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How many times do you watch every episode of Battlestar Galactica? The answer may depend, not just on how much you enjoy hearing Edward James Olmos’ smoky rasp, but also on how eager you are to freeze-frame key moments every episode in search of clues. If you look hard enough, there are little details in recent BSG episodes that either give a crucial glimpse of where the saga is going — or they show that fans have an overactive imagination. Decide for yourself (with spoilers) after the jump.

The Mighty Hunter appears! The constellation Orion, aka the Mighty Hunter, appears a few times in last week’s episode of Battlestar, “The Ties That Bind.” You can see it in the background when the Cylon basestars start fighting, and then later when Tory introduces Cally to President Roslin’s running mate. As various people have pointed out, this star formation would only look like Orion from Earth, or somewhere near Earth. So are our heroes closer to Earth than they realize? Or was this just a stock star backdrop that someone threw in there? [Cyn City]

Starbuck paints the Ship Of Lights. In the original 1970s Battlestar series, a ship called the Ship Of Lights appeared in an episode called “War Of The Gods.” According to Galactica Watercooler, the Ship Of LIghts possesses technology far beyond that of either the humans or the Cylons, and it belongs to the Seraphs, glowing beings similar to D’Anna’s vision of the Final Five. The Seraphs bring Apollo back from the dead after a fight with Iblis, who’s sort of the devil. And the Ship Of Lights seems to turn up on Starbuck’s latest masterpiece, painted on the wall of her cabin on the Demetrius. Her paintings have predicted the future before — is she predicting a meet-up with the SOL? Is it something to do with the final cylon? [Galactica Watercooler]

In fact, some viewers theorize that the reason Starbuck came back from the dead, with a mint-condition Viper, was because she already hitched a ride on that Ship Of Lights. Also, Starbuck mentions a comet. Could it be Halley’s Comet, and was it near Earth? If so, then it might have been the year 1986 or 2071. [Colonial Fleet]

And speaking of astronomy, what’s that “triple flashing star” Kara keeps mentioning? Is it Alpha Centauri? (Which fits the triple qualification, but not the “flashing” one.) The ringed gas giant is probably Saturn, but it could be Jupiter. [Battlestar Blog] Screen captures from Galactica BBS.

Well, tonight is my favorite night of TV. Battlestar Galactica is on.

This is the last season so i’m a bit bummed. Here’s last week’s episode.

When I was knee-high, one of my favorite comic issues was the What If Thor Battled Conan the Barbarian? title in the original What If…? series. Marvel’s cute alternate-dimension spin-off may have spawned some pretty weak product, overall, but No. 39 was a cherished read. I’m not sure if it was the story’s outrageous homo-eroticism, its deltoid aesthetic, or its abundance of flowing male locks, but something about that issue fascinated me. It also nurtured my embryonic inner fanboy, and gave me an appreciation for cross-over storytelling—as penny-dreadful cheap as that type of storytelling usually is. So when the first Alien vs. Predator movie emerged a few years back (a hybrid effort which also took a detour through the comic realm), I felt compelled to go see it despite the fact that it had all the promise of Ali Lohan. And like most fans of Alien and Predator who’d bought tickets to AvP on an act of faith, I grouched about how roundly it lived down to expectation for a while, then forgot about it.

