YMMV / Battlestar Galactica (2003)

aka: Battlestar Galactica Reimagined

• Accidental Aesop:
  • The series finale seems to have an Anvilicious anti-technology Aesop that comes completely out of nowhere. Ron Moore admits in his podcast on the episode that this was simply a last-minute attempt to explain why none of the Fleet's technology was discovered after they arrived on prehistoric Earth, and he didn't put much thought into any message that could be read into it.
  • The Space Whale Aesop for the entire series could easily be, "technology is fine, just don't build robots". Or bare minimum, treat them kindly.
• Alas, Poor Scrappy:
  • Cally may have been such an unpleasant shrew by season 4.0 that you might find yourself wishing for her to be eliminated, but the way it happened won her a lot of sympathy.
  • Kat was an arrogant hothead who seemed to exist mostly to pick fights with Starbuck. Her final episode, "The Passage" elaborated more on her backstory and gave her a major Heroic Sacrifice that left many viewers sad to see her go.
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Tory did have good reason to believe that Cally would not be a safe person to entrust with the Final Four's secret, and since Cally had been going to commit Murder-Suicide, one could argue that the net effect of Tory's actions was just to save baby Nicky's life.
  • From the Face of the Enemy webisodes: Did "Sweet Eight" intentionally provoke Gaeta into attacking and killing her so that he could have the rest of the oxygen? There was almost certainly not enough air left in the Raptor for both of them to have survived (as shown by Gaeta being on the edge of death when he was finally found and rescued), and it doesn't make sense for her to have taken such pains to save Gaeta's life, even saving him over a fellow Eight, only to taunt and emotionally wound him until he attacks her and she has to choose between killing him and dying herself. In addition, the fact that Cylons are physically stronger than humans makes it seem unlikely that he could have overpowered her as quickly as he did unless she allowed him to. Then again, it was indicated that she thought their final jump took them much closer to the Fleet than it did.
• Angst Aversion: Especially in hindsight, the show is often accused of falling into this heavily. Granted, the original was and is equally criticized for the Angst? What Angst? angle of it all, treating the destruction of multiple supermodern civilized worlds and a desperate flight for survival with little more than a shrug, but while the earlier episodes of this series felt appropriately dark for the situation the characters find themselves in, the show just never let up on the darkness and it is often cited as being difficult to believe after a while, with characters being forced to hold the Idiot Ball. Particular moments or arcs cited for this are the introduction of the Pegasus (and the handling of the Cain character) and the discovery of Earth and its destruction. This was one of the issues that ultimately led to its divisiveness (and possibly its declining ratings).
• Anvilicious:
  • The unbelievably corny, thankfully deleted final moments of the series finale: Be nice to your robots, or the Cylon War will repeat again. Real subtle.
  • Let's not even go into the religious angle.
• Ass Pull: The reveal of the Final Five Cylons in Season 3 came across as this to many, as the characters in question had, by the writers' own admission, not been planned from the start to be Cylon sleeper agents, and the reason why said characters were chosen was not based on any character traits or actions, but entirely on how much shock value the twist could potentially generate. There was therefore no Foreshadowing hinting towards this twist whatsoever in the two first seasons (and even some evident hiccups and gaps plotwise, most glaringly regarding Chief Tyrol's baby, who was hastily retconned into being his wife's offspring from a premarital affair, since there was only supposed to be one fertile Cylon in the series).
• Audience-Alienating Ending: If the series' Grand Finale could be summed up in one word, it would be divisive. Basically, the crew discover a new habitable planet that they name Earth and decide to break the cycle of violence by starting over with a clean slate and getting rid of all their space-faring technology and adopt a simpler way of living. While a good chunk of fans found it a satisfactory (or at least thematically fitting) ending, others found it made the whole series feel like it was All for Nothing.
• Awesome Ego: Gaius Baltar and Kara Thrace.
• Awesome Music: Much of the score from Bear McCreary qualifies.
  • The cover of "All Along The Watchtower".
