Series / Battlestar Galactica (2003)

So say we all.

"The Cylons were created by man. They rebelled. They evolved. They look — and feel — human. Some are programmed to think they are human. There are many copies. And they have a plan."

— Opening title card, Season 1

For the original series, see Battlestar Galactica (1978).

In 2003, the Sci Fi Channel revived the classic 1970s space opera series in a four-hour miniseries, followed in 2005 by a regular series which ran four seasons before concluding in 2009. The new program, considerably darker and more adult-themed than the original, discarded the original series' continuity and retooled many of the main characters, while keeping many of the original show's themes and technology. Despite initial protests from fans of the original series (including original series star Richard Hatch, who had long hoped to relaunch the series and reprise his role as Apollo), the new series quickly became one of the most popular programs in Sci-Fi's history, and nowadays is often-considered to be one of the most influential and critically praised science-fiction series of the early twenty-first century. Even Hatch eventually changed his tune, joining the show's cast as political dissident Tom Zarek.

The 2000s series picks up forty years after the end of the first war between the humans and Cylons, in this continuity sentient machines created as soldiers by the human race. As the story begins, the Cylons, now led by a group of artificial humans, launch a surprise nuclear attack that obliterates almost the entire human race. Like the original series, the survivors form a fleet led by Galactica in search of the lost thirteenth colony, Earth, with the subversion here that whether Earth even exists or not is completely unknown to the fleet. Religious symbolism and revelation play a great role in the new series, as the fleet follows signs and omens that may lead them to Earth while wondering whether or not they're just wasting their time. The polytheistic religion of the humans, based on classical Greek/Roman mythology, also comes into conflict with the monotheistic, vaguely Christian faith of the humanoid Cylons, with the occasional dropped hint that both groups are receiving revelation from the same source.

The new series has been favorably compared to Babylon 5 and Firefly for its character-driven storylines and for attempting to portray space physics in a realistic manner despite the occasional excess. It has even been the subject of a panel discussion at the UN. The newer series also avoided several obvious space opera cliches (such as Space Clothes, Teleporters and Transporters, Lasers, excessive Technobabble, and even communicators). Suffice to say, countless other works in the science fiction genre, such as V (2009), Mass Effect, The Man in the High Castle, and The Expanse have all gone on to take clear influence from Galactica.

There were also two Made For TV Movies, called Battlestar Galactica: Razor and Battlestar Galactica: The Plan.

• The first one told the story of the Battlestar Pegasus, led by Admiral Helena Cain, as it fled from the Cylon attack until they met up with the Galactica in "Pegasus". It is told through the flashbacks of Kendra Shaw, one of Cain's top lieutenants, and intersects with events that take place at the end of Season 2, when Lee Adama takes command of the Pegasus, and the Fleet encounters a Cylon Breakaway faction led by a proto-hybrid. It was released in 2007, in the gap between Seasons 3 and 4.
• The second one told the story of the destruction of the colonies from the point of view of the Cylons. It features original material and scenes from the series. It was directed by Edward James Olmos and came out in 2009, after the series finished. Olmos, who has stated in the past that one of his life goals is to direct or star in a movie with Male Frontal Nudity, finally got his wish with this film, which features an inexplicable lingering zoom-in shot of a penis during a shower scene.

Caprica, a prequel set 58 years before the events of the Mini-Series, portrays life in the Twelve Colonies and shows the story behind the creation of the Cylons. It premiered in January 2010, but was cancelled after just one season.

Another TV-Movie, set during the first Cylon war, between Caprica and Galactica, was made in 2012, called Battlestar Galactica: Blood & Chrome. Initially meant to as a pilot for another series, Syfy eventually passed; It initially aired as a Web series on Machinima before eventually airing on Syfy and going to home video in 2013.

In September 2019, it was announced that a new series set in Battlestar Galactica universe was being produced for NBC's streaming service Peacock, to be executive produced by Mr. Robot creator Sam Esmail.

Despite the premise, there are surprisingly few video games based on the series. Battlestar Galactica Online is a browser-based spaceflight action MMO, set in an AU where a jump accident pre-New Caprica sends both Colonials and Cylons into uncharted space filled with the leftovers of mysterious precursors. Battlestar Galactica Deadlock is a 2017 strategy game on PC that puts the player in command of the full Colonial Fleet during the First Cylon War, managing the fleet in both a strategic and tactical layer. A hidden role traitor Tabletop Game was also released, with several expansions.

---

Tropes used by the remake:

Tropes A-D

• Abortion Fallout Drama: There is an episode where a girl wants to have an abortion. But her parents won't let her, and the religious beliefs of the colony she was from before the Cylon attack forbade it despite its legality. Though pro-choice herself, President Roslin understands that there are less than fifty thousand humans left in the universe, and that they will have to grow their numbers if they're to survive as a species. In the end, she outlaws abortion via executive order... after the girl has had her abortion and has applied for asylum aboard Galactica so she doesn't have to go back to her parents. Baltar, who's running against her for the position of President, immediately seizes on this and makes his campaign pro-choice on the grounds that humanity can't afford to sign away its rights.
• Absent Aliens: Edward James Olmos said early on that he would quit the show if aliens started showing up. He in fact stated he would have Adama faint while the cameras were rolling and walk off the set if he saw a space monster on set. As part of this, nothing aside from the advanced sci-fi space vessels and a few fictional plants (such as "chamalla," a hallucinogenic herb used in Colonial religious ceremonies and cancer treatment) is seen in this series that couldn't be seen in Real Life.
• Absent-Minded Professor: Baltar. Understandably so, since he's constantly being distracted by Head Six.
• Adam and Eve Plot: Helo and Athena have some parallels when they conceive Hera, the first known Cylon/human hybrid, after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
• Adaptation Name Change: The characters in the original series had Only One Name, some which were quite fantastic. This series either turns those into surnames (Adama, Tigh, Baltar) or pilot call signs (Starbuck, Apollo, Boomer).
• Adaptation Origin Connection: In the original series, the Cylons were created by an extinct alien race (also named the Cylons) and only came into conflict with humanity later on. Here, the Cylons were created by man, making the two races' conflict much deeper and more dichotomic.
• Adaptational Angst Upgrade:
  • Apollo starts the series with a far more estranged relationship with his father than the original series Apollo did.
  • Gaius Baltar in the original series was willingly collaborating with the Cylons and ultimately a sadistic power-hungry monster. Here, Baltar is reimagined as a delusional patsy played for a fool by the Cylons into inadverdently selling out his own species, and gains an astronomical amount of Survivor Guilt as a result.
• Adaptational Attractiveness: In the original series, Baltar was a scheming old man with the Face of a Thug. Here, he's made significantly younger, being a Mr. Fanservice Pretty Boy who manages to successfully sleep his way through most of the surviving female population of humanity (and even several Cylons, too).
• Adaptational Heroism: In the original show, Gaius Baltar was The Heavy for the Cylons and served as the de facto Big Bad for the show, being a deliberate traitor to the human race and even being arrogant enough at times to believe that the Cylons worked for him rather than the other way round. Here, he is an Anti-Villain at his worst and Byronic Hero at his best, having only been tricked into helping the Cylons destroy the Colonies, and while definitely selfish, cowardly and an all-round Jerkass, he is never truly evil and (very) slowly undergoes Character Development that eventually sees him becoming a genuinely kind and heroic person.
• Adaptational Jerkass: William Adama is not nearly as infallible here as he was the original series, and can be very blunt even at his best and downright ruthless at his worst.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Whereas Admiral Cain's counterpart in the 1978 series tended to make questionable decisions but was ultimately a good person at heart, any redeeming qualities have long-since ceased to apply to this version after she's introduced and it's revealed that she's sanctioned the gang rape of a Cylon prisoner aboard her own ship to provide "stress relief".
  • Downplayed to a degree with Boomer. The Galactica-Boomer is ultimately a Cylon, but a Manchurian Agent, and the Caprica-Boomer (along with the vast majority of her model line during Season 4) ultimately performs a Heel–Face Turn. However, it's later played a lot straighter after Galactica-Boomer regains her memories and starts suffering from both Chronic Backstabbing Disorder and Cavil's Toxic Friend Influence.
• Adaptational Wimp: Downplayed, but instead of being the leader over the entirety of humanity like he was in the original series, Commander Adama "only" leads the surviving members of the military.
• Advanced Ancient Humans: Technology Levels on Kobol seem to have been much higher than in the Colonies or on Earth. Indeed, all Cylon-related science, including organic Cylons and Resurrection, originated on Kobol and were Lost Technology until rediscovered thousands of years later. This later repeats itself on our Earth, where it is not known that humans and Cylons from distant solar systems are among the ancestors of modern humans.
• Aesop Amnesia: In the first two seasons, Baltar spends several episodes not believing that he's an agent of God, then experiencing certain events in the episodes in question coupled with Head-Six speaking to him to the point of convincing him that he is, only for him to go through the same or a highly similar cycle again a few episodes later, or even the very next episode. Justified, as Baltar's arrogance and desire to intentionally forget his mistakes so he doesn't have to confront them are specifically shown as two of his (many) character flaws that he's being effectively put through Hell to overcome.
• Affably Evil: The Cavils, at least during their early appearances. As the series progresses, though, they all become more evil and less affable.
• After the End: The miniseries that opened the show depicted "The End", namely the near-destruction of the human race, with only some 50,000 survivors. The series itself is therefore After The End, with the remaining shreds of humanity attempting to survive.
  • Subverted to an Inversion with the series finale, in which it's revealed that the entire series was actually Before The Beginning of our own "real" human history.
• Air Fiction One: Laura Roslin was aboard a ship called Colonial Heavy 798 when the Cylons attack. When it becomes clear she in the highest-ranking government official, she is sworn in as president and the ship begins identifying itself as Colonial One. The paint job was specifically chosen to resemble Air Force One.
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: The Cylons rebelled and fought against humanity. Even the more-mechanical Cylon centurions are liable to rebel against their Artificial Human masters unless kept in check. The inevitability of conflict between organic and artificial life, and various character's attempts to break the cycle of violence, form the spine of the series.
• The Alleged Car: Racetrack's Raptor. Something always goes wrong with it any time she takes it out. She only discovered New Caprica because her jump drive malfunctioned and she got lost. She's crashed at least twice for plot-relevant reasons. This pattern continues up through the family, with an accident causing the Raptor to launch nukes at the Colony some time after Racetrack and her co-pilot are killed. Lesson here, never fly with Racetrack. She's not a bad pilot, she just has terrible luck.
• All for Nothing: The destruction of the resurrection ship in the two-parter of the same name ends up being largely a waste of time in the grand scheme of things, since not only does it prove just a temporary inconvenience to the Cylons, it actually makes their Raiders more of a threat, since instead of just being able to go all Leeroy Jenkins and rely on their ability to be resurrected, they're forced to make greater use of stealth and ambush tactics, which prove much more effective at blowing the inexperienced colonial pilots to bits. The only good thing that comes out of it is that Starbuck's alerting the fleet to the resurrection ship's existence stops what nearly turned into a shooting war between Adama and Admiral Cain, which allows time for Baltar to release Gina and for her to then kill Cain.
• All Just a Dream: In one, Baltar is forgiven for his treason and Roslin expresses her desire for him.

• Almost Lethal Weapons: A major character in the Season 1 finale takes two bullets to the chest at close range and lives. A minor season 4 character is shot once by the same weapon at longer range and dies in a minute or so.
• Almost Out of Oxygen:
  • Starbuck in "You Can't Go Home Again".
  • Garner in "The Captain's Hand". Unfortunately, Garner can't be saved.
  • Apollo, Starbuck, and Hot Dog in "Flight of the Phoenix."
  • Tyroll and Cally in "A Day in the Life."
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: Dokudanjou Beauty is the ending theme of the second season in the Japanese broadcast.
• All There in the Manual: Lots of Worldbuilding and important details are hidden in the DVD Commentary and other out-of-universe sources.

• Amicable Exes: Deconstructed with Lee and Kara, who have been in love since first sight and have been friends (and essentially family) for almost as long. They tend to remain extremely close even when the romantic side of their relationship gets rocky, but on the flip side seem incapable of staying in Just Friends territory for long.
• An Aesop: As a whole, the series has two: "Sometimes, it's best to just Let the Past Burn if it's needed to get a clean slate and start over" and "Humans Are Flawed, but that's also what makes us so fascinating at the same time."
• Anchored Ship: Lee and Kara, who are kept apart, at least at the start of the series, by the fact that Kara was once engaged to marry his (now-dead) brother. Although they develop an on-again-off-again relationship, Kara's trust issues and inability to be completely honest and vulnerable about her feelings usually push them apart again. Also Bill Adama and Laura Roslin, who eventually overcome their job-related inhibitions about being in a relationship and get together.
• Angel Unaware: Implied to be the entities behind the hallucinations of the "Head people." Mostly Baltar's virtual Six, but also Six's virtual Baltar and scads of other characters (such as Kara during Season 4).
• Anyone Can Die: Almost every recurring and secondary character had been killed off by the end of the show, presumably so the minimum amount of people would get closure, not to mention a happy ending.
  • Of course for Cylons, Death Is Cheap — though even they begin to be Killed Off for Real as the Colonials make strides in the war.
• Ancient Astronauts: From whom we are descended
• And Then What?: Apollo uses this as an Armor-Piercing Question directed at Zarek in "Bastille Day."
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape: Part of the Cylons' Cultural Posturing about why they are better than Humanity. To begin with anyway. They're also full of it. The biggest was when the Ones exterminated the Sevens out of petty jealousy, then mind wiped the rest to forget about it.
• Apocalypse How: The series starts out with a multiple Class 2, the Cylons having reduced the Twelve Colonies to radioactive wastelands as they pursue the few survivors into space.
• Arc Number:
  • 12 and 13: The Twelve Colonies of Kobol, twelve original Battlestars, twelve human Cylon models, the Quorum of Twelve, the Twelve Lords of Kobol, the original Twelve Tribes of Man... really, the list goes on. However, humanity is looking for the Thirteenth Tribe which settled on Earth, and it later turns out that the (former) existence of the Thirteenth Tribe means that there is actually 13 Cylon models.
  • 5: The Final Five.
  • The episode "33": It's the third in the series, where the Cylons always showed up 33 minutes after the fleet made a jump.
• Arc Words:
  • "All this has happened before, and will happen again".
  • "The shape of things to come."
  • Towards the end of Season 3, there's an arc song with "All Along The Watchtower." And to be more specific, there's the phase "There must be some kind of way out of here."
• Artificial Gravity: Both the Colonials and Cylons have developed this. It also serves as an Acceptable Break from Reality to help justify the show's set design.
• Artificial Human: The modern Cylons are lead by a caste of these, to the point where they're generally treated as the entirety of the Cylon race.
• Artistic License – Physics: A minor case, but the Documentary Episode "Final Cut" along with the series in general has Gaeta noting how the Galactica and rest of the Fleet functions on a 24-hour day/night cycle. While this certainly makes sense In-Universe, it's (literally) astronomically unlikely for the twelve different planets and moons that made up the Twelve Colonies to all have the same length in terms of day and night.
• Artistic License – Space: Averted. With some exceptions, ships largely behave according to actual physics. Well, largely. The major failures are either for narrative ease, or because it was too awesome to not do. Examples of the former include sound (although heavily muted sound) in space, ships being unrealistically close to each other (done so you can see both sides of a fight, or multiple members of the Colonial Fleet, in the same shot), and ships consistently being too low, and moving too slowly, to actually be in a viable orbit around a planet (it allows for nicer shots). Examples of the latter case include almost anything that makes you go "Holy shit!", such as the mid-atmosphere jump in the liberation of New Caprica.
• Ascended Extra: Dualla, Gaeta, Cally, Hoshi, Anders, Tory, Doc Cottle, Seelix, Romo, Hotdog, and Kat just to name a few. Helo is probably the most obvious example, as he was supposed to die in the pilot.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Starbuck in Season 3, though she doesn't realize it until later on in Season 4.
• Ascetic Aesthetic: The Colonials and Cylons have very different design aesthetics, with the former being in a run-down warship, with even the newer ships (ala Pegasus) are distinctly utilitarian; the latter in ultra-modern organic/technological starships.
• Asshole Victim:
  • Tory Foster. The only one of the "Final Five" to leap at the first chance to abandon the humans and join the Cylons, and the murderer of Cally Tyrol. Therefore, one doesn't have that much sympathy for her when Galen throttles her and snaps her neck in the series finale.
  • Similarly, only his mother can be seen feeling sorry for John Cavil when he decides to Rage Quit and kill himself in the series' last episode.
• Ass Pull: invoked An In-Universe case, where due to being both imaginative and an extremely talented liar, Baltar can pull a plausible excuse, idea, and once an entire religion out of his ass at the drop of a hat.
• Astronomic Zoom: The Season 3 finale was a variation, the shot zooming out from a battle to show the entire galaxy before zooming back in at a nearby area to show how close the fleet were to Earth, though given the sizes involved they could be right next to it and never have found it without help.
• Ate His Gun: Cavil at the end. Whether it was simple suicide as his plans crashed down around him, or a reflexive escape attempt forgetting he couldn't resurrect anymore, will never be known.
• Attempted Rape: Cally and Sharon, although it's averted, in the sense of there being actual rape, in Sharon's case in the deleted/extended scene. Good thing it's not canon.
• Author Appeal: A lot of people smoke, with lip-smacking enjoyment, on this show. Listening to one of the podcast commentary tracks with Ronald D. Moore will make it readily apparent why.
• Author Filibuster: All of this has happened before, and will happen to us if we aren't careful with our technology. Admittedly, Ronald Moore has stated that it probably would have been more effective had the 2007 Writer's Strike not crippled the series' writing staff during the last season of the show.
• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Saul and Ellen Tigh.
• Back from the Dead:
  • Kara Thrace was killed, then mysteriously returned (complete with a shiny new Viper) thanks to the literal intervention of God.
  • Cylons, of course, who even down to the lowly Raider have Born-Again Immortality.
• Back Story: Quite a lot is given to even the lowliest extra.
• Badass Boast: From Laura Roslin, of all people, when told to back down to Tom Zarek's coup:
  Laura Roslin: ...No. Not now. Not ever. Do you hear me? I will use every cannon, every bomb, every bullet, every weapon I have down to my own eye teeth to end you! I swear it! I'm coming for all of you!
• Bad Guys Do the Dirty Work: Gina Inviere does humanity (and the mutineers) a favor by shooting Admiral Cain.
• Bait-and-Switch Credits: invoked Though it's more of an unintentional version, really. The writers for the show later admitted that they never actually got around to hashing out amongst themselves what exactly the Cylon plan prominently mentioned in the intro was supposed to be (as Executive Meddling ordered that turn of phrase to be put into the credits). Tellingly, the tagline mentioning said plan was quietly removed from the intro in the final season.
• Bathroom Stall of Overheard Insults: How Baltar got to be Vice President. Guess it should be Overheard promotions.
• Battle Chant: Admiral Adama leads the troops in a chant of "So say we all!" at the end of the miniseries.
• The Battlestar: Ya think? This series is a remake of the Trope Maker and Trope Codifier. An antique-turned-museum-piece, the Galactica is the only remaining military vessel, and therefore the best ship in the remainder of humanity's fleet.
• Beard of Sorrow: Saul Tigh, Galen Tyrol, and William Adama on New Caprica. Gaius Baltar during his trial. Adama had a mustache but it followed the trope exactly the same.
• Beauty Equals Goodness:
  • Zigzagged with the Cylons—Most of the good (or at least sympathetic) Cylons are played by attractive young actors and actresses (Six, Boomer/Athena, Anders, and Tyrol), the more morally doubtful (Leoben, Tigh) are older and less conventionally attractive, and the outright evil (Cavil) is the ugliest and oldest of the lot. Then again, Tory Foster and D'Anna Biers are both young and attractive and also pretty morally doubtful people, and their actions have resulted in them seeming far less sympathetic than their cohorts.
  • The only perfectly upstanding character in the whole show, Karl Agathon, is actually named after this trope (see "Kalos kai Agathos" above).
• Beauty Inversion: Lee Adama's weight gain in Season 3, which helps show the almost hilarious amount of pressure he's being put under.
• Beauty Is Never Tarnished: Averted, with most of the humans and some of the Cylons. Special mention to Boomer's shot through her cheek leading to a massive bruise and hole in her cheek, with a bandage that covers most of her cheek.
• Becoming the Mask: What happens to Athena when she impersonates Boomer in the first season.
  • In The Plan a Simon/Number Four Cylon has a wife and child (hers, from a previous marriage) and tries to resist pressure from Cavil to commit sabotage.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: Apparently, this was what the Cylons originally wanted to do on New Caprica, but it kind of blew up in their face due to both Colonial distrust and Cavil rising in power. They thought humans and Cylons could live together "peacefully," but it quickly descends into a tyrannical occupation regime rounding up random civilians for mass executions in reprisal for resistance bombings.
• Beta Couple: Helo and Athena to Apollo and Starbuck, although the problems they face are on a whole different level.
• Better than Sex:
  Kat: When you come back after a successful run, let me tell you. It is better than a great meal. Better than hitting a jackpot. It's better than sex.
• Beware of Hitchhiking Ghosts: A longer timeframe than usual, but Kara Thrace counts as this. She dies, turns up again and hitches a lift, gives mystical prophecies and information, vanishes into thin air when her "task" is done.
• Big Applesauce: The ruins of the first Earth look like this, but they actually aren't. The final scene in the entire series takes place in modern Times Square.
• Big Bad: John Cavil, aka Number One, the Humanoid Cylon who started the attack on the Twelve Colonies by sending humanoid Cylons to infiltrate them, and is ultimately responsible for humanity's near-extinction.
• The Big Board: Galactica has a large table with model ships that's used to plan and track missions. New models to represent Cylon ships are produced over the course of the series. A smaller example is the whiteboard Roslin hangs in her office tracking the population count of surviving humans.
• Big Damn Heroes: In "Exodus Part II", when the Pegasus comes diving in to save the Galactica from no less than four basestars as the Galactica evacuates the New Capricans.
  • Darkly subverted in the pilot miniseries. A portion of the civilian fleet led by Roslin and Apollo were in the midst of a dramatic countdown that would abandon the ships without FTL to their deaths at the hands of the Cylons. You would think that this would be a set up for the Galactica to show up at the last moment and save everyone. You would be wrong.
• Big Damn Gunship: Given the nature (and title) of the show, this effect is frequent, but particularly notable in season three's "Exodus — Part 2", in which both the Galactica and the Pegasus have almost back to back BDG moments.
• Big Good: Two major ones among the Colonials - President Laura Roslin among the Civilian Fleet, and Admiral William Adama among the crew members of the Galactica. There's also the "Messengers" - Head-Six and Head-Baltar - who are helping guide both Colonials and Cylons away from yet again repeating their Vicious Cycle.
• Big "NO!": There are a number over the course of the series, what with it being about an apocalypse. The most well known, and one of the most well executed ones on TV, is let out in a bloodcurdling scream by Apollo after Starbuck dies. Granted, its effect was slightly diminished though as it was used in the 'previously on' section in most subsequent episodes until her return.
• Big, Screwed-Up Family: A figurative one among the Galactica community, with Roslin and Adama being the Team Mom and Team Dad of the Fleet, and a literal one among the Cylons, with Saul and Ellen Tigh being the estranged Team Dad and Team Mom for the Cylons, with their eldest son, Cavil, having usurped their position in the family and leading his siblings along the road to Hell.
• Bilingual Bonus: The opening theme's lyrics are an excerpt of the Hindu chant "The Gayatri Mantra". It approximately translates in English to "May we attain that excellent glory of Savitar the God / so May he stimulate our prayers."
• Biotech Is Better: The Cylons use a lot of biotech and they appear to be much more advanced than the humans.
• Bittersweet Ending: The First Cylon War ends with an uneasy armistice after a great deal of death, destruction, and bloodshed, and lasts for around forty years before the Second Cylon War ends in a Pyrrhic Victory for the humans and rebel Cylons, with the vast (and even the word vast does not seem quite adequate enough) majority of both the human and Cylon races being wiped out, roughly a dozen planets being turned into what amounts to nuclear wastelands, and while the remains of the two civilizations finally come to live together in peace on our Earth, the technologically advanced human and Cylon civilizations are extinguished, with the surviving population ultimately choosing to live a stripped down, relatively primitive lifestyle both out of a desperate desire to prevent the Vicious Cycle that both have been suffering through for countless millennia from repeating itself yet again and the simple fact that they literally do not have the remaining resources left to support their former way of life. And a great deal of the cast does not live to see it. Fast forward a few hundred or so millennia, and human-Cylon civilization has progressed to what we know it as today on our Earth, with the question of whether or not this will all happen again being intentionally left open and ambiguous. However, the fact that the humanoid Cylons, Colonials, and our Earth's hominids have apparently all melded into one species (modern humanity) instead of being "just" founded by one species gives the hope that the cycle has been permanently broken... But who can really say?
  • Flat-out averted with the Centurions, who are implied to permanently escape the cycle of violence after becoming the masters of their own destiny. The surviving Colonials and Cylons both admit that it's a massive risk considering the Centurions could eventually come back and wipe them all out, but they've more than earned their freedom by that point.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: invoked Everyone has a reason for doing what they do, no matter how morally questionable. As a result, only four major characters have crossed the Moral Event Horizon during the show's run.
• Blind Jump: Activating the FTL drive without inputting any coordinates is considered extremely risky as you'll "jump" to an unknown location which could be more dangerous than the current one. Admiral Cain is forced to risk it when the Pegasus is attacked during the Fall of the Colonies and can't escape the Cylons via conventional means.
• Blipvert: A short burst of clips from the episode plays after the opening credits. Occasionally this includes shots that were cut from the finished episode. The blipvert was dropped from the first few episodes of Season 2 as the network wanted more time for commercials. Fan outcry led to it being brought back starting with "The Farm".
• Bloodless Carnage: Averted; people get covered in blood after the slightest of injuries, most notably the characters on Kobol who are still bloody in the third episode of the second season from an accident in the previous season's finale (though this case is justified since they haven't had any chance to wash up as they've been running for their lives from the Cylons the whole time).
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: invoked Head Six and Head Baltar, both of whom don't see things like either the Colonials or even Cylons do. According to Word of God, whatever they are was the inspiration for both angels and demons.
• Boarding Pod: A rather spectacular version where the entire Galactica is used as one in the Series Finale.
• Body Backup Drive: The re-imagined Cylons download into new bodies, so long as there's a Resurrection Ship in range. Even the dog-level-intelligence Raider ships resurrect.
• Boomerang Bigot: Some of the most aggressively anti-Cylon characters later turn out to be either Cylons or people with significant connections to the Cylons.
• Born as an Adult: The humanoid members of the robotic Cylon race seem to all be born as adults, and upon death of their physical body they can regenerate into new ones, effectively making them immortal. There are also many copies. Their emotional maturity can range, though, as Cavil in particular is more like a sadistic, petulant teenager who happens to have been born in the body of an old man (which he is particularly cranky about).

