Spoilers through Season 3, of course.
So, finally watched the last bit of season 3 of “Battlestar Galactica” last night—there were some slow episodes in there, but I’m pretty forgiving of any show that is laden with pious nonsense and still keeps me captivated. (It helps that both the Cylon and human religions are validated as “true”. As myths that point to a culture’s values and sense of self, religion is true in the way any fiction is true.) I knew Starbuck couldn’t be dead; her death was too abrupt, and she hadn’t done anything that seemed to fulfill her purpose.
So obviously, the big questions at the end of Season 3 are: Who’s the final Cylon? Where are the final five (other than the ones functioning as sleepers on Galactica) hiding? What’s the plan?
I decided to start by looking up the song that was playing from Earth (I am about 90% sure that Starbuck was sending it out over and over as a signal to the Cylons) to wake up the sleepers—”All Along The Watchtower“. The song is an apocalyptic song based around the rantings of Isaiah, concerning a wish list of horrors to descend on the hated Babylonians. You could take that a number of ways, the most unpleasant being that humanity is Babylon and needs to be destroyed completely.
Of course, there’s also the strong possibility that just the lyrics themselves, without reference to what they’re referring to, are the important thing.
“There must be some way out of here,” said the joker to the thief,
“There’s too much confusion, I can’t get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth.”“No reason to get excited,” the thief, he kindly spoke,
“There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we’ve been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late.”All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.
Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.
I suspect that the conversation between the joker and the thief is being replicated between whoever (Starbuck!) is sending the song and the sleepers. All of this—the war, the genocide, the eternal weary fleeing—has been nothing but noise and confusion leading up to a more clear, certain fate. Now they’ve been awakened, and they have to move towards their fate with determination.
So, what is the fate?
My tepid guess: The apocalypse of the 12 colonies and the dogged determination of the Cylons was all an effort to rejoin Cylon and human with the lost tribe of Earth. In peace. And they programmed the seven to be war-mongering in order to create the circumstances that would lead to this very chase. And then programmed five of themselves to be sleepers whose job is to protect humanity so that they don’t die out completely before everyone reaches Earth. At least the four of them, though I would be shocked if the fifth Cylon wasn’t Starbuck. After all, once they realized they were Cylons, their first inclination was this doesn’t change anything. They go straight back to their jobs, and they’ve always been fierce defenders of humanity and all have been instrumental at various points in keeping humanity together and heading towards Earth. (Tory’s attempt to rig the election for Roslin makes a lot of sense in this view—Roslin would have avoided the New Caprica debacle altogether, and Tory quite likely has been programmed to do whatever is necessary to keep humans on the move.)
It also shows that the five at least predate the first Cylon war, since Tigh fought in it. Of that detail, I don’t know what to think.
Ideas? Speculation?
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Well, we’re still left with the question: who made them?
“It also shows that the five at least predate the first Cylon war, since Tigh fought in it. Of that detail, I don’t know what to think.”
That is one of the things that makes the revalation at the end of season three so problematic for me. It seemed to be pretty clear that the humanoid Cylons are pretty new technology, at least dating from the post-war era. It also seems that they don’t age (this is simple assumption, but they seem to all be the exact same age, and they don’t seem to ‘grow up’). Tigh is clearly a problem in both of these cases, as he’s definitely aged, and we know for a fact that he was in the last war, and it isn’t a case of forged documents.
Another problem I have is that the huge fuss that Six and Roslin make about Hera being special seems kind of unnecessary now. Chief and Cally also have a human/Cylon child, and there have been no special dreams about him.
I don’t know, I’ve been dead-set for this to be some sort of trick or mistake, just because I don’t want Tigh to be a Cylon.
On the other hand, I think I love your theroy about their programming being meant to help them get to earth. Tory’s actions make a lot of sense in that context.
The humanoid Cylons are not all the same age. The Priest Dude is an old guy…or did you mean within each type? Well, that’s explained by resurrection.
I suspect that the humanoid Cylons are not Cylons at all, but constructed by something else, and integrated with Cylon tech as a convenience and a pretext.