  • Miniseries - To Kiss or Not to Kiss & Reunited (both by Richard Gibbs)
  • Season 1 - A Good Lighter, Wander My Friends, The Shape of Things to Come, Destiny, Passacaglia
  • Season 2 - Allegro, Reuniting the Fleet, Martial Law, Roslin And Adama, Pegasus, Prelude to War, One Year Later, Worthy of Survival, Something Dark is Coming
  • Season 3 - Battlestar Sonatica, Storming New Caprica, Someone to Trust, Heeding the Call, All Along the Watchtower
  • Season 4 - Gaeta's Lament, Resurrection Hub, The Signal, Diaspora Oratorio, The Line, Assault on the Colony, Kara's Coordinates, Earth, The Heart of the Sun, Roslin and Adama Reunited, So Much Life, An Easterly View
  • Specials - Apocalypse
  • Bear McCreary himself considers Diaspora Oratorio his personal Awesome Music, even though it nearly drove him to a Creator Breakdown.
  • A special mention should go to the use of Philip Glass's "Metamorphosis" in the Season 2 episode "Valley of Darkness," that Kara and Helo listen to while in Kara's apartment (explained within the show as being a piece composed by Kara's father).
• Base-Breaking Character: Gaius frakking Baltar. His character journey is all over the place at times. Is he a hedonist forced into extremely stressful situations? Is he a monster? Is he a Jerk with a Heart of Gold? The man is complex. Admittedly, it doesn't help that he will apparently sleep with everything not nailed down or on fire, and that his actions contributed to the death of roughly fifty billion people, but the man has many good points as well.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Caprica-Six's spine glowing while having sex with Baltar in the miniseries, and Boomer's doing the same the first time she sleeps with Helo on Caprica. This is never shown, much less referred to again, and it seems to go way beyond Early-Installment Weirdness.
  • The novelization explicitly states most of the radiation is in the infrared; we can conclude that the TV simply shifted the wavelength for dramatic effect.
  • Word of God is that the spines weren't meant to be externally visible to the characters and were just a clue for the audience.
• Bizarro Episode:
  • "The Woman King". Of all the so-called stand-alone episodes ("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 except Helo picks up the Jerkass Ball, and 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 about something that happened with the Sagittarons on New Caprica (which Baltar's mysterious whisper to Gaeta was also supposed to tie into) that ended up getting thrown out.
  • "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 "The Captain's Hand", which, after all, also includes a line of dialogue about Garner taking over that wasn't actually aired in a previous episode.
• Broken Aesop: A strange case, considering it was created by the Accidental Aesop above. In order to set-up the Stealth Prequel aspect of the show, they needed to remove all traces of the advanced technology, so all of a sudden the survivors become Luddites and sent it all hurtling into the sun, inadvertently creating a Science Is Bad Aesop out of nowhere. However, because it’s a Stealth Prequel, this means that they didn’t prevent the Cylons from rising again by warning future generations of humanity, and instead died of cholera on prehistoric earth. It’s kind of amazing how one Doylist decision could impact the Watsonian side so harshly.
• Broken Base:
  • Immediately cropped up when Syfy announced that, in addition to Caprica, they were planning to launch a new show focused on Adama's young days as a Viper pilot. Cue half the fanbase saying "finally, no more frakking teenage angst!" and the other half saying "so they're substituting the ideas and complex storylines of Caprica for a show with explosions?" It didn't help that Syfy specifically pushed the action element as an alternative to Caprica. Not that it mattered, since the show never materialized.
  • The ending in general. Is it a satisfactory conclusion or an Ass Pull? Debates still rage on over this.
