I'm 25 minutes in now. It is... wonderful. Not exactly pacey, no, but I'm at the scene where
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The girl who didn't get on the train is in the dead girl's room using the Virtual Boy Advance to talk to the telepathic 1:! avatar the dead girl made for herself
...and I think I've already got the major plot point figured out.
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I know there's cloning or something, and Stoltz is going to make cylons which are proto centurions, but I think the reason Cylons rebel is down to what is on that dead kid's computers, and it involves the suicide emo boy's stuff as well - Stoltz has his cylons read and is missing ingredient X and so he dumps the work his dead daughter was doing into the kernel for GNU/Cylon OS 0.82 <beta> and when they become properly hive-mind self aware they got all menstrual over the one god business and the humans are fundementally evil (i.e. the simulation of the snuff-nightclub with the fit lezzers) business as well, accepting these as fundemental tenets of their instantly necessary moral code.
I can't wait to see if the next hour and a bit proves or disproves my predictions, because if I'm wrong, then I sincerely hope the writers have something even cooler in mind, and if I'm right, then that's cool. If I'm not sure come the end of the pilot whether I'm correct or not, then that's locked me into at least the first season when it airs.
Visually it is brilliant, it looks like Galactica in the Caprica sequences (duh) but you know how things can get different with spinoffs. Secondly every idea it has hinted at or addressed so far...
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monotheism/polytheism, dead relatives, tech, people you know but might just be imagining are evils, such as Polly Walker's fuckable and lovely counsellor
... resonates nicely with Galactica. They aren't the same show but they've the same DNA. George Lucas, I'm talking to you, and the writers of Enterprise, Hannibal Rising and the rest... THIS IS HOW YOU DO A PREQUEL. After only 25 minutes, this is how you do it.