All Your Basestar Are Belong To Us
io9 has its Monday summary of the previous Friday’s Battlestar Galactica episode. If you’ve seen it, then you know that Gaeta sang. A lot. And that he has a fantastic, mournful, voice. Go Alessandro!
So, has this episode changed my prediction of Dualla being the Final Cylon? I’m not sure, to be honest. On the one hand, this episode devoted quite a lot of screen time to Gaeta and his singing — and to Anders making a point of Gaeta’s Lament. However, it could just be a huge red herring. Some viewers are saying that Gaeta isn’t a big enough character to have the kind of impact that’s expected for the Final Reveal. The same is true of Dualla. However, like the other four, Gaeta was involved in the resistance and has been the person actually pushing the buttons to get humanity to Earth. Dyspeptic Mutterings has a succinct run-down of Gaeta’s influence from the beginning.
Certainly Gaeta’s pain from losing a leg fulfills part of the hybrid’s prophecy “in the howl of terrible suffering.” However, Gaeta has nothing for which to be redeemed (“hungering for redemption”). At one time he did, when everyone thought he was a Baltar supporter, but once it was revealed that he actually helped the resistance that faded. Cally would fulfill both these predictions, but she’d have to be resurrected. Considering they’re about to go into the resurrection hub, it would have quite an impact if she popped out of a tub of goo there, but how likely is that? Nothing so far has shown that the Final Five resurrect as the other models do. Here’s the part of the hybrid’s prophecy that I’m talking about:
And the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering.
As far as Kara Thrace and her Special Destiny goes, remember what else the hybrid said, that Starbuck “will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse. The harbinger of death. They must not follow her.” Certainly Starbuck has led the Cylons to their end, since once the resurrection hub is destroyed all Cylons will be mortal. I still won’t be surprised if there turns out to be two Starbucks — her old self (who is likely dead) and her new self (created by the Beings of Light). This would not be inconsistent with RDM saying that the Final Cylon isn’t in the Last Supper photo, if indeed Starbuck turns out to be the Final Cylon.
I keep thinking everyone is going to die except for Hera and Nikki, the new Eve and Adam who have genes from both humans and Cylons.
Hi Lisa, I thought I would finish up my guesses on “what it all means.”
Since it has been repeatedly pointed out by the show’s producers that Razor is, in fact, the first two episodes of this season rather than a stand-alone movie, I think it is meant to introduce important story points– chiefly, the origins of the human-like cylons and the prophetic warning given by the Geezer Hybrid to Kendra Shaw about Kara Thrace. (Why both Kendra Shaw and Kara Thrace have Special Destinies known beforehand by cylons, I don’t know.)
First, a long bit about the origins (spoilers and probable spoilers ahead). We know from the background laid out for the upcoming Caprica series that the very first human-like cylons were made by humans just before the first Cylon war. They were created by Daniel Graystone, the maker of the mechanical cylons, for a special purpose: to re-incarnate his teenage daughter Zoe and her friend Tamara Adama. His daughter was a genius who had devised a way to upload her personality into artificial intelligence before dying in an explosion with Tamara (Joseph Adama’s daughter, the Admiral’s older sister)
Daniel Graystone and Joseph Adama collaborated to give the uploaded personalities new organic bodies (Tamara is assumed to also have been uploaded into and AI program by her friend). Joseph Adama is said to have been horrified by the results and turned his back on the project.
Unknown to the fathers, the two daughters had been part of a secret monotheistic sect. The explosion that killed them was caused by Zoe’s boyfriend, the most fervent monotheist among them.
Speculation: Zoe is downloaded into a new body. Zoe then insists on a new body for her dead boyfriend as well, but is refused by her father. She finds a way to take control of mechanical cylons and uses them to build a body for her boyfriend. Her reincarnated boyfriend, combining his zealot’s will with newfound power, decides it is destiny that he should convert the world to monotheism. Refused by Zoe, he destroys her and begins experimenting to build more human-like cylons. In the process, he initiates the first cylon war– a war that ends at the exact moment of the conclusion of those experiments (as witnessed by Bill Adama in Razor). At this point, he is able to replicate the human-like cylons, but not create truly new beings.
Joseph Adama would have been in part responsible for the war and he may have sought to correct his mistake. That’s why I think he might have downloaded himself into the body of Romo Lampkin to continue the fight. He would fit the description of, “the fifth, still in shadow, will claw toward the light, hungering for redemption that will only come in the howl of terrible suffering.” Although he doesn’t seem to be howling and/or suffering terribly as of yet, he would certainly be hungering for redemption.
Wow, I didn’t even get to my main point… will continue later.
continued…
Gaeta could be the final cylon, his character is certainly more significant than either Tory or Anders. But dramatically, it would still be a big “so what?” One mystery still surrounding Gaeta though is from the scene where he visited Baltar in the brig prior to his trial. Baltar whispered something to Gaeta that made him fly into a rage. Could be significant.
[Stupid observation: All hidden cylons so far have a name that starts with “T”: Tyrol, Tigh, Tory, and Samuel T. Anders. If this is significant, and, god, I hope it’s not, then Tom Zarek and Kara Trace would be lead suspects (or perhaps a detoxed Ellen Tigh– although I think she is human and may have been saved by one of the Cavils… and is now looking for revenge against the rest of the human race).]
Anyways, back to the big picture. Most of the prophesies on the show are literally true, but are parsed in a left-handed manner that make them true in unexpected ways. So when the hybrids say “all this has happened before, and all of it will happen again, again, again…” I think that means the war between man and machine has happened exactly once before. Specifically, it happened on Kobol. The people of the 12 colonies are not people at all. They are an earlier evolution of “skin jobs.”
For a race that has had spaceflight technology for thousands of years, the colonials seem to have little in the way of non-mythologized history. I think the 12 lords of Kobol were in fact 12 models of organic androids who eventually managed to reproduce naturally– as the cylons now seek to do.
The spacefaring planet of Kobol was left abandoned and destroyed, yet the colonial scriptures never say why. The colonials probably left Kobol after a devastating war with their creators, actual humans. The real humans are probably the “13th tribe” that returned to their home planet… Earth. The colonials may have been programmed not to think about Earth or the days on Kobol when the “gods” lived among them. In lieu of actual history, they may have adopted a mishmash of Greek and Roman mythology to fill in their origins.
The Six in Galactica’s brig mentioned that, in their research, the cylons have come to know more about the colonials than the colonials know about themselves. I believe the cylons are aware that the colonials were created and are hoping that somewhere deep in their collective memory is the path to Earth, supposed home of the cylons’ one true god.
So when the hybrids say “Kara Thrace will lead the human race to its end. She is the herald of the apocalypse. The harbinger of death. They must not follow her,” the human race in question may not be the colonials, but the people of Earth they will meet.
Like you, I also feel there will be very few people left at the end of the series, but rather than just Hera and Nicky, I’ll bet there will be 12 survivors.