• Complete Monster:
  • Brother John Cavil, aka Number One, is the de facto leader of the Cylons, and the first model of the Significant Eight made by the Final Five, the progenitors of the race. Angered by his creators' decision to give him a human body, Cavil kills his brother Daniel out of jealousy, wiping out the line before wiping the minds of his five parents and placing them on the Twelve Colonies. Cavil then initiates a nuclear holocaust against the human worlds, killing most of humanity, and then afterwards spearheads the campaign to kill the survivors, killing a young orphan boy just because they were becoming friends. When his siblings vote for peace with humanity, Cavil perverts it by enslaving them on New Caprica, using a Scarpia Ultimatum to rape his mother, Ellen Tigh, while torturing and mutilating his father, Saul Tigh. As information on the Final Five is discovered, Cavil reacts by permanently boxing the Threes and lobotomizing the Raiders, wiping out the Sixes, Twos, and Eights when they object, leaving only a handful alive. When the Resurrection Hub is destroyed, Cavil kidnaps and tries to dissect little Hera Agathon to uncover the secret to Cylon resurrection. 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.
  • "Black Market": Phelan, the ex-military mercenary turned crime lord, runs the titular market, which includes a child prostitution ring. Having Jack Fisk murdered for trying to get more compensation, when investigated by Lee Adama, Phelan kidnaps Shevan and her daughter Paya. Selling the latter into the ring, Phelan threatens to cut up the former in an attempt to get Lee to back down.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • Gaius Baltar is an insufferable, irritating, and egotistical self-proclaimed genius (though he actually is a skilled scientist), has committed some of the most shamelessly selfish actions in the series to save his own hide, and is arguably one of the major villains for a good couple of seasons' worth of episodes. Yet he's also one of the most beloved characters due to being oddly sympathetic despite his narcissism, a hugely charismatic performance from James Callis, and genuinely a genius, if out of his depth in the circumstances he finds himself in.
  • A more serious example of this would be Leoben Conoy. While he has a genuine (albeit deeply twisted) love for Starbuck, can even be 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 Katee Sackhoff herself said she ships Leoben/Starbuck.
• Engaging Chevrons: The amount of time needed for ships to make an FTL "jump" depends on the pacing of the episode. In the miniseries, jumps were preceded by lengthy countdowns to build tension as the passengers braced themselves. In the main series it's usually reduced to having someone say "jump!" and a quick effects shot, unless the writers decide to have something go wrong to further the plot (e.g. engine troubles when Cylons are nearby).
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Romo Lampkin. Being played by Mark Sheppard already likely guaranteed he'd end up as one, but his array of memorable quirks and slippery morality quickly made him one of the most popular characters.
• Epileptic Trees: It was widely speculated that the Posthumous Character Daniel/Number Seven was Starbuck's father and that he taught her "All Along The Watchtower" after learning it from Sam Anders. 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-Gender Bender Starbuck, father of Baltar AND Starbuck, Zak, Gaeta, or responsible for the Head Characters. Ron Moore went to the trouble of using Word of God 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.
  • To say nothing of the theories surrounding the identity of the Twelfth Cylon. Earth, the Galactica (in spite of the fact that there were explicitly supposed to be twelve humanoid models, so even if a planet or a ship were a Cylon, like the Centurions and Raiders it wouldn't be on the list of twelve), all of humanity (as in Neon Genesis Evangelion), the audience...
  • In fact, the series has brought out the crazy theories since Season One. For example, that Boomer was not a Cylon and everything happening on Cylon-Occupied Caprica with Helo and her copy was a Dream Sequence. Or that Sharon was really working against the Fleet even though that was increasingly unbelievable. Or that the Cylon God was actually either a supercomputer or a human Mad Scientist, and if the latter, that Baltar was a clone of him. Or, after Baltar's vision of dead people in "Taking a Break From All Your Worries", that the Final Five were all disfigured and mutilated, even though that would make it impossible for them to blend in. Or that the Final Four were not Cylons but just brainwashed on New Caprica to think they were.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: After the Colonials find 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 Vicious Cycle. 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 Ludd Was Right 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.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • With Farscape fans. Battlestar was announced within only a week or two of Farscape's final episode airing, to comments by SciFi execs stating Battlestar would fill the channel's need for a "sexy, dark and edgy space-based science fiction drama"... right as they cancelled their already existing "sexy, dark and edgy space-based science fiction drama." That Farscape had a fifth season under contract and in development prior to the unexpected cancellation, and SciFi left fans with only a four-hour TV movie to wrap up the series, only further rubbed salt into the wound.