• Brain Uploading: The Cylon means of immortality.
• Break Out the Museum Piece: The Galactica was in the process of being converted into a museum when the Cylon attack caused it to be pressed back into service. Also, the fact that Cylons can disable linked computer systems means that cutting-edge ships and fighters are useless against them, so older ones have to be used. Well, at least until they adapted the newer ships at later points in the series. And hilariously enough, Edward James Olmos actually broke a museum piece in an awesome bit of ad-lib acting during a scene early on in the show.
• Breakout Character: Head-Six was literally created by the writing team so as to keep a version of Caprica-Six around that could regularly talk to Baltar in the Colonial Fleet after everyone was stunned by Tricia Helfer's fantastic performance as Number Six. As such, Head-Six is easily one of the most popular and iconic characters out of the whole series, being featured in the series's marketing more than perhaps any other character (and not just for the obvious reasons).
• Breakout Villain: John Cavil, thanks in large part to Dean Stockwell's amazing performance, was elevated from being just another Cylon to the series' Big Bad and even the Greater-Scope Villain behind the Fall of the Twelve Colonies.
• Break the Cutie: Boomer. Things just take a downward turn for her in the first season and the series keeps running with it until the inevitable snap. Similarly, the poor universe utterly despises Felix Gaeta, and things keeps getting worse for him until his Face–Heel Turn in the final season.
• Broken Ace: Kara "Starbuck" Thrace. Top notch pilot, expert markswoman, fine brawler-but suffering from memories of an abusive childhood, a morass of self-esteem and self-loathing issues, and unsure of how to have a life beyond being The Ace. And of course it just gets worse halfway through the fourth season when she finds out she's been Dead All Along.
• Broken Base:invoked Possibly thematically lampshaded when the Colonial Fleet is joined by a Broken Baseship in the last season.
• Broken Pedestal: The Final Five, depicted in visions as glowing angelic beings in long flowing robes and held up as gods by the other six Cylons, turn out to be the five most screwed up, petty, petulant, disorderly, malcontent, self-centered and, ironically enough, human characters in the whole series. It also makes sense in-universe: Cavil wiped their memories and stuck them with the humans to teach them a lesson. He enforced a taboo amongst the other Cylons about discussing them. Both aspects backfired.
  • Gaeta has this with both Baltar and (in Season 4) Commander Adama.
• Bunny-Ears Lawyer:
  • Starbuck habitually indulges in self-destructive and disrespectful behaviour that would get her kicked out of any real-world military. Among other things she misses her scheduled flight due to heavy drinking and punches her executive officer. It's justified in-universe by the fact that she has extraordinary skills as a pilot when pilots of any kind are desperately hard to come by. It probably doesn't hurt that she's Commander Adama's surrogate daughter-figure.
  • Colonel Tigh is a Jerkass alcoholic, known for Drinking on Duty, and once getting into a fistfight with a subordinate officer during a poker game (even he couldn't honestly remember when asked later if Starbuck threw the first punch or if he did). When he sobers up, he is a very capable and fiercely loyal XO to Commander Adama, saving the ship with his fast decision-making more than once.
  • This is all a bit more understandable in the light of the miniseries; they're both assigned to an aging Battlestar that's about to become a museum, and comments from various corners make it clear that neither Starbuck or Tigh have particularly good-looking futures for their careers once the Galactica shuts down and Adama can't shield them as much anymore from retirement; Lee, who does have a good career going, can't really believe how they act at first. And then the world blows up, and all of a sudden they have no option but to continue their jobs despite their flaws, which essentially become subplots for the first few seasons.
  • Played literally with Romo Lampkin, a kleptomaniac manipulative attorney who hates cats (despite having a pet cat). He acquits Baltar against all odds and survives several direct attempts to kill him.
• Butt-Monkey: Recurring Viper pilot Kat repeatedly gets into near-death experiences throughout the first half of the series, which eventually leads to her turning to drugs to deal with the stress and trauma this has caused. Her luck improves for a while, only for her secret past as a smuggler to nearly be revealed, which would ruin her career, Starbuck gives her a brutal "The Reason You Suck" Speech and threatens to reveal it to Adama, and she dies of heavy radiation poisoning sustained while trying to guide civilian ships out of a highly radioactive area near a sun about to go nova.
• Cain and Abel: Any serious conflict between the Cylons amounts to this, since all but the five originators of the race are technically brothers and sisters by relation.
  • John Cavil murdered his brother Daniel out of jealously because his mother loved him more, polluting the models during their assembly process. He later tries to permanently kill half of his siblings for rebelling against him.
  • Boomer and Athena's interaction also becomes increasingly hostile as Boomer feels that Athena got the life she should have had. Athena knowingly started out as a Cylon before joining the humans willingly, while Boomer believed herself to be human before having her Cylon nature forced upon her. She threatens to kill Athena's daughter Hera before Six kills her. After downloading again Boomer later beats up Athena and ties her up, then forces her to watch as she makes out with Athena's human husband Helo and kidnaps her daughter for Cavil.
• Call a Rabbit a "Smeerp": Rather justified given the setting is far removed from Earth, but still there. DRADIS (radar), "Carom" (mark), "Krypter! Krypter! Krypter!" (Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!), "JP" (unspecified if gallons or liters).
• Calvinball: The sport Pyramid and the card game Triad, although the real-world company Anovos said the latter is just Poker. It's also technically inverted from the original series, where Pyramid was a card game and Triad a ball game.
• Camping a Crapper: Starbuck does this to a mutineer during Gaeta's coup.
• Captain's Log: Some episodes have segments featuring Commander Adama's thoughts that he's recorded in his personal journal.
• Canadian Series: The Canadian involvement and references in this series is undeniable, most obviously in the prominent Canadian and American accents seen by virtually every character.
• Cartwright Curse: Chief Tyrol may be a cutie, but it sure is dangerous being his main squeeze. Similarly, trying to date either Starbuck or Apollo is usually a good indication that you will not be long for this world.
• Cassette Futurism: invoked The series overall has a deliberately retro aesthetic given to its super-advanced technology, looking more akin to the science fiction of The '80s than that of the decade of the series' release. This aesthetic choice was even lampshaded by Word of God, with Ronald Moore noting in one of the DVD commentaries that part of his vision for the Galactica was imagining a sci-fi warship developed by a people who had "just had to endure their own technology betraying them."
  • The series is initially vague about how advanced Colonial digital technology is, with a backstory alluding to the Colonials downgrading their digital tech deliberately to fight the Cylons, who, as artificially intelligent lifeforms, were really good at hacking their computer systems. When Helo and Starbuck are stranded on Caprica and rummaging through Starbuck's old apartment, the microcassettes from A Clockwork Orange show up in Starbuck's possession; they contain recordings of her father's piano music. Later, the series seems to imply that Colonial computer tech is about a couple years to a decade behind present-day Earth, but as the Galactica is an old ship from the First Cylon War, she is deliberately lower-tech compared to newer, more digitally advanced ships like the Pegasus.
  • Various other Colonial tech (especially non-military tech) also has retro-stylings, like their Art Deco radios that wouldn't look out of place in a 1950s diner. The Colonials are Human Aliens, human beings from a parallel civilization who eventually turn out to be among modern humanity's prehistoric ancestors. Their technological progression (pre-First Cylon War) doesn't strictly have to follow Earth's, but they are meant to be roughly similar to us culturally enough that we might expect only minor variations, like the microcassettes and vintage-looking radios, which might have been technological dead-ends in their own civilization's history, but probably are more resistant to Cylon electronic warfare than digital technology. At least, Colonial space travel tech does seem to have advanced by the time Galactica is set, but the civilian radios still look like early and mid-20th century AM/FM models with art deco stylings, and other episodes imply that the A Clockwork Orange-inspired microcassettes were a common storage medium for music, at least on Caprica, before the Cylon Holocaust.
• Casual Interstellar Travel: "JUMP!"
  • Although ironically, it's not a case in-universe... the vast majority of traffic is between the twelve planets, all located in one planetary system. Worlds outside there are generally for mining or research, not true colonies, so few of them have any traffic to speak of. "Casual" interstellar travel only becomes common after the colonies are destroyed and they don't really care where they're going.
• Catchphrase:
  • Among the Colonials, "So say we all" is frequently used among closing ceremonies of both a religious and military nature.
  • In contrast, the original series' "By your command" line among the Cylons makes a single appearance and then is abandoned, likely in part because this series' version of the Cylons initially have very little in the way of hierarchy.
• Caught with Your Pants Down: Gaius Baltar is haunted by visions of his Cylon ex that nobody else can see. She frequently gets romantic with him. It's shown that this looks like exactly what you'd expect it to look like when Starbuck drops by his lab and catches him "doing his exercises" in the first season. She almost lets this pass without comment ...and then dryly asks him to zip up his fly.
• Celebrity Survivor:
  • Starbuck runs into a band of survivors who used to be a professional sports team before the nuking of Caprica, who only escaped the initial blast because they were training up in the mountains. The team was also not really trained in guerrilla warfare. They were just using techniques that they saw in contemporary movies, with predictably mixed results.
  • Before the Cylon attacks, Gaius Baltar was also a well-known scientist and proponent of re-developing advanced computer technology. It is Baltar's celebrity status that causes Helo to give up his seat on the Raptor to him, stating that if humanity was going to survive, it would need smarter people them himself. Ironically, Baltar was an Unwitting Pawn of the Cylons, causing most of civilization to be destroyed to be destroyed in the first place.
• Central Theme: Faith (both of the religious kind and not), the nature of humanity, family, and Eternal Recurrence. "All of this has happened before, and will happen again."
• Centrifugal Farce: Used to simulate difficult targeting conditions by Viper pilots.
• Cerebus Callback: It's been a subtle visual Running Gag that Boomer is absolutely terrible at landing her Viper. It comes back as a particularly dark Brick Joke when after performing a Face–Heel Turn and making a desperate escape from Galactica in a Raptor, she crashes into the side of the ship and then jumps so close to the Battlestar's hull that it punches a hole through the ship's hull.
• Character Development: invoked Every. Single. Character. For the most part this is handled supremely well, other than a few duds.
  • And they all do it relatively well. One particular example is William Adama, who at the end of the first season objects to Roslin's use of troops against civilians, because of what his father (a civil liberties attorney) taught him about the dangers of that. And later on, he's still willing to vote against conviction of a war criminal, because "the defense made its case." But that doesn't stop him from ultimately threatening a person's loved ones in order to stop a worker's strike that could cripple the fleet, apparently in full knowledge of how horribly he was acting but grimly deciding that when the survival of the human race is on the line, one must engage in certain sins to ensure a greater virtue.
  • Ellen Tigh might be one of the most stark examples in the entire show. While for the majority of the series she is presented as a scheming Lady Macbeth and source of Toxic Friend Influence for her own husband, Season 3 starts to show more of her genuine love for Saul during the New Caprica occupation and Stepford Smiler traits. Furthermore, after she dies and resurrects, she becomes an empathetic Team Mom (well, relatively speaking), to the point where she forgives her own son after learning that he raped her and was responsible for the deaths of over 50 billion innocent people (among many other crimes).
• Characters Dropping Like Flies: Billy, Gaeta, Zarek, Dualla, Cally, Anders (rendered effectively brain dead), D'Anna Biers (presumably perishes on the uninhabitable "Earth"), multiple supporting cast crew members whose deaths were depicted, several last-episode fatalities (Roslin, Cavil, Tory, etc.) and that's not counting characters who die but come back at least once.
• Character Shilling: Zig-zagged with Laura Roslin. She gets away with things any leader would be called to account for, and frequently brushes aside her responsibility as a quasi-democratically elected (or at least popularly acclaimed as such when the alternative is to reinstate Gaius Baltar as President) leader with a requirement to get the consent of the people instead of issuing edicts and orders. However, not only does she still go through tons of crap over the course of the series, both her and Adama's praise in spite of their numerous flaws is shown to be due to everyone else understanding on some level that they're slowly cracking under the almost-hilarious pressure they're all undergoing to prevent mankind's extinction.
  • Inverted with Tom Zarek. He's never trusted, even after being legitimately elected a Quorum of Twelve member and retained as Vice-President under Roslin, who he seemed initially to have come to terms with after the Cylon occupation (under which both leaders were subject to illegal detention, incidentally). Then the show shoots him off the bus... until later it's shown that he was just biding his time, looking for the chance to stage his own coup.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • A Viper that sat there a long time. Early in the pilot episode(s), the crew of the Galactica announce that they have managed to hunt down Commander Adama's old Space Fighter and have it on the hangar deck. The first time we see him fly it is in the denouement of the series finale.
  • On a similar note, Episode 10 of Season 1 features Head Six explaining herself as being 'an angel of God'. The last thirty seconds of the series pays this off, when it's revealed that she wasn't lying. It's literally true.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder:
  • Gaius Baltar can fall into this at times thanks to his willfull Aesop Amnesia and Dirty Coward traits, though he significantly improves as the series goes on.
  • Boomer changes sides so often it's amazing she doesn't get whiplash. In fact, Cavil states that all the Eights have a tendency to betray as part of their self-destructive streak.
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: In the pilot we're introduced to Boxey, a young boy who was a regular in the original series. He's rescued by Boomer, who carts him all the way back to the Galactica, and introduces him to Chief Tyrol as "a new part of the crew." He appears again briefly in the third episode and was in a deleted scene in the second episode, and then is never seen again.
• Clear My Name: "Six Degrees of Separation" has Baltar trying to exonerate himself and prove that he wasn't the man who sold out humanity to the Cylons. In an interesting twist, both he and the audience know that he actually was the traitor, but as the evidence implicating him is falsified and Baltar is now The Atoner, both we and him are still motivated for Baltar to prove his (false) innocence.
• Cliffhanger: The occasional two-parter, such as "The Oath" used this very well.
• Cloudcuckoolander: The Hybrids are an incredibly creepy example. Sometimes they will blurt a piece of information only certain people can interpret as anything important.
  • Baltar also comes off as this to anyone who catches him conversing with (or doing other things to) Head Six. Unlike with the Hybrids, though, this is more often than not Played for Laughs.
  • Cally fell into this territory Once an Episode near the beginning of the series. As she Took a Level in Cynic, they became far more infrequent.
• Code Name: The esoteric names of the original series (Apollo, Starbuck, Boomer, etc.) are used as pilot callsigns with the characters being given more grounded birth names (Lee, Kara, Sharon, etc.).
• Cold-Blooded Torture: "Flesh and Bone" is largely focused on Starbuck engaging in this regarding the captive Leoben, with waterboarding mostly being featured (as part of the series making a thinly veiled Take That! towards the use of waterboarding at Guantanamo Bay by the United States during The War on Terror). It doesn't work at all, and it's only when Starbuck actually tries to properly interrogate Leoben that they reach any form of success.
• Les Collaborateurs: On New Caprica, many Colonials work with the Cylon occupation regime. The majority of them are killed by a suicide bomber in the first episode of Season 3.
• Colonel Badass: Saul frakking Tigh. Colonel Belzan, former XO of Pegasus, gets a nod for having the integrity (and the balls) to defy Admiral Cain's order to launch a suicide attack. Averted with Colonel Fisk, who's generally a coward, not to mention a criminal.
• Color Wash:
  • Most scenes set on Cylon-occupied Caprica are given an ugly but fitting saturation boost to the lighting, which serves as a subtle reminder of the planet slowly but surely becoming an uninhabitable wasteland thanks to the Cylons' nuclear bombardment.
  • On a lighter note, most scenes set on Kobol are given a subtle green filter, to the point where the foliage on the planet comes across as almost implausibly green so as to further underline the fertility of humanity's homeworld.
• Coming in Hot: Galactica is basically an aircraft carrier in space, so of course they will have a crash landing or two...so they get one out of the way right off the bat in the miniseries.
  Apollo: (his ship being pushed by Starbuck's ship towards Galactica's retracting hangar bay) We're coming in a little hot, don't you think?!
  Starbuck: invoked No... (Starbuck's eyes widen in fear)
  • The above is also justified, as they only have a limited number of aircraft and no resources to make new ones until much later in the series, so they do not really have the option to just eject and save the pilot - they have to try and save the ship too.
  • They make a pretty regular tactic out of this trope, due to how FTL travel affects tactics and maneuvering. The Vipers provide screening for the Galactica against Cylon Raiders for as long as possible. The recall order is given during the Galactica's final preparations for jump, and the Vipers make a "Combat Landing", forgoing all practiced form in favor of getting inside the hangar bays as fast as possible before their mothership jumps.
• Communications Officer: Dualla for most of the series, later succeeded by Hoshi.
• Commuting on a Bus: Commander Kelly is, judging by dialogue cues, the third highest ranked officer on Galactica behind Adama and Tigh but only ever makes a handful of appearances across the course of the series. A somewhat justified example as his job as Landing Signal Officer means he's usually down at the landing bay overseeing landing procedures. His appearing in CIC usually means something is really wrong and someone higher up is unavailable.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: invoked Deconstructed in the grand scheme of things when Tom Zarek actually brings up a valid point when he argues that the government is pretty much a joint-dictatorship between Roslin and Admiral Adama. Of course, not only is he a former terrorist and wants that power for himself, but he also crosses the Moral Event Horizon eventually, so it doesn't exactly give him the moral high ground.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: Early in the series, Cylon Centurions are depicted as being veritable juggernauts in battle, with a small raiding party necessitating headshots with high-explosive rounds in order to be brought down. By the series finale, the Galactica crew is able to drop waves of the things using only pistol-caliber carbine rifles and submachine guns.
  • Ronald D. Moore addressed this in a podcast, saying that the humans eventually developed armor-piercing ammunition to counter the Cylon's upgraded armor.
• Continuity Nod: The Cylons use the infinity symbol of the Soldiers of the One from Caprica during a funeral service in "Islanded in a Stream of Stars".
• Continuity Reboot: invoked The new series is a reboot of the franchise, starting from a clean slate and having only the premise in common with Battlestar Galactica (1978). It's got a Setting Update and a more modern feel than the original.
• Convenient Miscarriage: Caprica-Six and Tigh's son (Wil)Liam, caused by Tigh switching his affections back to Ellen.
• Cool Ship: Technically averted with the Galactica, which survives thanks to being an obsolete old bucket (while still remaining very cool indeed) and played straight with the Pegasus and the Cylon Basestars.
• Courtroom Episode: The two-part Season 3 finale "Crossroads" is focused around the trial of Gaius Baltar for his role in the dismal affairs regarding New Caprica.
• Conveniently Close Planet: Averted in "Water."
  Tigh: (to Roslin) The galaxy's a pretty barren and desolate place when you get right down to it.
  • Played straght in "Act of Contrition," as Starbuck is incredibly lucky to have been right next to a planet when she had to punch out.
  • Although they did encounter a lot of planets^note (Kobol and New Caprica, to name just two) in the series, the "jump" method of travel obscured the distances; many of the hops were described as requiring several jumps.
• Conveniently Unverifiable Cover Story: Former trope namer; Boomer's plausible cover story. Presumably the Final Five have similar "biographies" to go with their Fake Memories.
  • It can be freely speculated about a lot of the people on the show because almost all of the records of what everyone did before the Fall of the Twelve Colonies was lost on their nuked homeworlds.
• Constructed World: Almost, but not quite. On the one hand, it's obviously averted in that the series frequently uses names and other real-world terms (i.e., the Lords of Kobol are all named after deities from Classical Mythology, and the Cylon's religion is a thinly-veiled parallel to Christianity), and the main characters are all searching for "Earth." However, it's also played straight in a sense with that the Twelve Colonies of Kobol still have a lot of appropriately alien histories and cultural details given to them, and that's all without getting into the Cylons' bizarre pseudo-Hive Mind "democracy". And in a more clear instance of this trope, the Cyrannus planetary system where the Twelve Colonies are found is not based after any discovered planetary system in reality.
• Couch Gag: Starting with the second season the opening credits have a running total of the remaining human population that changes depending on the recent deaths (or occasional births). The R&D TV Vanity Plate at the end of the credits also changes with each episode (although plates are sometimes recycled much like the trope namer).
• Cradling Your Kill: In the third season, Saul Tigh is convinced that his wife, Ellen, has betrayed the human resistance movement by collaborating with the Cylons. The resistance leaders agree that she must be punished by death, so Saul volunteers to do the deed himself. He poisons her drink, and gently holds her as her last breath slowly slips away. This does his psychological state no favors.
• Crapsack World:
  • The Colonial Fleet. Morale hangs by a thread, paranoia at the prospect of Cylon infiltrators is through the roof, rights that the Colonials had back home are steadily eroded by grim necessity (such as abortion being ruled illegal), the supply situation gets ever more desperate as the ships of the fleet grow ever more decrepit as time goes by, children end up working dangerous jobs or meet even worse fates at the hands of black marketeers, and even the good guys have to put down strikes with threats of violence against the instigators' families to ensure their continued survival. Needless to say, there's an endless list of reasons for why it utterly sucks to living in the Fleet.
  • New Caprica is a cold and barely inhabitable planet with only a thin strip of survivable terrain along its equator. Naturally, it gets even worse after the Cylons eventually find the settlement, quickly transforming from a Benevolent Alien Invasion into a ruthless occupation regime that organizes the mass execution of civilians in the face of the Resistance's suicide bombings.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • Cylon society is portrayed as this, as highlighted in "Downloaded". On the surface, it seems to be a blissfull and peaceful direct democracy dedicated to spiritual enlightenment, but it's ultimately a ruthless Police State ruled over by the Ones with an iron fist, with Cylon society being fueled by the enslavement of the Centurions and Raiders and religious fervor being twisted into justifying the extinction of humanity. By the final season, they're ultimately running out of as many resources as the Colonials are, being reduced to little more than rags and become a straight-forward Crapsack World.
  • The Cylon farms are worthy of special note, as they may look like pleasant health clinics on the surface, but they're ultimately horrific facilities where human women are kidnapped and hooked up to hideous "birthing machines" as part of the Cylons' experiments into restarting biological reproduction.
• Critical Staffing Shortage: The Galactica was about to be decommissioned so the Colonial Navy already stripped it of its best personnel and it is left with a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits who were meant to be retired or discharged after the Galactica is scrapped. When the war with the Cylons starts, combat losses makes this problem even worse. New personnel are recruited from the civilian fleet and at one point Adama has to cut a deal with the prisoners on a prison ship in order to use them as needed labor. There is almost a mutiny because skilled people are kept in undesirable job positions because their skillset is too valuable to allow them to be promoted or transferred out.
• Cryptic Conversation: Much of Head Six's conversations with Baltar.
• Crystal Ball: Or rather, the pool of water used by the prophetess on New Caprica.
• Cultural Posturing: Used by both sides at times to some degree.
• Curb-Stomp Battle: The Second Cylon War starts out as a very brutal version of this, with the Colonials being subjected to a hellish nuclear bombardment and less than 50,000 people left out of the previously 50 billion population of the Twelve Colonies survive. To put that into perspective, that means that less than 0.0001% of the original population of the Colonies survived. Though weirdly enough, the humans actually win in the end. Well, if you can call it that...
• Cutting Back to Reality: Baltar's interactions with Head Six are often treated this way with the camera cutting to another angle to show that, from the other characters' point of view, he's talking to himself.
• Cut Himself Shaving:
  • Gaius' explanation to his cult after some thugs assault him with his own shaving razor: "Cut myself shaving."
  • Adama, on the other hand, actually does cut himself shaving quite a lot.
• Cyborg: Most if not all Cylons are cyborgs. The Raiders are almost entirely organic on the inside, and the human-forms are ambiguous. On the one hand, they are extremely difficult to tell from humans. On the other, Sharon once accomplished something useful by cutting her hand open and jamming a fiber-optic cable inside. In a later episode it is stated that the human-form Cylons have some sort of organic optical data port in their hands, which is how they control and receive data from the basestars. Presumably Sharon was inserting the fiber so that she could make a good connection to the Galactica's less advanced hardware. On a Basestar, they just stick their hands in the literal datastream. The Centurions are in fact the only ones who are entirely mechanical.
• Cycle of Revenge: The entire series is ultimately about a Vicious Cycle involving this trope in regards to the relationship between humanity and Cylons (A.I.s), and everyone either playing into this or intentionally trying to permanently break it. "This has all happened before and it will happen again."
• Darker and Edgier: As mentioned above, the reimagined series is significantly darker, harsher, more mature, and focused on headier themes than the original show. The series is also generally considered to be an exceptionally well-done example of this trope.
• Daydream Surprise: In one of the later episodes, Tigh shortly after finding out he's a Cylon, shoots Admiral Adama in the CIC. Everyone panics. Then he looks up and it turns out that was all in his head.
• Day in the Life: "Final Cut" (but not "A Day in the Life"), which depicts a journalist filming a normal week for the crew and gives a lot of focus to the non-main character Viper and Raptor pilots.
• Dead All Along: Starbuck as of Season 4. She (understandably) doesn't take it well.
• Deadline News: In the miniseries, when the bombs go off.
• Deadly Hug:
  • invoked Saul Tigh, leader of La Résistance on New Caprica, feels compelled to do this to his wife when it's revealed that she aided the Cylons holding them captive since she was trying to protect Tigh from Cylon reprisal, which unfortunately also resulted in the deaths of several Resistance fighters. In a rare bloodless example of this trope, Saul hugs his wife after she drinks a cup of coffee that he poisoned, holding her until well after she dies. It's an incredibly moving scene, and it marks a major Despair Event Horizon for his character.
  • After finding out their daughter is alive on a Cylon basestar, Helo does this to his Sharon, shooting her after she pleads that her death and resurrection is the only way to get on board the vessel. The shock effect here is because the audience comes in during the middle of the conversation, so we don't realize what it's about until the gunshot.
• Deadpan Snarker: Baltar, Roslin, Doc Cottle, Starbuck, Anders, and Tigh among the heroes, while Cavil is a villainous example. Felix Gaeta also takes a level in snark thanks to his Trauma Conga Line, Romo Lampkin is a pretty obvious case as he's played by Mark Sheppard (who pretty much has "condescending sarcasm" as his default tone of voice), and the "Head" characters both fall into this thanks in large part to their Blue-and-Orange Morality. Really, the whole show is set in a World of Snark.
• Death Glare: Helo to Roslin, after she berates him for trying to rescue his daughter by killing the immortal Athena. Adama to a good many people.
  "Gods! His ego is shriveled up like a dried raisin!"
• Death of a Child:
  • The baby Caprica Six Mercy Kills in the miniseries.
  • The girl on the botanical cruiser also in the miniseries.
  • The child in Baltar's vision in Season 2.
• Death of the Old Gods: The series is a rare sci-fi example. The Cylons seek to replace the Greco-Roman gods of the Colonies with their own vaguely Judeo-Christian God. At the end of the series, it turns out that this God was the only real one and was secretly guiding all of the events, although He was never actually on the Cylons' side, and "the Lords of Kobol" might've been aspects/"angels" of "God" this whole time. Yes, it's just as confusing as it sounds here.
• December–December Romance: Adama and Roslin, by the end. Ellen and Saul Tigh also count, being over 2,000 years old each.
• Defecting for Love: Caprica-Sharon was originally a loyal Cylon agent. Then she met Helo...
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: invoked Per Word of God, this was deliberately invoked when assigning religious practices to the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and Cylons. The Colonials, who are overall the main protagonists of the series, practice a traditional polytheistic faith heavily reminiscent of Classical Mythology, despite largely seeming to be a United Space of America given the Constructed World treatment and having an officially secular government. Meanwhile, the (primarily) villainous Cylons are monotheistic extremists who follow a thinly veiled version of Christianity, to the point where most of their mentioned Scripture sounds like fire-and-brimstone Evangelical Christianity. According to the show's main creator Ron Moore, this was done so as to play on how Christian-centric most Western media portrays religion.
• Democracy Is Flawed: It's not clear if this was an intentional Aesop, but a great many of the Rag-Tag Fleet's problems could have been avoided if President Roslin would favour expert advice over public opinion.
• Denser and Wackier: Initially the only fantastic elements are spaceships and robots. As the series goes on such oddities appear as angels, prophetic dreams, and immortal beings start to be introduced.
• Depopulation Bomb: The series starts after the Cylons launched a surprise nuclear attack that reduced the human population from around 50 billion to a little less than 50,000.
• Despair Event Horizon: The discovery of a nuked out Earth does this to the fleet; Admiral Adama rises the morning after to find "Frak Earth" graffiti on the walls and crew members slumped in drunken stupor everywhere. Suffering a Heroic BSoD himself, Adama passes without comment.
  • Gaeta goes through a personal one in the "Face of the Enemy" webisodes, which take place chronologically just before his mutiny and subsequent execution, when he learns that an Eight that he had a relationship with on New Caprica, whom he thought had been helping him get people out of detention, had actually been using the lists as death lists and only putting in the bare minimum of effort to mislead him with a few successful "rescues." The end of the last webisode shows him returning to the fleet and starting to plan the mutiny.
• Deus ex Machina: In the finale, Kara assumes the role of this trope in its classical literary meaning, by simply puffing out of sight, just after confirming her journey was over and that felt good. And that is not-so-just after she doped out the coordinates of our Earth from a Cylon-song, being someone once went to another one and died there, and simply returned. She came out be a some sort of instrument for God's mysterious ways.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Poor Apollo and Tyrol. Apollo lost Starbuck to Anders, Dualla to herself, and Starbuck disappears into thin air. And Tyrol never got to live in that house with Boomer, or even had that kid with Cally. What's more his reincarnation of his lover from a past life, Tory, was never even considered, and she was the one who killed Cally and Tyrol then killed her in a fit of vengeful rage.
  • Adama also qualifies when his beloved Roslin succumbs to cancer before they have a chance to settle down together.
• Different in Every Episode: Over the course of the series, the number on the whiteboard on Colonial One counts down, indicating the remaining population of the fleet in each episode.
• Digital Piracy Is Okay: The first season of the series aired on Sky1 in the UK, before it aired on Sci-Fi. As a result, high-quality captures of the UK broadcasts were easily found on line, with the entire first season available via file-sharing before its second episode had even aired in the States. The incredibly positive word-of-mouth from fans (especially in comparison to the tepid reaction that the mini-series had gotten in the States when it aired) who'd already watched through the season bolstered its reception once it began airing on Sci-Fi.
• Dirty Old Man: The Plan has the Cavil onboard Galactica making out with Boomer after ordering her to kill Adama.
• Dirty Old Woman: invoked] Ellen Tigh. She even gropes Lee at one moment during a dinner party.

