FF:QLD Battlestar Galactica discussion...

But Ellen didn't know that on new caprica...but cavil did so yah..werid

The only Daniel i can think of is Daniel Graystone, the main character from the upcoming Caprica series and the creator of the cylons...

I think the episode could have almost just been the Ellen flashbacks and the Adama/chief ship thing. not too sure about the Sam part. I'm still trying to piece it together in my head

 

As far as I can work the general timeline, humanity and the Lords of Kobol co-existed on Kobol until about 3000 years ago, then the first Cylons were developed, which led to the first bout of war between humans and Cylons after which the 13 Tribes (one of which were the original skinjob Cylons) went their seperate ways to Caprica, Earth and the other planets. Faster than light travel has not been developed at this stage. The Thirteenth Tribe arrives on Earth and starts civilisation, eventually getting to the point where they procreate, and no longer need Resurrection to sustain their race. The skinjobs on Earth eventually come to another holocaust about 1000 years later (I think I missed the cause of this one), but the Final Five get advanced warning and have a primitive Resurrection Ship in orbit around Earth ready to accept an upload from them.

Planet Earth go boom 1000 years after Kobol go boom, and Saul, Ellen, Tyrol, Anders and Tory upload to the ship and depart for the Twelve Colonies to bring warning not to develop Centurions. They arrive too late to prevent this development, lacking FTL drives to get there quickly. Along the way, they've perfected and refined the process for Resurrection and developing skinjobs, and use this as a bribe to get the Centurions to stop the war. Cavil/John, being the first of the new skinjobs turns on his creators, boxes them for a while, and then downloads them to new bodies with new memories to go to the Colonies and observe the folly of humanity and learn from their alleged mistakes. Saul and Ellen are apparently the first two sent, while Tyrol, Anders and Tory end up getting sent later.

What's really interesting is the fact that the Significant Eight are even more flawed than most of humanity seems to be, yet they believe themselves to be perfect examples of evolution. This is possibly egged on by the Ones, which are possibly the worst of all, with a severe Oedipus Complex and inferiority issues blended with delusions of grandeur.

I think the name for the Sevens is a pure coincidence considering the name of the character Daniel Graystone in Caprica, given that RDM has so far stayed true to his original statements that none of the humanoid Cylons are based on any humans.

 

Just so we all know that I called it.

 

a little OT- did anyone else find it a little offputting to see John Hodgman as the head docter - the guy from the PC vs MAC adds

 

Ha..Yeah Goobs was like.. THAT's PC!!!! , and I'm trying to shush him so I can hear! Yes, think he was offput.

 

Things I :

- retro-continuity done right. Lost - take note.

- exposition done right.

- John Hodgeman. Oh the money I would pay for a Cottle/Hodgeman spin-off.

- 1/Cavill/John - he's known everything, and has been playing everyone, the whole time.

- every character being a complete frak-up.

- the Old Man's decision-making process: 1) vehemently disagree, 2) drink heavily, 3) ah frak it.

- the Chief laughing in Tori's stupid evil face at the notion of them being together.

- Boomer's coming home.

But most of all I just this frakking show.

 

I can't wait to see what happens when Chief finds what Tori did to his wife...

 

I'd almost forgotten about that. Hope they don't forget to give some time to that little revelation. They did almost get together though at one point didn't they? Chief and Tori..

Also hope Boomer and the Chief get to reconnect, although he is her father....ish. ewwww. And Tye and 6..same thing..EWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWWW. ALthough I was ewwing as soon as Tye walked in and started feeling the baby kicking.

Anyone up for a Saturday night gathering at our place for BSG viewing?..well, we'll be here

 

Cargin's got it pretty much right, but I just want to type out a rough timeline to help my own train of thought. This episode was the info-dump to end all info-dumps, and it fundamentally changes so many things we thought we knew. So here, along with my commentary, is the rough course of events as I understand it.

3600+ years ago, mankind and the gods lived together on Kobol. Or that's the poetic version that the sacred scrolls tell us. Either way, my gut feeling is that human life didn't originate on Kobol, it came from the stars, repeating the same cycle we see continuing to play out now.

Ron Moore said in one of his podcast commentaries that mankind "stole fire from the gods," that being the secret of creating life. Were the gods Cylons? We don't know. It doesn't really matter. The point is, man created artificial life. That life evolved, and took on a form we now recognise as the humanoid Cylon. Biological but synthetic, incapable of naturally procreating, surviving via download. They became known as the 13th tribe of humanity.