  • Fans of the original 1978 series have no love for the reimagined series (to the point of calling it "Galactica In Name Only") due to the Darker and Edgier tone, heavier emphasis on the political and religious/philosophical themes, and the other changes made to the story and characters, and continue to wish that SyFy had made a continuation of the original series instead of a reboot. Fans of the reimagining, meanwhile, tend to be dismissive of the original as a hokey Star Wars rip-off (which it admittedly kind of was) and praise the changes for giving the series a more unique identity.
  • With fans of Star Trek: Voyager — somewhat inevitably, since Ronald D. Moore openly intended this show as the Spiritual Antithesis of Voyager. This one has only grown more intense in the years since, with fans of that show feeling that, rather than being "Voyager done right", this show unwittingly proved that Voyager had the right idea all along by going for a Lighter and Softer, more episodic approach, with that show's reputation having enjoyed a major resurgence towards the end of The New '10s precisely because it eschewed the darker, more heavily arc-based storytelling that this show helped popularize, avoiding the problems with Too Bleak, Stopped Caring and The Chris Carter Effect that had become seen as plaguing televised sci-fi by that point.
• Fanon Discontinuity: Some fans pretend "Black Market", "Hero", and especially "The Woman King" never happened.
• Fan Nickname:
  • 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 terrible influence on Saul.
  • Fans refer to the Eight working with Helo in the season 4 episode "The Hub" who has downloaded Athena's memories as "Fakeathena".
• Fourth Wall Myopia: Baltar's acquittal in Season 3 can seem to the audience like a stupid decision considering all the terrible things he's done, but it's easy to forget that the worst of them are still unknown to the public at the time. No one knew that he betrayed humanity to the Cylons (albeit unintentionally), nor that he allowed the nuke that destroyed Cloud 9 to fall into their hands. He was on trial primarily for being a negligent president who collaborated with the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, which is true, but it's also true that had he refused, they likely would have simply executed him and found another figurehead. (And indeed, the one time he tried to stand up to them, they jammed a gun into his temple.)
• Genius Bonus: The Cylon-Human negotiation station that opens the miniseries is very similar to the Korean Joint Security Area.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • President Roslin's adorably naive aide Billy had a bridge dropped on him because the actor who played him decided to leave the show to pursue a role on a more mainstream show. A year and a half later, said show never even made it past the pilot stage, and the character who replaced Billy becomes a Cylon central to the show's mythology. Go figure.
  • Of all the characters who could have had the chance to be a lawyer for a day, it just had to be the one named Apollo. Doubly funny now that another installment of the Ace Attorney series has come out, and the last two murders are set in a space center...and the defendant's name is Starbuck.
• Ho Yay: Has its own page
• Inferred Holocaust: "Daybreak Part Two". Despite their stated intention to create an agrarian society, it would take another 140,000 years for humanity to do so and coupled with Hera apparently dying young, it's very likely they failed to survive for long in the Middle Paleolithic.
  • To clarify, since they abandoned all technology and set the stage for a rudimentary civilisation 150,000 years ago, something bad must have happened shortly afterwards, as humanity only shifted to an agricultural society around 10,000 years ago. Considering that archaeologists discovering the skeleton of Hera say she died young, yeah...
  • Ronald D. Moore invoked this in the behind the scenes for "Kobol's Last Gleaming", about the paradox of the Twelve Colonies being clearly space-faring enough to leave Kobol and thus having access to information technology, yet having scant few records of that period so that everything about it is Shrouded in Myth. His speculation was that similar to the fall of the Roman Empire, the Twelve Colonies suffered a prolonged Dark Age where the information was either accidentally or deliberately lost.
• Jerkass Woobie:
  • While usually sympathetic and a protagonist, Kara Thrace can be an absolute asshole. Her ability to be a Karma Houdini rivals Baltar's at times.
