January 2006

Flickr user Charlie Brown has posted three shots of an awesome Galactica prop… an actual ballot from a Colonial election!

At first glance, I thought this was one of the ballots used during the election seen in Season One’s ‘Colonial Day’. But that was a vice presidential election.

So this must be a Season Two prop… which makes this a bit of a spoiler (though ‘Charlie Brown’ has taken care to blur the name of the 2nd candidate that appears on the ballot).

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As any Galactica fan knows, networking computers is a pretty bad idea.

So, when Lt. Gaeta was forced to network Galactica’s navigation computers to do an emergency FTL jump during ‘Scattered’, fans knew there’d be repercussions.

But, given BSG’s heavy geek fanbase, the resulting Cylon virus plotline — where a virus infected Galactica’s networked computers and immobilized the ship — seemed a bit contrived to many fans. Responding in a recent SciFi Q&A, Ron Moore gave his two cents:

We strive to keep things realistic without getting bogged down in too much technobabble or detail about it. We do have a very good, very knowledgeable technical advisor, who usually flags down errors of this sort, but in the end, it’s my call when to stay with the dramatic beat or change things around to keep it scientifically accurate. It’s a very subjective call and basically I listen to my own instincts as a writer, so if we’re doing something that pulls you out of the show because you know better, it’s probably a result of me taking the dramatic rather than the accurate path.

Makes sense to me, but the Hollywood North Report digs a bit deeper into this issue in this week’s BSG TechBlog.

Just noticed Apple is now carrying an audiobook version of the new Jeffrey Carver novelization of the BSG miniseries.

Here’s the description from Amazon:

For forty years, the Twelve Colonies of Man experienced peace, united since the war against the man-made Cylons. The Cylons, mechanical beings created to perform the manual labor civilization required, were gone forever…or so humanity thought.

But in those years, the Cylons developed new Cylons that looked and acted like humans–with one goal in mind: to destroy all humanity! When they suddenly attacked the Twelve Worlds, humanity’s extinction seemed inevitable.

Only a single warship survived the massive attack: Battlestar Galactica, the oldest ship in the fleet, ready to be decommissioned and turned into a museum. Commander William Adama, himself set to retire, had but one course: to marshal the meager forces available, a ragtag crew of misfits and green recruits, to prevent their enemy from wiping out the last vestiges of the human race. But the Cylons, stronger, smarter, and driven to destroy their creators, may just be too powerful for them and all of humanity to survive.

Sounds familiar, huh?

The SciFi Channel has posted Ron Moore’s podcast commentary from the first half of the two-part ‘Resurrection Ship’ episode.

Most of this podcast centers around how ‘Resurrection Ship’ — which was originally conceived as a single episode — became a two-parter.

Here are a few of the more interesting highlights:

• The original version of ‘Resurrection Ship’ was 20 minutes long… a huge amount of extra footage, which eventually became part of the 2nd episode.

• RDM almost says “Picard” when talking about Adama’s motivation in a scene

• The ‘Case Orange’ codeword refers to a Navy battleplan during World War II

• The ‘Downfall’ codeword refers to a movie about the last days in Hitler’s bunker. (He’s probably referring to this film.)

• The “terminate Adama’s command” is an homage to a similar scene from Apocalypse Now where Harrison Ford gives instructions to Martin Sheen’s character.

• RDM reveals that Number Six was originally present when Baltar gave Gina some clothes, but they eventually cut her out of the scene because it muddle the emotional intent of the scene.

Want to see the shape of things to come post-Resurrection Ship?

Well, you’re in luck. Fan-favorite Dark Thoughts has uploaded 15 shots from ‘Epiphanies’, the Caprica flashback episode.

‘Epiphanies’, which will air week after next, will show us Laura Roslin’s life on Caprica before the attack.. which means we’ll get to meet President Adar (in whose administration Laura Roslin served as Education Secretary) and see what life in the Colonies was once like.

(Thanks to Hober for the link!)

To celebrate Friday’s new Galactica episode, we’ve added a Yahoo Widget version of our popular Galacticaa Dashboard widget.

The new widget is cross-platform, so it will work on both Windows and Macintosh computers that are running Yahoo Widgets 3.0 and later. (Mac users can use either the Yahoo Widget or our original Dashboard widget. They’re identical.)

Download the Galacticaa Yahoo Widget

UPDATE: Thanks to everyone who’s downloaded the widget. We’ve had almost 1000 downloads since the new widget was released!