Watch out, nerds!  Here’s the new trailer for The Plan — the new Battlestar Galactica movie coming this fall.

It’s a week later and I think everyone’s kind of built a bit of a consensus around the Battlestar finale. Most of the people I’ve talked to and things I’ve read indicate that people seem to think that the final episode was clearly imperfect, but did the job well enough.

To give the writers some credit, ending Battlestar is an impossible task. Between making the nerds happy (I include myself in this category — I’m the one, after all, with a TV blog) with explosions and space warfare and resolving the character/plot arcs, ending the series seems like a no-win proposition for such a long-running series. (By the way — prepare yourself.  This is exactly what’s going to happen when Lost ends.)

In the end, it was a mixed bag. As such, here’s a list of five things I disliked about the Battlestar finale. I’ll get to the five things I liked later this week (no promises, though. You know me.)

Five things I didn’t like

1.  The Epilogue – I like to think there were always three possibilities for Battlestar in regards to its orientation to our reality (the world of Barack Obama and Hannah Montana and Ellen DeGeneres): the show takes place in the distant past, the distant future or in the present day (the fourth possibility, I suppose, is that our reality doesn’t exist in there’s). And I think that the idea that these folks were our ancestors was always a possibility that floated in the back of my mind.

And that ended up being the case, which was very disappointing. Personally, I didn’t want the worlds to intersect — I’d much rather the Battlestar world stay self-contained and not try to make some grandoise statement by making them our ancestors.

Jane Espensen said that Ron Moore had the vision of Six walking through Times Square in his head from the very beginning. To that, I just have to say that sometimes it’s a good idea to change your mind and rethink you first instincts — because your first instincts aren’t always the best choices.  The last sequence with the dancing robots felt pushy.

Also, getting rid of modern technology – Really? Everyone’s willing to just give up medicine and weapons and transportation? For a show where nothing gets done easily, that was a rather drastic decision made by Lee “Butterfingers” Adama. None of his decisions have ever gone over that well (remember the Baltar trial?).

2. Starbuck disappears – I’m not sure which decision I disliked more, the decision to tie the story into modern day or the decision to just completely cop out on the whole Starbuck mystery. In storytelling in general, there are few things that irk me as much as intentional ambiguity — the whole “we’ll leave it up to the audience to decide” song and dance. What happened was this — they wrote themselves into a corner and they didn’t like any of the options enough — so they just didn’t pick.  I would rather have had an unsatisfactory resolution than none at all.

3. Not enough carnage – I was really expecting fewer people to make it to the end. Not to sound like some sort of bloodthirsty freak, but there seemed to be an endless supply of extras to kill but none of the major characters bit it (I don’t count Tori and Cavil — plus Roslin had to die). I just feel like they needed to up the stakes a bit by having fewer people make it to the end.

4. The Opera House scene – I like that they stuck with the Opera House scene, but in the end I don’t think it really added anything. I’m not sure what they were trying accomplish, besides some ominous foreshadowing (and I’m not sure they planned the finale that far in advance).

5. The fact that nothing really happened in the last hour – I think everyone in the room I watched in was waiting or some other shoe to drop.

This is it, guys.  We’ve gone from Cylon attacks every 33 minutes to New Caprica to Starbuck fake-dying to a devastated Earth. And now it all comes to an end.

I’m going to make three predictions for tonight’s series finale of Battlestar Galactica. Surely, I’ll be proven as a fool on Monday morning, but it’s always fun to engage in idle speculation right?

Here we go.

1. The admiral will go down with his ship. I don’t know how Adama can make it out of this alive. Roslin is going to kick soon and it would be too sad to watch him carry on without her and without his ship. I see one of the final images of the series being Roslin and Adama dying aboard an exploding Galactica. I realize the plot doesn’t appear to be going in that direction, but there will clearly be something about transferring power to the younger generation, new beginnings, blah, blah, blah.

2. Apollo and Starbuck will not live happily ever after. They’re going to screw it up somehow — they’re just not the marrying types, no matter how hard they want to be.

3. Hera will still have great hair. This is pretty much guaranteed.

TiFaux boyfriend Joel McHale was on Keith Olbermann’s show Tuesday night to weigh in on the Meghan McCain–Laura Ingraham–Ann Coulter brouhaha that’s been stultifying the country for a few days. Please to enjoy as Joel compares the conservative ladies involved to several models of Cylon.

