Ever since the amazing reinterpreted Battlestar Galactica series kicked off in 2004, we were told what to expect: The Cylons look just like us, and they have a plan. Well their plan is finally being revealed in the straight-to-DVD prequel film (called, naturally, "The Plan") hitting stores this week. But we already know that it must involve blowing humanity's frakkin' minds on a weekly basis. Here are 10 of the most memorable moments from a show that featured more than its fair share. Oh, and of course a bunch of them involve people getting killed.
10. GAIUS GOT A GUN (Episode: "Fragged)
Gaius Baltar (James Callis) is pretty much a rat-bastard, and his penis almost single-handedly destroyed humanity. But when he's part of an away-team on the surface of the planet Kobol and a pilot named Crashdown starts acting like the mustache guy in Sleeping With the Enemy, it's clear someone's going to die in an unpleasant manner. To save Cally's life, Baltar steps up to the plate and shoots Crashdown in the back. It's the first step on Baltar's pot-holed road to redemption..
9. PEGASUS POPS IN (Episode: "Pegasus.")
When a huge ship shows up on Galactica's radar, the Vipers (their fighter ships) are quickly scrambled to intercept what they assume to be a Cylon Basestar (big baddie ships). But the ship's Colonial signals and the Vipers' visuals confirm that it's actually another Battlestar, the Pegasus, that managed to escape the Colonies' destruction and has been roaming through space. It's a rare moment of victory and joy for humanity (and probably the largest jump the count of survivors ever took in the opening credits), and when you go back and watch it knowing exactly how frakked up everything gets between the Galactica and Pegasus' psycho bitch commander Admiral Cain, it's even better.
8. SIX IS GREATER THAN THREE (Episode: "Downloaded")
If redeeming Gaius Baltar seems like a tall order, than redeeming Cylons—especially the specific one that made humanity's destruction possible (and totally killed a baby) in the mini-series—should have been virtually impossible. But that's the path that begins in this episode, when the newly christened Caprica Six (Tricia Helfer) and the Number Eight Formerly Known as Boomer (Grace Park) put their heads together and realize humanity's destruction was a mistake and that they can lead the Cylons in a new direction. But first, trapped in an underground parking structure by a human rebel group's bomb blast, Caprica Six has to save the life of rebel leader Sam Anders from a particularly crazy Number Three (Xena herself, Lucy Lawless) by bashing her head in with a rock. Don't all good redemptive stories start that way?
7. TIGH AND ADAMA HAVE A GRUFF OLD MAN FACEOFF (Episode: "Sometimes a Great Notion")
Taken out of context, this scene is hilariously awful. But in the context of old friends William Adama (Edward James Olmos) and Saul Tigh (Michael Hogan)—one of whom turns out to be a 2,000-year-old robot—who've seen it all and have run out of hope, the scene (featuring a gravelly-voiced old man being yelled at by an even gravellier-voiced old man about how Old Man #1's wife was a slut, and featuring Old Man #2 referring to his penis with the unforgettable euphemism "main vein") is a poignant acting tour-de-force.
6. STARBUCK AND LEE FIGHT USING PURE SEXUAL TENSION AS A WEAPON (Episode: "Unfinished Business")
Tensions are running high in the fleet after the evacuation of New Caprica (the humans adopted homeworld), so everyone climbs into the boxing ring to have it out with their object of irritation. But when longtime wannabe lovers Lee Adama (Jamie Bamber) and Kara "Starbuck" Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) step into the ring while at the same time flashing back to that one time they boned on New Caprica and then Kara immediately proposed to another dude, every punch is really a kiss, but it's also really a punch.
5. LAURA ROSLIN INVENTS AIRLOCKING (Episode: "Flesh and Bone")
When Kara interrogates a captured Leoben Cylon (Callum Keith Rennie), he seems to know an awful lot about her past and he claims to have planted a nuke somewhere in the fleet. As Kara tortures him in increasingly brutal ways, Leoben finally admits that there was no nuke. Rather than keep him prisoner, President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) invents a new method of execution that will come to be humanity's most popular: sending him out the ship's airlock into the icy embrace of space ("airlocking," in the popular parlance). It's a shocking indication of how far Roslin is willing to go, a chilling indication that humanity might not be so humane after all, and a really awesome way to kill someone.
4. IT CAME FROM PLANET EARTH (Episode: "Crossroads Part 2")
Humanity had spent years and years wandering aimlessly through space trying to find the planet Earth—which, in their religion, is basically like setting off in a boat and trying to land in Heaven. Even Admiral Adama, who rallied mankind around the idea of finding Earth, isn't sure it exists. So when the presumed-dead Starbuck suddenly pops up in her pulls her Viper announcing she's been to Earth, and then the camera suddenly pulls back and shows us our own familiar blue and green globe, it's as surprising and rousing a shot as the series ever produced…even if it's their least exciting special effect ever.
3. SHARIN' SHARON'S SECRETS (Episode: "Miniseries Part 2")
By the end of the miniseries that kicked off the show, we'd already discovered that the hot blonde, the twitchy arms dealer and the slimy PR executive were all really robots in disguise. But in the last moments of the miniseries, when a copy of Galactica's likeable rookie pilot Sharon "Boomer" Valerii walks out and joins the rest of the skinjobs, we realized these guys were really playing for keeps. If Boomer could be a Cylon, so could anyone…a state of uncertainty that had us suspecting every single member of the cast until the final Cylon was revealed in the final season. (And even a bit beyond that, depending on how much you trusted the show's assertion that there were only 12 humanoid Cylons.)
2. DOES CHIEF TYROL HAVE TO CHOKE A BITCH? (Episode: "Daybreak Part 3")
A lasting peace is about to be enacted between humanity, peaceful Cylons and John Cavil's (Dean Stockwell) warlike Toasters. All the Final Five have to do is stick their hands in some goo and mind-meld. But doing so lets Tyrol (Aaron Douglas) see that Cylon Tory Foster (Rekha Sharma) was the one who shot his wife out an airlock, so he breaks free of the goo and kills her with his bare hands. This cathartic, albeit violent, moment is immediately followed by all fucking hell breaking loose, and the combination of the chaos, the catharsis and Stockwell resignedly shooting himself in the face make this a fitting climax for the series (no matter what Internet haters say).
1. ADAMA DROPS A BATTLESTAR ON NEW CAPRICA (Episode: "Exodus Part 2")
Humanity is fucked. They settled on a shithole planet they named New Caprica, and then the Cylons showed up and took over and poked out Tigh's eye. On top of that, as soon as the Cylons showed up, Galactica turned tail and ran. But, like the Cylons, Adama has a plan. He coordinates a way for the humans trapped on New Caprica to escape, but they need some way to distract the Cylons to do it. So in one of the coolest moments in any sci-fi series ever, Adama proves that he's got the biggest balls in the universe when he jumps the Galactica directly into a freefall in New Caprica's atmosphere, launches all the Vipers to attack the Cylons and then jumps back out right before they hit the ground. Nobody's balls are bigger than Big Balls Bill Adama.