The Tigh thing is an easy plot point–Tigh didn’t serve continuously between the wars, so the Cylons could have kidnapped him, transferred his consciousness into a Cylon body, programmed him to forget, then stuffed him back into his life–and questions about where he’d been could be covered by his drinking jags. The relative age of the other sleepers is mid-20s, early 30s, and that puts them after the first Cylon war in the time line, plenty of time to work up the technology.
I love the show, but I’ve felt for the last season at least that the writers were just fucking with me, or rather, that they were winging it and hadn’t thought the show through this far. That has to change in this last season, and the need for closure will help, I think. I thought it was pretty clear from the end of the third season that Starbuck was the fifth sleeper, but the previews of season 4 make it look like they’re screwing with that idea, and I think that’s a big mistake.
the five at least predate the first Cylon war, since Tigh fought in it.
We don’t actually know that. All we know is that Tight thinks he fought in it. We dont’ know anyone who fought with Tigh. He and Adama met after the war.
Well, we’re still left with the question: who made them?
I think it’s pretty obvious that the Centurions developed them somehow—that there was some kind of directed evolution. And that the humanoids rule over the Centurions could mean that the Centurions developed them to replace their human masters they shunned, or (my pet theory), the Centurions and humanoid Cylons had a war themselves and the latter won.
That is one of the things that makes the revalation at the end of season three so problematic for me. It seemed to be pretty clear that the humanoid Cylons are pretty new technology, at least dating from the post-war era.
I don’t think that’s obvious at all, especially since there’s reason to think the first five predated the seven.
The idea that the Cylons developed themselves out of human captives, though—yeah, I like that.
I dunno about this. If it were so and an eventual future plot point, we have seen some evidence of volition on the part of the Centurions, but they don’t show any volition at all, beyond being deadly killbots.
I’ll add that I think the last episode had a very interesting theme—that the concept of “free will” is a fairy tale we tell ourselves to order the world, but in the end, we’re all just products of circumstance and environment. Thus, the revelation that one is a Cylon doesn’t change one’s behavior and the scapegoating of Gaius Baltar is unjust, because at no point can you safely say he acted in a way that any other person in exactly his circumstances would not.
Which is why the Centurions, I think, will end up being more than just pawns in the game—or they are pawns, but no less than anyone else. Also, this means the differences between Cylons and humans collapse, that the human notion that we have free will and they’re just machines is a joke. Echoes of the despair of “Watchtower”.
The November two hour movie of Razor is going to show a brief young Adama during the first Cylon war, and it’s supposed to be really good at filling in some holes and preparing you for what’s to come.
Have any of you seen the preview for season four on Sci-Fi? You can catch it on Youtube (if it’s still there) but in that Kara is back and everyone is like WTF and she’s thrown in a cell because of course they don’t believe her. Her husband Anders tells her she’s the “fifth” cylon but that’s *probably* not going to happen. If you listened to any of Ron Moore podcasts (yes, I am a geek) he kinda shot that down. Kara is something else entirely as are the last five Cylons models. We’ll see what happens but Incertus,
I love the show, but I’ve felt for the last season at least that the writers were just fucking with me, or rather, that they were winging it and hadn’t thought the show through this far.
I’ve met a few of the writers for BSG and you have no idea how on point you are with that statement. I was totally disappointed with the selection of the last five Cylons, one of which was created but never intended to be a Cylon, so as soon as I saw that the character was a Cylon I knew the show was being written on the fly. Plus, Ron Moore has a film version of The Thing and a few other projects he’s doing and at the time David Eick was trying to get Bionic Woman off the ground, which meant the two showrunners weren’t really “show running”. Plus, in his pod cast I believe he mentioned that they’d brought it up in the room at that time which one’s would be the last five, meaning it’d never been planned out.
Count me among the people who were going Huh? with the Chief’s being a Cylon, and the whole Hera importance thing went out the window. But I guess we know that the Chief really loves Cally, because that was the only way Cylons could breed with humans. And maybe that’s the point: for humans and Cylons to breed.