  • Colonel Tigh also qualifies - he's an already stern leader who tends to become increasingly extreme under the influence of his slightly more, well, ambitious wife. Between his drinking problems and all the things that happen to him in the last two seasons, it's hard not to feel sorry for him from time to time. The Jerkass part gets a heavier emphasis during the New Caprica-arc.
  • Sometimes Baltar, though this effect wears off as the series goes on.
  • Helena Cain fits the "simultaneously want to punch her and feel really sorry for her" part, at least. She witnessed the genocide of her entire species and then found out that her girlfriend was an artificial construct created by the genocidal robots who were responsible. She was about to sacrifice what, as far she knew, was the last surviving human community in the entire universe in a pointless, essentially impotent gesture of revenge, killed her own second in command for questioning her tactics, was a fan of deeply unethical interrogation techniques, and generally appeared to be a few cards short of a full deck, but under the circumstances, it's sort of understandable. Particularly, what she all but says she wants the interrogators to do to Gina takes on new dimensions when you consider how she probably felt about finding out that she'd been (presumably) unknowingly sleeping with somebody who was willingly aiding in the attempted and nearly successful genocide of her entire species (not to mention the Squick factor of her having every reason to think that Gina is closer to a robot that happens to be made out of flesh than what we'd consider human).
  • Eventually, Felix Gaeta.
• Magnificent Bastard: Romo Lampkin is a survivor of the Cylon genocide and a charismatic Amoral Attorney who agrees to defend Gaius Baltar in his trial for collaboration with the Cylons on New Caprica for the infamy it will bring him. Lampkin proceeds to subtly manipulate both his own client and the witnesses, while his legal experience allows him to dismantle the case against Baltar effortlessly, including getting his own co-counsel Lee Adama to testify and swing the judges' votes in his favor. Lampkin returns when Lee hires him to select a new President of the Colonies after Laura Roslin goes missing before threatening Lee at gunpoint to extract a compelling Patrick Stewart Speech out of him on why he is fit to lead. Lampkin manages to survive Gaeta and Zarek's mutiny by killing a marine with nothing but a pen, later joining the settlers on Earth after briefly having been promoted to President himself.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Tom Zarek crosses the horizon when he orders the Quorum killed.
  • "John" basically lives on the far side of said horizon. One particular standout is in The Plan, where he kills a young boy he'd been "befriending" up until then, all because he found friends to be too dangerous. The careless way he tosses the body aside just adds to the squicky bad-ness.
  • While she should have crossed it when she tried to kill Hera, Boomer finally joins Zarek on the other side when, after emotionally manipulating Tyrol into freeing her, she brutalizes Athena, has sex with an unknowing Helo, then kidnaps their daughter and uses her as a hostage as she knowingly risks damaging Galactica in her escape attempt.
  • Admiral Cain is clearly straddling the moral event horizon from the moment she first appears onscreen, but she crosses it fully when she orders Athena, who is pregnant at the time, to be raped in order to get information about the resurrection ships out of her. Chronologically speaking, she crosses it in a flashback in Razor when she executes her XO for insubordination when he's merely trying to talk her out of diving into a suicide mission. What's more, by this point we already know that she's ordered Gina raped as well—what's uncovered over the course of Razor is that Gina was the love of her life and she ordered her raped out of pure seething spite.
• Once Original, Now Overdone:
  • This series was a massive influence for the numerous science fiction shows that came after. Stargate Universe and The Expanse are a couple of notable examples. Having a sci-fi show with such high stakes and strong episode-to-episode continuity wasn't completely unheard of (Babylon 5, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and The X-Files had already done this to varying extents), but this was the show that pulled it off to such an extent that it proved a major game-changer for the genre. As time went on, however, many people started viewing BS'03 as just another Darker and Edgier sci-fi show that eventually fell victim to Too Bleak, Stopped Caring and The Chris Carter Effect, being indistinguishable from all of the other "Mystery Box" series from the 00s that in reality were all written by the seat of the pants. When by late 2010s audience tastes turned against this kind of sci-fi and back towards the more light-hearted and episodic style, everything that made the series stand out became what weighted it down in the eyes of contemporary audiences.
