Battlestar Galactica: Final Season (SPOILERS)

One small thing I noticed about some of the piano music our piano player was playing: In two specific spots (the first being in his first scene with Starbuck), what he was playing sounded very much like a small ripoff of "Clair de Lune." I found that fascinating.

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Okay, one last thought: I just rewatched the episode. The "Clair de Lune" music in the beginning that the piano player is playing is the same music we hear at the end when Kara plays a tape of her dad's music while lying with Sam.

Hmmm ... if that doesn't make me think they're the same person, then I don't know what does!

Oh yeah, it was definitely her dad, and it was definitely in her head. My lady friend and I figured it out a little over halfway through, at which point we both felt kinda silly that we hadn't figured it out earlier.

I like the idea that her father is Daniel. So, let's go hypothetical: Cavil sabotages the Daniels on a genetic level (worse than boxing, it seems), but not before Ellen preserves a few, or creates one, etc. She sends it off to Caprica, it learns to love and therefore reproduce, and creates Kara, the first human-Cylon mixed child. Perhaps the place where all this Daniel stuff happened is "The Colony" that Cavil mentioned. Methinks Kara finds this place and everything is revealed to her there. Either way, I think we can start calling her "Danielle."

It explains pretty much everything that's happened to her; her death, resurrection, having seen Earth (but without realizing it's barren), her creativity, et cetera. It also explains her connection to Hera. Well, sort of...there's no actual reason why being a human-Cylon child would give you weird visions and cause you to instinctively know some song you've never heard, but it would at least explain them relative to one another.

Gotta say; this was a good episode, but not terribly enlightening. A lot of the major reveals were just delayed another week. Rumor has it next week's episode is going to explain an awful lot, so this is probably just the calm before the storm.

So...what did we really learn? Well, we learned that whatever connects The Final Five also connects Kara AND Hera on some level. And we learned that the Boomers can't be trusted. And as Cat pointed out, we know Liam (the baby) is really dead, and probably isn't going to be part of some crazy twist. Except insofar as the whole love thing effects Cylon reproduction.

By the by, what exactly happened there, with Boomer? I lost track for a moment. At first it looked like Tyrol knocked a random Eight on the head and swapped her out for the Boomer in captivity. But then she has sex with Helo...why? Not to, uh, "arouse" suspicion? She couldn't have said she had a headache? Or is she just straight-up evil?

I was even more confused at first, because it didn't occur to me that she was playing Tyrol, but I guess she was, yes? Didn't really love him/think about him, just wanted Hera. Pretty nice twist. Hera's been stolen by both sides now.

Anyway, really surprised we didn't get a major Starbuck hint/reveal here, but I guess we'll have to wait another week for all this stuff to start to come together. Here's stuff that probably has to be shown or explained in the last few episodes (lemme know if I'm forgetting anything):

• They (probably) have to find a habitable planet.
• We need to find out what the frak is up with Starbuck.
• We need to find out what's up with Hera.
• We need to find out what's up with the people in people's heads.
• We need to find out how the music ties everyone altogether.
• We need to find out what The Colony is.
• We need to find out who the "dying leader" is.

On that last point: this may have been mentioned already, but who thinks the "dying leader" could be Galactica itself? They've started to change the language they use to describe the ship, talking about it more and more as if it were a person, and alive (which it is now, after all). I think they finally used the word "dying" to describe it in this last episode, too.

Or...gulp...it's Adama. I don't think he can die unless it's part of the finale, but here we are, right up against it.

One thing I just remembered: when The Final Five were drudging up memories, one of them made reference to Anders playing music for them. I think, specficially, they said he was the one who played that song. Dunno what that means, if anything.

Good post, Yoda. A few random thoughts:

-- I assumed that Boomer hooking up with Helo was a way to show us that she was NOT really in love with Tyrol and was, in fact, merely playing him. Our first hint that things were not going to go as we might have hoped. She was willing to cheat on him with Helo (and seemed to enjoy it, frankly) to get what she wanted.

-- Dying leader: I go around about that too. We've always assumed it's Roslin, but perhaps not, since her visions weren't entirely accurate. I hadn't thought of the ship, but that makes a LOT of sense. A lot of "she" references to the ship these days (okay, nearly all of them from Adama, but still ... very noticeable). But my mind was going in other directions: Baltar? Still Roslin (who did collapse at the end of the episode after having some sort of recurrence of a vision involving Hera, with someone taking her pulse near the fadeout)?

I like the idea of it being the ship, though. Better than all the other possibilities. And it's the kind of thing they would do, for sure.

-- I dunno about finding out about the Colony. I assumed it was some sort of "other" cylon place where they did their research and work on moving forward evolutionarily, but didn't really feel I needed to see it if they choose not to show it to us.

