I heard an decent answer to the Boomer/Athena question, though — Athena and the Chief are both Cylons, whereas Helo is not and Hera is only a half-breed. This could explain why Helo and Hera couldn’t tell them apart. But still, letting a random Eight walk in and take Hera from day-care, in a flight-suit no less? Come on..

I also agree that this stuff was most certainly not planned. For example, I am convinced the only reason they gave Nick Tyrol a different father — Hotdog — is because by the time the writers decided Tyrol would be a Cylon, Nick had long since been born, and they didn’t want to have to deal with a second Human/Cylon half-breed child. In particular, this would have made Hera non-unique and therefore more or less useless.

– Music –

I found that Bear McCreary (who creates the music for BSG) has a blog. In one of his posts, if you scroll down to the heading “Post-Production: Writing the Score”, you find that the song played during the opening montage is in fact an original Bear McCreary piece, and not Philip Glass as I thought. It is in fact part of Slick’s Sonata, “Elegy”. Incidentally, that post I linked to is part 3.. you should read through it from part 1, it talks a lot about the production of “Someone to Watch Over Me” and is a very good — and very interesting! — read :)

Specifically related to this past episode, I absolutely agree with you that it was weird for both the Chief and Athena to be able to identify Boomer immediately but Helo and Hera could not. My girlfriend’s explanation was that the Chief had an epic love for Boomer while Helo actually loved the originally Boomer before meeting Athena on the planet (and initially thinking she was Boomer), but I think her explanation stems from the fact that she never really like Helo’s character and thought he was kind of a meat-head. Also, even my girlfriend’s explanation does not explain Hera, as children usually have an absolutely uncanny ability to recognize their mothers.

All that said, I have a hard time thinking that all that has happened in the last couple seasons was actually originally planned out. I really don’t think they ever planned to make the Chief, Colonel Tigh, Helen, random manipulative bitch who replaced Billy, and Anders cylons. While the explanation of the sort of cylons they are kind of mollifies my disbelief somewhat, adding in the thirteenth cylon (who I agree with you is most likely Starbuck’s dad) after all of the talk of the twelve models strikes me as a weak plot addition. Also, where the hell has Xena, Warrior Princess been?