.. spoiler warning for those that haven't seen the mini-series ..

What, no Jar-Jar?

I'm deeply pleased that there was no comic-relief designate being force-fed to the audience, the equivalent of the Jar Jar Binks or Ruby Rod .. the type of character that is intended to appeal to children and otherwise garner ratings from dim-witted twits. Allowing any light-hearted moments to be presented by the otherwise heavy-hearted characters gave those characters more dynamic range and drove home the contrast of those moments. It strays from the mass-market recipe on this, and it's better as a result.

If anything, the Boltar character was the most consistently funny, but in a tragically deprecating way. He's the darkest character so it worked to allow him to be the infrequent goofball. Some of his body language like the head moves were seriously funny once you're watching for them, but there's no gratuitous slapstick and you're not going to catch him on the front of a cereal box.

From the death-to-the-humans dept.

If more of these do see the light of day, the Cylon motivation should prove to be one of the more interesting cornerstones to the overall plot. Components of the machine-against-human thread have played out all over the place, ie. Matrix, Terminator, the Borg, even the replicants from Stargate, the 'original' series.

The twist in this case is that the machines, the Cylons in this case, appear to have developed philosophy, and as a result, ideology, and most interestingly, theology. This makes for some dark comparisons to holy war, and not accidentally.

For twists-upon-twists, it will be interesting to see if the creation of these almost-human Cylon models become their own downfall .. they'll be just soooo human that they'll also be lumped into the you-must-be-destroyed category. There's a graying of the demarcation between humans and cylons, in that both are just complicated machines that are virtually indistinguishable from one another. Perhaps the 12 Cylon models aren't necessarily manufactured, maybe they're clones from a dozen kidnap victims .. at least one from a stripper convention.