Battlestar Galactica: Final Season (SPOILERS)

I'm starting a new thread to discuss this final half-season (10 eps) openly. No excuses if you stumble in here and read something you didn't want to.

Well ... The obvious question after this first episode ("Sometimes a Great Notion") is this, of course: If Kara isn't the final cylon, then what the heck is she?

Discuss.

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Addendum about Earth being inhospitable: I'm betting the solution to this dilemma will be something else, and that they will soon depart from Earth completely - take to the skies, fight the "bad" cylons a while, work things out, and end by finding a hospitable planet that is not Earth.

I think Lee's speech to the Quorum was important in telling us which direction the show will end generally: We're giving up the old ways, the old gods, the prophecies and forging our own path now....etc. etc.

And I'm curious about what they're going to elaborate upon regarding the beings on the Earth having been cylons and not humans....yet living like humans.

As soon as Courtney and I saw the cylon parts on Earth, it started to come together. The fleet found cylon parts, and came to the conclusion that the 13th Tribe was cylon. Here's another theory: the 13th Tribe was human, but ended up at Earth and nuked the cylons. IE: humans did to cylons on Earth, what cylons did to humans back on Caprica. Another example of the two being the same; capable of the same goods and the same evils. It's precisely the kind of thing the show likes to do, and it fits pretty nicely with the "all of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again" meme, too.

I think the mutual destruction of their societies will show them that this is where their conflicts inevitably end up, and the shocking realization of the inevitability of it will force them to try to put aside their differences. Or not. There's got to be a couple more shockers in store. And it does kind of "feel" like the characters deciding the 13th tribe was cylon probably means we're supposed to believe it, too. But it was said rather quickly, too, and requires a lot more explanation, so maybe they're simply mistaken.

Re: Ellen. Pretty hard to guess, if only because the way it makes sense hasn't been given to us yet. Any reasoned speculation is going to have to be based on the pieces we already have, so you can't really reason out the last Cylon being someone like Ellen, if the reason it makes sense hasn't been revealed yet.

The way it happened kind of makes it seem as if the Final Five had the equivalent of "backups" over on Caprica, which downloaded all the way from Earth when the planet was nuked. Did it take 2,000 years for them to get over there? Who knows. But they're cylons, and they died on Earth and came back on Caprica, so some kind of new download process seems likely. In the flashback, Ellen seemed to realize they were going to be downloaded elsewhere, and was reassuring Tigh that they'd end up together. This makes it sound like the process is random, and that she simply thought fate would bring them together to the same place, wherever they ended up.

More important, though, is that it was clearly understood that they'd end up somewhere else. So either a) the Final Five were special and knew it even then, or b) all cylons on Earth thought they'd end up somewhere else, and either only the Final Five did, or the others were dispersed elsewhere.

If it's some variation of b), then this whole thing is starting to feel like a metaphor for Hinduism, where beings jump from life to life to try to slowly change and break out of the seemingly inevitable cycles they keep falling into.

Courtney called the Dualla suicide pretty early -- mainly from the look on her face as the shuttle was flying back from Earth. I agreed, but changed my mind when she was talking to Lee.

As for Starbuck...whew...who knows? I thought she'd pull the pilot's head back, it'd clearly be recognizable as her, and the music would pick up and let us know we'd seen a revelation. But it didn't. It was vague...BSG's never vague when it's intentionally revealing crucial information. Sure enough, the end of the episode comes, and we learn it's Ellen, instead.

So, what the heck's going on with Starbuck? It can't be something as goofy and cheap as having a twin. So, was she cloned? Either way, why did she seem so optimistic about showing them the way to Earth, if she'd been there and it was a wasteland? Whatever she saw, it wasn't the Earth they ended up at.

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?

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)?

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.

Dualla's suicide: Honestly didn't see it coming. I was sure in the beginning of the episode that they had flung her into the forefront here because she would be the final cylon, and I was actually MAD about that (since we hadn't seen much of her lately and I was feeling a bit manipulated) ... so my mind was in a totally different place when she was standing there at her locker. The gun came up and I flinched and said out loud, "Didn't see THAT coming."

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.??

BTW, I love this show.

One more question, Yoda, regarding your theory: I am assuming that they speak of the same Earth we live on. (Same name, we saw Florida at the end of season 3, songs from our time period, etc.)....

How does your theory fit in with the fact that we are here now? Is this all in the future? the distant past? or are they saying WE are cylons now? (After all, the cylons are hearing songs from OUR LIFETIMES, and Tyrol and Anders have said the song feels as if it is from their childhoods.)

Just curious about your thinking on this aspect of things: the "Earth"ness of their Earth.

One more comment: Am I the only one who kept thinking last night, "Where's Charlton Heston and the Statue of Liberty?"