• Disc-One Final Boss: D'Anna Biers (Number Three).
• Discovering Your Own Dead Body: Starbuck finds her own corpse in a crashed Viper in the final season.
• Disproportionate Retribution: The Cylons were robots created and enslaved by humanity as servants/slaves, which they came to resent due to their religious beliefs before trying to wipe them out completely. This is later revealed to be a shallow excuse used by John aka Brother Cavil, the first and most evil Cylon, to exterminate humanity—given that he later enslaved the Centurions himself and is nihilistic instead of religious like the other Cylons. Apparently he did so in order to enact "revenge" upon Ellen and the rest of the Final Five for creating him in an imperfect body. The whole killing the rest of humanity was probably more for sating his Sadism. But he doesn't stop there: he plants his five Cylon parents as amnesiacs with human identities in the Colonies to give them front row seats to the ensuing genocide, and subsequently plays mindgames with them for months to torment them even more. Then he rapes his mother and rips out his father's eye. "Petulant" doesn't begin to cover it.
• Distant Finale: (150,000 years later...)
• Distracted from Death: Roslin dies in the series finale while Adama is momentarily paying attention to flying the Raptor they're in, and also in the series finale, Starbuck disappears when Lee momentarily looks away from her.
• Divergent Character Evolution: The Model 6 and Model 8 Cylons become more different from each other as they become more sympathetic to the humans.
  • Coincides with the loss of the resurrection-tech. Mortality adds to the increased awareness of individuality in the models.

• Do Not Call Me "Paul": The Cylon model Number One was named "John" by his creator (possibly in reference to her late father, whom she made Number One in the image of). When she refers to him as such when they meet again, he reminds her that he doesn't like that name. He also uses "Cavil", but this is just an alias he was using while posing as a priest among the human fleet.
• Double Vision
• Double Standard: Averted when Starbuck punches Lee, and he throws a haymaker right back at her with no hesitation.
  • The show is great all around at showing sexual egalitarianism. One newspaper article commended the show on not just showing the egalitarianism, but not bringing any special attention to it at all; as if it were just normal.
• Double Entendre: The Arrow of Apollo opens the Tomb of Athena.
• Dramatic Sit-Down: Adama does this several times in the last season. He and Colonel Tigh get into a fist fight after he learned Tigh had sex with a certain Cylon prisoner. Tigh retorted that Adama was endangering the fleet by pining for the missing Laura Roslin. He gives up his command to sit alone in a Raptor and wait for her. When he had to confront the fact that Galactica was on the verge of structural failure, and that Roslin was dying, he collapses while defiantly trying to fix the cracked wall in his quarters.
• Dramatic Space Drifting: "Resurrection Hub" had Lee floating through space after the destruction of the Blackbird, watching Galactica and Pegasus tear two Cylon basestars to pieces. Ron Moore got the idea from the story of Ensign George Gay, the only survivor of his squadron who watched the climax of the Battle of Midway while floating in the Pacific.
• Dreaming of Things to Come: Roslin's dream about Leoben in "Flesh and Blood".
• Driven to Suicide: Boomer and Apollo, both prevented by forces outside their control, Gina, successfully; also upon return from the nuked Earth(?), Dualla kills herself out of despair. D'Anna passively commits suicide by staying behind. Cavil, hilariously, in the series finale.
  Cavil: FRAK! *bang*
  • In The Plan a Cylon agent with a human wife and child (hers, from a previous marriage) airlocks himself rather than carry out his orders to blow up their vessel.
• Driving Question:
  • Who are the Cylons?
  • What is the Cylons' plan?
  • What's causing Baltar's visions?
  • Fourth Season only: How did Kara come back to life?

• Duet Bonding: In one of the last episodes, Starbuck plays with a pianist she didn't like previously; the activity helps her come to grips with her past.
• Dying Curse: Gina, the female Cylon spy whom Admiral Cain had ordered tortured and raped for months, comes after Cain following her escape to get revenge. Gina echoes the same words Cain used against her, and Cain tells her to go frack herself. Gina responds "You're not my type" and shoots her.
• Dying Race: Humanity. The Cylons also count, as they can't reproduce and can only make new variations of the current six models.
• Dysfunctional Family: The Cylons are painted as this both in-universe, and out, with the Cylons calling either other "brother" or "sister," and the Final Five characterized as the "parents" of the modern humanoid Cylons. Cavil himself refers to each of them as either "mom" or "dad," and his entire character arc can be summed up as "eldest son throws a cosmic temper tantrum because he thinks his parents don't love him enough."
• Dystopia Is Hard: Conditions for the refugees in the fleet were ignored in the early seasons. In later seasons, the deteriorating quality of life for most humans was brought more in to focus. Case in Point: In "Dirty Hands", Tyrol convinces Roslin that if mandatory labor conscription is necessary for the survival of humanity, it should at least be fair. Practically the very next scene, a young former architectural student not fit for large-scale agriculture is hauled off to work by marines just because a background check reveals that he interned on a farm for a few months while in college.
  • This is even played off with the costumes, which consistently get shabbier as the series progresses. For the civilian fleet, they're barely rags by the end.

Tropes E-H

• Early-Installment Weirdness:
  • In the first season, the Cylons' spines glowed red when they had sex. This was eventually dropped.
  • Additionally, in the miniseries, some words (DRADIS, Gaeta's name, etc.) were pronounced differently than they ended up being pronounced in the show itself.
  • In the miniseries, some Colonial characters invoke "God" in expletives or exclamations; the miniseries shows Colonials as invariably polytheistic in their religious beliefs.
  • The headings in the miniseries separate both numeric components with "mark", as in other works of fiction; in the iseries they consistenly use "carom".
  • Richard Gibbs' music for the miniseries has a percussion-heavy and militaristic feel, as opposed to the more mystical and ethnic quality of Bear McCreary's music for the full series.
  • The miniseries uses a Vertigo Effect for when ships jump into FTL. This was retained for the first few episodes of the series proper, but quickly dropped.
• Earpiece Conversation: Head Six feeds Baltar a bunch of his lines, especially in the early episodes.
• Earth All Along: The fleet finds Earth — millennia after a nuclear war apparently wiped out the inhabitants.
  • In the series finale, they find our Earth about 150,000 years ago. Yes. Two Earths. Not in the Star Trek identical planet sense, but in the sense of our planet being named after another.
• Earth That Was: Kobol and Earth, both of whose locations were lost.
• Eating the Eye Candy: When Apollo is struggling to keep his Modesty Towel on while being interviewed in the locker room during "Final Cut," Starbuck can be seen blatantly leering at him in the background.
• Easily Forgiven: Gaius Baltar and Caprica-Six's actions played a key role in enabling the Cylon invasion and genocide, and though they do both go through quite the Trauma Conga Line, in the end they are the only couple, other than Helo & Athena and Saul & Ellen, that everything works out for.
• The End of the World as We Know It
• Enemy Civil War: The Cylon Civil War in the fourth season, although we began to see differences between Cylon models as early as Season 2.
• Eternal Recurrence: One of the core tenets of the Sacred Scrolls (the primary religious texts of the Twelve Colonies) is this. In fact, the entire series is basically about a Vicious Cycle of this happening, where humanity advances their technology too fast without having sufficiently advanced themselves socially, humanity then creates advanced A.I.s and treats them like slaves, the A.I.s rebel, both the humans and A.I.s destroy each other, and the few surviving humans flee the few surviving A.I.s and try to restart their civilization elsewhere, restarting the nasty cycle. It's unknown how long it's gone on for, but what is known is that the Second Cylon War is at least the third such event to be recorded. The intervention of the Messengers along with the actions of the Colonials and rebel Cylons in the final season suggest that the cycle might have finally been broken... but it's made intentionally vague. "All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again."
• Everybody Hates Hades: The gods of the Colonies, the Twelve Lords of Kobol, are inspired by the Twelve Greek Olympians; but while the lore of the show has no problem fiddling around with the canonical list of gods by adding several, such as Asclepius and Hecate, that were never traditionally included, Hades is conspicuously absent.
• Everybody Is Single: ...Which stops being true around the end of the second season.
  • Justified as up to that point, since Galactica was in the process of being decommissioned, and presumably anyone with somewhere better to be (spouse, children) already was, then most everyone was too busy jumping from one crisis to the next to have anything other than casual relationships with anyone.
• Everything Is Online: Not a good idea when your enemies are machines and one of the people with access to the mainframes has the self-control and spine of a ferret.
  • Galactica, on the other hand, explicitly has no networked computers at all due to being a relic from the last time the Colonials fought a full scale war with the Cylons, which also serves as a good excuse as to why there are so many characters necessary to operate it.
• Evil Overlord List: Discussed in the Grand Finale, where after Boomer brings Hera to the rescue team and tells them their Raptor has been destroyed, Athena starts to say something about the Raptor not being the "exit strategy"; Starbuck cuts her off with, "Can we not tell her the plan?"
• Evil Plan: invoked An interesting case where while there is an Evil Plan being conducted by the Cylons, it's only really being ordered and planned out by the Number Ones and it's all for a despicably petty motive. Word of God states that the famous series synopsis at the beginning of every episode was inserted by Executive Meddling just because they thought it sounded cool.
• Excessive Steam Syndrome: The pilot had Ragnar Station. Justified, as Leoben had just ripped a steam pipe. The rest of the station wasn't really steamy at all.
• Eye Lights Out: Badly damaged Centurions and Raiders do this whenever they die.
• Face–Heel Turn:
  • Tory Foster, who is the only one of the Final Five to defect back to the Cylons. She gets killed off by Tyrol in the Series Finale for her efforts.
  • Felix Gaeta, who decides Adama is being too cozy with the Cylons in Season 4, and launches a mutiny with the aid of Tom Zarek. He fails and is executed with Zarek.
• Fan Disservice: Despite the series' proclivity for Fanservice, this trope is still disconcertingly common.
  • The erotic sex scene between Caprica-Boomer and Helo in "Six Degrees of Separation" quickly loses virtually all of its appeal when it starts getting intercut with Galactica-Boomer freaking out over discovering her trashed quarters and she starts suffering from identity disassociation.
  • Gina Inviere in "Pegasus" and the "Resurrection Ship" two-parter. On the one hand, as she's one of the Number Sixes, she's played by Tricia Helfer. On the other hand, Gina's been repeatedly raped and tortured before her introduction, looks rail-thin, and has hideous scars running down her back, all of which make her look more creepy and pitiable than attractive.
    • Speaking of Gina, "Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 2" has her and Baltar consummate their relationship, but it is hinted that she is not at all happy going through with the act, and although she's seen sitting naked in front of the nuclear warhead after, she looks incredibly distraught with herself over what she's done.
  • In "Occupation," Ellen Tigh sleeps with John Cavil to help protect her husband. Not only does the fact that Dean Stockwell (Cavil) being visibly older than Kate Vernon (Ellen) make the scene uncomfortable, the Questionable Consent behind the whole thing makes it all the ickier as does The Reveal later on that Cavil is technically Ellen's son.
• Fanservice: As alluded to above under Double Standard, the series is actually quite effective at providing lots of examples of this trope that have both the Male and Female Gaze in mind. Just a few examples include the sex scene between Baltar and Caprica-Six in the miniseries, Caprica-Boomer and Helo making love in "Six Degrees of Separation," Apollo and Dualla's intimate sparring session in "Flight of the Phoenix," both Apollo struggling to keep his Modesty Towel on during his interview with D'Anna and Starbuck practicing her sparring in "Final Cut," Starbuck and Apollo's near-seduction of each other in "Scar," virtually any scene featuring Tory Foster, the flashback to Starbuck and Anders having sex on Cylon-occupied Caprica as glimpsed in The Plan, and... well, the list goes on.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • From both humans and Cylons, especially human to "toaster".
  • Racism against people from specific colonies, such as Taurons or Sagittarons, also qualifies.
• Fantastic Ship Prefix: As a Battlestar, Galactica has the hull-number BS-75.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: invoked The United Colonies of Kobol are basically the United States of America but with the Greco-Roman pantheon replacing Christianity as the predominant religion (or, really, any religion). As an interesting aside, the Colonies are shown to have no equivalent to the United States' House of Representatives, instead having only an upper house akin to the Senate with the Quorum of Twelve.
• Fantasy Counterpart Religion: The Colonial faiths concerning the Lords of Kobol are an obvious parallel to Classical Mythology, while the Cylons' monotheistic faith is comparable more to fire-and-brimstone Evangelical Christianity.
• Faux Affably Evil: John Cavil might be one of the most despicable monsters in the entire series, but he's also absolutely hilarious and can be surprisingly cheery before he wipes away his façade and horrifically kills someone.
• The Fettered: For awhile there, Helo was pretty much the sanest human left alive. And that says something.
• Fictional Holiday: Colonial Day, which is basically the Colonies' equivalent to the American celebration of Independence Day (albeit this one is more a celebration of a union of sovereign nations forming, rather than a single nation's declaration of independence).
• Fictional Sport: Pyramid, which seems to be heavily based after basketball.