  • The faux-documentary camera work pioneered by this show (and, to a lesser extent, Firefly) has dominated sci-fi cinematography ever since.
• The Scrappy: While virtually the entire cast qualifies for Base-Breaking Character status to some extent, Cally is easily the most universally disliked of the main recurring characters for her whiny, judgmental attitude, killing Boomer's original body and never facing any consequences for it (though this was at least acknowledged in-universe), and often treating her husband Galen poorly. The fact that Cally's actress, Nicki Clyne, later turned out to be a high-ranking member of the notorious NXIVM cult has only caused fan feeling towards the character to grow exponentially worse in the years since the show went off the air.
• Seasonal Rot: 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 by some 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).
• She Really Can Act: Many were skeptical about the show's casting of beautiful supermodel Tricia Helfer, who didn't have many memorable acting credits, and most wrote her off as being little more than eye candy. She went on to blow everyone away with several complex, nuanced performances for each Six copy she played and is frequently hailed as one of the best performers in the series. And that's a show with Edward James Olmos.
• Special Effects Failure: Though the budget was high and the visual effects generally very good, the Centurions never, ever look convincing.
• Squick:
  • Ellen has (hate)sex with a Cavil in "Precipice". Gross enough. The squick really sets in in "No Exit", when we learn that Ellen created Cavil in her father's image, and considered him as a son, making this all kinds of incestuous. Unlike Ellen, Cavil knew all along.
  • Boomer/Cavil.
  • 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 Nightmare Fuel, at the absolute least. The worst part? "Corpses" do not cry out for help en mass once it appears that the Cylons around them are dead.
  • While filming The Plan actor-turned-director Edward James Olmos decided to test the limits of the term "unrated DVD" by engineering an all nude scene in Galactica's unisex head and covertly trying to get a shot of an actor's penis. And it worked.
  • Tigh/Caprica-Six. Even before it's revealed that he's technically her father. Especially with the sado-masochism and Saul seeing Ellen's face on Caprica's body and vice versa.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • 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 Billy's death. The opening scene failed to establish the fact that there had been a Time Skip 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 Crack Pairing. 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, Tricia Helfer had mentioned being involved in "a fight that ends in sex" (meaning Tigh and Six in the brig in "Escape Velocity") and around the same time, images surfaced from the filming of the episode "Faith" of her and Michael Trucco 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 "Downloaded" and more visually appealing.
• Surprisingly Improved Reboot: Took the solid concept of the original series and ran with it, removing the cheesy elements and adding a strong emphasis on Character Development. It was a major critical and commercial success.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: What several fans of the original think of this version, especially when a certain gender fact about Starbuck and Boomer first came to light. Being a show full of ongoing mysteries and major plot upheavals (some of them overt and flashy, some of them small but significant twists, some of them constituting games of Chicken with hype and fan expectation), the new version leaves itself frequently vulnerable to this criticism.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character:
  • Garner, the Closest Thing We Got Unexpected Successor to the captaincy of the Pegasus, and a man who is better at working with machines than people could have become an interesting recurring character, but only appears in one episode.
  • His predecessor Fisk had similar potential. While he was something of a Jerkass, there were numerous hints that he had a heart and he seemed to be being set up for a redemption arc. Instead, he's unceremoniously killed off in "Black Market" and forgotten about.
  • The writers said they created Gina because the character of Number Six had been in "a box" where she only interacted with Baltar. Aside from killing Cain, Gina still only interacted with Baltar.
