Battlestar Galactica - 4.11 "Sometimes a Great Notion"

Only slightly less depressing then the third season opener "Occupation" (a debatable point, but I find a society held captive and subjugated more depressing than one that discovers their promised land is a nuclear wasteland and has lost almost all hope for the future) the opening of the second half of the final season of Battlestar Galactica features one of the most unexpected, but understandable in retrospect, suicides I've witnessed on-screen.

Over all I enjoyed the episode despite the fact I had the urge to kick the Admiral in his drunken caboose when he went asking Tigh to kill him. There was something utterly selfish about a parent looking to commit suicide after his son's wife did, leaving the son to try to fix the hopeless and demoralized civilization.

I'm still not buying Ellen as the fifth final Cylon - I have the feeling it should be more shocking than that. I'm leaning towards Ellen being an older version of Six theory or that Tigh is confusing Six and Ellen again. Is anyone surprised Ellen's a Cylon? Most people suspected her back in the first season when she was introduced. Most of the Colonials would just accept Ellen as a Cylon as it would explain her personality quirks. I'm hoping it's a red herring so the revelation of the 5th is a shocker later. I'm still hoping for a resurrection revelation (That has always seemed like the most fun way of revealing it from a writer's point of view - kill off a group of characters and have one of them resurrect while everyone else is in mourning - lots of trauma to go around for everyone, especially for the poor unsuspecting Cylon waking up in a resection pool) - It's not clear that the Final Five were using the same resurrection apparatus as the other 7 and that destroying the Hub would affect their ability to resurrect (Or that the 1s, 4s and 5s couldn't rebuild the Hub).

I also lead toward the 13th colony Cylons having been wiped out by the remnants of the 13th tribe after the Cylons had nuked the 13th colony and moved in as the Cylons were doing on Caprica. (This also explains why the Cylons were convinced they needed to wipe out the Colonial survivors after they nuked the 12 colonies - they had a belief the humans would come back and kill them because they had before).