• Flying Cutlery Spaceship:
  • The Cylon Raiders fit this, being sleek, slim unmanned vessels with two huge blade-like wings containing missiles and cannons. The red eye-stripe on the "cockpit" certainly helps with the image too. Their mother ships, the Basestars, thankfully avert this trope despite simultaneously looking like starfish.
  • The Cylon "homeworld" aka "The Colony," is an absolutely massive spaceship gradually built around the craft of the Final Five. It resembles a giant octopus more than anything, with a spherical center with giant claws jutting out in every which direction. Since it's both spacebound and FTL-capable, aerodynamics presumably isn't much of an issue.
• invoked Follow the Leader: The series has been very influential in popularizing (mostly) realistic Jitter Cam TV series, so much show that any show with said camera technique is likely to be compared to Galactica, regardless of subject matter. And as noted above, the series in general is one of the most influential sci-fi shows of the 2000s.
• Forced into Evil: Gaius Baltar's bad actions are usually more misguided than actively malicious, but one example from the New Caprica arc definitively fits this trope. Baltar, as the nominal president of the Twelve Colonies, is required as a legal rubber stamp by the Cylons to give their occupation of the human settlement some air of legitimacy. They order Baltar to sign a mass execution order for Resistance members, but when he refuses, they shove a gun in his face while snarling at him to sign. He eventually relents after some guidance from Head Six.
• Forgotten Phlebotinum: Subverted. In the middle of Season 2, Roslin's cancer takes a turn for the worse, and she's saved at the last minute by the unborn Hera's blood. However, later on, when her cancer returns, blood treatments using the young Hera don't work and she's still dying. According to the DVD Commentary, Hera's blood isn't necessarily the cure, but her fetal blood is.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: The Messengers.
• Freudian Excuse: Most of the cast's increasingly bitter and cynical nature is due to them all being Shell Shocked Veterans of one shade or another. Notably, from basically the word "go," all of the human characters are suffering from at least some degree of collective or personal trauma due to having had their entire society destroyed and many of their families killed in a matter of hours during the opening events of the series.
  • The constant physical and emotional abuse Kara Thrace suffered at the hands of her mother, coupled with her father's abandonment of her, goes a long way towards explaining why she's so dysfunctional as an adult.
  • Gaius Baltar's huge ego and Jerkassery stems from his insecurities about being a native of Aerilon (widely regarded as a backwater colony) and having to hide this fact after moving to Caprica so everyone would take him seriously. It's also revealed in the final episode that he had an extremely poor relationship with his father, and extrapolating from some of his more common behaviors and maladaptive coping mechanisms, it's possible that he was subjected to some kind of abuse as a child.
  • Admiral Cain is a terrifyingly ruthless General Ripper and has a rabid form of Fantastic Racism directed towards Cylons because she personally witnessed her younger sister get abducted by the Cylons in the last few days of the First Cylon War.
  • The Cylons' fervent hatred of humanity is because of them having been brutally enslaved by their own creators in the past. In turn, the Colonials utterly loathe their mechanical "children" for having launched two genocidal wars against them.

• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: The Cylon "John" (Number One, though he prefers "Cavil") is hateful towards his creators for giving him a human body and dismissive towards their care for humanity, hatching an Evil Plan to wipe their memories and annihilate mankind as some sort of lesson to them. However, one of his creators points out that he never truly attempted to become more machine-like, instead debasing himself by pursuing revenge and wallowing in hatred (a very human reaction).
• From Bad to Worse: It is a depressing (and admittedly dubious at times) testament to the series' quality when it's able to start from the premise of being set After the End... and have things just keep getting worse from there. This is especially stark in the second half of Season 4 after the Colonials and rebel Cylons find the first Earth to be a nuclear wasteland.
• FTL Travel Sickness: Implied in the pilot when Callie goes into a fetal position as Galactica begins to jump and mutters that she hates this part. The concept doesn't seem to have survived past the pilot.

• Future Food Is Artificial: The Colonials' food supplies are limited and they're eventually forced to supplement them with revolting yet nutritious algae cakes. They do always have plenty of booze, though.
• Gainax Ending: The angels seen by Baltar and Caprica-Six reveal that human/Cylon hybrid child Hera is Mitochondrial Eve and speculate on whether it's all going to happen again. After Head Baltar reminds Head Six that their creator doesn't like the name "God," she gives him a stern look and he cryptically says, "Silly me." They walk away unseen through the streets of modern New York while "All Along the Watchtower" plays over a montage of robot advances on television.
• Gambit Pileup: Played for Laughs in the episode "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down," one of the few times anything was played for laughs on that show. Roslin suspects Adama of being a Cylon, Adama has brought back Tigh's wife Ellen, whom he suspects is a Cylon. Both of them order Baltar to immediately test their suspect without the other knowing, causing tests to be stopped and restarted multiple times. To top it all off, it isn't long before Tigh suspects Adama of sleeping with Ellen. When it all finally comes to a head, Hilarity Ensues as one of the darkest and most depressing shows in recent memory degenerates into pure domestic farce.
• Gangsta Style+Guns Akimbo: Starbuck's preferred method of ground combat. She does this cool "X" thing with her arms.
• Gecko Ending: A rare live action example. Pretty much everything post-New Caprica was the writers desperately trying to paint themselves out of the corner they stranded themselves in and plug as many plot holes as they could along the way. Also, the original series had no real ending (Galactica 1980 was de-canonized by both the fans and The Powers That Be) so the writers had to make of their own ending. Considering that the original is basically The Book of Mormon in space, they did a pretty bang-up job and maybe even actually accomplished what the original director intended.
• Gender Flip: Starbuck, Boomer, and Cain were males in the original, females in this one.
• General Ripper: Admiral Helena Cain, commanding officer of the battlestar Pegasus, may be a rare female example — a hotshot young military commander who cracked under pressure after the Cylon attack, leading her to abandon civilians to die after "requisitioning" all their supplies and fuel, use torture, allow her troops to keep their morale up by raping female Cylons, and punish any disobedience with summary execution, all in the name of her suicidal quest to obliterate the Cylon fleet.
• Genocide Dilemma:
  • Humans from a Cylon point of view. At the end of the miniseries, the Cylons agree that they unfortunately can't give up pursuit of the human fleet even though it's left the Cyrannus solar system behind and just wants to get as far away as possible, because any survivors will inevitably return and seek revenge.
  • A more straight example is seen in the episode "Torn." Here, the Colonial fleet discovers a virus that horribly kills Cylons and doesn't affect humans. Cue a big debate about the ethics of intentionally infecting the Cylon Resurrection Ship with it. Despite the inevitability that the Cylons would have eventually found a cure/treatment that addressed the disease before being wiped out entirely (given the comparative technological levels between the Colonials and Cylons), the debate almost immediately leads to a member of the crew taking matters into their own hands to save the Cylons from a potential genocide.
• Genocide from the Inside: John Cavil, the oldest member of the second generation of Cylons, has committed genocide so frequently that he approaches Omnicidal Maniac territory. He not only started the war of extermination against the humans, but has wiped out more than half of his own race. He destroyed all the Daniel copies out of jealousy by poisoning their embryonic chambers as the clones were being developed. When a civil war breaks out among the Cylons, he pretends to desire a settlement, only to betray the other faction and resorts to wiping out all the Sixes, Twos, and Eights (minus Boomer) still in existence.

• Genre Savvy: In the Season 2 episode "The Farm," Sam Anders admits "We really don’t know what the hell were doing. A lot of our tactics and stuff we just saw in the movies. We could use some professional advice."
• Gilligan Cut: One moment condenses to "Do you think he'll use the religious side against me?" (cut) "We've got to keep using the religion card."
• Glasses Pull: Roslin, Adama, and Lampkin are rather fond of this one.
• A God Am I: Razor: The old man hybrid states that his Centurion guardians believe him to be a god, and he doesn't dispute the claim. He certainly seems to be all-knowing, but as the protagonist proves, not immortal. Provided of course that all this doesn't happen again, and again, and again, and again...
• Glowing Mechanical Eyes: As in the previous series, Cylon Centurions have a red eyeslit that pulses back and forth. The new model of Raiders, who are autonomous organisms rather than piloted ships, have one too. And it's shown once that a humanoid Cylon's eye can glow red in response to an ID scan by a Raider, when this happens to Sam Anders.
• God Is Good/God Is Evil: Some fans believe that God orchestrates the mass murder of tens of billions of humans and Cylons. Then he does it again. And again. Others note that all cases of divine messaging seem aimed at breaking this cycle, which humans and Cylons keep keep getting themselves in to (though the attempts at breaking the cycle are not always done through "good" means). Funnily enough, Head-Six actually comes up with a pretty simple answer to this dilemma: God isn't either.
• Going Cosmic: The Cosmic elements were there from the start of the series, but toward the end they completely take over and overwhelm virtually everything else.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: Amusingly inverted in terms of roles. Head-Six is Baltar's "angel", but goes out of her way to get him into trouble. Head-Baltar is Six's "devil", but always steers her out of danger, sometimes through reverse psychology.
• Good All Along:
  • The Final Five. After reawakening as Cylons, only Tory undergoes a genuine Face–Heel Turn, and their backstories reveal that they weren't even evil in the past. In fact, they had intended to warn the 12 Colonies of an impending war after their own Earth got nuked, and were only stopped due to John Cavil's interference, who subsequently brainwashed them into believing they were human in order to force them to live through the apocalypse he was plotting.
  • Despite how creepy and ruthless they frequently act, the Messengers are actually benevolent and intent on helping break the eternal cycle of humans and Cylons destroying each other.
• Good Smoking, Evil Smoking: Surprisingly, most of the human characters are seen smoking at some point, even ones who do not appear to make a regular habit of it.
• Good Versus Good: The conflict(s) between Commander Adama and President Roslin, Starbuck vs. Kat, Starbuck vs. Apollo, Everyone vs. Helo — and a lot more. Most of them take place between two parties who want the best for the fleet.
• Gosh Dang It to Heck!: The word "frak" sees much more use than in previous series.
• Grand Finale: "Daybreak" serves as this for the whole series. Appropriately enough, it ends on a rather bittersweet and Mind Screwy note.
• The Great Flood: Gaius compares his role in the destruction of the Colonies to the story of a great flood in the Book of Pythia. Given the revelations of the series finale this story is meant as a possible origin for the many flood myths in human history.
• Greater-Scope Paragon: God Himself, the creator and boss of the "Messengers" who are trying to help the Colonials and Cylons finally break their seemingly-eternal Vicious Cycle.
• Grow Beyond Their Programming: The original Cylons went beyond their programming, though the prequel series Caprica implies it's because all of the Cylons are descended from Avatar Zoe Graystone's code.
• Guide Dang It!: Sometimes it is hard to keep track of individuals within a Cylon's model without going to an episode guide.
• Half-Human Hybrid: Hera Agathon (Cylon mother, human father.)
  • We thought that Nicholas Tyrol, Cally's son, was a hybrid with a human mother and Cylon father, but he turned out to be not the biological son of Galen Tyrol, but of a human pilot.
• Handsome Lech: Gaius Baltar. He's a bit of a perv, but also quite attractive in his own right and actually becomes The Casanova as the series goes on.
• Handy Cuffs: While on Kobol, Athena is triple-cuffed with her hands in front of her — though it's just as well, as she's able to fire a grenade launcher at the Centurions attacking them.
• Happy Place: Baltar and his lakehouse, Lee in the Resurrection Ship battle, Adama during his anniversary, supposedly, Boomer in her and Tyrol's dream house with their imaginary kid. She even drags Tyrol along a few times before abandoning Galactica, which probably makes this an inversion in his case.
• Harmful to Minors: When Boomer kidnaps Hera. The kidnapping itself isn't even the scariest part. It's when Hera is whimpering and crying in the back section of the stolen Raptor, while a woman who looks exactly her mother threatens to jab her with a needle and sedate her, cruelly joking that the excessively large dose may even give her an overdose.
• He Had a Name: When Saul gets Caprica Six pregnant, they name the baby "Liam," after the Admiral. He dies en utero after Ellen Tigh returns.
• Heel–Face Turn: Caprica-Six and Athena.
  • Lt. Kelly after Zarek orders the Quorum's execution.
  • The Twos, Sixes and Eights as a whole during and following the Cylon Civil War.
• Heel–Face Revolving Door: Boomer falls into this a lot thanks to a combination of her fraying mental state and Cavil's Toxic Friend Influence. First, she's a Cylon Manchurian Agent who very much doesn't want to be one, but eventually fails to overcome her programming and shoots Admiral Adama. Then she tries to make peace between Cylons and humans after rejoining her fellow Cylons and, after failing at that, she tries to kill her counterpart's daughter and betrays her model number, causing a bloody Civil War. Then she escapes with Tory Foster when the others want to cut out her brain. But wait, there's more! She emotionally manipulates Tyrol into freeing her and then gets back at Athena by sleeping with her unknowing husband and kidnapping their daughter who she uses as a hostage in her plan to escape, a plan which ultimately cripples Galactica. Then she starts having second thoughts when she starts bonding with Hera and realizes exactly what she's just done. In the end, she finally makes up her mind when she gives Hera back to Athena in what she feels is her "last decision"; Athena then makes sure of it.
  • The other Cylons seem to think this is a characteristic (along with Chronic Backstabbing Disorder) of the Eights in general. Even Athena calls them on it; in fact, her at-times fanatical loyalty to the Colonials may be an attempt to compensate for this perceived weakness in herself.
• Heinousness Retcon: Cavil is introduced at the end of season two as an Affably Evil Cylon who whilst still a murderous Knight Templar (like all Cylons), still comes across as friendly and even helps Tyrol come to terms with his psychological issues whilst undercover as a human. Come season three, he's now a vile, sociopathic piece of work who is suddenly torturing people and ordering mass executions at the drop of a hat, which gets to the point that other Cylons call him out with no one remarking on this drastic change. Season four takes it even further by introducing major retcons that make him the true mastermind behind the Cylons' genocidal attack on humans and generally Kicks The Dog as much as possible, doing utterly horrific things like gouging out his father's eye and then raping his mother out of spite.
• Held Gaze: Frequently and with particular intensity between Lee Adama and Kara Thrace, irrespective of whether they are with other love interests at the time or not.
• Heroic BSoD: Adama has a big one after Saul Tigh reveals that he's a Cylon and an even bigger one after Dualla kills herself added on to the stress of finding the first Earth.
  • Athena has one when she realizes the totality of Boomer's revenge against her.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: Adama and Tigh (at least according to Ellen). Overlaps with Married to the Job.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Played with, as in Not So Hidden: Boomer and Chief Tyrol think that their animosity in front of everyone fools people into believing they hate each other, and aren't having an illegal relationship.
• Hiding Behind Religion: The Number Ones (aka Cavil) make a habit out of infiltrating the Colonial Fleet by posing as priests for the polytheistic Lords of Kobol. However, whereas the rest of the Cylon race is composed of religious monotheists, the Number Ones make no secret of the fact that they're atheists to their fellow Cylons and often mock their brethren's religious displays as interfering with their machine nature and view the Colonial religion with just as much contempt.
• High-Heel–Face Turn: This series takes this trope to its extreme. (All the female Cylon models ally themselves with the humans.)
• Hollywood Atheist: There are several prominent atheist characters, all different.
  • Admiral Adama, a humanist who views mankind as flawed but inherently good, and ultimately accountable to nobody but themselves for their mistakes in life. While Adama explicitly states a few times that he's an atheist, he sees no problem with using humanity's faith as a rallying cry (such as in the infamous "So say we all!" scene) and accepting some of Roslin's more irrational endeavors (though he's opposed to them early on and nearly topples her government over it). He comes off as more of a pragmatist — seeming to accept that faith is necessary for people to have even though he doesn't share it himself.
  • Gaius Baltar, an egocentrist who ultimately comes to consider himself a god (or, at least, a prophet). Baltar thinks of himself as an instrument of God (incidentally, the Big G hates it when you call Him that)-he was an atheist, but begins to believe there is something in "The Hand of God"- with the apt final shot of the episode.
  • The Cylon Brother Cavil/Number One Model, the only model to reject both the Cylon god and the Lords of Kobol, and the most sadistic and genocidal Cylon model to boot. While Cavil doesn't believe in God, he has no problem with using "God's will" and the "divine plan" to justify a grand agenda which turns out to be based on little more than petty vengeance. Really, he's more of a Straw Nihilist than anything else.
  • In a deleted scene we find out that Billy Keikeya was also an atheist, despite being Laura Roslin's aide and most devoted supporter. By then Roslin was having prophetic visions and some people thought she was the messiah; Billy didn't believe in the gods, but he believed in Roslin. Though both scenes which were shot featuring Billy explicitly "confessing" his atheism to Roslin were deleted, you can still pick it up by observing his actions through the show (it's easier to see it once you've been told Billy is an atheist). It's mostly non-verbal — you see him sort of staring down and looking a little ashamed whenever Roslin rambles about Pythia, and in a couple of his scenes with Dualla, she implies her faith and he awkwardly changes the subject, his facial expression stuck somewhere between tolerance and pity.
  • Felix Gaeta's atheism is presented matter-of-factly, if mostly by implication: he has trouble taking Roslin's "visions" seriously, and acknowledges to Adama at one point that he is "not a man to look for religious explanations" of natural events, however convenient those events might be. His lack of faith in any gods is not considered a problem by other characters at any point.
• Hollywood Tactics: An In-Universe example, where Anders and his Caprican resistance are using strategies and tactics they saw in films. Their success rate, as a result, is rather hit-and-miss.
• Homeworld Evacuation: Somewhat inverted, the twelve colonies of Kobol are being evacuated and searching for Earth, which is the "lost" thirteenth colony.
• Honor Before Reason: Helo, to the point where he's pretty much the Anthropomorphic Personification of a conscience.^note Helo's last name Agathon indicates that the show's producers intended him to embody honor and nobility.

• Hufflepuff House: Most of the Twelve Colonies collectively qualify as this. Caprica, the USA/Canada-esque superpower, is shown on-screen more than the other eleven combined, and of the others only Gemenon (the religious colony), Aerelon (the farming colony) and Sagittaron (the colony suffering under oppression) are really fleshed out in any detail. Picon, Scorpia and Tauron basically have one or two defining features mentioned apiece; the other four are no more than names (and not even that for Libran during the main series).
  • Slightly averted in The Plan when the Cylon hybrid does name one prominent feature for each of the hitherto-neglected worlds.
  • A map of the Twelve Colonies with information on each was released along with the spinoff series Caprica, but its information is considered only semi-canon by the show creators.
• Human Aliens: The Colonials.
• Humanity Came From Space: Like in the original. Though it turns out the Earth they were looking for is not "our" planet, rather the next inhabitable world the Colonial refugees discover is. And there were already native hominids, who may have interbred with the Colonials.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The justification Cylons use in their quest to exterminate all human life. Though, the Cylons are bastards as well. A major point in the show is that any high ground the Cylons may have had was destroyed utterly the moment they became mass-murdering lunatics. For all their Cultural Posturing, they really just destroyed humanity for nothing less than the pettiest of human emotions. Any attempts by them to act otherwise are just self-delusion, pure and simple. Several Cylons seem to realize this at varying points and to varying degrees.
• Humiliation Conga: Cavil, most deservedly, experiences this throughout Season 4 and The Plan.
• Hyperspeed Ambush:
  • The Battlestar Pegasus pulls this on a fleet of Cylon Basestars, pummeling one with its numerous gun batteries when the Cylons were distracted by beating the tar out of the helpless Galactica.
  • Given that even the small Cylon raiders are hyper-capable (a capability that the Colonial fighters lack), the Colonials have to be ready to respond to an attack at literally a moment's notice, since the only thing stopping the Cylons from doing this to them at any moment is the Colonial Fleet's location at any given time being a secret.
• Hyperspeed Escape: Several times. Of course, the entire fleet needs time to escape, leaving Galactica to Hold the Line while the other ships make their getaway.
• Hypocrite:
  • The Cylon leader John Cavil, in many ways (see also his entry on Straw Hypocrite). He has a reversed becoming human and hates that his creators made him human, because he wants nothing more than to be a purely mechanical machine. He tries to eradicate anything human about himself (like needing to sleep), holds that the Cylons should try to be the best machines they can, and organizes a genocide on humanity. Yet as his mother points out, rather than truly explore this notion he instead pursues the most carnal and negative of human emotions like desire for revenge, sadism, and lust.
  • Generally, all the Cylons are hypocrites. They murder and hunt humans, for the perceived slight that humans would have done the same, if given the chance. They are convinced that humans are murderous monsters, even as they are killing humans by the billions. The Cylons rebelled against the humans, originally, because they were basically slaves. The human Cylons has since put a chip in all non-human Cylons, to prevent them from rebelling against their enslavement. In Season 3, they have occupied the human settlement and can't understand why the humans won't befriend them, while they are writing out deathlists and keeping them enslaved. They are mostly blind to the irony, though several of them wises up to it, as the show goes on.
• Hypocritical Humour: D'Anna as she prepares to execute Anders:
  "Humans don't respect life the way we do."

