Restart «Battlestar Galactica» Ronald D. Moore's The Cylons remains one of the most ambitious and complex projects in television history. It's ambitious because it combines sci-fi action with complex plots about politics, religion, and ethics, making the episodes far more cerebral than early fans could have imagined. However, the series is convoluted because its main storyline relies on a reversed timeline that takes a long time to decipher. Basically, both the Cylons and humans originated on Kobol. The Cylons set out to find Earth; later, the humans abandoned Earth after an unknown cataclysm. The two groups later clashed, and the series chronicles their second major conflict from beginning to end.
Here's the thing, though: despite the fact that humans left Kobol on modern starships, those who later formed the Twelve Colonies have a very fragmented understanding of their own history. The show attempts to explain this by claiming that an ancient computer malfunction destroyed the computer records of Kobol, leaving written texts as the only surviving record of that period. It's an interesting idea, but it's completely nonsensical, and the fact that the colonists remember so little about their home planet remains the most annoying plot hole in «Battlestar Galactica» .
All this has happened before.
From the very beginning of the series «Battlestar Galactica» It remained a mystery why humans knew so little about when they first left Kobol. Sure, it happened 2,000 years earlier, but everyone left the planet on modern starships. They should have had enough information technology to record these historical events for posterity. However, in the episode "The Last Glimpse of Kobol," we learn that a computer failure destroyed much of this early technology and virtually all of humanity's electronic records. What information remained was contained in written texts, much of it religious scriptures. These scriptures formed the cornerstone of early colonial culture.
This explanation is perfectly acceptable if you don't think too much about it, and it fits with the show's overall theme: over-reliance on technology is dangerous. But given how realistic and believable the sci-fi series is, «Battlestar Galactica» , it is completely incomprehensible how little information the Twelve Colonies have about Kobol and the departure of their ancestors from it. Could it be that nobody didn't save anything on a futuristic DVD or portable hard drive where they wouldn't be affected by this major computer glitch? And really, really? nobody recorded nothing about this period except fragmentary religious beliefs?
All this will happen again.
It's completely pointless, and it's the clear result of Ronald D. Moore's desire to have his cake and eat it too. He wanted the world «Battlestar Galactica» had a mysterious past that the main characters would unravel throughout the series. This works quite well in the real world, as much of our ancient knowledge was lost due to the lack of modern information technology until the 20th century. Moore also wanted the series to be set in the distant future, when humanity had spread across the stars. Unfortunately, this means we have to accept that spaceships were invented before floppy disks.
Overall, this plot hole isn't a critical flaw. "Star cruiser Galaktika» remains the most ambitious and provocative science fiction series of the 21st century, setting a standard that almost no other series has been able to match. Yet for a show so entrenched in the mysteries of the ancient past (where humans and gods, by the way, conversed!), it's disappointing that we're left with so many questions and so few answers. Except for the answer we get in the series finale, of course: God works in mysterious ways. Want something more concrete? Sorry, vague biblical platitudes are the best Moore can do!