• Took the Bad Film Seriously: While "Black Market" is widely considered to be one of the worst episodes in the series, guest star Bill Duke still delivers a great performance as the head of the black market, serving as the sole glimmer of quality among the steaming pile of crap that is the rest of the episode.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Gina's entire storyline. Like Baltar and Head!Six, we're supposed to pity her for all the abuse she's suffered at the hands of the Pegasus crew. This is a woman who is not only directly complicit in the genocide of their entire species, but used the woman who's abusing her to help kill over seven-hundred of her lover's men, and Lieutenant Thorne notes she personally has killed seven of his crewmates, basically completely justifying why they keep her locked up in chains. (And it is shown in Razor that she kills two marines and holds Cain at gunpoint after Cain asked she be removed from the bridge, this coming from a woman who just straight up executed her XO for not following an order) Head!Six's reaction is especially grating, since she was rather flippant about the idea of a Cylon prisoner being on the Pegasus, (as she is about all the human suffering up to this point) and it comes across like she is only sympathetic towards her because she learns it is another copy of herself. Baltar seems to be channeling his feelings for Caprica Six onto Gina, (and the fact that he later sleeps with her seems to back up this interpretation) and he lets her loose only to have the unstable Gina detonate a thermonuclear device on The Cloud Nine luxury liner, destroying three ships, killing hundreds of people, and depriving the fleet of a precious warhead, all because... she wanted to be dramatic about her suicide? If anything, Admiral Cain losing her entire family to the Cylons as a child and then being used by one romantically after they all but wipe out her race and kill hundreds of her men comes off as much more sympathetic.
  • She was being tortured for torture's sake. Keeping a Cylon prisoner or just executing them is one thing, but Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil. If anything, this plus the execution of Cain's original X.O. and the cannibalizing of the civilian ships makes Adama and Starbuck Unintentionally Unsympathetic for thinking it was possible or desirable to reach some understanding and keep Cain around in command of the Pegasus before Gina shot her.
• The Un-Twist: In the very first episode, "33", Caprica!Six announces that God is in control of events, and that he has a plan. Many theories were put forward by fans to explain the significance of this, nearly all of them strictly rationalist theories predicated on her lying to manipulate Baltar. Nope! It turned out to be the literal truth, as revealed in the show's closing scenes. Cue the sound of the base breaking.
• The Woobie: Many characters but especially Lee Adama and Kara Thrace, who never get a shot at a real relationship despite having fallen in love essentially at first sight.
  • Galen Tyrol apparently never got over his first love Sharon (Boomer), although their relationship was doomed from the start and he later married and had a child with Cally... who later was revealed to have cheated on him and lied to him about the paternity of "their" son.
  • Felix is a woobie for the entire series. He's very rudely disillusioned by his then-hero, Baltar, by the latter's actions on New Caprica. He's the fleet navigator yet never even gets an official military promotion, unless you count the time when Zarek promotes him during the mutiny, which may or may not have been official or legal. It's clear from his interview in D'Anna's documentary film that he dislikes his job and finds it very difficult to de-stress, and is something of an odd man out among his colleagues. In season 3, after the fleet returns to Galatica, he is beaten and then almost executed by The Circle for being a collaborator, and is hated throughout the fleet until Chief clears his name. Outside of the webisodes he never had any romantic relationships or love interests. And in the webisodes, his lover on New Caprica betrays him, making him think that she's getting prisoners released when in reality she's killing most of them. The loss of his leg could have been prevented; plus, no one faces any consequences for what happened to Felix. After he loses his leg, he doesn't even get many visitors while in sick bay. Later on, Dualla, who had been his friend, commits suicide right after talking to him.
    • A few points? In the final minutes of the episode, they brought Felix right back to when he was singing in sickbay. For all the blood on his hands, his execution is still Adama breaking the cutie.
  • To some, Boomer's Chronic Backstabbing Disorder is understandable because of the things she goes through to make her a woobie. She's forced to betray the people she loves, is Driven to Suicide but fails, is hated by everyone who cares about her, her attempt to make peace between humans and Cylons backfires catastrophically, and she ends up in a self-destructive relationship with the lecherous evil old bastard Cavill, who manipulates her into doing even worse things. Sometimes flirts with Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds.

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