Really old folks remember when it was called "SF", not SciFi. Like Scientology, SciFi is a science fiction author's joke...of course, it would help to know the long since dead term "HiFi", now only familiar as an echo through a John Cusack movie - itself an aging bit of pop culture.

Little theatrical, movie or TV science fiction addresses - or attempts to address - meaningful themes. BSG is at least making a go of it. That every possible plot twist was foreseen in the pages of Astounding Science Fiction in the 1930's shouldn't keep Hollywood from continuing to try.

In particular, the Galactica cosmos pales in richness next to Known Space or the Foundation or Diaspar - or even relative to the leaden worlds of Doc Smith. Speak of ancient prophesies!

2,000 years! Pffft! Even L. Ron Hubbard's cartoon universe stretches back billions of years. (Although nobody has mentioned the obvious religious symbolism of a period of two millennia.)

While you're mulling over whether we're all Cylons (how cool would that be! - if the writer's strike hadn't let the surprise congeal) you might consider whether either of the last two episodes - before or after the hiatus - showed a recognizable image of Earth from space. Even after an atomic holocaust - even during a nuclear winter - the Earth's continents will remain recognizable for much longer than two thousand years.

Since fiction - even science fiction - is about people, what I have always found most disturbing about most televised SciFi is precisely the lack of a meaningful depiction of humans doing science. (2001 is one exception.) Whether or not we're battling or making nice with Cylons is completely irrelevant to the underlying drive to comprehend the universe.

Any fictional universe in which "people" (flesh, metal or spam) fail to be ultimately driven by curiosity and creativity is - well - extremely artificial. Personally, I like when a series tries to wrestle with issues of music and art (joining science as other expressions of our individually unique relationship with the ultimate) - even if it comes out pretty cheesy. This isn't a reflection of SciFi, it is a reflection of attempting to depict something completely honest. Actors can pretend all sorts of things. When pretending to be musicians, though, they have to actually BE musicians. They have to break the fourth wall.

So in this remarkable space fleet, with remarkable artificial lifeforms, visiting dozens of habitable (if often thoughtlessly degraded) planets, with faster-than-light travel, with strange unfathomable archeological sites scattered about the cosmos, with evidence of actual resurrection as well as artificial (which is more remarkable?!?), with bizarre biological engineering that (almost miraculously) can result in human/machine breeding - with all this, we focus on the melodrama? And the most melodramatic character is the only scientist onboard? And by a fresh plot twist he just happens to be wrestling with all the same issues that Victor Frankenstein did in 1818?

Having landed on a new world (ancestral homeworld or not), discovering that it had been nuked within a relatively recent 2,000 years (what is a "year" anyway to a fleet without a planet?), further discovering that the first few hundred bodies discovered are of artificial origin, one might feel a spark of interest at continuing to study this phenomena in enough detail to fathom the connection to one's own history.

It was [melo]dramatic for Roslin to burn her bible. Rather, one might have chosen to look at it afresh in the light of these new facts. The helter-skelter (now THAT would have been a good song for the Cylon pop charts!) pace of the episode was clearly an attempt to capture the feeling of having your belief system completely undermined. The large number of plot points are setting up stories to come.

Is this "Earth", really the Earth? And why are they surprised at the crispy critters? Obviously the colonies were founded due to some earlier historical twist - that this is lost in the mists (or more properly, mysts) of time is simply additional evidence that some cataclysm pertained.

All the confusion and most of the angst on Galactica could have been avoided if Adama or Roslin had simply done what anyone with leadership responsibilities would have thought to do before jumping into orbit, and gone on the PA system to point out that none of them knew what the 'morrow would bring and that this might not actually be Earth and that since nobody had heard from Earth since the dawn of recorded history that some unfortunate happenstance may have befallen the planet, and that - hey! - isn't it cool that we seem to have finally made peace with our ancient enemies, the Cylons (who, by the way, are now mortal like us) and isn't that even more important since after all, the universe appears to be full of habitable planets (rather than waiting until the end of the show to point this out).

Who the frak cares who the fifth Cylon is? Even in the absence of spaceships we are each of us voyagers through a vast and remarkable cosmos. Even in the absence of evolving robotic life forms we are each uniquely challenged with inventing our own destiny.