Someone elsewhere reminded me of Kara's time in the baby farm ... and that they took her ovaries. That would lend itself to some sort of clone idea ... and if the cylons already know how to download consciousnesses ... well, who knows?
Aye, was thinking the same thing. They had her prisoner on New Caprica, too. They've had tons of opportunities to do something like this. Sounds ridiculous, but what else is there? I can't believe I'm saying this, but cloning makes a lot more sense than anything else I can come up with.
I'm discounting the possibility that there's a completely new idea that could explain all this, if only because there's really no way to guess something like that.
What I don't like about this whole Kara thing right now (her finding her plane on the planet) is that we saw the ship explode IN SPACE nowhere near there. So how did it get onto Earth? And if it exploded that much (remember it was pretty completely 'sploded at the time), why was Kara's body so very intact (and her blonde hair still so, well, BLONDE)?
All I can think of is that the vortex she died in is some kind of weird wormhole, which I'd been assuming since even before she died in it. The blonde hair thing is stupid, but I'm willing to chalk that up to the show runners just wanting to give us some way to know it was her without too much wondering.
So many loose ends on this one. And it was obviously a dodge to keep us thinking she was the big reveal, until Ellen at the end of the episode. Gotta say I'm a bit disappointed in the whole Ellen thing ... although it fits with Deanna saying that only four were "in your fleet." So Deanna wasn't fibbing there. I'm disappointed because, when it happened right there at the end of the episode, it felt like some sort of tectonic shift in how the show is playing out. This bad Earth, the creatures there being cylons, not humans, learning that these cylons are 2,000+ years old, Kara being some sort of oddity we don't know anything about (a harbinger of death, for sure!) ... everyone now being ultra-cranky, etc. Felt like such weird shifts in focus that I am still kinda processing how I *feel* about what they're telling us, story-wise.
I feel the same way about some of it. Mainly about Kara being, well, totally weird, and the 2,000-year ago thing. Both feel like the kind of thing they're going to have to stretch to explain. But I've felt that way before and been wrong, so we'll see.
Yoda, I like your over-arching story thoughts here -- humans having nuked cylon planet, cylons having nuked human planets.... I assume you mean that the cylons of the present didn't do it as retaliation, right? (They certainly don't ever mention it or talk about it, which would be unfair to withhold that from us for so long.) They did it merely because this is the way of things, cyclical warfares, etc. etc.??
Right, that last one. It shows that both humans and cylons are capable of inflicting a holocaust on the other under the right circumstances, and that societies are cyclical, and that the only way to break out of the cycle is to work together. Something like that.
Anyway, the symmetry is too perfect and, like I said, it's just the kind of thing they like to do. It feels weird to suggest that there's any real pattern to most of what we've seen, but a few things have held. The biggest has been that, after showing the cylons do something unthinkably cruel and horrible to humanity, everything since (
everything) has shown us that the bad guys aren't as bad as they seem, and the good guys aren't always all that good. The last logical step is for the two to completely invert, which means humans inflicting the same kind of mass-murder on cylons that cylons inflicted on them. Not THESE humans, and not THESE cylons, but the idea is the same. It completes the cycle.
Frankly, when they first found the cylon parts, I had a slightly different theory: I assumed that these other cylons rose up against these other humans on Earth, and the two destroyed each other. Thus, humans and cylons see where their conflict is heading (mutual destruction), and they realize they have to work together. But then they identified that the entire planet was made up of cylons, which kinda dashed that. But the idea that humanity wiped them out isn't too far removed from this.
The big thing at this point is whether the Final Five knew they were special even on Earth, and how they ended up on Caprica. Some cross-universe download that takes about 2,000 years and wipes their memories? Remember, Caprica Six gave a compelling speech about how our lives have no meaning if we don't die. It wasn't just a good speech, it was one of those speeches that we're clearly supposed to agree with. Maybe the Final Five are a compromise between the two -- they die, but they get to start over, with only trace elements of the lessons they learned in the last life.
Very Hindu, very gradual-path-to-Nirvana. Your observation about Lee's speech to the fleet is a good one, and ties into this: they're free to reject polytheism AND monotheism, and embrace this cyclical, life-force stuff, or something.
Sorry for this sort of free association analysis.
It's the only way to talk about the show, I've found.