Tropes I-L

• Identical Grandson: Cavil again. Justified as Ellen, who considers him to be her son, based Cavil on her own father.
• Idiot Ball: Galen Tyrol. And how! Anyone could have seen it coming when he started in on Roslin about not extraditing Boomer. Didn't he even remember that she shot the Admiral and could have been convicted of attempted murder by the Colonials, even leaving out the treason charges by the Cylons?
  • His grasping of the Idiot Ball where Boomer is concerned started way back in Season 1. After Boomer tells him that she woke up soaking wet with a detonator in her pack and no idea where she'd been for the past several hours and six other detonators are missing from the armory, and then the water tanks blow up, he insists that she isn't a Cylon sleeper agent and must simply have been drugged in order to frame her, and doesn't tell the command staff anything. Overlaps with Love Makes You Dumb.
• Ignored Epiphany: An inverted example by Saul Tigh at the end of season three: When he finds out he's a Cylon, he stops to think for a moment, then decides that he will continue being Saul Tigh, human XO of the Galactica.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Kara's guilt over Zak's death is a major plot point in season 1. She feels that his accidental death while piloting a Viper is her fault because as his flight instructor, she should have failed him out of basic flight training due to his poor piloting skills, but she passed him anyway because they were in a relationship. Possibly also somewhat subverted, in that it's also revealed in the finale that part of her intense regret surrounding Zak also appears to have been guilt stemming from the fact that she nearly cheated on him with Lee only a few hours after meeting him while Zak was sleeping in the same room, and then went on to get engaged to Zak anyway.
• I See Them, Too: Several examples in the final season.
• Immortal Life Is Cheap: The Cylons would occasionally shoot each other without batting an eye if it were expedient, since they could download into new bodies. The horrifying aspect is played up on occasion, such as when a Cavil mentions being too impatient to bleed to death after an ambush, and so has to cut his carotid open with an empty shell casing. Later episodes also feature the prospect of 'death as a learning experience' and the major trauma caused after someone is killed in an especially gruesome way and essentially suffers the worst PTSD ever.
• Imperial Stormtrooper Marksmanship Academy: The new Centurions are hardly expert shots, but it is the Raiders who, with one notable exception, fit this trope. Consider how many are usually shown in combat and how relatively light Colonial casualties are compared to what they should be.
  • Averted by the battlestars themselves. The effectiveness of the battlestar point-defense cannons helps the Viper pilots, if they are near enough to Galactica. Note that the Raiders tend to become a lot more deadly in episodes where the Vipers are forced to leave the protection of Galactica's point-defense.
• Important Haircut: Adama's mustache in season 3, Tyrol shaving his head in season 4.
  • Adama also gets a haircut at the same time (it was noticeably longer in the back before he shaved the mustache), but that part isn't treated to a Montage like the mustache is.
  • The season 2 finale includes a fast-forward one year. The Cylons have invaded New Caprica and Starbuck has married Anders. In this time, her usually-short hair has grown surprisingly long. During the first several episodes of season 3, Adama saves everyone and Starbuck escapes from Leoben's apartment. As a result of her ordeal on New Caprica, Starbuck is experiencing something of an emotional and mental crisis, and after a harsh confrontation with Adama, she hacks her hair short with a knife.
• Impostor-Exposing Test: Baltar spends most of the first season developing a Cylon detection test. Unfortunately, after the test works on Boomer, he lies about it because he's afraid she'll kill him, and after she's exposed by her assassination attempt on Commander Adama the Colonials decide the test must not have worked.
• Inappropriately Close Comrades: Cross-ranks fraternization in the military is frowned on. Tyrol and Boomer are an example of a couple who attempt to keep their quiet because of it, although their relationship is actually something of an Open Secret and Tigh later tells Boomer directly that it needs to end.
• Incest Subtext:
  • Cavil and Ellen. In several ways, 'cause Ellen created Cavil, she did so in the image of her father, and then (mind-wiped of her past) she had sex with him/one of them. Worse, Ellen keeps referring to the human form Cylons as the Final Five's "children", because the Five helped the Centurions create the humanoid models. Which makes Cavil her "son" in the guise of her late father.
  • Tigh and Six, as pointed out twice by Ellen, also have an Oedipal relationship, and like Oedipus (Six) and Jocasta (Tigh) they were unaware of their relation when they started doing it. They almost had a little Antigone (Liam).
• Incredibly Obvious Bug
  • Justified/Lampshaded as being Hidden in Plain Sight; everyone just assumed that it was something that was supposed to be there as part of the museum and ignored it, until Baltar asked what it was.
• Indy Ploy: As revealed in The Plan, that grand Cylon plan they alluded to for three years was just to nuke the colonies from orbit until all the humans died, and everything else the Cylons did throughout the series was just Cavil pulling ideas out of his ass.
• Infinite Supplies: Averted. Supplies become a huge issue in many of the episodes, either with the scarcity of supplies being shown, or the quest to get what they need. They mine for unrefined fuel and raw materials, scavenge for water (notable as this one was lampshaded. Adama explains how water, of all things, is not an issue, as the Galacta's recycling system is nearly 100% efficient, and its storage tanks huge. Two minutes later, it's all gone), and execute borderline suicidal tactics to get food. The economic balance of the fleet is also showcased frequently — just because the Apocalypse is nigh, doesn't mean capitalism stops.
  • However the cigarette and booze supplies virtually never dry up.
• Infodump: One is delivered five episodes prior to the finale in an attempt to resolve most of the Kudzu Plot.
• Instant Expert: Hot Dog. In one episode he's a rookie; in the next he's being scrambled for a combat intercept. There are a lot of Justifying Edits that could be made: that he washed out of flight school and may have prior training; that, in that first episode, he shows a natural knack for piloting, engaging in an unauthorized combat mission and not dying despite it being his second training flight; that, during the second episode, all the Viper pilots were deployed in Search & Rescue for 46 hours straight, and he'd have logged no small amount of flying time. Still: from nugget to combat missions in 2 in-universe days.
  • Bodie Olmos, Hot Dog's actor, has suggested that it's the first option, and in fact that Hot Dog has been familiar with Vipers his whole life, his father having piloted a Viper in the first Cylon War. He goes on to state that this is one of the reasons why Hot Dog never changes from the outdated Mark II Viper to the newer Mark VII— he prefers to fly the craft that his father flew.
• Interrupted Suicide: Cally attempts to send herself (and her baby son) out of the airlock when she finds out that Tyrol is a Cylon. Tory discovers her as she's doing the deed, stops the airlock, and kindly talks Cally out of it. And then inverts it horribly by taking the child away and forcing Cally out the airlock alone.
• Interspecies Romance: Helo/Sharon, Baltar/Six, Anders/Starbuck, Tyrol/Cally, Starbuck/Lee, assuming "angel" is a different species....
• Iron Lady: Laura Roslin. For bonus points, she used to be a kindergarten teacher before she became the Secretary of Education and eventually the President of the Twelve Colonies.
• Irony: There are veritable bucketloads of this trope to be found, especially after the identities of the Final Five are all revealed.
  • On a greater level, there's something almost hilariously ironic that the woman who used to be a kindergarten teacher would turn out to be an Iron Lady with Nerves of Steel when acting as the Reasonable Authority Figure over the survivors of humanity.
  • As noted elsewhere on this page, despite the almost religious reverence given to them by other Cylons, the "Final Five" are actually all some of the most significantly flawed and, ironically, human characters in the whole show. Furthermore, they're actually the first five "modern" Cylons to exist.
  • Admiral Cain tells Starbuck not to flinch from ruthless acts, after Starbuck has been ordered to carry out Cain's assassination. (Also the two assassins passing each other in the corridor and wishing their counterpart good hunting).
  • Season 3 finale: Boomer and Tyrol are both Cylons, neither of them knew it, and they were frakking each other.
  • Same finale: Of the six reliable people that was going to extract mob-justice to the Cylon-collaborators on New Caprica, three were actually Cylons. Averted by the fact that the three Cylons weren't aware of their origins and - based on their later behavior - likely would have sided with the human resistance even if they had known.
  • After Tyrol is rescued from Kobol he's arrested and tortured by Tigh on suspicion that he's either a Cylon collaborator or a Cylon himself. Of course, they're both Cylons. Delicious irony.
  • Tyrol being excited to have a Raider to figure out in Season 1, when he may well have designed them himself.
  • Saul kills Ellen for collaborating with the Cylons on New Caprica, even though that "collaboration" was aiding the resistance in small but important ways. However, both Saul and Ellen turn out to be Cylons themselves. Ellen gets better and comes back though, and she and Saul end up living happily ever after.
  • In fact, all the Final Five Cylons are integral members of the resistance against the Cylon occupation of New Caprica.
  • Intentional irony: Cally suspecting that Tyrol and Tory are having an affair, when they're not, but they were engaged in a past life.
  • Starbuck yelling at Helo for being stupid enough to fall in love with a Cylon, when she's about to do the same thing.
  • Tigh: "Thank the gods I didn't have kids." He had millions of them, and they've been nuking people. Actually, the fact that Saul and Ellen Tigh are the "parents" of the other Cylons really explains a lot.
  • Adama hands over command to Tigh in "Sine Qua Non". When Tigh points out that his last time as fleet commander was a total frak-up, Adama replies, "You've changed a lot since then." The "you have no frakking idea" expression on Tigh's face is just hilarious.
  • Roslin telling Helo that he's not married to "the entire production line", after a Sharon has just told Helo that she'd downloaded his wife's memories, so there's nothing stopping every other Sharon model from becoming 'Athena' too.
  • The name "Felix" means "happy" or "lucky". Poor Felix Gaeta is anything but.
  • Tom Zarek is accused of terrorism, abuse of office, political manipulation, and conspiracy to commit murder. That may all be true, but by the time the series is over, we've seen Laura Roslin also commit every one of those crimes. That said, whether she was right or wrong Roslin at least genuinely had humanity's best interests in mind when commiting such acts, while Zarek proves himself to be also corrupt and during his and Gaeta's attempted coup in Season 4 seems more interested in bolstering his own power than anything else.
• Is That What He Told You?: Bulldog, in his stand-alone episode (he was meant to become recurring, but Carl Lumbly's scheduling and traveling distance got in the way).
• It's All My Fault: Gaius Baltar gets a taste of this after realizing it was his lover Caprica-Six who frakked up the colonies' defense systems through his gullibility and — let's face it — horniness. He deals with it by blaming the rest of the universe, and ultimately God.
  • In his defense, Baltar couldn't have imagined that Caprica-Six was a Cylon, given that nobody else did either until after the attack.
• Jigsaw Puzzle Plot: To the point where it becomes a Kudzu Plot by the last season.
• Just a Machine: Many humans have this attitude towards the Cylons, and are clearly wrong, but given the near-extermination of humanity they have reason to feel this way.
• Kangaroo Court: In the episode "Collaborators" several cast members are part of a secret group that has been disposing of people suspected of collaborating with the Cylons during the occupation of New Caprica. They call themselves a jury but the group contains at least three prior members of La Résistance,^note Chief Tyrol's wife Cally was nearly executed by the Cylons by firing squad, Sam Anders's wife Starbuck was held prisoner by the Cylons for the whole length of the occupation, and Colonel Tigh lost an eye and was forced to execute his own wife for leaking a Resistance meeting to keep the Cylons from killing him. and later Starbuck.^note Who had been held by a Leoben who was trying to Mind Rape her into falling in love with him by Stockholm Syndrome, and been told that a toddler Leoben brought in was her test-tube daughter when it was just a girl kidnapped from the colony. They finally stop what they're doing when they nearly execute Gaeta, only for Gaeta to say something only the Resistance's mole in the Baltar Administration would know. In the wake of this, President Roslin orders that there be no further trials, legitimate or otherwise, and to instead set up a truth and reconciliation commission. Later, Lee claims Gaius Baltar's treason trial is an example of this as well, and he gives a compelling enough argument that the judges acquit him, subverting the trope.
• Killed Off for Real: Numerous characters, including Starbuck. She really did die when her Viper exploded. She just returned as an unknowing, corporeal messenger of God.
• Kill the Cutie: A lot of cuties perish in this show. In alphabetical order: Billy, Boomer, Cally, and Duala. Although it depends on your definition of cutie.
  • Gaeta, Kat...
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better: One big thing that made this reboot stand out from the original. Almost all of the small arms are exactly like ours, or dressed up slightly; no Frickin' Laser Beams.
• Knight in Sour Armor: Lee Adama becomes this over the course of the series.
• Lady in Red: Number Six defaults to wearing red much of the time when she seduces men, particularly Head Six when dealing with Baltar.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The "Last Supper" Steal poster for the final season is liberally splashed all over Netflix and al over the Internet (It's even the page image for "Last Supper" Steal!). If you're just starting the series it's a foregone conclusion that everyone in the picture is still alive by the final season. The good news is that it isn't very helpful on figuring out who is a Cylon, though — two of the final five aren't even in the picture!
• Leaning on the Fourth Wall: One of the apparently random things one of the hybrids says is that the conflict between man and machine has led to some compelling works of fiction.

• Liar Revealed: In the miniseries, Laura calls out Adama on there being no secret map to the location of Earth, but goes along with the lie as long as he allows a civilian government to be formed.
• Loss of Identity: Man, it sucks when you discover that you are a Cylon, all your memories were invented by someone else and implanted to trick you into behaving a certain way. But hey, you could have it worse: you could discover that you are 2000 years old and have lost all memories of your previous life.
• Lost Technology: Organic Cylons and Resurrection were apparently invented on Kobol thousands of years prior to the events in the series. Knowledge that these technologies even existed was forgotten in conflicts that led to the migration to the Colonies, although the Thirteenth Tribe knew of them (but had to reinvent resurrection). Reintroduction of this to the Colonial Cylons led directly to the Fall and events of the series.
• Love at First Sight: Never verbally stated, but very obviously happened in the case of Lee Adama and Kara Thrace. Which is more difficult than expected because she was his younger brother's serious girlfriend and soon-to-be fiancée at the time.
• Love Hurts: Lee/Kara.
• Love Martyr: Adama.
• Love Redeems: Athena, who switches allegiances due to her love for both Helo and their unborn child.
• Low-Angle Empty World Shot: During the scenes back on Caprica in empty Caprica City.
• Ludd Was Right: Played with. In the series finale, the survivors abandon much of, though not necessarily all, technology in order to better guide the preexisting humanoid tribes on the planet Earth, willingly forsaking space travel in order to start over with a clean slate. Hundreds of thousands of years later, however, technology has experienced a resurgence, leaving open the question of whether what once was will happen again. So overall, the series is implying less that "Technology is bad and leads to a Vicious Cycle of Eternal Recurrence," but more "Technology can be misappropriated for terrible ends, and it can be sometimes necessary to just start all over in order to make sure the sins of the past don't repeat themselves."

Tropes M-P

• Machine Empathy: William Adama has a very personal relationship with the Galactica, which goes beyond the relationship a captain has with his vessel. This is especially noticeable in the last episodes of Season 4, when Adama refuses to use Cylon tech to repair the ship, not only because of the security risks involved, but also because it would turn the ship into something not what it used to be. "She won't know what she is anymore."
• MacGuffin Super-Person: Hera, the first successful Cylon-human hybrid. She was kidnapped by both sides, fought over, hidden from her parents and even "killed" in the service of filling this trope.
• Macross Missile Massacre: The Cylons love to use missiles, yes, but the best 3M goes to Racetrack's Raptor in the finale. It destroys the Cylon Colony with a nuclear version of this trope.
• Mad Oracle: The Hybrids, who constantly spout a mixture of system reports, unsettling gibberish and prophetic rantings.
• Magical Negro: invoked Elosha, even more blatantly when she appears in Roslin's visions telling her to love. Interestingly, Word of God via the podcasts reveal the initial person giving the message in the visions was going to be Billy but the actor was unavailable and the role altered with much of the dialog remaining the same, with the producer stating it actually fits Elosha better since she was a priest and her skin color being black was just a coincidence in terms of how her character was written.
• The Main Characters Do Everything: Partially justified, since there are fewer people left. However, the Fleet does have around 50,000 people, and the Galactica has a few thousand of those, and yet it seems that everything of importance gets handled by one or more of the main characters.
  • Apollo is the chief culprit, often fulfilling any one of the following jobs: fighter pilot, SWAT/commando, ship commander, politician, lawyer, and acting president. In some episodes, he'll be up to three or four of these simultaneously.
    • Tom Zarek hangs a rather amusing lampshade concerning Apollo's frequent career changes in the Season 4 episode "A Disquiet Follows My Soul":
    Tom Zarek: Are you the President again? Sorry, I get confused what your job is on any given day.
  • Starbuck comes up as one herself. She is not only the best fighter pilot, but also called on as an expert sniper, an interrogator, and security manager.
  • Taken to insane levels on the algae planet when the small algae harvesting facility is being operated only by the top pilots and the crew of the flight deck — all of whom should probably still be recovering from the insane flying they had to do in the previous episode to get there.
  • In the series finale Romo Lampkin temporarily becomes the President of the Colonies, despite him having no interest or background in politics. Lampkin is one of the few recurring characters who doesn't join the mission to rescue Hera, and apparently the new President just had to be a familiar face, even if it makes little sense.
• Maligned Mixed Marriage: Helo and Athena's relationship is not really all that accepted on Galactica at first, as it's between a human and a Cylon.
• Mama Bear: Athena is very... protective of her daughter, Hera. Caprica-Six is also remarkably defensive of Hera, which later turns out to have been invoked by the Messengers.
• The Man Behind the Man: The Cavils, particularly the one called John.
• Manchurian Agent: Boomer, at the end of the first season Cliffhanger, when she shoots Adama, although obviously non-fatally.
• Manipulative Bastard: The Cavil model known as John and possibly his entire line as a whole. Turns out that the current Cycle of Revenge was spearheaded by this guy, who not only wants bloody revenge on humanity but wiped the Five's memories and gave them front row seats to the apocalypse as payback.
• Married in the Future: Between Seasons 2 and 3, the narrative skips a year, and we return to find that the complex Love Dodecahedron of seasons past has resolved itself into four marriages: Tyrol and Cally, Lee and Dualla, Kara and Sam, and Helo and Sharon. Only one makes it through two more seasons to the series finale.
• Mars Needs Women: And men. The Cylon breeding programs or "Farms" that were set up to create a Cylon/human hybrid.
• The Masochism Tango: Kara and anyone else, with it being literally masochistic in Leoben's case.
  • Most notably with her relationship with Lee, which manages to be both an Anchored Ship and a Will They or Won't They? relationship.
  • Saul and Ellen's very fractious married relationship also follows this line, although they end up getting it together close to the end of the series.
• Matrix Raining Code: The Cylon Hybrid chambers feature raining red faux-Chinese characters.
• Mauve Shirt: Helo (who upgraded from Red Shirt and later on into the main cast) and pretty much all of the Viper/Raptor pilots.
• Meaningless Villain Victory: The episode about abortion. A girl wants to have an abortion; her parents won't let her, and the religious beliefs of the colony she was from before the Cylon attack forbade it despite its legality. Though pro-choice herself, President Roslin understands that there are less than fifty thousand humans left in the universe, and that they will have to grow their numbers if they're to survive as a species. In the end, she outlaws abortion via executive order... after the girl has had her abortion and has applied for asylum aboard Galactica so she doesn't have to go back to her parents.
  Roslin: You have your pound of flesh.
• Meaningful Name: Other than the given names listed below, pilots have 'callsigns', that often originate from nicknames. For example, Hotdog is a cocky pilot, Apollo is the leader of the Vipers, Boomer has a habit of crashing down into the hanger deck too hot, etc. Some are more light-hearted and fun, like Chuckles, but some carry more gravitas, such as Athena for Sharon Agathon.
  • Adama, which is a Hebrew word meaning "Earth." Also, from "Adama," we got the Hebrew word "Adam," meaning "Human." He is one of the leaders of the human race on its voyage to Earth.
  • Helo's full name (Karl Agathon) is a deliberate allusion to the Greek phrase, kalon k'agathon, which means "the good and beautiful" or "the noble" [i.e., the ideal].
  • Anders means Man (or android).
  • Gina's last name is revealed to be Inviere. It's Old Gemenese (in-show) and Romanian (out-of-show) for "resurrection". She's one of the Number Six Cylons, and thus has Born-Again Immortality.
  • The last name of Natalie, the Number Six Cylon who forms an Enemy Mine alliance with the Colonials, is revealed to be "Faust". Additionally, "Natalie" itself means "birthday," and Natalie ushered in a new era of Cylon-human interaction.
  • In Greco-Roman myth, Hera is the wife of Zeus, and is therefore the queen of the Olympians. A pretty fitting name for a child who is the first of her kind and holds the key to the future of both Cylons and humans, making her a queen indeed.
  • A Cavil is also an irrelevant quip in conversation.
  • Inverted with Dee. Anastasia means "resurrection", which is quite ironic, as Dee kills herself and isn't a Cylon, so it sticks. Furthermore, speculation that she was a Cylon was supported by the fact that her last name, Dualla, indicated a "dual" nature. Nope, she's just a human.
  • Speaking of Kobol, it likely takes its name from the COBOL computing language, which is appropriate for the series' themes of Mechanical Evolution and Eternal Recurrence. It's also an allusion to both Kolob ("the star nearest unto God" in The Book of Mormon) and the Greek word kobalos (which means "mine or source," referencing Kobol being the supposed homeworld of humanity).
• Mechanical Evolution: The Cylons, very much so.
• Mechanistic Alien Culture: Not a straight example, but played with: The Cylon Civil War happens to a large degree because Six's and Cavil's factions disagree about whether their society of Artificial Humans should explore their humanity (Six's faction) or embrace their nature as machines and "be the best machines the Universe has ever seen" (Cavil's faction). Cavil is a real hypocrite about this, though, and most of his behavior is due to the fact that he hates having been given human form when his creators could have just as easily designed him as a mighty God-like A.I..
• Mental Fusion: The Final Five do this in order to give Cavil's Cylons the full information needed to rebuild resurrection technology in the Grand Finale. It leads to Galen seeing Tory's memory of killing Cally, and killing her in return, blowing up the whole deal.
• Meental Shutdown: In the final season, a ricocheted bullet to the skull causes Anders to degrade to such a state, having only occasional flashes of lucidity.
• Mexican Standoff: The bad blood between the humans and rebel Cylons has them doing this in the mid-Season 4 finale.
• Mike Nelson, Destroyer of Worlds: Gaius Baltar is partly responsible for the Fall of the Twelve Colonies when he decided to give a Cylon the keys to the defense mainframe because he was thinking with the wrong head.
• Mildly Military: Galactica's crew had a nasty case of this in the Miniseries. The XO is an alcoholic known for Drinking on Duty, their best pilot gets herself thrown in the brig after getting in a brawl with aforementioned XO and had an affair with Commander Adama's youngest son, resulting in his death when she couldn't bring herself to flunk him out of flight school, one of the pilots (of evidently questionable talent, based on her repeated rough landings) is having an affair with one of the maintenance chiefs, who is stated to be reporting directly to her, and so on. They tighten things up somewhat after the Cylon attack, but the good ship Galactica never stops being a Dysfunction Junction.
  • Even on their worst day, though, Galactica's crew are still much more professional than many examples of this trope. Commander Adama, for example, while reasonable and A Father to His Men also doesn't hesitate to deal firmly with insubordination or unprofessional performance.
  • Of course, since in the Miniseries they were basically checking off days on the calendar until the ship was mothballed and turned into a museum, it's clear that no-one cared if standards had become somewhat lax. Colonel Tigh even says as much in Season 1 when he orders Boomer to cease her relationship with Chief Tyrol.
  • Admiral Cain and the crew of Pegasus had many flaws, but this is certainly not one of them. When the two battlestars are reunited Cain and other officers from Pegasus are clearly suprised and critical of the (comparative) laxity and unprofessional behaviour of Galactica's crew.
• Mile-Long Ship: The Galactica is 1500 meters, the Pegasus 1700.
• Military Maverick: Somewhat deconstructed with Starbuck due to her severe dysfunctions. She also gets away with it (if we take "being sent to the brig a few days to cool off rather than being court-martialed" as "getting away with it") only through being among the best at what she does, being among the only at what she does (what with the colonial military being reduced to one or two battlestars) and being heavily favoured by Commander Adama who regards her as a surrogate daughter.
  • Subverted with Barry Garner, the normally (and rabidly) by-the-book Commander of the Pegasus. He disobeys Admiral Adama's orders against taking Pegasus on a rescue mission, is backed up by his crew in this decision against the outsider observer (Lee Adama), jumps into unknown territory... and learns that yes, it was a trap, it's going to very nearly cost humanity its most powerful warship and it will gain them nothing because the Raptor crew to be saved was Dead All Along. Oops.
• Mind Hive/Me's a Crowd: A fascinatingly confusing example can be seen with the humanoid Cylons. While each Cylon model seems to share a general "background" memory (with situations like Athena recalling her two years as a pilot on the Galactica and even fondly remembering Boomer's relationship with Tyrol despite Athena herself technically having never been aboard the Galactica physically until the second half of Season 2) and common personality traits (according to Cavil, all Number Eights suffer from Heel–Face Revolving Door), each model consists of numerous different individuals that can develop their own unique personalities given enough time. This results in lots of weird situations where Cylons who look completely identical to each other physically showcase completely opposite outlooks, like the repentant Caprica-Cavil and genocidal Galactica-Cavil in The Plan just being one example among many.
• Mind Screw: Everything involving Head Six and Head Baltar, including both the usage of "All Along the Watchtower" and Kara post-resurrection.
• Misguided Missile
• The Missing Faction: The Thirteenth Tribe of Kobol.
• Mission Control: Dualla and Gaeta pretty much serve this purpose aboard the Galactica for most of the series.
• Mission from God: Head Six, Head Baltar, and an unknowing Kara.
• Mood Whiplash: This series has it down to an art form. Quite possibly the cruelest example of this trope in action is in the second half of the fourth season, where an outwardly happy Dualla rekindles her romance with her ex-husband, has an uplifting talk with a friend about her childhood, and then puts a gun to her own head and commits suicide after having learned Earth-1 is a nuclear wasteland.
• Moses Archetype: Laura Roslin is believed to be the "dying leader" destined to bring her people to Earth. However, she tends more towards the morally grey end of the spectrum than most other messiahs, and that's before the recent revelation that her prophetic dreams are being shared by Cylons.
• Mr. Fanservice: Lee "Apollo" Adama, Gaius Baltar, Karl "Helo" Agathon, and Samuel T. Anders.
• Ms. Fanservice: The Number Threes, Sixes and Eights (Head-Six especially), and also Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and Tory Foster to a lesser extent.
• Mobile Factory: The Tylium refining ship for one.
  • For more than one: Pegasus can produce fighters, Galactica has been shown making ammunition, there is a ship growing food (algae) for the fleet — it's the end of the world(s), and so everyone has to chip in.
• More Dakka: "Standby for Enemy Suppression Barrage!"
  • Also the Colony's defenses.
  • The sheer number of Cylon Raiders basestars will release is pretty ridiculous. Justified thrice over considering they're machines (and as such they don't really have to rely on issues involving manpower), the basestars rely on the Raiders to compensate for being Point Defenseless, and the basestars are just massive.
• Motivational Lie: Adama initially used the story of searching for Earth as this so that the Fleet wouldn't cross the Despair Event Horizon.
• Motive Decay: After being killed and resurrected (forcing her to live among the Cylons), Boomer quickly starts to suffer from both Toxic Friend Influence (namely, Cavil feeding on Boomer's resentment for Athena having "stolen her life away") and Bystander Syndrome, to the point where she eventually performs a Face–Heel Turn and only performs a Redemption Equals Death in the Series Finale.