We really don't know what happened next, other than that there was an exodus. But knowing what we now know, about the repeating cycle, I'm going to go out on a limb and say there was a war, and that Kobol was devastated by nuclear weapons. It was probably Cylon vs human, but who can really say? Either way, I'm told that three and a half millenia is long enough for an ecosystem to recover to the state we later saw. In any case, the thirteen tribes left, twelve going in one direction, one going in another. The curious Tomb of Athena, the map to Earth, was left behind, perhaps for the benefit of other Cylons who might happen upon it, perhaps just in the hope that human and Cylon might one day be re-united.

Time passed. We don't really know how much. Presumably at least a millenia, long enough for ships without jump drives to cross the tremendous distances between origin and destination. Mankind made their home on a series of worlds they called the Twelve Colonies, while the Cylons made their home on a world they named Earth.

On the Colonies, the story of Kobol became enshrined in myth, and a woman named Pythia wrote a series of prophecies about the cycle of time, and about the exile and rebirth of the human race.

"All of this has happened before, and all of it will happen again."



By the time of roughly 1000 years ago, the Cylons on Earth had gained the ability to procreate biologically. They had long since forgotten how to download, and for all intents and purposes were living as humans. (Quite frankly, the suggestion seems to be that we, right now, the viewers, are the thirteenth tribe, that we've forgotten where we came from, and are just living out our lives. I find that quite intriguing.) And then, they created artificial life of their own.

I'm reading between the lines when I suggest that it was these new robots rebelling against their makers that devestated Earth, but quite frankly, if it were anything else none of this would make sense. The glimpse we see of Galen at the market suggests that the attack was very sudden, catching the people of Earth totally by surprise. Well, almost totally by surprise. Five scientists had seen it coming. They had been warned.

This is the part that people seem to have been missing slightly, since it's almost a throwaway line, lost amongst all this talk of Daniels and Ellens and Johns. The Final Five, the last survivors of Earth, became that way because they saw signs. Messengers came to them. Tory saw a man. Anders saw a woman. They were people nobody else could see.

Sound familiar?

I won't even try to speculate about who or what or how. I think it's god(s), but I don't anticipate a conclusive answer. Still, all of this has happened before.

Tory, Galen, Sam, Saul and Ellen rediscovered their heritage, and worked night and day to rebuild the ressurection technology that would allow them to escape the holocaust they had been told was coming. They placed a ship in orbit, and when the nukes hit, they downloaded and survived.

 

That is the best thing i've read about it on the net. Well done BBN.

i too think Daniel is gone for good.

 

Thank you. I really enjoy going deep on stuff like this, as you might be able to tell if you've followed my posts on threads like this one over time.

 

Was so hoping for BBn to give us a play by play. THANKYOU.

Side note. I think you're a brilliant writer. It's like Branagh doing Shakespeare for me..everything, even though it's really complicated, seems to just make sense!

 

Aw shucks.

Honestly, I wrote it at work in a race against the clock. It'd be better if I'd had a chance to look back at it even once. It was just a stream of consciousness to try and get my own thoughts in order.

That said, I think it says a lot about the show that it's got the depth and the number of layers needed to permit such a wordy onslaught.

 

Nice to know I got something generally right for once... My mind is still so melted by that info download that I'm still trying to comprehend all that we learned. I'll be watching it again tomorrow when I don't have to go work a graveyard shift at midnight on the firing line to pick up some more of what I missed/forgot.

 

Episode 16

Ok, well that episode better be the calm before the storm. I guess like episode 12 was.

Alot of build up to things happening in the end there....on the home stretch now.

 

That was great, BBN. An excellent summary on the backstory of the show.

Having watched the last two episodes a couple of times to get it straight, I find myself a dissatisfied with the exposition given by Anders. A few things still warrant some explanations to satisfy me, but I doubt we'll see them. But, for matters of public interest:

The Temple; who constructed it and when? The impication was that it was constructed in an earlier "cycle", and the Final Five just comandeered it for their use.

The Memory Wipes; I can accept John wiping the memories of the Final Five and inserting them back into Colonial Society for his Plan, but what about everyone elses memories? Did John send Tigh back in a body that aged? And what about his time during the War? If not, we're talking a Magical Whammy of Major proportions here.

The Plague: I know, but this is till a sticking point for me. It was important, and then it wasn't. I would like it finally exposited on.

What was interesting though was that I and a couple of others were wrong about the Earthlings; they didn't create God, they actually created Lucifer. And that revelation means that the writers have retconned the uncomfortable statement "And They Have A Plan". John's Plan has always been to make humanity suffer for him having being made in it's image, it's just that no one else was aware of it until now.

I dunno if I can say I was wrong about the Final Five being Prophets yet.

Adama's reaction to the news his ship was dying was heartbreaking. His indignation that she was constructed "on the cheap" was priceless too. Using the Cylon resin reminded me of using the Cylon stemcells to save Roslin.