Though the trailer for season 4 is awesome, with Kara screaming in her cell that they’re going the wrong way, and no one believes her.
I’ll have my ass in the seat, regardless.
I’m still pretty sure that the President is the last Cylon. She and Starbuck have been the big contenders, for me, and i’m pretty sure it’s not Starbuck. I think one of them has to be the Cylon and the other has to be Keanu Reeves.
but then, i’m also not sure about Colonel Tigh. Maybe he really is that old. Maybe there were humanoid Cylons before there were machines. You know the premise, all of this has happened before and all of this will happen again… maybe the humanoid Cylons are the 13th tribe.
Kara is probably the 13th Cylon—that would be the smart choice. 13 tribes, 13 Cylons. 12 normal tribes, 1 special Earth tribe, 12 normal Cylons, then Kara Thrace.
The one thing I’m sure of is that the 12th Cylon is a woman.
Thus, the revelation that one is a Cylon doesn’t change one’s behavior and the scapegoating of Gaius Baltar is unjust, because at no point can you safely say he acted in a way that any other person in exactly his circumstances would not.
Gaius is my favorite character because he’s the worst of humanity with aspirations of being the best. It’s so easy to despise him for his vanity and weakness - because we all have that. My prediction - and it’s not much of a stretch - is that he and the cult (?) that hauled his ass out of Dodge after the trial will cause more trouble in the future. I suspect the trouble will have something to do with children, fertiliby, and maybe suicide bombing.
The big question that bothers me is why Gaius never knocked up Caprica Six. Not idle silliness—if he’s human and he loves her, and I think he is and does, then he should have had the potential to conceive with her and you know she would have wanted it. It doesn’t make sense within the confines of the show that Caprica Six would have avoided the chance to be the mother of the new generation.
Amanda Marcotte
I’ll add that I think the last episode had a very interesting theme—that the concept of “free will” is a fairy tale we tell ourselves to order the world, but in the end, we’re all just products of circumstance and environment. Thus, the revelation that one is a Cylon doesn’t change one’s behavior and the scapegoating of Gaius Baltar is unjust, because at no point can you safely say he acted in a way that any other person in exactly his circumstances would not.
Other way around: The fact that the Cylons are impelled to hunt down humanity and are instead able to seek alternatives (occupying New Caprica instead of nuking it, for example) is an argument for free will.
Gaius is a villain because he gives into circumstance when he could choose not to, and the only reason his persecution is “unfair” is because we all have human failings. Let he who is without sin launch the first missile, etc.
I think part of the character of Baltar–and the reason that he never knocked up Caprica Six–is that he doesn’t really love anyone other than himself. certainly not for the first couple of seasons. And when he does start to love her, it’s not Six he falls in love with, but the version that had been raped and abused on Pegasus. Even at this point, I’m not sure he’s quite divested himself of his overpowering vanity.
Not to my mind, Petey. I in fact think that the show is an angry retort to the stories of AI robots laboring under free will—it exposes free will as a myth we flatter ourselves with. I have a post brewing about it, though. I think the whole history of arguments for free will are based more on hope than reason.
I’m wondering if the creators killed Starbuck last year so Sackhoff could star in Bionic Woman, but then had that backfire when the studio or network rejected her as the star, so they retooled it for someone else and gave her the secondary role as a bone. It certainly seems like they just slapped someone into the lead role of Jamie Sommers. Michelle Ryan is just not that good.
Ok–but how you can get on a soapbox about any injustice if you don’t believe in free will (unless you think some people are programmed to piss and moan more than others)? This, I cannot wait to read.
And, as for the “robots” comment–when the Cylons reject their programming, then they are no longer “robots.” Just like the humans always do vile things (spacing “collaborators”) when they act according to their “programming.” Every morally good act the humans do is a rejection of the zeitgeist.
Oh Great!
Amanda’s going to go all Matrix on us…
Bionic Woman has far greater problems than Michelle Ryan. There’s not an actress alive that could make the dialogue on that show worth a damn.
I’d kind of like to see them arrive at Earth and find it ruled by apes.
