particularly if you missed that Ellen is the fifth cylon.

What's it say if the couple with literally undying love is the very, very screwed up Saul and Ellen? In that flashback, by the way, it sounded as if they were human who were about to become Cylons.

In which case, the Resurrection ships began as resurrections--a fulfillment of the Christian promise of rebirth (thus, the Last Supper symbolism of the ad campaign). And the endless rebirth--well, everything has happened before and will happen again applies on a personal as well as a cosmic level. How many times have Ellen and Saul lived and destroyed one another? No wonder there's a Sanskrit chant at the beginning of the show.

If resurrection is possible what does that mean for Adama and the dying Roslin? Will she wanted to be downloaded--will she, like Kara, even have a choice?

Will Lee want Dee to come back?

Yeah, some of the writing was a bit clunky, but the possibilities opened up were genuinely interesting and moved from space opera into true science fiction.

It's also pretty clear that, yes, Moore had this idea very early on if not from the get-go.

I, like Benfer, always liked Loh's writing--her one on trying to get her kid into a private school was perfect and priceless.

But this last one just left me cold. Loh basically tries to rationalize her behavior by attacking the institution of marriage and pretty much claims that those of us who can keep a promise as innate fuddy-duddies (builders) who just don't value innovation and excitement.

Sorry, when all was said and done, Loh's marital break-up did read like a mid-life crisis sans sports car. Her pretense that the break-up of their family wasn't going to be a huge deal for her daughters is a convenient bit of self-deception.

And I don't need to read personal essays for self-deception--I can find that anyplace.

Now, it's just a question of waiting for the inevitable sadder, but wiser essay (with the requisite moaning about the lousiness of dating post-40 as a single mom) that we'll get a year or so from now.

that it's far more about the parents than the kids. The deluge of defensive letters speaks to that.

Yes, I know homeschoolers and their kids are doing okay. Sort of. But what I see over and over again is this antagonism on the part of parents to the world outside the family--outside parental control. In a sense, it is deeply anti-education in that it is about parents trying to control completely the people and ideas to which their kids are exposed.

The distorted views you guys have of public schooling is both sad and funny. O'Hehir supposedly educated and sophisticated, but he's got the same isolationist views as the other homeschoolers. Not really that different from right-wing zealots.

Fact is, you won't always be there and your children will have to survive without you. When you deprive your children of being with peers of different backgrounds and beliefs and don't let them experience being taught by people who have taught hundreds of other children, you are limiting them.

One of the things, I truly value about my child going to school is that she hears ideas that she wouldn't hear from me. Then we discuss them. But, then, I don't fear the influence of the outside world.

By the way, my kid's public school isn't a prison of close-mindedness and rigidity. We also take trips, visit museums and, oh, you know give her books to read. Where do homeschoolers get the dumb idea that the rest of us don't do things with our kids? Sounds like rationalizing to me.