Alien vs. Predator: Requiem won’t erase the bad taste of AvP from our collective memory; it’s an improvement over the first movie, but it’s the kind of improvement that doesn’t add up to much, like installing granite countertops and a whirlpool bath in a tar-covered pile that was condemned several years back. Foundations like dialogue and characterization and sequence are too flimsy—and to hell with the it’s just an action movie justification, because there’s more than one class of action movie, and the AvP films, with such an impressive pedigree, ought to succeed better at what they set out to do. Alien, Aliens and Predator are Class A popcorners that transcend genre and entertain us so well because they aim a little higher than just entertaining us. Movies in this category have more than enough (or just enough) script and production value to support the wonderful mayhem we’ve traded our ducats to see, and make everything come alive around it. Class B actioners may lack in one or more production departments, and are often sillier than a lopsided smile, but their energy and charm and teeth-shattering turbulence carry them along so beautifully that all the holes in the foundation are caulked and the structure stands proud (slot flicks like Tremors, Anaconda and Reign of Fire into Class B, if we’re keeping tabs). And then there’s Class C, the category where action movies go to die. It’s populated by yawns like the first AvP film and other lukewarm efforts that lack juice, in part because of inept filmmaking, and in part because the action sequences—the core component of the film—fart around rather than detonate brilliantly onscreen.

I think most viewers up for some snappy sci-fi ass-kickery would be thrilled if Requiem had the balls and energy to make its way into Class B (flawed in many ways, but bloody entertaining). I’m not sure it does. In fact, I could easily substitute Phillip’s review of AvP here, minus the plot outline, but (a) that would be too lazy even for me, and (b) like I said above, Requiem is a step up from the first movie, if only by millimeters. The action sequences don’t wheeze, at least, and the effects are more than passable (the brothers Strause, who co-directed with half-hearted boners, are better known as special effects wizards). The Predator has a fair amount of carapacious solidity onscreen, and the aliens’ nesting maws are as real as ever—but you can hide a lot of cheap latex in the shadows, and Requiem’s lighting (courtesy of Director of Photography Daniel C. Pearl, I assume) is more clumsy and muddy than artfully dim. Lighting design seems to have been waylaid altogether, somewhere, with this one, but I’ll move on before I get taken to task for discussing lighting in just an action movie.

The set-up: an alien-infested spacecraft dives into the Colorado mountains and releases acid-drippers into the woods. Down comes a Predator to clean up the mess and flay a few human trophies while he’s tracking the eggheads, who in turn are tracking podunk mountain town inhabitants for feast and fodder. The World’s Most Forgettable Characters fighting to survive the invasion include a handful of The O.C. rejects (except for the main O.C. type, played by Johnny Lewis, who may actually have been, at one point, on The O.C.), a bland town sheriff (John Ortiz), and a Ripley stand-in named Kelly O’Brien (Reiko Aylesworth); like Ripley, Kelly is taut, maternal, good with a gun, and trained to operate heavy equipment. I’ll stop the comparison there because that’s where the comparison ends, despite the filmmakers’ best efforts to homage us into giving a fuck about their product.

The scenes that are supposed to galvanize us most include aliens attacking teens in a high school swimming pool, homeless people meeting their maker in a sewer, the Predator taking out the town power-plant, and a handful of Alien-on-Predator arrangements that throw the odd punch but aren’t enough to sustain the movie. Especially a movie with dialogue so inept that what’s said onscreen doesn’t even deliver good B-movie entertainment in the way bad dialogue often can; here, the characters frequently speak at each other without actually responding to what’s been said (Woman in Labor in Maternity Ward During a Blackout: “When are the lights coming back on?” Nurse: “The power’s out. We’re operating on emergency generators.”). Or they utter contradictory nonsense in a single line (Sheriff to Deputy via Radio: “Keep in touch, otherwise I’ll see you in the morning.”). That’s probably too much focus on dialogue for just an action movie, though, so let it lie.

There’s barely anything here to recommend, but I’ll try real hard for the diehard fan before giving up and bowing out with a solid pan. On the plus side, Requiem sports an actual alien/predator hybrid, who clomps around the small Colorado town, alpha-dog to a ravenous rabble of newborn aliens. This small-town setting is another new feature; whereas no one can hear you scream in space, the deep jungle or the Antarctic, a few shrill hollers invoke the National Guard and all manner of chaos when extraterrestrial fiends overrun residential streets. Requiem also amps it up by throwing kids and pregnant mommies in the way of the monsters, and there are enough exploding guts to satisfy the gorehounds. The most entertaining moments aren’t those when alien meets human chest, but (like the billing promises) when Predator rumbles with his prey; some of these sequences want to be visceral, but they’re shot a little too dark, and edited a little too ADD, and surrounded by a little too much couldn’t-care-less filmmaking to really lift off. Like the first AvP movie, Requiem’s biggest defect is its criminal lack of tension.