-- Now that we've heard Kara tell the pilots point-blank stuff about finding that habitable planet (we'd assumed they were looking, but this episode opened up by reminding us that they've been looking steadily for weeks now), I am convinced that the show will end with such a find. If not, I think they'd be moving in the direction of coming to terms with just living out in space forever. After all, three episodes left -- can't really be putting off these larger plot points anymore.

-- Opera house, Hera, prophecies, dying leader, etc. etc. All this stuff has been drummed into our heads for years. Somehow we have to have a wrap-up of all that. I DID realize with this episode that the #8 that Roslin keeps seeing in her vision is, in fact, probably Boomer and not Athena as she had surmised. So I think that was a small piece of the puzzle on Friday -- that Hera is kidnapped by Boomer and not being taken by her actual mother. A simple case of mistaken identity on Roslin's part while interpreting her visions.

Yeah, I initially thought "how can they hear each other in a bar when they're both speaking at levels that wouldn't carry" and then set the thought aside. heh

If her father taught her the song, he could also have taught it to Blanders.
I think your supposition here is what we're going to see happen, and I like how it all fits together.

This week-long delay on Hulu and Sci-Fi is going to be the death of me. I stayed up til 2am watching this ep a second time, in case they didn't host it the next day. I'm glad I did, but frakkin' ouch.

Chief wrenched teh goo-smearing 8 during the blackout and Smallvilled her down to the brig, far as I can tell. Then Boomer goes into the bathroom and Athena recognises her, has to be neutralized. Then Helo comes in and mistakes her for Athena. At this point, I think Boomer seems a little disappointed that Helo doesn't realise it's Boomer and two things come into play:
1. Stupid human men never look at they wimmens! When Chief found out Boomer was a cylon (and didn't know he was one yet) he said something to her about seeing her face every day (referring to seeing her face on Athena) and she winced.
2. Frakking Helo might assuage her jealousy of Athena over the way Hera failed to thrive under Boomer's care, and wouldn't stop crying til Athena got to the base star. Boomer seemed pretty offended by Hera's preference.

Ooh, good point!! I forgot about that.

I think the reason we didn't get the whole Starbuck story is that Daniel/Dreilide is more central to the wrap-up than just his role as absentee musician father. The title of his album is "Live at the Helice Opera House".

"Dreilide", by the way, is German for "third eye" and is a denotation of a spiritual person. Nice development of the theme of Kara's religiosity.

Could the dying leader be Ellen Tigh, who already died a couple of times and might be part of their finding a new home? Nim thinks we're still going to find a planet and name it Earth, and that this final earth will have the continents we recognise (whereas the "Earth" they found in season 4.0, we never saw continents). I like that idea too, but I'm really wondering if Moore has a happy ending in mind at all. Here's hoping.

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REALLY? HOW THE FRAK DID I MISS THAT TITLE?

I think I was too busy reading the name of the artist and never really thought to look at the album title! SHEESH!

So why hasn't Kara herself made the connection. We've heard (and she's probably heard) Roslin mention the "Opera House" stuff in her prophecies ad nauseam by now.

Wow, that's huge. I totally missed that. But then again, I missed Leoben in the Viper too. Oh wait.... *cough* (ducking)

SD, I wish I could rep you three times for that album title alone. Marvelous find! I want to rewatch the whole episode now JUST to see that!

*kiss kiss* It's great!

Heh. Creep.
I have been searching for a screenshot of the album cover. No joy, thus far. Nim mentioned the title to me, having read it in an article. Am now searching for that. But yeah, I didn't see it either, was trying to make "Dreilide" into a word in my head. :/

That's what I was doing! Dreilide/Daniel? Not the same number of letters, rats! Etc. etc. If this were "Lost," then I would have tried to rearrange the letters to spell something else, since they've done that numerous times.

No screencaps of the album cover online yet, but I did find independent confirmation of the album title at Battlestar Wiki. (I should be getting paid to promote that site!)

Ah; it underscores the fact that she was playing him. Hadn't thought of that.

It is, and they're careful enough about the language their characters use that I don't think the change in the way they talk about the ship is a coincidence.

Re: Roslin. Roslin being the dying leader is the obvious choice...so much so that I've just assumed it was too obvious, and that it therefore can't be her. I think it's gotta be Kara or the ship, with my money being on the latter. Or...again...gulp...Adama.

I would normally agree, but Cavil said something about how "they haven't found it." That line seems to suggest that, well, "they" will find it, and that it's important.

Yeah, that solidifies it. I think it was probably a given, but now it's a no-brainer. Whether or not the ending is perfectly happy, or has perfect closure, there's going to be a habitable planet in there somewhere.

