series and is not the same character as Starbuck or her father Dreilide Thrace. It should be noted that under its superficial appeal, this theory wouldn't have actually explained anything. Starbuck teleported from the maelstrom to Earth, crashed, and resurrected in the Ionian Nebula without a Resurrection Ship or Hub, so being a hybrid wouldn't make her return from the dead any less supernatural and would only make her story ''more'' complicated, and there was no direct connection between Sam Anders and Jimi Hendrix (who both plucked "All Along the Watchtower" from the universal subconscious), so there's no need for a direct connection to Anders for Dreilide Thrace to have done the same.

** A more serious example of this would be Leoben Conoy. While he has a genuine (albeit ''deeply'' twisted) love for Starbuck, can even be [[AffablyEvil pleasant company]] and is played by the incredibly charismatic Callum Keith Rennie, more than a few fans ship him with Starbuck as though it were a storybook romance, ignoring little things like him keeping her locked up for months, kidnapping a child and trying to force her into motherhood and her stabbing him to death every night, only for him to download again the next day (which is straight out of a horror movie). It probably doesn't help that Creator/KateeSackhoff herself said she ships Leoben/Starbuck.

** [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket "Black Market"]] also strays into BLAM territory; not only is the black market plot itself rampantly disliked and considered thin on logic even by Moore in his episode podcast, it introduces a piece of backstory for Apollo (a pregnant fiancée he walked out on who died in the Cylon Attack) that never comes up again and fans would prefer to forget. It only averts being completely expendable from continuity by killing off Colonel Fisk and paving the way for a major plot turn when Apollo becomes the new ''Pegasus'' commander later. And you can still get that bit just by watching the "Previously" at the start of [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E17TheCaptainsHand "The Captain's Hand"]], which, after all, also includes a bit of dialogue about Garner taking over that wasn't actually aired in a previous episode.

** [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket "Black Market"]] also strays into BLAM territory; not only is the black market plot itself rampantly disliked and considered thin on logic even by Moore in his episode podcast, it introduces a piece of backstory for Apollo (a pregnant fiancée he walked out on who died in the Cylon Attack) that never comes up again and fans would prefer to forget. It only averts being completely expendable from continuity by killing off Colonel Fisk and paving the way for a major plot turn when Apollo becomes the new ''Pegasus'' commander later. And you can still get that bit just by watching the "Previously" for [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E17TheCaptainsHand "The Captain's Hand"]], which, after all, also includes a bit of dialogue about Garner taking over that wasn't actually aired in a previous episode.

** [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket "Black Market"]] also strays into BLAM territory; not only is the black market plot itself rampantly disliked and considered thin on logic even by Moore in his episode podcast, it introduces a piece of backstory for Apollo (a pregnant fiancée he walked out on who died in the Cylon Attack) that never comes up again and fans would prefer to forget. It only averts being completely expendable from continuity by killing off Colonel Fisk and paving the way for a major plot turn when Apollo becomes the new ''Pegasus'' commander later. And you can still get that bit just by watching the "Previously" for [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E17TheCaptainsHand "The Captain's Hand"]], which, after all, also mentions Garner taking over despite that dialogue not having been aired in an actual episode.

** [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S03E14TheWomanKing "The Woman King"]]. Of all the so-called stand-alone episodes ("[[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket Black Market]]", [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E15Scar "Scar"]], [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S03E15ADayInTheLife "A Day in the Life"]], [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S03E16DirtyHands "Dirty Hands"]], etc.), it is the only one with no connections to the overall plot of the series, can be completely excised from the show without losing any vital story developments, everyone in it acts wildly out of character and [[WordOfGod even Ron Moore hated it]].

*** It also doesn't help that several scenes in earlier episodes that would have made the events make more sense (most notably Helo having reported several things that turned out to be false to better explain why no one will listen to him now) were deleted, and the whole thing was meant to lead into a storyline (which Baltar's mysterious whisper to Gaeta was also supposed to tie into) that ended up getting thrown out.

** "The Woman King". Of all the so-called stand-alone episodes ("[[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket Black Market]]", "Scar", "A Day in the Life", "Dirty Hands", etc.), it is the only one with no connections to the overall plot of the series, can be completely excised from the show without losing any vital story developments, everyone in it acts wildly out of character and [[WordOfGod even Ron Moore hated it]].

