Looking Past The Glowing Spines

I'm trying very hard to give the current Battlestar Galactica a second try. Last time, I only made it to the end of season 1, despite really wanting to love the series. But, late one night a few months back, whilst battling insomnia, I caught half of an awesome class-struggles episode from what I believe is Season 4. It keeps wandering into my mind when we blog about the vanishing middle class, and the manipulative tricks of politicians, so I eventually decided I needed to put it all on netflix and try again.

There's a lot of genius in that show, but it all gets so badly muddied by the production errors and a few logic holes.

(To see spoilers, highlight all the text, and/or copy and pace into a word processor and turn the text black)

Octagonal paper. It doesn't make a ton of sense in-character, since it would be wasteful cutting off those corners or inefficient making octagonal sheets individually. But, even if you suspend your disbelief of that and assume there's some cultural reasoning to justify the extra expense, you then find that they don't apply it consistently. Traditional square-cornered books appear on Caprica. Apollo's notebook at the sabotage inquiry is just a normal rectangular notebook. The president's whiteboard, critical to the visual thematics of one of the best episodes, has rounded corners.

Water Numbers. They claim the Galactica has a year's supply of water. Then they say they lost 60% of the water reserve. Then, in the same scene, they claim to have less than a weeks supply left. 1 year minus 60% does not equal 1 week. It's hard to conceive of how the writer, director, editor, and the actor who delivers the line all could miss that. That's a continuity error worthy of a Pizza Face Death or Camera Man film.

Glowing spines. This was what broke it for me the first time. When it showed up in the early scene this time through, I just repeated to myself "Her spine is not really glowing. It's just a suboptimal lighting decision, not an intentional special effect intended to have meaning or relevance." It's gonna be tough, though. Sometime on the next disk is the sex scene in the woods (pictured left), which made me give up on the show the first time. If you're a trained soldier, and you've been spending weeks in the woods, running for your life from the red lights of cylon centurions, then unexplained red lights emitting from the back of your lover (and reflecting visibly off of several wet tree trunks around you) should kill your erection. It'd be one thing if sex with a Cylon rarely happened - I can suspend my disbelief on one or two occassions, and just assume the orgasm was so good, or the guy had his eyes closed, so he didn't notice. But there's plenty of implication that Baltar and the Crew Chief both shagged Cylons again and again without ever catching on. How pathetic is their sexlife that they never tried any other positions? Guess they just know what they like.

Indistiguishable Cylons. I do understand that the cylon detector program is stalled, sabotaged, and just generally mismanaged. Just the same, it's hard to swallow that "Cylons can't be distinguished by humans" when we know that:
1)Burnt Cylon "flesh" reveals trace synthetic elements
2)The government new for several decades that the radiation of the Ragnar Anchorage kept it safe from the Cylons since it was poisonous to them (and not to humans)
3)Their freakin' spines glow when they have an orgasm! That's gotta be genetically or neurologically different than human!
4)There's only 12 models of Cylon. Sooner or later, someone's going to say "Hey, you look and sound exactly like that guy I knew back on Picon!"

Given those facts, I sincerely hope that at some point (relatively early in the overall plotarc) they have somebody finally call Baltar out on his ridiculous inability to build a functioning Cylon detector. It's painful to see someone as bright as Adama or Madame President falling for his lies. That season 3 or 4 episode I saw had one scene of Baltar in a prison cell - man I'm lookin' forward to that.

I think I can (suspend my disbelief). I think I can. I think I can.