Great, great point. The Opera House is one of the loose ends that, when I think about it, gets me depressed, because I keep thinking it represents a time in the series when they hadn't yet decided on the until outcome, and that it was going to get more or less forgotten. But this point makes me feel otherwise. Great observation!

We all assumed it was Athena with her own baby, obviously, and that Six and Baltar were "stealing" it. But now Six is a good guy, and it could be Boomer with the baby, so Six and Baltar could be rescuing it. It fits perfectly.

And...wow...that just gave me an idea. Didn't all that Opera House vision stuff happen on Kobol? Kobol looked pretty flippin' inhabitable to me! I say they settle on Kobol together, where it all started, thus bringing everything full circle and keeping with the idea that it'll all happen over again. Crap, why didn't this occur to me before? Was there some reason they couldn't say on Kobol, or was it just their single-mindedness about finding the lost tribe? They've found it, it's not what they were hoping, so now, why not just live in Kobol?

Good point. And it'd be kind of funny, wouldn't it? Anders and her father are friends, or know each other, or heck, they could be in a band together, and then Anders goes off and marries his daughter 2,000 years later. Kooky.


Yeah, interesting wrinkle there, where some people seem to be able to tell them apart.

Isn't it crazy? I forget more about this show than other shows show us to begin with. I didn't think of the Hera thing until I was writing the post. I said "wait, this sounds familiar." I guess all of it really has happened before.

Very cool! And awesome catch on the album title. All that jumped out to me was the last name, but man, this Daniel theory stuff is really starting to come together, eh?


I'll be a tad surprised if they fudge that badly (IE: just calling ANOTHER planet Earth), but I could be wrong.

I do think there could be something to the whole contintent thing, though. When they zoomed through the Universe to show us "Earth" (or so we assumed) at the end of Season 3, North America was pretty distinct and recognizable. I remember yelling to my girlfriend "that was Florida! THAT WAS FLORIDA!!!" But there's no guarantee that the one they showed us was the one they landed on.

Look at how paranoid they've made us, though. Because we never saw a matching overhead shot of Earth, we're wondering if they Earth we saw was Earth at all. They've done quite a number on us.

They can't live on Kobol - Something about people's souls being damned if they tried. I do remembering them covering that.

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I'm looking through Battlestar Wiki, and I think there was an environmental disaster of some kind, but that it seemed to have cleared up by the time they got there. The only reference I can find to any religious problem is Head Six telling Baltar something about how souls that die on Kobol are "forever lost," but I dunno what that means, it's only Head Six, and I think she was really messing with him at the time.

Dunno, then. Might have to go back and watch some of the episodes in question.

It fits really, really nicely, so I'm going to fight the idea that it doesn't work as much as possible. It's habitable, it starts the cycle over again, and it contains the Opera House, which we have to figure is going to be part of the big finale, anyway.

We'll know soon enough, thank goodness!

Could Head Six have meant only that there wasn't a resurrection ship nearby? (I don't remember her saying that, so I'm just tossing that out there.)

I'm just SO glad this last season is finally rounding third and coming in for home -- in a manner I feel worthy of the series. I was worried there a few episodes ago!

I had a feeling about Starbuck's father being the 13th Cylon.
(too bad they didn't have Dirk Benedict play him)

Still not sure what happened on her first trip to Earth though. I thought maybe a Ship of Lights had something to do with it (I've been hoping for them to use that plot device for ever) and that maybe the destroyed Earth is really Terra (they never showed it from space revealing the look of the land-masses) and they will still find the lush green Earth with blue skies and sandy beaches Starbuck swears she saw.
Maybe her father is living there?
Of course, if that were so, why then wouldn't the other Final Five remember it?

Only 4 episodes left.
Seems like we're gonna get hit with a lot of information in the next month.

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Fear the Probe!

Only THREE episodes left. Not four. Yikes!

It is 4, actually, if we are talking about one-hour episodes. We have one more stand alone, and then a three part finale; the finale is split over two weeks, with the last installment being a two-part episode shown back-to-back. Alas, It is just three more times we get to sit down and watch new material on a Friday...

I was talking about episodes/days on the calendar, not hours. Sorry about the confusion. He'd ended by mentioning the next "month," which would be four weeks or so. And really it's just two more weeks from tonight (since tonight is one of those remaining three sit-downs). So, just a half-month, not a month, from now.

Yoda, have you seen the short description of tonight's episode on the Comcast on-screen menu?

"Islanded in a Stream of Stars" -- While Helo copies with the abduction of Hera, Galactica's damages overwhelm the crew's repair efforts.

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Hmmm.... Galactica = Dying Leader seems slightly more plausible with a description like this. Three and a half hours till tonight's episode...