** "Black Market" also strays into BLAM territory, though it averts this by killing off a minor (but significant) character and paving the way for a major plot turn later.

*** WordOfGod is that the spines weren't meant to be externally visible to the characters and were just a clue for the audience.

* SeasonalRot: The miniseries and Season 1 are both generally regarded as awesome, and Season 2 is also well-liked despite a couple of patchy episodes in the second half of the season. However, Season 3 is considered to quickly run out of steam after the New Caprica arc wraps up (albeit the two-part finale was well-recieved), Season 4 is regarded as pretty forgettable, and Season 4.5, outside of the mutiny storyline, is just seen as a nonsensical mess that completely fails to satisfyingly conclude the show. Unusually, most of the individual episodes in the final seasons are actually pretty well-regarded in and of themselves, with the major criticisms being more around the overall story arc (or lack thereof).

** Apollo and Dee's relationship came across this way to many fans. The writers had tried to build up the relationship between them during the second season but their scenes together kept getting cut. The scenes that ''did'' make it in ended up looking incredibly awkward as they discussed tension between them that the viewers hadn't seen. Not helping matters was the fact that Dee had already been set up with Billy in the first season. "The Captain's Hand" opens with Apollo and Dee suddenly in bed together which some viewers found particularly tasteless as the previous episode had ended with [[DeathOfTheHypotenuse Billy's death]]. The opening scene failed to establish the fact that there had been a TimeSkip between the episodes other than Lee's gunshot wound being partly healed, which gave the impression Dee immediately forgot about Billy. At least part of this can be attributed to Billy having to be written out because his actor scored a lead role in a pilot for another show (which ironically wasn't picked up) and wanted to leave.
** The relationship between Tigh and Caprica-Six, of all the people that could be paired, was a far worse offender that seems like the result of the writers throwing things against the wall after Tigh turned out to be a Cylon. If you had suggested it or written it in fanfic before it actually happened, it would have had to be called a CrackPairing. It seems non-coincidental that it was written out and fizzled into nothingness after the episode "Deadlock" and Tigh and Caprica were returned to their usual relationships with Ellen and Baltar, respectively, with no further interaction between them. It didn't help fan reaction that at one point before the episodes aired, Creator/TriciaHelfer had mentioned being involved in "a fight that ends in sex" (meaning Tigh and Six in the brig in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E04EscapeVelocity "Escape Velocity"]]) and around the same time, images surfaced from the filming of the episode [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E06Faith "Faith"]] of her and Creator/MichaelTrucco sparring, so fans who kept up with the news were expecting Six/Anders, not Six/Tigh, which would have been easier to believe given what happened in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E18Downloaded "Downloaded"]] and more visually appealing.

** Apollo and Dee's relationship came across this way to many fans. The writers had tried to build up the relationship between them during the second season but their scenes together kept getting cut. The scenes that ''did'' make it in ended up looking incredibly awkward as they discussed tension between them that the viewers hadn't seen. Not helping matters was the fact that Dee had already been set up with Billy in the first season. "The Captain's Hand" opens with Apollo and Dee suddenly in bed together which some viewers found particularly tasteless as the previous episode had ended with [[DeathOfTheHypotenuse Billy's death]]. The opening scene failed to establish that there had been a TimeSkip between the episodes other than Lee's gunshot wound being partly healed, which gave the impression Dee immediately forgot about Billy. At least part of this can be attributed to Billy having to be written out because his actor scored a lead role in a pilot for another show (which ironically wasn't picked up) and wanted to leave.

* StrangledByTheRedString: Apollo and Dee's relationship came across this way to many fans. The writers had tried to build up the relationship between them during the second season but their scenes together kept getting cut. The scenes that ''did'' make it in ended up looking incredibly awkward as they discussed tension between them that the viewers hadn't seen. Not helping matters was the fact that Dee had already been set up with Billy in the first season. "The Captain's Hand" opens with Apollo and Dee suddenly in bed together which some viewers found particularly tasteless as the previous episode had ended with [[DeathOfTheHypotenuse Billy's death]]. The opening scene failed to establish that there had been a TimeSkip between the episodes other than Lee's gunshot wound being partly healed, which gave the impression Dee immediately forgot about Billy. At least part of this can be attributed to Billy having to be written out because his actor scored a main role in a pilot for another show (which ironically wasn't picked up) and wanted to leave.