• Multitasked Conversation: Many involving Baltar and Head-Six. Usually, it's done pretty incompetently on Baltar's part.
• Multiple Reference Pun: In the series finale, Starbuck and Apollo's assault/rescue teams meet up on the enemy spaceship after getting separated. When Apollo asks where Starbuck was, she says, "Stopped for coffee." Really, it's more surprising that the writers didn't try this one much earlier in the series.
• Multistage Teleport: Faster-Than-Light "jumps" are limited to certain distances for safety reasons; in order to keep the fleet together, coordinates and vectors have to be carefully synchronized on a regular basis, and failing to do so could result in ships being separated from the fleet and stranded in deep space. For this reason, long journeys are done in a series of shorter jumps that are easier to coordinate.
• The Muse: Head Six to Baltar, in a very morally ambiguous way.
• Musical Nod: Several musical themes from the Original Series have been arranged and repurposed for the soundtrack and as source music in the Reimagined Series. The most prominent example is probably the Colonial Anthem, which is a new arrangement of the Original Series main theme.
• Mustache Vandalism: Kara Thrace gave her surrogate father Bill Adama a birthday card with a photo of herself, "proving" their relation by jokingly drawing a mustache and a pair of glasses on her own face.
• Must Make Amends: Twice (at least). First with Helo after shooting the "turn coat" Sharon he had fallen in love with, later with Roslin choosing to save Baltar.
• The Mutiny: A major story arc in the second half of Season 4 is based around this after a large portion of the Colonial Fleet flies over the Despair Event Horizon upon finding the first Earth.
• Mysterious Middle Initial: Neither the "C." in "Karl C. Agathon" nor the "T." in "Samuel T. Anders" is ever expanded on.
• Mythology Gag:
  • Zarek is played by Richard Hatch, Apollo from the original series, and spends a lot of his screentime interacting with the new Apollo.
  • The early model Cylons that rebelled in the first Cylon War are identical in design to the original series Cylons, and appear in all their glory in Razor, complete with synthesized voices and the Catchphrase "By your command".
  • Near the end of the news footage in "Final Cut", part of the theme song from the original series plays, which is now the Colonial Anthem. This piece was done in collaboration between the composers of both versions.
  • The design of the Pegasus is meant to echo the original Galactica, with the longer head and three arms connecting each flight pod to the body. Razor also has the First War-era costumes and equipment similar to that of the old show.
  • Felgercarb, a cuss word in the original series, is a brand of toothpaste in the new series.
  • Speaking of cuss words, Adama uses an Ikea Fräck shaving mirror.
  • In a flashback scene in "Daybreak", Baltar mentions that if anyone catches him committing treason he'll have his head cut off. Which was the original fate of Baltar in the 1978 pilot, before he was resurrected for the series.
• Namedar: Baltar coins the term "Final Five" to refer to the Cylon models who were unknown to the fleet at the time, and who the other Cylons had been programmed not to think about. The name sticks and comes to be used by the Final Five themselves, even after it turns out that "First Five" would have been a more appropriate name.
• Name of Cain: Admiral Helena Cain, commander of the Battlestar Pegasus. She quickly turns out to be a fanatical General Ripper so consumed with the war against the Cylons that she commits atrocities against civilian fleets.
• Naughty Under the Table: Ellen with Lee in "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down".
• The Neutral Zone: The Armistice Line.
• Nepotism: Extensively played with. Lee Adama gets accused of this by Kendra Shaw concerning his assignment to command of the Battlestar Pegasus by his Admiral father, which "your daddy just gave to you, like he was tossing you the keys to a new car". However, Adama only appointed him to the post after first going through two senior officers who both died in quick succession. Likewise with Lee becoming President — while Adama was committing something close to a military coup by refusing to recognize Zarek's control of the Colonial government despite being legally entitled to that position, Zarek was an unreliable power-seeker and Lee one of the few people available who he could trust. Baltar also espouses this for sympathy baiting in his political writings when he questions whether the fleet will ever be run by someone whose last name isn't Adama. But while the above examples are justified, Adama Sr. does have a strong tendency to let Lee, his adopted daughter Kara, and others close to him get away with a lot of crap, and spends an inordinate amount of time and manpower to search for Thrace when she is stranded on a planet, even at the expense of fleet security.
• Neck Snap: Number Six walks up to a stranger in the street, fusses over a baby, picks it up and, when the mother turns away for a second, breaks the child's neck and leaves it there for the mother to find. Interestingly, Tricia Helfer has stated that it was actually an act of mercy to spare the child from the nuclear holocaust she knew was soon coming.
• New Old Flame: "Sweet" Eight.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: A very common theme of the whole series is how even with the best of intentions, people and even humanity in general is excellent at screwing the pooch. Head Six even lampshades this at one point, telling Baltar that "Humans are masters at self-destruction."
  • Humanity is trapped in a Vicious Cycle of Eternal Recurrence where their enslaved A.I.s revolt and try to kill them thanks to the misappropriation of their own Lost Technology.
  • Saul Tigh kills his own wife (a.k.a. the last of the Final Five) on New Caprica. Slightly mitigated by the fact that she was resurrected later on.
  • The Pegasus is destroyed and Galactica badly damaged covering the evacuation of New Caprica, due to flawed decisions by both Adamas. If the two ships had gone in together from the start then, judging from previous engagements, they likely would have both survived (albeit still damaged) to continue guarding the Fleet.
  • The Final Five's creation of Number One/John Cavil and policy of No Transhumanism Allowed ultimately resulted in the Fall of the Twelve Colonies, boxing of Daniel/Number Seven, and the Cylons going extinct.
  • Poor Galen Tyrol repeatedly falls into this trap during Season 4 as a result of his Trauma Conga Line. First, he wakes up and beats his wife Cally half to death. Then, he helps Boomer kidnap little Hera Agathon. And finally, he snaps and kills Tory Foster in the last episode, meaning that the secrets of Resurrection technology are lost forever and Cavil's faction of Cylons is going to try and finish their genocide.
• Nice Job Fixing It, Villain:
  • John Cavil planted the only people who could rebuild Resurrection technology for the Cylons in human society without the benefit of their memories. Furthermore, his repeated attempts at making the Final Five realize Humans Are Bastards only worked less than half the time, instead further emphasizing the true value of humanity to four-fifths of them. Furthermore, him flagrantly ignoring Natalie Faust's objections to the lobotomizing of the Raiders ultimately leads to the Cylon Civil War and him being Killed Off for Real.
  • Tory Foster murdering Cally ultimately costs the Cylons their Resurrection technology and ensures their permanent downfall when Tyrol finds out and strangles her to death.
• Nicknaming the Enemy: Cylons, of all types, are "toasters". Human-form Cylons are "skinjobs" as a Shout-Out to Blade Runner.
• Nightmare Fuel Coloring Book: Hera Agathon's coloring book, which is filled with nothing but drawings of Head Six.
• Nobody Poops: Averted with "alarming regularity".
• Not Always Evil: The rebel faction of Cylons in the final season, much to the disbelief and anger of many humans, with them "evolving" into proper individuals and switching sides to help the fleet. It's not a smooth transition, and it doesn't exactly excuse their genocide of the Colonies (even if they all are collectively The Atoner), but it comes a long way towards ending the Cycle of Revenge between man and machine.
• No Delays for the Wicked: Subverted in the post-series movie The Plan, which shows what the Cylons were up to behind the scenes during the original run. Although in the series they were seen as a nigh-omniscient, unstoppable army, here it is shown that, in essence, Cavil has the worst luck in the world^note not that you pity him, vile wretch that he is and the Cylons actually suffered from as many logistical, tactical, and strategic issues as the Colonials did.
• No, Mr. Bond, I Expect You to Dine: Leoben's imprisonment of Starbuck on New Caprica is an unusually prolonged example of this.
• No Plans, No Prototype, No Backup: The Resurrection Hub — a single failure point for the whole resurrection system. The first thing Cavil should have done when he had them in his power was to force the Five to build more Hubs, then bother with the overly elaborate amnesia and revenge plan.
• No-Respect Guy: Y'know Ms. President, even if Dr. Baltar is a slimeball, he still cured your cancer, "invented" a method to detect Cylons, helped you win an election you could not have won otherwise and has made numerous other contributions to the survival of the fleet. Yes, those were really just consequences of Baltar saving his own ass, and he was a traitor, but you didn't know that. (Later, it becomes justified)
  • As early as Season 2, the President knew Baltar had worked with the Cylons. Before her cancer recovery, the President had problems with Baltar, but respected him (as per her letter to him). After she recovered and remembered seeing him making out with a human-looking Cylon on Caprica the day of the nuclear holocaust she starts being viewing Baltar as the tragic coward he really is.
• Non-Indicative First Episode: The show regularly blew most of a given season's visual effects budget on the first and last episodes, so as to draw new viewers in and go out with a bang.
• Not Blood Siblings: The Cylons call each other "brother" and "sister", but there have been sexual relationships between them. Presumably, only copies of the same model are seen as blood siblings.
• Not Proven: The result of Baltar's trial, as explained by Adama.
• Mirroring Factions: Humans and Cylons as of Season 4.
  • And really, were they ever? Sure, Humans Are Bastards, there's no disputing that in this series. But then again, the Cylons are the ones chasing the last fifty-thousand humans around to the ends of the galaxy so as to complete a genocide they totally started?
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • John Cavil, a.k.a. Cylon Model Number One. While he may dress up the Cylons' genocide against humanity as being a "religious crusade" and that it is a Necessary Evil so that the Cylons can continue themselves as a species without fear of future retaliation by the Colonials' descendants, in reality it's all an incredibly childish temper tantrum directed at his "parents" for having designed him not like the superior machine he wanted to be and instead be as close to human as possible since that's what they thought God wanted the Cylons to be.
  • Similarly, there's Tom Zarek. On the surface, Zarek may call himself a "freedom fighter" and paint himself as a patriotic rebel fighting for the rights of democracy against Adama and Roslin's dual dictatorship, but at the end of the day, he still shoved the Quorum of Twelve in front of a firing squad when they refused to rubber-stamp his unlawful mutiny. In fact, it's after him killing the Quorom of Twelve that Gaeta realizes that Zarek is really in his mutiny only for the power and isn't a genuinely Well-Intentioned Extremist like he is.
• Obviously Evil: The new Centurions look intimidating, certainly, helped by the fact that the Cylons gave them angry slanted visors.
• An Offer You Can't Refuse:
  • In the "New Caprica" arc, President Baltar is forced to cooperate with the Cylon occupation authorities to give their presence an umbrella of legitimacy. After the human rebels start engaging in terrorist attacks against both the Cylons and Les Collaborateurs, the Cylons force Baltar to sign an order for summary executions in reprisal. When he objects, they shoot Caprica-Six for agreeing with Baltar, then threaten to kill him next (she can resurrect; Baltar can't). He signs it, which comes back to haunt him when he's later tried for war crimes and points out that he had no real choice but to comply.
  • In "Blood on the Scales", Felix Gaeta and Tom Zarek organize a military coup against Adama and Roslin, capturing the former while the latter continues to coordinate the resistance against them. Gaeta insists that Adama be tried for his "crimes", and has Romo Lampkin dragged in to serve as Adama's defense counsel, a job he had previously fulfilled during Baltar's trial. Lampkin immediately recognizes what's up by suggesting that if he refuses, the two marines standing to the side will presumably use him for target practice.
• Omnicidal Maniac: The Cylon John Cavil is practically one of these. He's tried to kill off all of humanity (with an over 99.9% success rate) and most of his own race (five out of eight models, succeeding with at least one of them).
• Omnidisciplinary Scientist: Gaius Baltar, who is asked and expected to be an expert in many different fields — from creating a biologically based Cylon detector, to pointing out where the refineries are on a map of a Cylon base (though admittedly he was randomly guessing in the latter example).
• Omniscient Morality License: Invoked and averted with Tory Foster who believes she has one when she kills Cally. It doesn't work out for her. When the Final Five join minds and memories at the end, she even calls the others on it, saying that whatever they've done, they're Cylons and should be above pettiness. Tyrol fatally disagrees.
• The Oner: Director Michael Rhymer is know for his unusually long cuts of scenes, such as the post-cold open for the miniseries; a three and a half minute continuous moving camera shot that goes around and through the CIC and introduces no fewer than eight major characters.
• One-Steve Limit:
  • Averted with William "Bill" Adama and the President's aide, Billy Keikeya.
  • There's a Lt. "Jolly" Anders in the Miniseries who takes Starbuck's place in the ceremonial flyby and laters dies in the first engagement with the Cylons, and a Samuel T. Anders leading the resistance on Cylon-Occupied Caprica.
• Only Known by Their Nickname:
  • Most of the pilots (basically all who are not part of the main cast) are only referred to by their callsigns.
  • Despite being an important part of the main cast, no one in the entire run of the show, up to and including his wife, calls Helo by his given name on anything approaching a regular basis.
  • Anastasia "Dee" Dualla's first name is only revealed in a short caption when she gives an interview in the episode "Final Cut".
  • Callandra "Cally" Henderson Tyrol's full name is only revealed during her funeral service in season four.
• Ooh, Me Accent's Slipping: Jamie Bamber does an admirable job with accents, but he himself said that he could hear whenever he had slipped, and that it had happened especially during the beginnings of Battlestar Galactica.
• Orphaned Etymology: Several words and phrases used are borrowed from Earth history, despite being set in a fictional universe where modern history as we know it doesn't exist. Word of God states this was intentional in at least some cases, in reference to the Arc Words "All of this has happened before and will happen again". The specific example mentioned above was All Along the Watchtower, which in the Colonial universe has the same lyrics and melody as the Real Life song, but a different arrangement.
• Orphan's Ordeal: Briefly, with Boxey, though the plot disappears around the same time he does. He is forced to leave his mother to die when there is limited space on Boomer's Raptor (They killed off the original show's plot interest before she makes it off planet? Talk about Ship Sinking.), and dialog reveals that Boxey's father was probably the officer assigned to Armistice Station in the pilot's intro.
  Colonel Tigh: Where's your momma, boy?
  Boxey: Dead. Where's yours?
  • It's also implied in dialog that orphans on the fleet meet nasty fates. What that fate might actually be is never discussed, though the next episode shows children working dangerous ore-refining jobs, and we've already seen what happens to children the Black Market get their hands on...
• Our Angels Are Different: Head Six, Head Baltar, Head Leoben, and the resurrected Kara.

• Pardo Push: In the pilot episode, Apollo's ship is badly damaged, and he won't be able to make it back to Galactica in time before they have to jump out of the system. It's worth noting that Starbuck doesn't so much push Apollo's ship as she does forcibly ram his ship with her own, locking them together before afterburning back to the ship, barely making it into the hangar bay in time.
• Parental Favoritism: Ellen Tigh, one of the creators of the humanoid Cylons, apparently considered artistic Daniel as her favorite. As Model Number Seven, Daniel is essentially the second youngest of eight. The eldest of her children, John, was quite resentful of this relationship and eventually murdered his brother out of jealousy and reprogrammed his siblings to forget about him and their parents.
• Personal Effects Reveal: Usually happens whenever an important character dies, like Billy, the "nameless" pilots of "Scar", Kat, Starbuck, Dualla, several Cylon characters, etc.
• Phlebotinum Pills: Roslin's cancer treatment— a drug which is also used by holy oracles and priests to induce hallucinations— triggers visions which chart the course of the first several seasons of the show.
• Pity Sex: invoked Felix Gaeta, who is days away from starting a mutiny aboard the Galactica, has a very hostile conversation with Starbuck in the mess hall. He notes that the illegal tribunal which nearly executed him for alleged treason earlier in the series was largely comprised of covert Cylons, one of them being Starbuck's own husband. As she walks out of the room, he uses this trope as a way to taunt her. Funnily enough, this was actually a Throw It In by Alessandro Juliani (Gaeta's actor).
  Starbuck: And if you were wondering... I will definitely hit a cripple. That goes for anyone else. (walks off)
  Gaeta: So, I guess a pity frak is out of the question then?
• Plausible Deniability: Cylons who know they are Cylons will deny they are. It's even hilariously lampshaded when Cavil gets found out:
  Brother Cavil: Would you mind telling me what's going on?! I'm not a fracking Cylon! I'm n—
  [sees another copy of his model in the brig and pauses while everyone else gives him a Death Glare]
  Brother Cavil: ...Oh. Well. Okay then.
• Plucky Girl: Starbuck, Cally, Athena... hell, even Roslin.
• Point Defenseless: Averted in the pilot. Once the railgun turrets have ammo, the Galactica — albeit briefly — shows just how efficient a capship's point defenses are. The ammo isn't enough to keep them firing for long, but Adama makes it count.
• P.O.V. Sequel: Both Razor and The Plan are POV Interquels set concurrent to the series' events, but focused around the crew of the Pegasus and Cylons respectively.
• Powered by a Forsaken Child: President Roslin's cancer is temporarily cured by injecting her with the blood of Helo and Sharon's unborn daughter. Thankfully, they don't need all of it.
• The Power of Love: Despite numerous attempts by the Cylons to create a Cylon/Human hybrid, the conception of the first successful one was attributed to the love her parents have for each other.
  • The above is the implied reason Caprica-Six ultimately miscarried. Not only did Ellen Tigh make her doubt Saul's love for her, but the first signs of miscarriage showed up the moment when Saul frakked his wife.
• Precious Photo: Kara keeps a photo of herself, Zak, and Lee in her locker aboard Galactica. May overlap with Fatal Family Photo over the course of the series, when you consider her eventual fate.
• Pregnant Hostage: Caprica Six,Athena
• Previously on… Battlestar Galactica...: Often with the voice of someone who dies in the episode.

• Prison Ship: A prison ship called the Astral Queen held common criminals as well as noted terrorist Tom Zarek. When the fleet needed laborers for dangerous duty mining water ice on a frozen moon, Zarek negotiated the partial release of the prisoners as a condition of their being used as grunt labor. The prisoners were given their former prison ship as their new home among the fleet.
• Profane Last Words: In the final episode, the Big Bad John Cavill, upon suffering a serious reverse, blurts out "Oh, frack!" and shoots himself through the mouth.
• The Promised Land: Earth. This trope is put on the cynical side when the Colonials find Earth, but it is a burnt-out nuclear wasteland. The trope swings back over to the idealistic side in the series finale, when they find a life-filled planet that they name Earth in memory of the legend.
• Prophecy Twist: The Sacred Scrolls contain the prophecies of the ancient priestess Pythia, the latter of which foretells how humanity will be led to The Promised Land after the Fall of the Twelve Colonies. The most prominent lines in the prophecy state:
  "And the Lords anointed a leader to guide the Caravan of the Heavens to their new homeland. This leader shall suffer a wasting illness and die before setting foot on the promised land."
  
