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Friday, January 30, 2009

TV Watch: Battlestar Galactica Catch Up

I think Saul said it best when he quipped if it would be handy to have a chart. A recap of the show's events up to this point is like a Greek tragedy meets space opera which, at the very least, fits the show's basic themes.

Spoilers abound here, obviously.

I referred to the "final Cylon hunt" as something of a reverse murder mystery, where where it is more like hunting for a body than a killer. The resolution proved just as that would pan - a sea of red herrings before you find the real fish. Was it Baltus, with his seeming Cylon-like visions? Or Kara who certainly seemed to have visited a resurrection ship? Or an important background character like Dee?

Nope, it was Saul's wife? Don't even really know what we should do with that. It feels a little anti-climatic to me, and I can only hope the writers will make it work in the end.

The real open question, I think, is what the hell is Kara? Not a Cylon, but ... dead? She's a zombie? I'm also a bit confused on the whole "Cylon Earth" angle. It was a whole planet populated by clones of twelve people? Or was that just the models that survived to resurrect in space?

I think I get where they're going though. Cylons, humans - just sides of a coin which have been destroying each other, fleeing, repopulating, destroying, repeating history for thousands of years. Betting the "unknown Cylon helmet" turns out to be something human and that there are others Earths out there as well.

5 comments:

Winkyboy said...

Actually, my personal theory - although perhaps some others have thought this as well - is that there ARE no more humans. Everyone that we're seeing is actually a cylon of varying "generations". It would explain the recurring statement of "All this has happened before, and all this will happen again." It would also explain Kara's, Ellen's, and Baltar's situations quite well.

Josh said...

Yeah, I think that can fit what I've been thinking. Makes sense, although after all this "final five" stuff, it will a bit of a rub if the writers are like, did we say 12? We meant 12 million...

sterno said...

One of the running themes of the show has been history repeating itself. So my theory is that originally the Cylons were the dominant species and humans were not. Cylons made humans to be their servants and the Humans rebelled and chased them off. The Cylons then settled on earth and that was that for them until they blowed themselves up.

The cylons were largely lost to history back in the colonies. My guess is that somebody came across an ancient burial ground or some such and discovered the cylons again. I expect that will be explored in the Caprica series. Scientists then began to build Cylons to serve mankind using cloning technology. The very robotic cylons were created much more openly but experiments continued with the more human-like cylons in secret.

When the cylons turned, then the six cylons of the colonial descent went off to eventually come back and destroy the colonies. They were never really known to the public and that's why it was such a surprise. Also because the Cylons were grown through cloning, this is why they were generally unable to have children, etc. They are slightly different than the final 5.

I'm not quite sure what to think about the final 5. Did they resurrect in secret to some off-earth location and travel from there? Resurrection has a limited distance from what we've seen, so it's not like they could beam all the way to where the other Cylons were. Why do they have no memory of it? Why did they suddenly gain memory of it? No idea.

Winkyboy said...

Well, The Twelve can simply mean the first human-form cylons of the next generation of cylons. I'm thinking that the cylons, after at one time killing off the human race, simply keep reinventing themselves in an attempt to be as human as possible themselves.

They then, perhaps, program themselves to forget that they are cylons (although Ellen's statement of "It's all right" when they were dying on Earth in Tigh's vision/memory throws a snag in that a bit) and they go about eventually rediscovering all the science that they purposely left behind -- including building new robotic servants which are destined to rise up against them.

Or something vaguely similar to all this... :P

Brinstar said...

I thought it as weird when Ellen turned out to be the last one. I was let down, to be honest. I hope her existence / death has some point.