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the first 15 minutes has music and sound effects but no dialogue

I noticed that as well. It was actually moderately entertaining to watch the show with sound effects but without dialog. It reaired later, and they got the sound right.

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First, the religion stuff needs to be more fleshed out.

I'm willing to cut the writer some slack on this. Part of the mystery of the show is why, exactly, the Cylons are doing everything they're doing. Why engineer the next-gen Cylons to not only resemble humans but to be able to have kids with them? Remember the beginning of Babylon 5? It took a loooong time for all of the details to come out. BSG at least started off which much more of a bang than B5's Season 1.

In terms of acting quality, I'm neither enamored nor turned off by the secondary characters. They move the story along. I love the Baltar and Starbuck characters, and I'm really enjoying the ride. My real complaints are more with some of the combat strategy, planning, and whatnot, particularly with respect to FTL drives. Consider: they discover an asteroid with "tillium" (the magic fuel that makes FTL go). It's got a Cylon mine already on it and it's heavily guarded. Even if their amazing gambit worked and they succeeded in capturing the mine, I still don't buy it. There must have still been 100+ Cylon fighters in the air. They just turned tail and ran? None of them radioed or jumped elsewhere to report in? After that big explosion, all of the tillium refining machinery (and stores of pre-refined tillium) were gone. How are they going to be able to dig up, refine, and install all that extra tillium before the Cylons show up again? It's not like BSG has a tillium refinery below decks somewhere. I have similar issues with the "ooh look, we found water" episode and with their strategy in the season finale.

Of course, with the way they set things up, if they just let the story take its natural course, BSG and the whole fleet would have been minced meat a long time ago. Now, if they had the bumble-headed Cylons from the original series...