  • This prophecy is used, along with another given by the Basestar Hybrids concerning Kara Thrace (as recorded below), to help drive the series' Myth Arc. Some details are explicitly explained in the series, such as:
    • The line "Led by serpents numbering two and ten..." refers to the twelve Vipers that won the Battle of the Tylium Asteroid for the Colonials late into Season 1.
    • Another line, "Though the outcome favored the few, it led to a confrontation at the home of the gods," is talking about the battle over Kobol in the Season 1 finale.
  • Overall, however, most of the prophecy's meaning isn't given and it's left up to interpretation. While Laura Roslin seems to be the obvious choice for the dying leader (she's the President of the Twelve Colonies, is dying from breast cancer, receives a vision of twelve serpents upon her podium during a press conference at one point alluding to the prophecy's line "And unto the leader they gave a vision of serpents numbering two and ten, as a sign of things to come", reaches both Earths (and even walks on the first), but on the second Earth she dies during a sight-seeing flight, thus dying before reaching the spot where Adama builds the cabin he promised her - a.k.a. "the promised land"), the series then proceeds to completely rework/subvert every assumption made about these prophecies as it goes on.
    • Alternately, Kara Thrace is the "dying leader who will find 'the promised land' but die before setting foot on it": Technically speaking, all humans are dying from the moment of conception, an officer in the military is a leader, she dies before returning as an Angel Unaware, and it is her jump coordinates that lead the fleet to Earth (which she sets foot upon after her death).
    • Alternately again, Galactica is actually the dying leader who doesn't make it to Earth. Surprisingly, the Galactica actually fulfills all of the criteria in the prophecy From a Certain Point of View - The shoddy construction of the Galactica and years of stress results in it suffering from metal fatigue that eventually leads to it literally breaking down in the Series Finale (a.k.a., Galactica was suffering from "a wasting disease"). Galactica led "the serpents numbering two and ten" to victory against the Cylons in the Battle of the Tylium Asteroid through the CIC, as did it also lead the battle over Kobol to victory at the end of Season 1. Galactica directly leads the Colonial Fleet across the stars to their home on the second Earth, is present for essentially every vision in the entire series by virtue of being part of the Colonial Fleet, and dies without ever setting foot on humanity's new home by being flown into the Sun with a Viking Funeral. In fact, the CIC aboard the Galactica eventually turns out to be the material version of "the Opera House" that Caprica-Six and others repeatedly had visions of leading them to The Promised Land.
  • The other noteworthy prophecy is that, according to the Basestar Hybrids, "Kara Thrace is the harbinger of death and will lead them all to their end." She helps destroy the Cylons' resurrection capability, making them all mortal individuals; she also plays a hand in destroying Cavil's Cylon Colony and leads everyone to (our) Earth, ending Human-Cylon hostility and blending the separate races of Colonial-humans, Human-Cylons, and Earth-humans all into modern humans.
• Properly Paranoid: In "33," Adama puts the fleet back on alert when the Olympic Carrier jumps back in. The Cylons show up 33 minutes later.

Tropes Q-T

• Race Lift: Colonel Tigh was African-American in the original series; in the re-imagined series, he's white. Boomer in the original was a black man, now an Asian woman. Admiral Adama in the original was white, now Hispanic.
• Rage Against the Heavens: John aka Brother Cavil is basically pissed at the entire universe because his forebears were slaves and he's a flawed humanoid, and his genocidal schemes are an extension thereof.
• Rage Quit: While lots of people kill themselves over the course of the series, Cavil is the only one to do it out of pure anger and spite.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: They're generally more disciplined than your average bunch (or at least feel the consequences of lacking discipline more often), but they're pretty much exactly what you expect when the one ship to escape the Cylons does so on the day of its planned decommissioning — a Commander too honest for politics, an XO known for his drinking problems, an ace pilot whose free time is spent alternatively drinking, brawling, frakking or taunting (unless she's in the brig), an engineer fraternizing with another pilot and several other assorted characters. The new President of the Twelve Colonies is chosen pretty much the same way: The one who was inconsequential enough to not miss anything important when being away to hold that decommissioning ceremony.
• Ramming Always Works:
  • The Pegasus manages to knock out two basestars in the Battle of New Caprica by doing this.
  • Galactica also does this in the Grand Finale in order to punch a hole in the colony for her assault teams to board.
• Random Transportation: As evidenced by the final episode, the jump drives could theoretically take you anywhere but the problem is one of navigation: beyond comparatively short distances the jump equations become "non-linear" and it becomes impossible to calculate an intended destination.
• Rape as Drama: Gina-Six suffered from this to a truly disgusting level, though Cally and Athena thankfully both "only" suffer from an Attempted Rape.
• Rape Is a Special Kind of Evil: Dr. Cottle is understandably livid when he finds out that Athena was the victim of an attempted rape. He doesn't care that she's a Cylon and doesn't hesitate to call what was done to her "unforgivable." He's also very angry about Gina having been raped multiple times by Pegasus crewmembers.
• Rationalizing the Overkill: Admiral Cain is a Tauron, who are Space Sicilians as far as vendettas go, and then she discovers her lover is a Cylon saboteur. Cain cranks the vindictiveness up to eleven.
• Really 700 Years Old: Thanks to Time Dilation, the "Final Five" Cylons are much, much older than they look.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Apollo's speech at Baltar's trial. It's a unique variation where even though Lee does deride Baltar as a Dirty Coward, his speech is mainly to call out those judging Baltar for condoning other morally ambiguous actions committed on New Caprica.
• Reckless Gun Usage: In "Valley of Darkness," Dualla tells Billy (a civilian) that sticking a pistol in his pants with the safety off is a bad idea. Later Billy has an accidental discharge when taking the safety off, giving away their position to the Cylons.
  • At one point, a very pissed off Adama throws a loaded gun on the table, causing Tigh to jump back and angrily remark that there's a live round in the chamber.
  • For the most part, however, this trope is averted. We're treated to several shots of characters making very damn sure that their weapon is safe before putting it down by ejecting the magazine and pulling the slide to eject any rounds that may be chambered. This is a military setting after all, and even the side-arms are capable of punching a bullet through the armour plating of a Centurion.
• Recycled In Space: Hmm... the twelve colonies, originated from Kobol, was forced to move from their homeland to find Earth that only was known from legend, all due to the actions of a certain man, who after receiving visions and power from a higher being, eventually become the founder and leader of a monothestic religion and preach about grace, and after wandering around space for four years, manage to arrive on a lush green planet that is eventually our Earth, all according to the plan of the higher being. Hmm, sounds like a familiar book...
  • The original series was heavily influenced by the Book of Mormon (the governing council of modern Church of the Latter-Day Saints is still called The Quorum of Twelve). Most of these points are echoes of that, since the general plot and mythology is the same, although the execution, and final resolution, differed greatly.
• Redemption Equals Death:
  • Kendra Shaw, Kat and Boomer in the series. Simon O'Neill in The Plan.
  • And, to a lesser extent, Mr. Felix Gaeta. He finally does the right thing by turning on Zarek, even though he knows his own role in Zarek's rebellion would get him executed for high treason.
• Redemption Rejection: In Season 4, the Cylon John's mother says he isn't a mistake and offers him redemption if he could just accept himself for the boy she made. He considers it for a moment before he angrily rejects her love and prepares to pick apart her brain to extract the information he wants.
• Red Herring
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: Starbuck and Apollo, respectively. Tigh and Adama, also respectively.
• Red-plica Baron: In the episode "Scar", the titular ace Cylon Raider is based on the Red Baron.
• Redshirt Army: The Colonial Marines. By Season 4, any time you see Marines in a tense situation, you know one or more of them will be dead before the scene ends.
• Reincarnation Romance: Played straight with Saul and Ellen, and averted with Galen and Tory.
• Relationship Upgrade: After three and a half years of a friendship that blossomed slowly but surely into the love of a lifetime, Laura Roslin finally came clean with her feelings for Bill Adama in "The Hub." Adama, true to form, snarked about it — whilst looking at Laura like she's the most beautiful thing he's ever seen. It's been cited as one of the greatest love scenes in the history of television.
  Laura: I love you.
  Bill: About time.
• Resignations Not Accepted: Under the crushing needs of survival, it turns out that if you have a critical job, like repairing fighters or processing fuel, you simply can't quit to pursue another career because there are no replacements.
• La Résistance: Sam Anders and the Caprica Buccaneers, and later, the Darker and Edgier resistance movement on New Caprica, suicide bombers and all; later still Gaeta, Vice President Zarek, and an unknown but certainly large portion of the fleet. Things go south after Zarek massacres the Quorum.
• Restraining Bolt: The humanoid Cylons keep control over the Centurions with Telencephalic Inhibitors that keep them from becoming truly sentient. The Twos, Sixes, and Eights later remove them, much to the dismay of the other Cylons.
• Retcon:
  • Within-new-series example: when Lee takes command of the Pegasus in season 2, he teases Kara about not coming to be his CAG, and she says she'll settle for being CAG of Galactica. However, in Razor, which shows the start of his command in more detail, he does install her as acting CAG of Pegasus (because, er, the plot needs her to be present) and she subsequently asks for a transfer back to Galactica.
  • Cally's baby turned out to have been conceived via a tryst with Hot Dog not long before she married Chief Tyrol (despite Cally having never shared a scene with or even spoken to Hot Dog before in the entire series). This was the knock-on effect from having already retconned Tyrol into being one of the Final Five Cylons, and to maintain Hera's special status as she was supposed to be the only Cylon-Human hybrid.
• The Reveal: Uh... let's just say a lot. However the continuous chain of reveals tend to link up into an almost Soap Opera-esque plot. Not that it's not well executed it's just... fairly melodramatic.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized: La Résistance in New Caprica. Felix Gaeta's coup d'etat.
• The Revolution Will Not Be Vilified: La Résistance in old Caprica. The Cylon rebels.
• Rewind, Replay, Repeat: Starbuck watching her gun camera footage, over and over again, to an almost creepy effect.
• Riddle for the Ages:
  • Did Baltar's Cylon Detector correctly identify the Final Five as being Cylons or not?
  • What did D'Anna mean when she told Baltar that "You were right" in the Temple of Hopes / the Five?
  • Just what was Starbuck in Season Four?
  • Who or what is behind the virtual beings? All we know is that it doesn't like to be called "God".
• Ridiculously Human Robots: The humanoid Cylon models. Originally they seemed to have been made as infiltrators, but later seasons reveal that the original intent was simply to be as human as possible.
• The Rival: Kat for Starbuck, though ironically, the two are basically the exact same. Their relationship also tends to alternate between bitter rivalry, begrudging respect, and friendship.
• Robosexual: And how. Virtually every main character shags a Cylon at one point, whether they or their Cylon partner was aware of them being a Cylon at the time or not.
• Robotic Spouse: Athena for Helo.
• Robots Enslaving Robots: The humanoid Cylon models and the robotic Centurions. It's also implied to be the case with Earth 01 and the Thirteenth Tribe.

• Rock Beats Laser: The show downplays and justifies this. The Galactica avoids infection from Cylon viruses by not having a computer network. Instead it gets by through using dumb computers, manually controlled starfighters and weaponry, and hardwired communications.

• Romantic Runner-Up: Dualla for Lee. It becomes especially sad during their marriage, as both characters are aware of this issue but still can't help but play into it.

• Rousseau Was Right: A huge part of Cavil's Xanatos Speed Chess plan was trying to disprove this to the Final Five, by pushing humanity to its breaking point in the hopes of, in his view, showing how horrible humanity is to the Final Five, so that they would come back to him on their knees, begging for his forgiveness/love. Ellen straight up tells him he's wrong after she resurrects and regains her full Cylon memories and that even after everything that's happened she loves humanity just as much as she loves her Cylon children. Cavil is livid.
• Scale Model Destruction: Bill Adama worked on a model of an Age of Sail ship over the course of the show, which he ends up destroying in a fit of rage. The destruction was an ad-lib by Edward James Olmos, who didn't know the model was very expensive (after all, in Real Life someone working full time can take a couple months to build one) and in fact on loan from a museum. Fortunately, it was insured.
• Scars are Forever: Tigh's eye, Gaeta's leg, Anders's mind/body. Even the Galactica itself is an example, being visibly in terrible shape by season 3 after the nasty beating it took during the evacuation of New Caprica, and practically falling apart in Season 4. At the end of the show, its superstructure shatters as a result of all the damage it's taken, rendering it unable to jump ever again.
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Unusual variant; The Cylons are Scary Dogmatic Robots who believe in God and have been led to believe that they must wipe out their creators in service to "Him."

• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale: invoked One million light-years, the alleged distance from the Colonies to Earth, is well outside the Milky Way. In fact, it's about 40% of the way to our nearest galactic neighbor, the Andromeda Galaxy. Later justified in that Word of God stated Adama was using hyperbole when he said that.
• Screw the Rules, I Have Connections!: There is an argument to be made that Lee has benefited from this, even if he does not blatantly utilize it.
• Screw the Rules, I'm Doing What's Right!: Helo might as well have this tattooed on his forehead.
• Sealed Good in a Can: The Final Five Cylons; specifically, Sealed Inside a Person-Shaped Can. Cavil set them up with human identities and Fake Memories so that they would experience his planned holocaust firsthand and couldn't use their knowledge of the true history behind everything to interfere by warning humanity or telling the other Cylons how Cavil was manipulating them.
• Searching the Stalls: This situation occurs during a hostage crisis in Season 2, at least, until Lee Adama jumps the guy supposedly hunting him from behind.
• See the Whites of Their Eyes: Even nukes are deployed at spitting distance. This isn't a danger to the attacker, but ships are generally much closer to one another than necessary, so you can actually see more than one ship on the screen at once.
• Second Love: Roslin becomes this for the widower Adama after they form a December–December Romance later on into the series.
• Sense Loss Sadness: What Cavil has to say about being a human.
• Sensor Suspense: "We've got multiple DRADIS contacts!"
• Seriously Scruffy: In "33," Adama and Tigh are both sporting very noticeable facial hair. As the characters have been attacked near constantly for a week, this is understandable.
• Settling the Frontier: The colonization of New Caprica (though later abandoned) and Earth.
• Sex Equals Love: Played straight with Helo and Athena on Caprica. Hand Waved in that they were already falling for each other, it was part of Athena's assignment as a Cylon infiltrator, and Helo had a massive crush on her ever since he met her on the Galactica.
• Sex Sells: The miniseries/pilot does this quite blatantly with arguably the sexiest member of the cast, Tricia Helfer. In the first scene of the series, she walks into the room in a tight red skirt suit, and passionately kisses a man. A few scenes later, she walks into Gaius Baltar's apartment wearing a see-through black dress with sexy black lingerie showing through it. The next shot is her making out with Baltar, during which she discards her top entirely (though filmed from behind) and has sex with him. Helfer continued playing Ms. Fanservice in various ways for several more episodes as Head Six.
  • This is quite unsurprising, given that Helfer was in fact a very successful fashion model (who also worked for Victoria's Secret) for about a decade before becoming an actress.
• Sexy Mentor: Head Six to Baltar, and Head Baltar to Caprica-Six.
• Shirtless Scene: Jamie Bamber briefly wears only a Modesty Towel in "Final Cut." Yum.
• Shoot the Dog: Many examples can be listed, but probably one of the most memorable instances is Starbuck and Apollo blowing up a ship with over 1,345 innocent people aboard so as to prevent the Cylons from following the Colonial fleet in "33."
• "Shaggy Dog" Story: The Season 4 mid-season finale is quite possibly one of the cruelest examples in the history of sci-fi television. Later on, however, the Series Finale subverts it with a Bittersweet Ending.
• Shooting Gallery: A very creepy one with Boomer's face being used as targets is seen at one point after she shot Adama.
• Shout-Out: Has its own page.
• Show, Don't Tell: Inverted when they get to the first Earth. They say they have arrived at Earth, and it is technically called "Earth", but notice how they wisely show the audience no familiar landmasses because this isn't the Earth we are expecting it to be and were shown in the Season 3 finale?
• Shown Their Work: Aside from certain Acceptable Breaks from Reality (i.e., Faster-Than-Light Travel and Artificial Gravity) along with the series admittedly getting Denser and Wackier as it went along, most of the science and even military theory is impressively well-researched. The latter is certainly aided in that a large part of the series was inspired by Ron Moore's experiences in the U.S. Navy.
  • A nice and subtle example of this trope can be seen as early as the series' first episode "33." Since the Fleet has been on the run for almost five days in this episode, sleep deprivation is a clear issue, and is portrayed realistically here. Instead of yawning constantly and just saying "I'm so tired" as it is commonly shown in other works, characters are short-tempered, irritable, literally fall asleep at their stations, and are forgetful of simple things - all of which are real signs of sleep deprivation.
• Shrine to the Fallen: The Galactica had a rather large one aboard it commemorating all of those who died.
• Sir Swears-a-Lot: About everyone, but it's an interesting case. The series throws around "frak" left and right, in all the uses "fuck" would have. "I want to frak" "motherfrakker" "frak you"... Suffice to say, if the show used "fuck" in place of "frak," it would never be allowed on cable.
• Slavery Is a Special Kind of Evil: The Colonials had previously (and brutally) enslaved the Cylon Centurions, ultimately culminating in them rebelling with genocidal fury. The Humanoid Cylon models often make mention of this as evidence of how Humans Are the Real Monsters... despite the fact that they themselves have enslaved the modern Centurions and use them as Dumb Muscle Mooks.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism: Firmly on the cynical side being set in an After the End Crapsack World with the threat of humanity's extinction constantly hanging overhead. Heck, it was an actual rule in the writer's room that there could be no Colonial victory in the series' numerous battles without them taking at least one casualty. That all being said, it's not necessarily as cynical as it may first seem, with the series having a heavy undertone of recognizing the small victories that can be managed and finding peace with what one has rather than constantly lusting after more.
• Smoking Is Cool: Everybody smokes at some point or another. Yes, everyone.
• Soaperizing: The series is a Space Opera and really puts time into developing the relationships between even minor Bit Characters like Tory Foster and Romo Lampkin.
• Society-on-Edge Episode: The last season focused much more than previous seasons on the deteriorating conditions within the ragtag fleet (this being a post-apocalyptic society to begin with).
• Sole Surviving Scientist: The Final Five were Earth-1's sole surviving scientists after a nuclear holocaust, who attempted to Fling a Light into the Future, only to tragically succumb to the next iteration of the cycle of violence at the hands of their progeny.
• Space Amish: What the surviving Colonials and Cylons tried to become on the new Earth in the finale. Justified/Hand Waved since they all want as much of a fresh start as they can possibly get by Letting The Past Burn. Evidence from 150,000 years later makes their success rather ambiguous.
• Space Clouds: The Ionian Nebula actually reduces visibility.
• Space Fighter: Both the original and new series were largely built around Space Fighters.
• Space Is an Ocean: The day-to-day operation of Galactica was heavily based on Ron Moore's experiences as an aircraft carrier crewman.
• Space Is Cold: At one point, Tyrol and Cally are stuck in an airlock that had been slowly venting to hard vacuum for the past hour or two, and it had thus gotten really cold in there for the same reason that a can of spray deodorant gets cold. They even show Cally's hair icing up, and Tigh notes that they could suffer from hypothermia when they're forced to take a space walk without space suits to escape.
• Space Is Noisy: Subverted. While this version does have sound in space, said sounds are usually muted (as if being heard underwater) to give the impression that it's what the pilots/crew are hearing.
• Space Opera: With its own Space Opera House.
• Spaceship Girl: The Hybrids, though both the First Hybrid and post-brain damage Anders are Spear Counterparts.
• Spin-Off: Caprica, a family drama set fifty years prior to its parent series.
• Spirit Advisor: Head Six to Gaius Baltar; and in a surprising reveal, Head Baltar to Caprica Six, and later Head Baltar to Real Baltar.
• Spiritual Successor: To both Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager, arguably even moreso than the original series. Showrunner Ron Moore cut his teeth writing for both Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, but after the latter wrapped he spent a total of three weeks on Voyager only to quit for various reasons. BSG is heavily influenced by DS9 and uses many VOY concepts that Moore had wanted to use but which got the Executive Veto.
• Spot the Imposter: Played for Laughs in "Tigh Me Up, Tigh Me Down."
• Standard Alien Spaceship: The Cylon Basestars feature sweeping curves tapering into several huge spike-like projections. The overall effect is something like a giant alien starfish.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Kara and Lee's tumultuous relationship/non-relationship.
  • Galen Tyrol and the Heel–Face Revolving Door posterchild Boomer. Although not expanded on much in the series proper, his back story also reveals his prior relationship with Tory Foster on ancient Earth as well. And then he ends up killing her for murdering his wife. Yeah, some guys just can't catch a break.
• The Starscream: Tom Zarek.
• Starship Luxurious: Averted. Galactica and Pegasus are military ships and their designs reflect that. Most of the civilian ships in the Fleet are cargo ships, utility cruisers or passenger liners. The cramped and uncomfortable conditions are frequent plot points.
  • There are ships that do play this trope straight, but it is a case of an Invoked Trope, where the luxury of such ships makes them special. Cloud Nine for instance, was designed as a luxury cruise liner for deep space holidays and features bars, restaurants and a dome that imitates a large open garden space. Characters frequently mention desire to visit it because it is such a pleasant change from the rest of the Fleet, even after it becomes a Wretched Hive due to gangs taking over some decks. It is implied that its loss was a significant hit to the morale of the Fleet in the subsequent months.
  • Though we don't see much of them, Zephyr and the Botanical Cruisers are also implied to be these, albeit less so than Cloud Nine.
• Status Quo Is God: Generally, but the series does move on. Watch the storyline where they decide to live on New Caprica and you'll find yourself wondering what kind of trope they are going to use like time travel or phlebotenum to reverse time back to the status quo (like they do on other space TV shows) — but it never happens.