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.

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.


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.


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.

Yeah, this is the part of the series that ticks me off. When we saw Earth at the end of the season 3, I jumped up and yelled at Courtney "that was Florida! THAT WAS FLORIDA!" I'm pretty sure the Season 3 thread is probably filled with us talking about all sorts of weird theories about how the 13th tribe becomes us some how, or something kinda-sorta like that.

As interesting as this is (and there are ways to make it work...if certain things hadn't already happened), I don't think it fits with Season 4. I don't think it's our Earth. The song thing seems to contradict this, but Ronald Moore's on record saying some goofy stuff about liking the idea of one song existing across multiple planes of existence, or somesuch nonsense.

Total cop out, I know, because as soon as we hear the lyrics, the logical conclusion is that their universe is our universe, and at some point this is going to tie back into our recorded history somehow. But I don't think it is...I think it's just some weird multiverse thing that caught Moore's fancy, and it's in the show even if its presence is misleading.

Still think it should have been Zak Adama, by the way.

I'm still not wrapping my mind around some of the aspects of that 2000-yr-old civilization of cylons. So, what happened? Some humans back then created cylons and THOSE cylons rose up, did whatever, ended up on Earth without humans around and yet lived like humans live ... apparently procreating, not having tons of "copies" of themselves like the cylons we know now ... markets, food, clothing, etc. ... all very human ....

Where were the humans at that point? On some other nearby planet? Is that where our gang will all end up? Or are those humans still living (assuming they simply nuked the cylons and went back to what they were doing)?

Oh, one last complaint, unless I'm missing something else: How CONVENIENT that they landed just where they needed to, in order to find Kara's plane, in order for Tyrol to find exactly where he died, etc. I realize there was a snippet where folks in small reconnaissance ships reported back that things elsewhere on the planet were the same, etc. etc., but honestly, what are the odds of them ending up in these spots? Or do we get to cry "destiny" and "special purpose" and stuff like that again? It's starting to feel a bit too convenient....

/gripe

Moore actually SAID that stuff about the song? No no no .... I cry foul then. I shouldn't have to watch webisodes or podcasts or see interviews or read articles to figure things out in this show. If they're playing 20th century rock songs and showing us Florida, then it's totally misleading to then have it not be Earth, or to be rewriting Earth history so that it's cylons and no humans and nothing from our past at all.

He might LIKE that concept, but add it onto Florida sightings, breathable atmosphere and water, everyone speaking freakin' ENGLISH, and you've now broken faith with your television audience, IMHO. I sure hope they explain it IN THE SHOW somehow.

We don't know yet, exactly, but they said that the cylon pieces they found on Earth were not the same as the cylons we've known up to this point -- similar, but not their own technology. I think this plays into the idea that things are cyclical and inevitable -- any intelligent society is going to have "the cylon problem" at some point. This is a separate part of the universe which ended up having similar problems.

Overly expanded theory that I don't think is true coming up...

Maybe it was a complete mirror: humans on Caprica create machines to make up for their own flawed nature and physical limitations. Perhaps cylons on Earth felt they needed to create something organic to give life meaning, utilize emotion more, or something of the sort. Even the cylons we've known up to this point have been desperately trying to mimic humanity in as many ways as possible. Maybe the idea is that both human and cylon initially lack the strengths of the other, and both are doomed to create the other and be overthrown by them. Not just cyclical, but parallel, too.

I don't think this is necessarily what's happening, but part of me thinks that there might not be a grand link that explains both societies. I think the "coincidence" aspect is going to be intentional, but not be a coincidence. It will be part of the idea that these things are cyclical, and can and will happen thousands of light years apart. IE: it's built into life as-is, and not unique to the society we've been following. At a certain point, any advanced society will have these problems.

The exception to this is the Final Five. Clearly they were on Earth, and found their way to New Caprica (still think the cross-universe download makes the most sense). But I don't think they're responsible for the other society, or anything like that.

Admittedly, this is all getting kinda murky. But I do feel pretty good about the idea that they're getting a rare glimpse at another iteration of the cycle they're going through now, and that the privilege of seeing where it ends up gives them a shot to make it different this time.

I hope so, too. And I wouldn't put it past them to engage in some pretty blatant misdirection. I'll let you know if I can find the link, because I remember reading it and thinking basically the same thing you're saying now.

Of course, as much as it would tick me off, I have to concede that the song thing is kind of inconsequential. In other words, it doesn't "break" the plot -- swap in a song you and I don't know, and it makes just as much sense. Still unfair to make us speculate, but it wouldn't be a plot hole.