The way I see it, we have no choice but to devote all of our available mental energy to thinking about the conclusion of Battlestar Galactica. We may want to think about how we’re going to feed ourselves and be able to do enough at work to not get fired, but the house of cards that is the fleet seems to be collapsing. This show has never been about reassuring happy endings for its fans, so we just need to brace ourselves for the end.

For me, here are the questions I’m kicking around.  And I’m sure I’m missing obvious answers:

• Does Starbuck’s finding of her own body have to do with time travel? I loathe time travel (as I’ve inarticulately argued on this very Web site), but that’s the best non-Cylon-related answer I can come up with.
• Who’s Daniel? I was at a party recently and nerded out with a stranger who suggested it was Zac Adama, tracing back to the Cylon who once whispered “Adama is a Cylon” in an attempt to save his own life (remember that episode way back when?). Personally, I thought it could have been Billy, but I was really basing that on nothing.
• What does Hera have to do with anything?  Why is she the key to mankind’s destiny?  Is the secret hidden in her voluminous hair.

to Maureen Ryan’s Battlestar column where viewers ask questions of the most recent episode’s writers, although it’s mostly about process and metaphysical meaning as opposed to story. And then here’s a preview for next week’s episode.

Umm… Kyle, Jesse. Ignore this post.

Maybe you can look and watch a pretty lady sing a pretty song.

But, yeah.  Jamie Bamber did one of those naked ads for PETA.  Here it is. Nothing really to add, because there’s nothing really to say.

Have a great weekend, everybody. I have the internet now in my new place so maybe I’ll have something to say by Monday.

Battlestar. Whoa.

We haven’t really addressed the show since it began a week and a half ago, but they really started off with some yowwee-zowwee moments. In particular, the revelation of the fifth cylon and the death of Dualla.

On the first issue, I think Ellen was as good of a choice as any. If it was one of the main folks, it may have come off as a cheap surprise. The fact that it was Ellen kind of has a blast-from-the-past element, plus it’s nice that Saul sort of has something to live for now (provided another Ellen is alive somewhere… and that, you know, she doesn’t hold a grudge for that whole ugly poisoning episode).

Oh, and as of this writing, most of the people in the TiFaux survey said they thought the fifth cylon would be “other.” But I think you bitches were just playing the odds.

But on the second matter, Dualla’s death seemed pretty cruel. Not necessarily in a ‘those darn writers are mean as heck’ kind of way, but more in the sense that it was an acute representation of the Godless chaos that drives the show. After all, Dualla was the sweet-faced, good-natured soldier who saw her first love interest get shot and her eventual husband get fat, get obsessed with someone else and then break up with her. (Also, I felt a slight twinge of discomfort by the fact that she was one of the only visible minorities on a pretty white show. But whatev — it’s showtime, Athena!)

Clearly, Dualla is not the last person who is going to die by the series’ end. So here’s a chart about Battlestar death. There are two concepts I am considering: one is how likely a person is to die over these last few episodes. The second is how expendable, up until now, they have been.  Clearly, it wouldn’t have worked to kill Adama off in season two. But, who knows, maybe he’ll die in the finale — signaling some sort of changing of the guard/generational shift/whoseewhatsit.

So, Friday’s the big day. Battlestar Galactica is going into the home stretch, with the creators promising to break our nerd hearts into a thousand different pieces with the operatic conclusion of our beloved series.

While I’m sure we’re all looking forward to seeing how this resolves and deconstructing the heavy lessons engrained in every season, there’s one question we’re going to have to find the answer to first: who’s the last cylon.

Starbuck? Seems too obvious with all the suspicion cast on her. Roslin or Adama? Maybe, but that’d be a damn ballsy move. Helo? Can’t be — his half cylon baby healed Roslin. Dualla or Gaeta?  Umm… kind of an anti-climax.

So before this series draws to a close, let’s do some speculation. If you want bragging rights, call it now. Who is the fifth cylon?

2008 saw a lot of great performances by whole bodies. Tina Fey couldn’t have told a lot of funny jokes if she hadn’t been able to say them with her mouth. And learned the lines by reading them with her eyes. And walked to the studio with her legs.

But there are some body parts that worked overtime this year, picking up the slack where other body parts just took up room (I’m looking at you Ellen Pompeo’s forehead!).

As such, let’s take a quick vote — which TV body part deserves recognition for its Outstanding Achievement in Being a TV Star Body Part? Let me know in the comments if I’ve left off a deserving part. Otherwise, going clockwise from the left…