* StrangledByTheRedString: Apollo and Dee's relationship came across this way to many fans. The writers had tried to build up the relationship between them during the second season but their scenes together kept getting cut. The scenes that ''did'' make it in ended up looking incredibly awkward as they discussed tension between them that the viewers hadn't seen. Not helping matters was the fact that Dee had already been set up with Billy in the first season. "The Captain's Hand" opens with Apollo and Dee suddenly in bed together which some viewers found particularly tasteless as the previous episode had ended with [[DeathOfTheHypotenuse Billy's death]]. The opening scene failed to establish that there had been a TimeSkip between the episodes other than Lee's gunshot wound being partly healed, which gave the impression Dee immediately forgot about Billy.

** The relationship between Tigh and Caprica-Six, of all the people that could be paired, was a far worse offender that seems like the result of the writers throwing things against the wall after Tigh turned out to be a Cylon. If you had suggested it or written it in fanfic before it actually happened, fans would have called it a CrackPairing. It seems non-coincidental that it was written out and fizzled into nothingness after the episode "Deadlock" and Tigh and Caprica were returned to their usual relationships with Ellen and Baltar, respectively, with no further interaction between them. It didn't help fan reaction that at one point before the episodes aired, Creator/TriciaHelfer had mentioned being involved in "a fight that ends in sex" (meaning Tigh and Six in the brig in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E04EscapeVelocity "Escape Velocity"]]) and around the same time, images surfaced from the filming of the episode [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E06Faith "Faith"]] of her and Creator/MichaelTrucco sparring, so fans who kept up with the news were expecting Six/Anders, not Six/Tigh, which would have been easier to believe given what happened in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E18Downloaded "Downloaded"]] and more visually appealing.

** The relationship between Tigh and Caprica-Six, of all the people that could be paired, was a far worse offender that seems like the result of the writers throwing things against the wall after Tigh turned out to be a Cylon. If you had suggested it or written it in fanfic before it actually happened, fans would have called it a CrackPairing. It seems non-coincidental that it was written out after the episode "Deadlock" and Tigh and Caprica were returned to their usual relationships with Ellen and Baltar, respectively, with no further interaction between them. It didn't help fan reaction that at one point before the episodes aired, Creator/TriciaHelfer had mentioned being involved in "a fight that ends in sex" (meaning Tigh and Six in the brig in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E04EscapeVelocity "Escape Velocity"]]) and around the same time, images surfaced from the filming of the episode [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S04E06Faith "Faith"]] of her and Creator/MichaelTrucco sparring, so fans who kept up with the news were expecting Six/Anders, not Six/Tigh, which would have been easier to believe given what happened in [[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E18Downloaded "Downloaded"]] and more visually appealing.

* EndingAversion: The first two seasons are great, to the point that it won a Peabody Award during the break between seasons two and three. When season 3 got underway, they started running out of ideas, and it was downhill from there. It didn't help that a large portion of the acclaimed writing staff (but not Creator/RonMoore) left the show before season 3 got underway, particularly all of the female writers (who were acknowledged to have been the guiding hand in the writing of the female characters up to that point). Though there is also a large contingent of fans that thinks the second half of season 4 was where things started getting bad. And that's not even getting into the controversy over the series' [[EsotericHappyEnding Esoterically Happy]] GainaxEnding.

* FanNickname: The Tattooed Pilot's unofficial call sign among fans is "Dragon" due to his dragon tattoo. Layne Ishay is "Nurse Bedside Manner" for her notable lack of any. President Roslin is Madame Airlock for her penchant of throwing people out of them. Ellen Tigh is Lady [=McTigh=] due to her [[LadyMacbeth terrible influence on Saul]].