It does kind of fit with the cyclical thing discussed in the post above, though: if one of the premises of the show is going to be that any society will face "the cylon problem" of their own creations overthrowing them, it's a pretty small leap to the idea that certain songs and ideas are inevitable in all societies. Sounds stupid, but it seems like it's consistent with where the show is going. The central premise being that these things aren't really coincidences, but part of the fabric of every universe, even if the specifics vary.

And what? Land shaped like Florida is cyclical too? Nope, I'm not buying it, not in terms of the song. I mean, it was identical in MUSIC and LYRICS. They could just as easily have just WRITTEN a little ditty or tune and used THAT as the trigger, the "song from childhood," etc.

It is just downright misleading to use an actual song from our lifetimes AND show us Florida AND call it Earth. That's a lot of misdirection, if you ask me. Smells more like jumping the shark if it's all coincidental and these three elements (song, Florida, Earth) have nothing to do with our actual Earth.

That's my firm opinion about it -- I'd feel swindled if it's not our Earth in some form. (Note: This doesn't take into account the possibility that they landed on the wrong planet. Totally different topic.)

She's a double from another time. She entered the worm hole and went back to earth, she probably destroyed earth when she was there and ended up in another wormhole back at the fleet. I'm not set on her destroying earth but it seems pretty likely. She is the harbinger of death after all so she did something terrible.

I don't think we're going to get a bunch of elaboration. As I mentioned quite awhile ago I thought cylons were humans and vice versa and that this cycle is going to keep happening if something doesn't change. I hope that they continue to merge the two "tribes" (the fleet and the cylons) and end the war with the rest of the cylons. How they get to that point could esily take up the last 9 epps.

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I find the double-time-travelly-type thing with the wormhole intriguing ... hmmm...

However, are you saying that perhaps Kara's coming through the wormhole and landing on Earth is what caused the nuked state of the planet? 'Cuz I thought they determined that it had been two thousand years since the nuking. Or did she travel back thru the wormhole, back those 2K years, nuke the planet, then....well, she'd have to find a way to get back thru the wormhole to be alive again, wouldn't she?

I'm missing something here, I know it. Enlighten me further....

This is easily the strongest and at the same time weakest element in Sci-fi stories; The Time Space Continuum. It has been done so many times and it always is going to be full of holes when put under a microscope. Simply becasue its all just conjecture to begin with yeah?

What is fun about it when its done right is that it doesn't always have to make sense. It just needs to feel right in order for the fans to buy into it. They've set it up pretty nicely by having her disapear in the manner she first disappeared and with the way they brought her back to the show they could conceivably not explain it any more than they already have and get away with it.


Be ready for that possibilty by the way, I read a little something about her character and her thoughts on how the finale turned out and she wasn't thrilled with the lack of closure her character had. So read into that what you will but that could very well mean that the show is simply going to run out of time before they can adequately explain what happened to her. And honestly, I don't think I want them to. Whenever a show like this tries to explain messing with the time space continuum it can come off as silly because nobody can really know about it anyway right?

The time/space theory I suscribe to is the one that goes like this; as soon as someone enters a wormhole/vortex/what have you and enters another time or dimension there is now a split in the time line which in turn means that there are two kara's so in terms of BSG they have already had a conclusion to one of the kara's who somehow died in a viper on Earth. So all that's left is the new kara or old kara, which is neither here nor there because she's still "kara" get it? So if there's no "closure" that's fine because it is what it is, she is simply there and there really isn't a logical or scientific explanation for it.

Anyway, as far as whether or not she nuked the planet or not. It seems pretty unlikely that she herself nuked the planet but I'm pretty certain we're going to find out that she was involved somehow.

I suppose you're right, PW, about the time-space thing. And yeah, if Kara went through the wormhole, and it was a time-warp wormhole, just as her first ship exploded, then the second Kara that didn't die could easily have come back, ship intact (although their inspection said it was "brand new," not just "not exploded" -- how does your theory explain the ship getting newer than before she left?), with no memory of the two months she was away. (She thought it was merely a few hours.) It would also explain why her memories up to that point are intact.

It still doesn't explain how a ship that exploded in space FAR from Earth ended up on Earth. I don't recall, but didn't it explode OUTSIDE the wormhole, before it entered? And that's why Apollo saw it, because he was right there also outside the wormhole?

Not explaining the time-space continuum is one thing, but some of this stuff is just sloppy writing and plot holes. They've gotta know that BSG nerds nitpick this stuff to DEATH and they'd never get away with making sloppy mistakes, right? (right??)

I do, though, get what you're saying about it merely having to "feel" right. That's what we all loved about "Back to the Future" -- it felt like how most of us would interpret time travel, and it worked internally.

And it didn't have stupid writing mistakes where A=B one minute and then doesn't the next.