The Cylons don't work as a unified concept.

Season One treats them as a military adversary with centralized command — but by Season Three, they're sleeper agents without knowing it, and Season Four splits them into "real" and "fake" consciousness, while the Final Five operate on different rules entirely.

A coherent show would have picked one and stuck with it. But Battlestar Galactica picks none of them because the structure enacts the claim: humans don't get to understand their threats before they have to respond to them.

Adama doesn't know Tigh is a Cylon when he's making fleet decisions with him. Roslin doesn't know the Final Five are in the room when she's setting policy. The audience, watching, is forced into the same epistemic position as the characters — making moral and strategic judgments on incomplete data, then discovering the ground shifted.

The consequence bleeds outward — post-9/11 security culture promises that perfect information prevents attack, but Battlestar Galactica argues the opposite: perfect information is impossible, so build systems that function when you're wrong about what's in them.