I think I may be even more excited about Claudia than about Ben - the show's never had a dearth of good-looking guys, but you can never have too many strong women on a sci-fi show, in my opinion. :) I don't think there's anything that could really make up for the loss of Jack (or semi-loss, or however that works out), but it's neat that they're trying to do new things instead of just leaving the show's rotting corpse on the air for another year to pump some more money out of the franchise.