The big question that bothers me is why Gaius never knocked up Caprica Six.
Well, he always thought she was human, which means he knew that pregnancy was a risk. Can you imagine Baltar being willing to have sex without taking steps to prevent pregnancy? I think we can blame this one on good old-fashioned contraception.
i mean, they must *have* contraception in their universe. Dualla’s not pregnant, and Starbuck never got pregnant by Anders or Lee or anyone. Helo and Athena haven’t had another kid. There’s way too much pregnancy-free boinking going on for it to be possible that there’s no contraception.
Also Gaius’ actions are largely excusable / explainable except for him handing that Cylon a nuclear bomb.
I mean WTF, it’s a nuclear bomb, there’s no amount of hurt feelings you can tell me makes that okay.
True, but I don’t think they ever knew that.
Petey, reading something into a text =/ my firm belief that it’s true. I read into the text the notion that we are guided by higher powers. I don’t actually believe that, but am aware that’s part of the story. I tend to find most arguments that there is a god, he is omniscient, and yet people have free will to be a bunch of nonsense and wishful thinking.
I tend to find most arguments that there is a god, he is omniscient, and yet people have free will to be a bunch of nonsense and wishful thinking.
The two would seem to be mutually exclusive.
And then I screw up my blockquotes. Obviously, it’s time for bed.
Amanda, you’re saying you think society’s traditional beliefs vis-a-vis the Almighty and free will are a bunch of horsehockey? Ok, that tack I understand.
Out of curiosity, what’s your take on it?
Just to be different I’m going with Tom Zarek as the 13th cylon. His character works well within the whole free will theme since he was a rebel against the twelve colonies before the attack. His movement from rebel to being an integral part of the refugee leadership plays nicely into the whole unification theme, and it would be teh roxxors for the old Apollo to be a cyclon. Just to go a little further out on a limb, I’ll claim that he’s known all along that he’s a cylon and he’s been quietly playing out his role to see if the humans really are worthy of salvation.
What do I win?
Well, he didn’t really fall in love with Six until they were away on Galactica, and at that point Six was no longer in corporeal form. That is, he fell in love with the Six in his brain; on Caprica he just saw her as a fuck buddy/research assistant.
As for Tigh, sure he and Adama didn’t serve in the first war together, but they did meet shortly thereafter. I was always led to believe that the humanoid Cylons were really, really new. And how long was he married for?
I also like Amanda’s idea that there was an intra-Cylon war at some point. That would also explain why the Centurions are no longer sentient (it was removed as punishment by the humanoids, say).
True, but I don’t think they ever knew that.
Well yeah, in context of the trial episode (episodes?) calling him innocent was pretty much the right call, based on what the available evidence.
But from a viewer’s perspective, I consider that the act that nails him firmly in the ‘villain’ category.
…to a lesser extent, setting up Admiral Cain’s death, though that was a much more morally ambiguous situation.
Tangentally, I’m keeping my fingers crossed that the fifth Cylon is Billy.
Not to my mind, Petey. I in fact think that the show is an angry retort to the stories of AI robots laboring under free will—it exposes free will as a myth we flatter ourselves with. I have a post brewing about it, though. I think the whole history of arguments for free will are based more on hope than reason.
Daniel Dennet’s Evolving Freedom is the most informed discussion of the concept of free will that I’ve found, as he has a good grasp of the science and its implications. The book offers a good understanding of what science offers us in terms of both determinism and randomness, and explains how neither can provide what most people claim to have when they talk about free will. However, he also examines what kinds of free will can exist without resorting to magic, though I think most people will find these too subtle and dissatisfying in the end.
I’m saying that I find it amusing and a sign that hope triumphs over reason that most people believe both in an omniscient god and in free will—they’re mutually exclusive. Yes, I’ve heard all the tortured reasoning about how they aren’t, and it still makes no sense. There’s interesting stuff in the series about it, but I’m not overly interested in an argument with you here about whether or not “free will” exists. When you’re not religious, it’s not nearly the troublesome burden that it is for people who seek religion to feel more important about themselves only to find that the tenets of their faith have an ego-destroying trap, vis a vis the impossibility of free will. At what point, they stick their fingers in their ears and go, “La la la god loves me and I’m important and I have a destiny that’s important and I have free will because without it I’m not important la la.”