* SeasonalRot: The miniseries and Season 1 are both generally regarded as awesome, and Season 2 is also well-liked despite a couple of patchy episodes in the second half of the season. However, Season 3 is considered to quickly run out of steam after the New Caprica arc wraps up (albeit the two-part finale was well-recieved), Season 4 is regarded as pretty forgettable, and Season 4.5, outside of the coup storyline, is just seen as a nonsensical mess that completely fails to wrap up the show's storyline. Unusually, most of the individual episodes in the final seasons are actually pretty well-regarded in and of themselves, with the major criticisms being more around the overall story arc (or lack thereof).

* SugarWiki/DevelopmentHeaven: They employed people whose job it is to cut the corners off of paper to make them into the series' distinctive octagonal shape.

** [[BigBad (John) Cavil aka Number One]] is the ''de facto'' leader of the Cylons [[PsychoPrototype and the first model of the Significant Eight]] made by the Final Five, the progenitors of the race. He proves to be a hateful being angered by his creators' decision to give him a human body. He [[CainAndAbel kills his brother Daniel]] [[GreenEyedMonster out of]] [[DrivenByEnvy jealousy]], wiping out the line. He wipes the minds of his five parents and reprograms his siblings to forget about them. Then he puts the Final Five on human worlds to witness the genocide he initiates against the Twelve Colonies and hunts down the surviving humans to spite his parents and to make them realize they should love him as the "prince of the universe" he fancies himself as. Despite professing to want revenge for the humans' enslavement of the Centurions, he [[{{Hypocrite}} promptly does]] [[RobotsEnslavingRobots the same thing]]. He uses a ScarpiaUltimatum to rape his mother and tortures and mutilates his father. During his time in the human fleet Cavil also killed a young orphan boy just because they were becoming friends, and at the end of the series tries to dissect little Hera Agathon to uncover the secret to Cylon procreation. He permanently boxes the Threes over the other Cylons' objections. When half of his brethren break with him over his enslavement of the Centurions and Raiders, he promptly wipes out the Sixes, Twos, and Eights, leaving only a handful alive. While John claims he wants to be a robot more than anything, he willfully succumbs to the lowest human instincts he so hates: vengeance, lust, and sadism.
** "[[Recap/BattlestarGalactica2003S02E14BlackMarket Black Market]]": [[FromCamouflageToCriminal Phelan]], the ex-military mercenary turned crime lord, runs the [[BlackMarket titular market]] and garrotes anyone who threatens his supremacy. When Apollo investigates the death of one of Phelan's competitors, the man pays him a visit, abducting the HookerWithAHeartOfGold Apollo had been seeing regularly and taking her daughter, warning Apollo that "I hear any more talk about Fisk I'm gonna send your whore back to you piece by piece, and then I'm gonna start on the little girl." As if that's not enough, in his headquarters he keeps a bunch of children locked in a cell. When Apollo confronts him and asks about that, he claims that some people are "demanding". When Apollo demands the kid back, Phelan replies, "Sorry, the little girl's been paid for. No refunds."

* EsotericHappyEnding: [[spoiler: After finding the planet to be known as Earth, Lee decides to send the entire fleet of ships into the Sun so that humanity can start with a clean slate and avoid the ViciousCycle. Although intended as an explanation for why none of the Colonials technology has been discovered by modern day humans, it had unfortunate side-effect of carrying an accidental LuddWasRight message. Without modern technology, most of the survivors would have greatly shortened life expectancies and greatly reduced quality of life, with the timeline indicating that humanity would not evolve into an agrarian society for another 140,000 years.]]