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I’ve been hearing about the new Terminator TV show, The Sarah Connor Chronicles, for a while now, but for some reason I never really gave it much thought. That is until I saw the trailer for the show. Surprisingly, it doesn’t look like a cheap, watered-down version of the movie; it actually looks really good. And best of all, we get Lena Headey (from 300) as Sarah Connor and the extremely underrated Summer Glau as the Terminator who’s job it is to protect John Connor. Can’t wait! The show starts January 13, 2008 on Fox.

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This one really snuck up on me, but luckily for those that didn’t have their DVRs set to record the season premiere last night, Fox has an encore airing on Wednesday and FX has an airing on Sunday night.

Tonight’s episode was a tale of two halves. The first – exciting, compelling and intense. The second – slow, plodding and anticlimactic.

Poor Ellsworth. After a humorous scene where he seeks marital advice from a dog, one of Hearst’s henchmen sneaks up on him in his tent and shoots him in the head. Just like that, one of the show’s most admirable, upstanding characters is dead. The news of this shooting sends the camp into a flurry of activity as Swearengen and his men circle the wagons.

Trixie’s reaction when she saw his body was both surprising and courageous. I’ve said all along that for a man with so many enemies, Hearst doesn’t surround himself with enough protection. It was true earlier in the season when he didn’t have any henchmen around and now that he does, they don’t do a very good job of watching his back. Trixie opened up her blouse and walked past six guns in the downstairs of hotel while carrying her small pistol in her right hand.

She got a clear shot at Hearst, but she was only able to hit him in the shoulder. I’m more than a little surprised that she was able to get out of the hotel alive. After the shot was fired, I assumed she would be stopped and searched coming down the stairs. Certainly the guns had to consider her arrival and the shot to be more than idle coincidence, right? Maybe they were too busy staring at her rack to see the smoking gun in her hand.

Regardless, she wasn’t able to finish the job and she rushed to Sol for help. He took her to Swearengen’s, which says something about the man’s reputation of strength and cunning. At this point in the show, I thought all hell was going to break loose, but things became oddly calm.

Bullock was in Sturgis campaigning for Sheriff and had to ride back to camp once news of the shooting reached him by telegram. He rushed back to Alma and the child’s side and eventually escorted her back home. And that’s all he did.

I’m not sure why Hearst hasn’t yet dropped the hammer. It seems like his attack on Ellsworth was just the beginning of his assault on the entire camp, but he seems hesitant for some reason. At one point, he’s watching the camp’s activity and he says to one of his bodyguards, “I was not born to crush my own kind.” Is the magnate having second thoughts after his brush with death?

Meanwhile, Al has made a deal with Wu that would bring Chinese reinforcements to camp. He had to make this deal due to his lack of confidence in Hawkeye, who telegrammed Al too quickly after receiving instructions to hire guns in Cheyenne. Al is usually right, but this smells like a setup and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if the infamous Hawkeye showed up.

The news has spread that this is the show’s final season, but the network is calling next week’s episode the “season finale,” when the term “series finale” is usually used in such cases. On last week’s blog, one of the readers commented that the cast and crew didn’t know about the show’s cancellation so that there’s a distinct possibility that the series could end unresolved. There are also rumors of a mini-series to allow creator David Milch to finish the series the way he originally envisioned. Obviously some sort of conclusion would be better than a cliffhanger for a finale. Here’s hoping that HBO shows the same intelligence in ending the series as it did in greenlighting it in the first place. It’s bad enough that “Deadwood” is going off the air, it would be a tragedy if it ended abruptly.