There Are Those Who Believe...

...that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans.  Some believe there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens....

-- opening narration to the original Battlestar Galactica series, spoken by Patrick Macnee.  You can find a sound file of the narration here.

Small spoilers for tonight's Battlestar Galactica finale follow.

Consider yourself warned.

That original narration fascinated me as a child.  Patrick Macnee's delivery of it was awesome, and I loved the lyrical quality of the writing itself.  There's also, of course, the idea behind the narration -- which I can't express any more eloquently than the narration itself.

So of course I always suspected that the current BSG's mantra of "all of this has happened before and all of it will happen again" had something to do with that original narration.  When they found Earth and it was destroyed, I -- like many fans, I assume -- figured that the BSG story takes place far into our future, where there have been two additional catastrophic human near-extinctions: along with the one on the original Earth, the one on Kobol, and of course the destruction of the Twelve Colonies.

However.

Mitochondrial Eve.

Mito-frakkin-chondrial Eve.

My science nerd and my sci-fi nerd collided into a rush of ecstatic squee.  That is just too entirely awesome -- whatever you may think of the rest of the ending.

I mean...Mitochondrial Eve.

Question

What would make a camera suddenly stop focusing and show vertical
halos (as in, more heads on top of real heads), with multiple lenses,
batteries, and a preferences reset? I suspect something physical but
I've never had a camera fail before.