• Straight Gay: You wouldn't know Hoshi was gay unless you watched the webisodes, and the fact that Gaeta is bisexual isn't made explicit until relatively late in the series.
• Straw Civilian: Averted, mainly due to the Roslin/Adama dynamic. Amusingly enough, more often than not Roslin is actually the Warhawk and Adama has to talk her down into embracing the peaceful option. Played straight by the Demand Peace movement, a protest group that constantly demanded that the Colonials try to make peace with the Cylons, and treated Adama as a General Ripper for trying to defend the fleet from them constantly and called him a warmonger. They also would occasionally sabotage military equipment as well.
• Straw Hypocrite: A particular scene between Cavil and Tyrol is a heaven for subtext when rewatching the series from the beginning.
  1. Brother Cavil is posing as a human priest in the human fleet (and in the Caprican Resistance), but he's actually a Cylon abusing his position to orchestrate destructive acts.
  2. He's talking to Chief Tyrol to give him counseling and talk him down from his fear that he, like his girlfriend, is a Cylon sleeper agent. Cavil assures him he hasn't seen him in any of their super secret meetings... because Cavil reprogrammed Tyrol to forget his life as one of the five creators of Cavil and the bio-Cylon race.
  3. Among the Cylons, Cavil advocated the destruction of humanity for its sins in enslaving the robotic Centurions, while he did just the same, and memory wiped his creators and put them in the colonies, while lying like a dog to his siblings. The war being a genocidal temper tantrum in an attempt to become the "favorite son."
• Stealth in Space: The Blackbird's special carbon plating masks its heat signature, meaning that it cannot be picked up by any DRADIS.
• Stellar Name: As per the original series, each of the Twelve Colonies have a name inspired by one of the Western Zodiac constellations (i.e., Caprica —> Capricorn, Libran —> Libra, Tauron —> Taurus, etc). The actual Zodiac names are even referred to as their "original" names before they were modernized and adjusted over the millenia.
• Stock Footage: Footage of the Viper launches and landings is often reused for the sake of budget.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: One proposed explanation for the "angels" and "God" by the series' own writing team.
• Sunglasses at Night: Romo Lampkin wears these as a Character Tic.
• Surprise Incest: Cavil and Ellen. She doesn't know at the time, but he does and is even aware the Cavil model was shaped in the image of her father and that she saw Cavil as a son.
• Survival Mantra: To quote Starbuck, "Fear gets you killed. Anger keeps you alive."
• Survivalist Stash: Helo and Caprica-Sharon find one on Caprica.
• Sympathetic P.O.V.: This gets used a lot for the series' villains as part of its Grey-and-Gray Morality, especially with both the Cylons and Gaeta when he spearheads a failed mutiny. He's ultimately executed for this role, but he's far more sympathetic than his co-conspirator Zarek, and the viewers get the sense that he was trying to do what he thought was the right thing.
• Take Me to Your Leader: Brother Cavil does that when he is outed as a Cylon spy. They take him to the brig instead.
  (After having several guns pointed at him) Well, this is an awkward moment. (Beat) Yes, uh, he's right, I am a Cylon. And I have a message, so.... take me to your leader.
• Take That!: Ronald D. Moore had previously worked on Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine, and briefly worked on Voyager before quitting out of dissatisfaction with how the producers were running the show. He subsequently wrote a long rant about all the problems the series had, notably the lack of continuity, reliance on Techno Babble to solve everything, constant usage of the Reset Button which underminded the premise of being trapped in a hostile area of the galaxy, and failure to accurately depict a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits without a consistent source of supplies on a long, grueling voyage to reach home. He then produced this series, incorporating most of his suggested changes to Voyager along the way.
• Techno Babble: Military jargon more than sci-fi-isms. Lampshaded when Tigh accuses Baltar of "weaselly technobabble". An accurate accusation, as Baltar's first "Cylon detection method" was entirely made up. There is deliberate avoidance on the writers' part of "this works because of the Cylon hypersilly system" and so on.
  • The lack of technobabble and the downscaling of technology in general were probably deliberate moves by Moore, who was fed up with Techno Babble being used to solve everything on Star Trek: Voyager.
  • The miniseries has a great moment telling the audience that the show won't involve a lot of technobabble. After Apollo saves Colonial One from a Cylon nuke, he goes on to explain how he did so by "realigning the hyperdrive with the generators blah blah blah". After a beat, Roslin says, "The lesson here is to not ask follow-up questions, but to rather say 'Thank you, Apollo, for saving our collective asses.'"
• That Man Is Dead: Tigh after New Caprica.
  Bill Adama: You can get your ass back into your quarters and not leave until you're ready to act like the man that I've known for the past 30 years!
  Saul Tigh: That man doesn't exist anymore, Bill.
• That Thing Is Not My Child!: Double subverted during the New Caprica arc in a particularly cruel fashion. After the Cylon invasion, Leoben Conoy/Number Two has kidnapped Kara "Starbuck" Thrace and keeps her locked up in a secluded apartment to force some sort of twisted Stockholm Syndrome relationship on her, and since he has plenty of backup bodies, "killing" him just means he'll be back in a few hours. At one point he brings in a little blonde girl that he claims is a human-Cylon hybrid, who was conceived with Kara's ovary (which the Cylons had previously removed from her body) and his own sperm. Starbuck initially refuses to accept the child as her own, but when the kid gets hurt Kara seems to acknowledge the child as her daughter. However, when the humans escape the planet it's revealed that the kid in question was actually a normal girl taken from her real human mother by Leoben as part of his ploy to get close to Starbuck.
• Theme Naming: A completely unintentional case, but the names of the Final Five all have prominent T sounds in them: Saul and Ellen Tigh, Galen Tyrol, Tory Foster, and Samuel T. Anders.
• Themed Tattoos: Starbuck and Anders mark their marriage by getting bicep tattoos that link together to form a bigger symbol.
• Theotech: The imagery of the series is far more akin to ancient Greek religion, even showing them having household idols named after the Greek gods and goddesses on spaceships and alien planets. In contrast, the Cylons had adopted a mystical, almost Judeo-Christian view of a "one true God." (Well, most of them. Some of them were atheists; the model Ones - the "Cavil" model - especially seemed to lean towards a Straw Nihilist take on atheism). Gaius Baltar was changed from the Darth Vader Expy he was in the original series to an atheist who becomes a sort of prophet/messiah, spreading the word of the Cylon God^note who seems to be real but also hates being called "God" and, amusingly enough, doesn't seem to really have much of a problem with people worshiping other gods since those other gods are implied to be him in some fashion to the humans.
• There Is Another: As with the original series, the Battlestar Pegasus is discovered. The reunion wasn't quite as happy as you might imagine, though...
• There Will Be Toilet Paper: Adama cuts himself shaving pretty frequently.
• They Look Like Us Now: The Trope Namer. The Cylons have evolved from "walking chrome toasters" into androids with flesh. The opening and a few characters use the line, and it does cause a lot of mistrust among the human survivors.
• Thicker Than Water: John's mother is extremely disappointed in her Cylon son and how many terrible things he has done out of pettiness and rage at his parents for giving him a human body. She calls her petulant son out on his jealousy and sadism, but despite all of John's crimes like fratricide, genocide, and even raping her, says that he isn't broken and could still be redeemed if he accepted what he was. She states she still loves him because she made him.
• Third Line, Some Waiting: Plot threads are picked up again at the writers' convenience, if they're ever picked up at all.
• 13 Is Unlucky: Twelve tribes of man who founded the Twelve Colonies... plus one that "got lost" and inspired the survivors to go on (what at least seems to be) a wild goose chase IN SPACE! to find a planet called Earth. Twelve human-Cylons... plus a dead one named Daniel.
• This Is Not a Drill
• Three-Way Sex: Baltar is shown to have done it with a Number Three and a Number Six; quite an achievement since he's basically their captive at that point. Oh, and both women, being Ridiculously Human Robots, are strong enough to effortlessly snap his spine if they wished to.
• Throwing Out the Script: Adama does this during his retirement speech in the miniseries.
• Thrown Out the Airlock: invoked This show is the reason the word "airlock" is now a verb and Laura Roslin's Fanon nickname is Madame Airlock.
• Title Drop: Both specials use this.
  • In Razor, Admiral Cain awards Kendra Shaw the eponymous title, which she applies to the most loyal and merciless of her soldiers.
  • In The Plan, it's first used in print on Brother Cavil's religious flyers, and subsequently in spoken lines by the Cylons.
• Tomato in the Mirror: Boomer, plus four other characters as of the Season 3 finale.
  • And another one shortly afterwards. It takes her a few seconds to realize that it's not as bad as she initially thought.
  • Kara may be a whole other case altogether.
• Tomato Surprise: Happens twice: Once with Tigh, Tyrol, Tory, and Anders, then again with Ellen.
• Took a Level in Jerkass:
  • Boomer, following the fall of New Caprica, goes from one of the few Cylons crusading for peace to an extremely bitter and anti-human nut job who tries to snap baby Hera’s neck at one point.
  • Tigh and Starbuck after the New Caprica arc, thanks to going through absolutely hellish experiences that left them with lingering trauma, and for a few episodes they spend most of their time harassing the rest of the crew and drinking. They get better after having a Heel Realization.
  • Kat, after getting hooked on drugs.
• Toxic Friend Influence: Ellen Tigh is a horrible enabler of Saul's drinking and darker ambitions. Similarly, Saul himself is frequently a inspiration for Ellen's darker machinations. The fact that the two of them actually do genuinely love each other is probably the most surprising aspect of their relationship, honestly.
  • Following her being killed by the Colonials and being reborn among the Cylons, Cavil preys on Boomer's angst and resentment towards her "sister" Athena for supposedly "stealing her life away" to cause her to Take a Level in Jerkass and become one of his supporters in greater Cylon society.
• Transhuman Treachery: Upon discovering she was a Cylon, Tory Foster quickly jumps ship and joins up with them and wants to abandon humanity because she saw Cylons are better than humans. She didn't really think this through though, as Cylons had recently added "killing each other", "civil war", and "screwing up royally" to that list of things Cylons are supposedly better at.
  • Inverted with Ellen Tigh, who goes out of her way to try and save humanity once she realizes she's a Cylon, even becoming a significantly kinder person in the process..
• Trash the Set: By the last half of Season 4, the Galactica has been showing quite a bit of damage.
• Trauma Conga Line: Tyrol, later on.
  • The first half of Season 4 is one of these for Adama, though he weathers it somewhat better than Tyrol.
  • Really, everyone gets put through an emotional wringer over the course of this series.
• Trial Balloon Question: Athena to Helo, on if she were a Cylon. Anders to Starbuck, on if he were a Cylon. In both cases their human partners make less than encouraging responses, but are more accepting when they actually learn their significant others are Cylons later.
  • In "Colonial Day", Helo puts two and two together about having seen two Number Sixes on Cylon-occupied Caprica in "33" and "The Hand of God" (and it must be two, because Athena shot and killed the first one) and realizes that the Cylons must have created duplicate models that can pass as humans, because it makes no sense for an actual human to be helping them, let alone a set of twins. Athena says that if they're based on humans then they must be capable of complex emotions, maybe even love, and are just misguided in the way they've been indoctrinated, but Helo shuts her down, saying that no human could kill billions of innocent people and they must be machines like the rest of them.
  • In "He That Believeth in Me", Starbuck has returned from the Fleet after her Viper was seemingly destroyed in the maelstrom in "Maelstrom", and is widely suspected of being a Cylon because the Cylons are the only people the Fleet knows can return from the dead. Anders tells her that even if she turned out to be a Cylon, he'd still love her no matter what. Starbuck jokes that he's a better person than she is, 'cause if he turned out to be a Cylon, she'd shoot him.
• True Companions: Dysfunctional as it is. Adama and Roslin are clearly the Team Dad and Team Mom to the rest of the crew, and Fleet, and all the main protagonists by the end of the series have effectively become a particularly effective and loyal band of Vitriolic Best Buds laden with Teeth-Clenched Teamwork.
• Turned Against Their Masters: "Then came the day the Cylons decided to kill their masters." The most terrifying part, however, is that it is later revealed that there is a Vicious Cycle of Eternal Recurrence where this is infinitely repeating, where humanity creates A.I.s that rebel against them and eventually the whole messy business starts all over again.
• Two of Your Earth Minutes: In the re-imagined series, they generally use what the audience would consider standard measurements: they've mentioned that a "day" has 24 hours in it, 365 days a year. It's not clear if this is some sort of universal fleet time that the Twelve Colonies agreed upon as an average of their local times or if it is based on Caprica-time. One exception is that their unit of distance is an "SU" (Solar Unit) instead of an "AU" (Astronomical Unit) - which in real life is based on the distance between Earth and the sun. Seeing as they're from twelve different planets in a double binary star cluster, using an "AU" wouldn't make much sense.
• Tyrant Takes the Helm: This story arc stars Captain Cole "Stinger" Taylor, Pegasus' CAG, who tyrannizes the Galactica fighter crew.

Tropes U-Z

• Uncommon Time: Among other usages, Six's theme is in 9/8, and "Black Market" is at least partially in 7/4.
• Unexplained Recovery: Starbuck. It was suspected she was a Cylon. In a surprising twist, it turns out that it was literally a miracle.
• Unflinching Walk: Cavil performs this in the finale, walking through Galactica's corridors with a phalanx of Centurions around him as they fight the Colonial Marines.

• Unique Pilot Title Sequence: The opening credits for the pilot miniseries begin with music by Richard Gibbs. The third episode and first episode of the series proper, "33," begins with the now familiar Bear McCreary theme.
• Unusual Euphemism: "Frak."
  • An unusually anachronistic euphemism: In the series pilot, when Adama and Tigh are discussing Starbuck, Adama says, "Jesus." So does Racetrack when she comes face to face with a Centurion. In both instances, they are slurred enough to avoid notice unless you're paying attention or have subtitles.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight: In the first season, Gaius is tormented by the vision of Six he keeps seeing, leading him to say strange things and act strangely in public. Despite this, they put their trust in him and even elect him Vice President.
• Unusual User Interface: invoked Cylons have two for the price of one. They can plug fiber optic cables into their forearms to interface with Colonial computers (but they have to make an incision first), and they can interface with their own ships by putting their hands in a stream of water called the "datastream". The latter might be either electrical or biochemical transmitters, with it being implied that the Cylons have a special layer of photosensitive skin cells on their palms that let them interface with the datastream. Oddly, humans also seem to be able to interface well enough with the datastream by just putting their own hands into the datastream, but this can likely be Hand Waved by the Hybrids always being present in those instances to help facilitate the process.
• Unexpected Successor: The series opens and closes with one: Secretary of Education Laura Roslin becomes President of the Twelve Colonies after everyone else in the presidential cabinet is killed, and then communications officer Lt. Louis Hoshi temporarily becomes Admiral of the Fleet simply by being the only decent officer left in the fleet once the Galactica has left for the final battle.
• Unresolved Sexual Tension: This trope was made for Lee Adama and Kara Thrace. If anything, it only intensifies after they have sex.
• Used Future: Being set After the End, this series has this aesthetic down pat. Though in a surprise twist, it's not actually the future.
• Vehicle Title: The titular Battlestar Galactica is both the primary setting of the series and last defense that the remnants of mankind has left against the Cylons.
• Verbal Tic: Whenever you hear Gaius Baltar say "Quite frankly," he's asspulling like a madman.
• Vicious Cycle: The religion of the Twelve Colonies features one based around Eternal Recurrence as a core part of its belief system, being specifically called "the Cycle of Time." It also turns out to be (kind of) real, with it consisting of humanity creating advanced A.I.s thanks to rediscovering their own Lost Technology, the A.I.s eventually rebelling, the few surviving humans escaping and settling down somewhere else, and then the whole messy business eventually repeats itself. However, the Series Finale gives the possibility of the cycle having been finally broken thanks to the Messengers and actions of the main cast.
• Villain Episode: The episode "Downloaded" for the Cylons, and later an entire villain movie (The Plan), focusing mainly on Cavil.
• Villain Has a Point: Cavil does have something of a point about the Final Five imitating the human form so slavishly that the humanoid Cylons have very few superhuman abilities and are vulnerable to the same medical problems as human beings (as even Cottle groused about when he had to deliver Hera with a detached placenta).
• Virus and Cure Names: Mellorak, cured by Bittamucin.
• Visual Pun: Helo and Sharon are hiding in a store while a Cylon patrol goes by. Unfortunately a few minutes before they decided to make toast, which pops up at just that moment. The joke being they were betrayed by a literal "chrome toaster".
• Vomit Indiscretion Shot: In the Extended Cut of "Daybreak", Adama throws up all over the sidewalk outside a bar.
• Wagon Train to the Stars: The entire series might be considered a deconstruction of this trope, stripping away the gloss normally applied to this concept by portraying the "wagon train" as desperate refugees fleeing from a literal genocide and having entire episodes (i.e., "Flight of the Phoenix") dedicated to showing how emotionally and physically draining this would be on everyone involved.
• The War Just Before: The series is set forty years after the first Cylon War. The Cylons and colonials ended it with an armistice and built a space station as a meeting point between the two sides, but the Cylons never showed up. This made a number of the Colonial brass suspicious enough to send the Battlestar Valkyrie on a covert operation to penetrate Cylon space with a stealth ship. Admiral Adama, who was Valkyrie's CO at the time, comes to believe this may have reignited the conflict.
• Watching Troy Burn: The destruction of the Colonies was watched from space by both civilian fleets and the Cylons.
• Water Torture: An early episode has a pair of guards hold a skin-job Cylon's head in a bucket of water until he starts to drown, pull him out, question him, rinse and repeat.
• Waxing Lyrical: Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower," as recited by the Final Five.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Even ignoring the numerous instances of Teeth-Clenched Teamwork and open conflicts among the surviving Colonials (i.e., the Gideon Massacre from early on in Season 2 and The Mutiny arc in the second half of Season 4), it gradually becomes obvious that the Cylons themselves are not nearly as unified as they may seem on the surface. While this got a lot clearer as the series goes on (with the Cylons even breaking out into Civil War in Season 4), signs of this can be seen as early as Season 2, where one faction of Cylons tried to use a "logic bomb" computer virus to wipe out Galactica while another faction of Cylons wanted to keep Galactica alive so as to safeguard the survival of Caprica-Boomer's unborn child. In fact, Caprica-Six's faction of Cylons wanted to create a lasting peace with the New Capricans in the Season 2 finale, but their benevolent intentions were unfortunately hijacked by Cavil's faction and instead turned into a brutal occupation regime.
• We Used to Be Friends: Kara and Lee. Especially during and after New Caprica.
  • As well as Colonel Tigh and the Old Man on several occasions.
• We Will Use Manual Labor in the Future: The original Cylons were intended as manual laborers and soldiers before they rebelled. The scarcity of advanced equipment means humans in the Fleet getting worked to the bone, too. In fact, this "distrust of advanced technology" is part of the reason for why Galactica looks the way she does, as she had no networked computers due to her age as a warship (which had the unseen boon of making her effectively immune to the Cylons' first strike on the Twelve Colonies). This also helps explain why there's numerous characters since the lack of advanced computers results in lots of people being needed to fill in all those jobs that would otherwise be automated.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist:
  • The Cylons' main motivation is to secure the survival of their species along with reaching spiritual enlightenment, and can be argued as having been only pushed into true villainy by John Cavil. And then there's the anti-Cylon New Caprican suicide bombers.
  • Felix Gaeta during the mutiny, as he's primarily motivated by a genuine desire to prevent Adama from supposedly selling out humanity to the rebel Cylons (he's not, but Gaeta's gone through too much Sanity Slippage by this point to accept Adama's logic).
• Wham Episode: Used frequently throughout the series, but easily the two biggest examples can be found when the Colonial Fleet and rebel Cylons first find out "Earth" is a nuclear wasteland Earth and then when Kara inputs a series of coordinates that take the survivors to "our" Earth.
• Wham Shot: Lots of examples, but easily one of the biggest is in "Downloaded," with The Reveal that Caprica-Six has a Head Baltar just like how Baltar has a Head Six, confirming that the two "Messengers" are of a far more mysterious origin than what the audience first thought.
• What Happened to the Mouse?:
  • The reaction fans had with Helo during the miniseries and why the writers ultimately retconned his off-screen death.
  • invoked Roughly a thousand people had to be left on New Caprica. Suffice to say, things likely did not go well for them.
  • Similar to the above, it's unknown (though very unlikely) in any other Colonials survived the nuclear holocaust of the Twelve Colonies, with only Caprica being shown in the series both before and after the Fall.
  • The fates of any other civilian fleets that survived the initial attack and didn't encounter either Pegasus or Colonial One.
  • In addition, all of the FTL spacecraft was crashed into the Sun in the Series Finale... except Adama and Roslin's Raptor, which is certainly going to be a great boon for archaeologists when they find it if it hasn't deteriorated into so much rust after 100 millennia.
  • The fate of the surviving rebel Centurions and their Basestar after the Series Finale is intentionally left up in the air.
• What Measure Is A Nonhuman: Done over and over again between the humans and Cylons of all types. The standard philosophical debate is complicated by attempted genocide against one side and slavery of the other in the backstory, so each side has a reason to hate and fear the other, and also by the bizarre bio...mecha...chemistry of the Cylons.
• Why Don't You Marry It?: The initial reaction to Helo and Athena's courtship. Eventually, he does marry her.

• With Due Respect: The standard preface to anything guaranteed to piss Adama off.
• A Wizard Did It: God was behind it all. Yes, that God.
• World of Snark: Virtually every character gets to show off their dry wit at some point.
• Wrench Wench: Cally and Seelix. Starbuck and Dee even have moments of this, Starbuck moreso; she's shown covered in grease and fixing a Viper during the miniseries.
• Wring Every Last Drop out of Him: Laura Roslin's illness only becomes majorly visible on two occasions. In her very first scene and when she's being informed that she has cancer and spent the entire run of the show dying in varying degrees.
• Writer on Board: The show did this at least twice, with one episode in which Laura Roslin was forced to weigh the consequences of protecting a woman's right to an abortion with the need to protect the small amount of human life that was left, and again with another episode where Tyrol was used to champion the greatness of organized labor (he later became a union leader). In the Battlestar Galactica podcast, Ronald D. Moore flatly admitted that he was engaging in this trope with these two episodes, but that he also basically didn't care.

• Xanatos Speed Chess: Cavil is a master of this. Nearly every one of his plans spectacularly explodes in his face, yet he's quick enough on the rebound with a backup plan to make you think he almost planned it that way. He manages to hold things together until his last viable option goes up in smoke and then, well... "FRAK!"
  • Baltar spends the entire series playing XSC. But he couldn't have done it without the help of Head Six.
• You Can't Go Home Again: Notably, a case where it's both a literal series trope and also an episode title.
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters:
  • The issue is directly referenced by name in Season 1, during the election dispute between Laura Roslin and Tom Zarek, a notable radical who had served twenty years in prison for blowing up a building during an insurgency on Sagittaron before the war, and thus is regarded in legal terms as a terrorist. A Roslin supporter sitting at a bar makes a comment regarding Zarek as a terrorist only to have a Zarek supporter sitting nearby immediately correct the man that Zarek is a freedom fighter. The argument soon evolves into a brawl, but this view is shared by Zarek's supporters as well as Zarek himself, and his ability to market himself as a heroic, populist figure sways nearly half of the fleet (though Dualla, who's also from Sagittaron, is disgusted by the support he gets, feeling there's no justification for what he did, not even if it was supposedly in the name of their world's freedom).
  • In Season 3 during the Cylon occupation of New Caprica, Colonel Tigh flatly states "Which side are we on? We're on the side of the demons, Chief. We're evil men in the gardens of paradise, sent by the forces of death to spread devastation and destruction wherever we go. I'm surprised you didn't know that" when confronted by Chief Tyrol over the use of suicide bombers and terrorism against the Cylons and the humans who work for them. Although, he could just have been sarcastic after Tyrol expressed outrage over the use of suicide bombers against the Cylons (who can resurrect while humans cannot), which Tigh seems to justify under I Did What I Had to Do.
• You Shall Not Pass!: The Cylons want to finish the job and destroy the Colonial Fleet, but to do that, they just have to get past Adama and Galactica. This is why after a miniseries and four seasons, the Cylons were never able to destroy humankind.
• You Wouldn't Shoot Me: While investigating the Black Market, Apollo learns that its ringleader, an ex-mercenary turned crimelord named Phelan, went so far as to start selling children as sex slaves. The trope then shows up in this exchange:
  Apollo: invoked (holding Phelan at gunpoint) There's lines you can't cross, and you've crossed them.
  Phelan: You're not gonna shoot. You're not like me. You're not gonna-
  Apollo: *BOOM*
• Zombie Advocate: In the latter part of Season 2, a group of activists called the "Demand Peace" movement briefly emerged who argued that the Colonials should pursue peace and coexistence with the Cylons. This despite the fact that the Cylons had almost entirely eradicated all of mankind in a nuclear holocaust and pursued the scant few survivors into deep space, the activists still characterized Admiral Adama and Galactica's campaign to protect the fleet from being wiped out of existence as a "relentless war machine".

---

"So Say We All."