* EsotericHappyEnding: [[spoiler:The ending is both very religious (a large part involves a ''literal'' DeusExMachina, though admittedly this part of it had been foreshadowed for most of the series) and very LuddWasRight, both attributes which pissed off a rather large portion of the sci-fi fans who'd watched it, but actually made quite a bit religious watcher extremely happy (some even call it the best sci-fi show). It doesn't help that without their modern technology, most of the survivors would have both greatly shortened life expectancies and greatly reduced quality of life. A large number of fans found it rather unbelievable that the entire population of ''Galactica'' would consent to giving up ''all'' their technology without any apparent major objections. Romo even points out the impossibility that it could work, but somehow it still apparently does.]]
** [[DownerEnding Or does it?]] [[spoiler: No traces survive of the culture that they supposedly set out to build. Humanity would not reach a level of having things like agriculture or anything more than the most primitive tools for something like 140,000 years. The implication being that whatever non-technological society they attempted to create was an utter failure, with the entire culture dying out and the human race having to essentially develop everything from scratch over the course of a huge span of time]].
*** [[spoiler:Of course, it's a matter of interpretation as to just ''how'' much technology was actually forsaken. When Lee Adama first brings up the idea, his stated intention is to bring the good of his civilization to the new planet, without the baggage. While finalizing the plans for settling on the planet, Bill even states that the fleet's resources will be evenly distributed among the population before it's jettisoned entirely. The only technology explicitly abandoned by the crew were space travel and the ability to create more artificial intelligence; everything else could very well have made it onto the planet, even if it wasn't shown onscreen.]]
*** One wonders if the writers had any idea what they were saying when they tell us that [[spoiler:the "fossilized remains of a young woman" were found: that Hera, for whom so much had been sacrificed, probably only lived long enough to have a couple of children, and quite possibly died in childbirth.]]

* IdiotPlot: "Epiphanies" revolves around the idea that a significant faction in the fleet favors peace with the Cylons and hates Adama for being a warmonger unwilling to negotiate or acknowledge humanity's own crimes against the Cylons. This is a series where the Cylons, however justified their original grievances may have been, exterminated [[AMillionIsAStatistic 99.9999% of the human species]]. Every single person on the fleet lost family and nearly all of their worldly possessions to the Cylon nuclear bombardment. The idea that a pro-Cylon faction could exist among this motley group of refugees completely defies belief. It's roughly equivalent to a pro-Nazi faction of Polish Jews sabotaging the Home Army and advocating for peace with the Nazis at the height of the Holocaust. On top of that, negotiation with the Cylons isn't even ''possible'' at this point because they shoot humans on sight, and are very open about this policy, making "why doesn't mean old Adama negotiate?" even more nonsensical. And in the Miniseries, it was noted that President Adar offered the Cylons a complete, unconditional surrender as soon as the bombs started falling on Caprica City, and they didn't even bother to respond.