I don’t have any fancy textually analytic reasoning for why.
I just really liked Billy, is all.
I also like Amanda’s idea that there was an intra-Cylon war at some point. That would also explain why the Centurions are no longer sentient (it was removed as punishment by the humanoids, say).
I thought that someone brought up the point that the Centurions weren’t sentient so that they wouldn’t rebel against the humanoid Cylons the way they rebelled against the real humans.
Diana made a point to tell the Centurion that shot her in the head to forget it’d done it.
Earth will be revealed to be the origin of all humans and cylons. Humans on earth created the cylons who rebelled, killed their masters and fled to Kobol; where they created cylons who rebelled and fled to the 12 colonies.
Or, after rebelling from the humans, and going off on their own free at the end of the war, they realized they didn’t like being free, and created the human-looking cylons to replace the masters they had escaped from.
They rejected having free-will, and created new masters to take it away from them
“They rejected having free-will, and created new masters to take it away from them”
Well, man DID create god…
The whole free will thing is a canard. Either the human mind is a purely causal computer (not necessarily ration, but causal - same inputs into the exact same initial state will always give the same output) or it’s probabilistic. If the former, then free will is an illusion. If the latter, then free will is just a cover for underlying randomness, dressed up in self aggrandizing language.
Pablo - I’ve been claiming something similar since season one. Clearly, the cylons were part of what pushed everyone off earth earlier in their history.
One of my other theories is that Kara is a god. If you look up Thrace in connection with Ares (god of war) and couple that with her fighting ability and now her rebirth/not death, it starts to make sense.
Tog, you basically summed up my argument for the post tomorrow. But, you know, I do dress it up with Cylons! So stay tuned.
Damn! I typed a rather lengthy comment a while ago and when I clicked submit, it got lost in the vortex. Well, here goes again!
I’m still having a hard time accepting Tigh as a cylon. I think Ron Moore’s got some serious splainin’ to do. It will be interesting to see how they pull it off, though the cynic in me thinks they can’t.
If I recall from Asimov’s Foundation series, there was a robot who appeared human who was around for centuries. He would pop up every now and then as the minister of one of the emperor’s, carefully nudging humanity along from behind the scenes. That might be the inspiration for Tigh as a cylon.
I think we can also expect that season 4 will be very light on combat scenes involving the Galactica. She took a terrible pounding at the battle of New Caprica in Exodus Part 2. Between the carbon scoring on her exterior, and the lack of replacements for parts and supplies, Galactica has at most one more fight in her. It would not surprise me if at series end the Galactica is destroyed staving off the Cylons one last time in order to allow the RTF to escape.
I also have a feeling that the show is going to end on one of those mindtripping Twilight Zone type scenarios. The last of the human survivors will land (or even crash land) on Earth or a planet that looks a lot like Earth. Their technology will be forgotten by their descendants, who will regress to a hunter-gatherer society, and their descendants will follow in the same footsteps as our ancestors, until they finally acquire the technology to achieve space flight and create Artificial Intelligence. As Number 6 told Baltar, “All of this has happened before. All of this has happened again.”
Ron Moore has hinted that the Five Cylons predate not just the other Seven but all the Cylons and existed in some form even before the colonials developed AI and built the first Cylons. It’s part of the eternal recurrence theme that runs through the mystical part of the mythos. “All of this has happened before and will happen again.”
I like the idea of Tom Zerrek being the fifth Cylon. I hadn’t thought of that but it could work.
I gotta disagree, Togolosh; I always thought that probability theory means we have limitations in our ability to acquire and think about data, and so I think your conclusion is in your premise.
It seems likely to me that we have limited choices and mostly follow a script, personally. So the Cylons are playing out a role, as are the humans.
Dammit, I think I’m talking myself around to your way of thinking anyway.
I’m still plumping for the daggit being a Cylon. I never trusted it.
