[Eric Paddon]

"There was vitually no character depth to any character on the original show. Don't get me wrong, I love those characters, they were fun and I would have hung out with them. But they weren't very real, or honestly very interesting."

Just out of curiosity, do you say the same thing about the classic characters of Star Trek? I'm bringing that in for a reason because Star Trek never had to see it's classic characters "reimagined" to satisfy anyone, and I think that is important when judging the characters of TOS in the context of what we typically saw on sci-fi TV in that era. These were characters who had to learn and deal with the consequences of what went on before in ways that no other sci-fi characters ever had to, coming as they did from self-contained formula shows where on Star Trek.

"After the first episode, you knew everything you needed to know about everyone. No one ever did anything unexpected."

Really? We saw Apollo get married in the second episode, and then saw the rug pulled out from under him. We saw Starbuck change from the "space Casanova" who would juggle women to a virtual monogamist with Cassiopeia by season's end. We saw Apollo in "Hand Of God" finally break out of a shell with women the result of losing his wife, with Sheba. We saw new details about Boomer and his expertise in other areas, we saw Starbuck's past explored regarding his orphan history that let us probe his psyche more and understand his nature. That's a pretty good effort for just 17 original episodes!

"Apollo always did the right thing, always."

He did the WRONG thing in "The Lost Warrior" by not acting quickly enough against the Cylon and the end result was the death of Bootes.

"And he was always concerned about everyone's feelings and making his father proud of him. A great guy, but a shallow character. "

What is "shallow" about what you've just described?

"Starbuck, who was on the outside, a rogue and a playboy, also always did the right thing."

Got himself taken prisoner in LPOTG; fouled up in "Long Patrol" by letting himself get knocked out and his viper stolen; got tricked into becoming constable in "The Magnificent Warriors"; certainly didn't handle himself correctly in getting set up for a murder charge; made unjust accusations against his friends when they did a simple background check on Chameleon. Not exactly a case of "always doing the right thing".

"Those aren't deep characters. That is a show about archetypes"

You seem to be equating "depth" with characters who are mental screw-ups about something and have to have some amount of dysfunctionality in their lives, and I just don't accept that premise.

"As for their interaction. Well they were in the same place most of the time, but that's it. One character rarely effected another character."

Apollo affected Starbuck; Apollo and Sheba affected each other; Cassiopeia affected Starbuck......

"The Apollo we had before his wife died, was pretty much the same as the one we had after."

See above comments regarding Apollo and women, and how "Hand Of God" gave us a dramatic turning point with his potential new relationship with Sheba.

"Starbuck juggled multiple women but we never saw him break anyone's heart, or ever suffer from his own guilt."

So much for Athena and Aurora. And by season's end he was no longer juggling multiple women, he had moved closer to Cassiopeia. That's my definition of an evolving character who's learning and that was what made Galactica a refreshing departure from before.

"Now, obviously you can find lines here and there to argue any of these points. But if its just a question of interpretation, that's not subtle writing, that the viewer filling in their own blanks."

No, I would submit in this instance it's more a case of not willing to look at Galactica in its proper context of what kind of show it was, and what it was doing new and different from before. The above examples I've noted are not examples of subtle writing that someone has to think twice about but examples that were important to many plot points of the stories and are fairly evident when one watches the series as a whole. Now I'm not saying the execution was done perfectly, but the results were there and it's just not accurate IMO to call Galactica a show of shallow characters, especially when I don't hear similar descriptions applied to the famous sci-fi characters of other contemporaneous sci-fi properties.