Ellen's change once back aboard Galactica and in the presence of Saul stunned me, but it does explain why the Humanoid Cylons are so frakked up.

Also, weird thought, but the Centurion pausing then retracting it's claws to help Ellen out of the Resurrection Vat was cute.

Four to go.

Be seeing you,

Magnus Darcrider

 

I have a suspicion that the Cylons do age if they don't resurrect. During Episode 14, there was a positively ancient looking Leoben on the rebel Basestar alongside a Six.

 

Really good stuff

Slow, character driven, intense and exactly what we needed at this point. Back to the stories of the Chief, Boomer, Kara, and Hera.
Wow.

Aaron Douglas as the chief should've been the focus of this whole season. I feel everything his character feels. Poor chief. So did Boomer mean all that? Why did she frack Helo? I actually cried when they were in their house in teh projection.

Did the President just die?

How did Hera know the song?

Kara in an imaginary world again, this time with her father as a side kick. Have had theories from a friend that Kara's Dad is Daniel, or Kara is a recreation of him in some way. Daughter I think. Still it doesn't explain the body on Earth.

Oh poor chief.

Is the ship gonna explode/be evacuated now? "I don't wanna explode?!!"Think I loved this episode..was a bit afraid of waht was to come after last 2 weeks..so what's that..3 to go?

Can someone come watch it with me next week?? hate crying on the couch alone watching foxtel!!

 

I absolutely loved the part where Kara's 'father' played that very familiar classic riff... another great musical tie-in to the old series.

 

Banner refresh time...

 

Holy fraking ****.

To steal a line from a friend of mine: "TV is over. Battlestar Galactica just won it."

I've seldom watched an episode of TV where I was so drawn into to the lives and the emotions of the characters as with Someone To Watch Over Me. I'm really feeling it now. The tiredness. The hopelessness. I feel like I'm one of them, one of those 40,000-odd people just trying to hang on a tiny bit longer. Galactica is falling apart around us. We're sending Raptors out farther and farther to look for a habitable planet, any habitable planet. The Raptors have clapped-out FTL drives that could fail any minute, and there's no guarantee that search and rescue could even find those scouts. The reward for finding a planet is a tube of toothpaste. In any other circumstance that would be funny, but here... Not so much.

If we don't find a home soon, we're not going to survive.

In some ways, this was an episode of things coming to fruition, like Caprica Six being elected as the representative of the Basestar in the new Quorum of ships' captains, something I cheered about. It was bringing us full circle to Galen and Boomer. I had a lump in my throat through the whole sequence in the cell, and then when she took Hera I was filled with murderous rage. The sense of betrayal was just palpable, and the final shot of Galen in the house just killed me.

But the fabric that held the episode together was the piano, and the walking dream that Kara Thrace's life has become. The whole episode was dream-like, and I think it's why I'm having such a difficult time expressing just how I felt watching it. The piano music playing through virtually every scene drew me in so deeply it felt like my own dream.

What does it mean? The vision of Kara's father, yet another one of these "people no one else can see"? All Along The fraking Watchtower? What does it mean?



Three episodes left.

 

I don't think I need to tell you all my thoughts on the last episodes other than "This ****ing show"

My theories -



- The guy at the piano is Starbuck's father

- Starbucks father is Daniel. He told Starbuck's mother, Socrata Thrace EVERYTHING and why Starbuck was so important. Which brings us to Starbuck's abuse as a child.

- The notes of All Along the Watchtower the Hera wrote are a star map to home.



So sayeth the crystal ball

 

1 - Yes

2 - No

3 - Maybe


To expound:

1 - Yes, listen to the podcast commentary for this episode (and indeed all episodes, great stuff). RDM confirms that "Slick" takes the form of a younger version of Dreilde Thrace.

2 - No. I've spoken to other people with this theory, and it's a good one, but there's a big problem with it. If Kara is already a Cylon-Human hybrid, then what is the point of Hera? This whole thing is about re-uniting the two seperate halves, since it's the only way to go forward. If that had already been done 20-something years ago, why bother?

3 - I guess, maybe, but if so there's a stratling lack of detail in it. I don't know what could be gleaned from it, navigation-wise.

 

When Hera first drew them, I thought it looked like the ol' 'stars about to align' message from god type image.

It may not be a star map as such, but it could be a constellation or an astrological sign (like Capricorn, Libra, etc).

 

Hmm..not enough happened for the 3rd last episode. Still, very excited abut what's to come.

I just read the first couple of pages of this thread back from 2005. It's weird reading it from when we didn't know MUCH AT ALL. Kinda cute. 4 years ago. Oh how much has changed since then.

We were planning on a meet at Kahlis and now we're planning one at my place..this has all happened before..

OKay, so it's 6am and I've got nothin.