* TheChrisCarterEffect:
** The show was accused of this on several occasions — the effect can be traced back as far as Season 3, when the decision to largely abandon the show's carefully crafted MythArc in favor of a series of standalone episodes almost resulted in its cancellation (and eventual pushback from the producers to get the plot back on track). Still, the showrunners were open about the fact that [[WritingByTheSeatOfYourPants they were mostly making things up as they went along]]. A series of open questions and mysteries were raised over the length of the show, and ended with [[HandWave handwaving]] and the revelation that [[spoiler:[[DeusExMachina God was responsible for many of the mysteries, and they may have been being literal in this]]]]. As a result of the series bible's publication after the show finished airing, fans now know that none of the plot points introduced in Season 3, such as the Final Five and Starbuck's death/resurrection, were things the producers were aware of at all during the first two seasons — they'd exhausted their stockpile of potential plotlines.
** The "Final Five Cylons" debacle, which dominated the show since Season 3 began. Realizing that the gradual reveal of the promised "Twelve Cylon models" was boring, the writers broke their own established rules by making major recurring characters Cylons who logically couldn't be. One of them was married and had fathered a child; the cardinal rule about Cylons until then was that they're sterile. They handwaved it off by ham-fistedly retconning that his wife had an affair (after they dropped a bridge on her). To make it worse, they had already revealed that one of the Cylons was "Model Number Eight", and 8 + 5 = 13, not 12. They had to invent a backstory that there used to be a Number Seven model, but he got killed. The ''BSG'' writers didn't just apply MagicAIsMagicA to their work in the end; they fell back onto "divine intervention" to explain plot twists which, if you analyzed them objectively, didn't add up.
*** While [[Series/BattlestarGalactica1978 the original series]] was sometimes viewed negatively by fans of the new show, most of the best-loved plot elements were re-imagined versions of original series episodes and plotlines. The show started meandering and falling apart precisely when the writers ran out of material and had to begin coming up with a metaplot of their own. Earlier ideas included "find Kobol, lost homeworld of humanity" or "what if another Battlestar survived?" (Pegasus), but by Season 3 they had run out of ideas.
** The "Death of Starbuck" ruse: in the first two seasons, the writers often boasted that they respected the intelligence of their audience and didn't walk them through plot points. At the end of Season 3, with ratings dropping and the writers running out of ideas, they pretended to kill off Starbuck. Even in real life, the writers and cast were ordered to act like Creator/KateeSackhoff left the show (Sackhoff was diagnosed with thyroid cancer and they did not know how long she will be gone for). The episode she was killed in bizarrely and obviously set up new plot points for her. She wasn't randomly shot or captured; she randomly flew into a storm due to a newly revealed religious plotline. It was confusing even then. Starbuck's "dramatic surprise return" was therefore predictable; writers who once said that they respected the audience's intelligence were now stooping to comic book deaths, though they insisted that this was a stroke of genius. All of this was supposedly related to Starbuck's "destiny", but they never fully explained (even in the finale) why Starbuck had to die and literally be resurrected by the Gods to lead the Fleet to Earth.
** Made worse by the fact that the intro crawl text assures viewers that the Cylons "have a plan" which explains their seemingly bizarre and illogical actions. Ron Moore openly admitted after the finale, word for word, that David Eick had called him up on the phone and said "it will be a great way to hook viewers in Season 1 if we put 'the Cylons have a Plan' into the opening credits." Ron was hesitant at first, and actually said back into the phone "but there is no frakking Cylon Plan!" They had never sketched out the motivations, goals, or even full backstory and social structure of the Cylons. WordOfGod... there ''never was'' a "Cylon Plan", and they were lying the entire time. Eventually, the whole thing is hand-waved when a character says "plans change". After the show was canned, a TV movie called "The Plan" finally revealed the plan. It was a desperate attempt to ''retcon'' an explanation, which gave the simple answer "the Cylon Plan was KillAllHumans but it didn't work".
*** Ron Moore didn't even write "The Plan" prequel TV movie - he stuck Jane Espenson with writing it after the finale. At the red carpet for the finale screenings, he would even openly say ahead of time "if anything doesn't make sense, the prequel TV movie from the Cylon point of view will explain it ''after'' the finale airs". At the time, Espenson even thought Moore was honoring her with this big responsibility. Later on, however, Moore had ''absolutely'' no input into "the Plan" TV movie (the ''actual title'' is "The Plan"!), basically running out the door shouting "no backsies!" and leaving Espenson holding the bag, as it were. To her credit, Espenson put a lot of work into trying to make a presentable retcon explanation of the story - according to her, by sitting down and marathoning all the season DVD box sets and taking extensive notes - but fundamentally, Moore gave her an ''impossible'' task to literally ''retcon'' an explanation he never had in the first place.
** There was also "the secret of the opera house", something that was being hinted at being something of great significance since season 1. In the finale, it takes up about 5 minutes to resolve, has little to do with any opera house at all, and is utterly pointless. It involves a 2 minute kidnapping of a character who was just rescued from a much longer and bigger kidnapping, and a cease fire between the Cylons and Humans that lasts all of two minutes before shit hits the fan, and the kidnapper is simply shot. So the whole plot ends with a kidnappee being rescued and the Cylons shooting at Galactica. Which is the exactly the situation before this all-important resolution of the opera house plotline. You could have fallen asleep during the resolution and you wouldn't have missed a thing.
*** The "opera house reveal" is actually one of the points that Ron D. Moore explicitly admitted he attempted to retcon an explanation for ''as he was writing the series finale''. As he said, he knew they'd been hyping up these religious visions of the Kobol opera house since Season 1, so while writing the finale, decided the answer was that it was meant to represent the CIC during the final standoff (because it has tiered levels in it, vaguely like an opera house?) - it was simply an AssPull , but he was genuinely proud he thought of "an explanation", unashamed to admit that he made it up ''retroactively''.

** [[spoiler: The audience heard about the Cylons moving seemingly human corpses on the Twelve Colonies into massive incinerators after the attack. When we see it in The Plan, the physical image will be guaranteed to give you NightmareFuel, at the absolute least.]] The worst part? [[spoiler:"Corpses" do not cry out for help en mass once it appears that the Cylons around them are dead]].