Slightly more seriously, they’re going to have to deal with Earth this series or see it spin out of suspension of disbelief. My guess is that we’re talking about a post-human Earth - a seriously post-human Earth - and one in which whatever the human species turned into played a major part in setting up the situation. They’ll probably encounter “gods”.
The whole free will thing is a canard. Either the human mind is a purely causal computer (not necessarily ration, but causal - same inputs into the exact same initial state will always give the same output) or it’s probabilistic. If the former, then free will is an illusion. If the latter, then free will is just a cover for underlying randomness, dressed up in self aggrandizing language.
Or it could be that the brain is a neural net and the whole idea of “the exact same initial state” is codswallop. Essentially brain processes would be stochastic as modified by feedback loops. One possible perspective on these feedback loops might be to label them “minds”…
I decided to start by looking up the song that was playing from Earth
A big theme of the show is “everything here has happened before and it will happen again.”
In the very first episode, Gaius says, “There must be some way out of here.” And the revealed four of the final five express some familiarity with the song and say they remember it from childhood.
Also, Sharon is a pretty good argument that free will exists in this space. Unless she was programmed to be a traitor to the cylons. If that’s so, why aren’t all the other Sharons traitors?
I just assumed near the end of last season that Starbuck was the first human-Cylon hybrid–not Hera. Which leaves someone else to be the unnamed Cylon, and explains Starbuck’s whole “hey guys, I’m totally not dead, but here to guide you through to Earth, as though that were my destiny and everything!” appearance at the end.
I read most of the thread, sorry if this is redundant.
Also, Sharon is a pretty good argument that free will exists in this space. Unless she was programmed to be a traitor to the cylons. If that’s so, why aren’t all the other Sharons traitors?
I think you’re referring to Boomer, in which case the answer is that she is part of the overarching program that the Cylons are following: the reconciliation of Humanity. In order for the Cylons to become more like humans they need to experience the illusion of free will in the form of rebellion. You can’t have a whole model series turn rebel but you can send one unit out there as a sleeper, to live with humanity and pick up some of their traits and bring that data back to the collective.
Same with Caprica Six, only I think she was an accident. She was supposed to program Baltar for use by the Cylons as their backdoor into the Colonial Defense system. She wasn’t supposed to fall in love with Baltar but she did. This created an Unexpected variable, in that she learned to Love in a different kind of way than the Cylons thought possible. They’re so fixated on love as a unifying force that they don’t understand or foresee that love can also be a form of rebellion.
Apparently, they don’t have Romeo and Juliet in the colonies, even though they do have the Merchant of Venice (as Roseline quotes the pound of flesh line sometime during season Two if I’m not mistaken).
I decided to start by looking up the song that was playing from Earth
Apparently, they don’t have Romeo and Juliet in the colonies, even though they do have the Merchant of Venice (as Roseline quotes the pound of flesh line sometime during season Two if I’m not mistaken)
I think Moore said in an interview that some Earth works were made in parallel by people in the colonies, so it was a Caprican All Along the Watchtower, not necessarily an Earth Version.
And I would suppose the same for Shakespeare.
Sorry tog, but you’re confusing probabilistic with randomness.
Also, with your “computer” analogy, what makes you think that you can ever recreate the “exact same initial state?”
Just for kicks, google “galactca mormon” (without quotes). The producer of the original series, Glen Larson, is apprently Mormon, and aspects of the religion permeate the show. 13 tribes, one of them “lost”? You bet!
Free will is an important aspect of Mormon theology.
Any chance the last Cylon is Lorne Greene???
Why does everyone conclude that the 4 are actually cylons? They themselves came to this conclusion based on little evidence and a lot of conjecture. Not only that, the only ’sleeper’ cylon on the show, Sharon, was in total denial even in the face of far more evidence. I think the other cyclons will be something different and less tangible.
As for the final cylon, why not the hybrid child? This is a common plot point in many sceince fiction shows, books, and movies (E.g V, 2001, Matrix, Underworld. . .) to have the hybrid be the pivotal plot point and bringer of the new order.