Battlestar Galactica 1.12 — "Kobol's Last Gleaming (1)" (here there be spoilers)

Cafe Society
#1

Second-to-last episode of the first season airs tonight. It’s the first half of a two-parter, to be concluded next week in the season finale.

Questions:

From the preview: Which Boomer is eating her gun? If it’s the Galactica Boomer, does this mean something has changed? Does she not believe what Baltar told her about the test? Or do we find out who wrote “Cylon” on Boomer’s mirror a few weeks ago? Oh, and has Tyrol told anyone about his suspicions yet?

Also from the preview: A base ship? Frak.

After several weeks of incremental development, the Caprica plotline has been suddenly kicked up a notch or nine. So— what’s Helo gonna do now that he knows something’s hinky with his glowspine bunk buddy? Does he flee from her, or try to take her out? And does she try to follow him, or does she go back to Six with her biomechanical tail between her legs? (Mmm, biomechanical tail…)

Does Baltar, the new VP, have any duties, or is he just Roslin’s designated successor? And does his belief that he’s an instrument of God interfere with this at all? On a related note, how many have gone through the Cylon tester?

Is Starbuck off the crutches yet? Did the scuffle with the gun-toting nebbish impact her physical therapy?

Does Roslin, knowing there’s an election due in a few months, continue her ethically questionable political machinations? How much is she buying her apparent role in the ancient prophecies?

Speaking of machinations, does the defeated Zarek slink back into the shadows, or does he continue to play a prominent role in the story? And what was with that significant look he shared with Ellen Tigh? (And is her husband still on the sauce?)

And speaking of prophecies, how will Roslin try to reconcile her apparent destiny with Adama’s confession, at the end of the miniseries, that he doesn’t really know where Earth is?

Any more discoveries or developments with the Cylon Raider in the hangar?

What’s the meaning of the title? Do they have a lead on the apparently historically and religiously important planet of Kobol?

They’ve solved their fuel and water problems, but what about food? Are they to the point of straining the corn out of the sewage or what? (Or maybe that’s where Tigh is getting the grain for his liquor.)

Who gets naked this week?

Spoiler policy: If it’s been aired in the U.S., it doesn’t have to be hidden in a spoiler box. If it hasn’t been aired in the U.S. and you’re worried people might not want to see it or know about it, hide it in a spoiler box, but make sure to label what’s being hidden so we can decide for ourselves whether or not to read it.

And if it’s been aired in the U.K. but not the U.S., please feel free to mention in your spoiler that I’m a jingoistic wanker for posting an America-centered policy. :wink:

Example:

Regarding the climax of next week’s finale, from the frakkin’ cover of TV Guide:Apparently it’s going to be a mind-bending cliffhanger, instead of a clean ending. I’m anticipating a lot of gnashing of teeth and rampant speculation in next week’s thread. Woot!

#2

I thought it was the Galactica Boomer, based on not having that weird glowing lighting the Caprica Cylons have. Tyrol is keeping his mouth shut to keep out of trouble (is his crewmember still in the brig?).

Baltar’s just the designated successor. He’s back to working the detector (and going to state funerals).

Starbuck was off her crutches enough to dance witn Apollo last week.

Roslin isn’t running for re-election unless Zarek looks like a winner. She may not even live that long. Ellen’s “look” at him was a drunken slut’s interest in somebody powerful and glamorous.

No other guesses. Back after the airing.

#3

I’d really like to know what’s up with the food. Has anyone checked Roslin’s population board lately? Was Galactica stocked with a 10-year supply of protein-enriched noodles & vitamin-enriched green beans?

#4

Adamaramen?

#5

More like, Leobenoodles.

#6

What does it mean, “woot”?

#7

woot

#8

Woof.

#9

Woo hoo! Didn’t see that coming! “Oooh… Lee! Lee!”

#10

You know, except for having a hub-and-spoke design instead of a rectilinear grid, the scriptural illustration of the City of the Gods on Kobol looks a lot like a bird’s-eye-view sketch I once saw of Salt Lake City! :slight_smile: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlestar_Galactica_(1978)#Mormon_influence

But if the Twelve Colonies culture has just the one religion, why does Roslin’s personal assistant have to ask what Kobol is? That’s like an average American blanking at the mention of Jerusalem.

#11

Say, didn’t they play a game with hexagonal cards in the original series, too?

#12

Every time I’ve seem them play cards on Galactica, they’re hexagonal.

All in all I thought it was a good episode but there was one moment that really stood out. Commander Adama is examining the recon photos and at one point he says “I think we should seriously consider permanent settlement on this planet”

Whiskey Tango Foxtrot. Did I hear that right? Aren’t they running from an enemy that nuked their planet and sabotaged and destroyed their space fleet? How can they consider for even a second that one battlestar with limited vipers (and a rag tag fleet) could possibly defend any planet. Okay, I just thought of one way. They could go underground and try to camouflage themselves. Good luck finding the time to excavate living quarters before they’re discovered by the Cylons.

I had oringinally thought that finding a habitable planet would be useful to them. Maybe grab a few tons of water. Do they need any biomass? Collect samples of possible new food crops. I never thought that they could do more than establish an extremely limited and heavily camouflaged outpost.

Am I missing something?

#13

So, Helo & Boomer. When Helo was injecting himself with anti-radiation meds, Boomer said, “doesn’t really work as well as before, huh?” What does that mean? Boomer was slipping him special Cylon anti-radiation meds that work better, and now he’s using human meds and they don’t work?

What’s the deal with Apollo & Starbuck? Apollo seemed awfully upset about her sleeping with Baltar. Why should he care? I thought he was gay. What was that about the time she was drunk and couldn’t keep her hands off that major…? Does Starbuck just like to sleep with high ranking men? Was she sleeping around on Zak Adama?

President Roslin seemed reeeally stoned this episode, and way too into this scripture, myth & prophecy stuff. Has she lost it? What’s this about getting the Arrow of Apollo, taking it to Kobol, using it to open the tomb of Athena, find earth, blah, blah, blah? Doesn’t that strike you as pretty out there? Wasn’t her agreement with Adama that she’d keep his secret about Earth in exchange for his letting her be president? Is the deal off now? Billy seems older all of a sudden. Why did I find it somehow strange when Billy asked if he could get Roslin some more water? He’s awfully concerned she get enough water, and he seems to be the main supplier. Something in the water there, Billy?

I don’t have a problem with that. It’d be like someone mentioning to me they were going to Eden, and I’d be like, “Eden Nebraska, or the Eden?”

Anyone notice as the three Raptors FTL’d into the Kobol system they flashed red, then blue? Is that some sort of red-shift blue-shift thing going on? I guess I’m not going to waste too much time pondering it, since I doubt Ron Moore has. At least it seems whathisname is out of the brig, although he probably wishes he was back in the brig right about now.

So now we know a single Cylon Raider can jump from where ever they are, all the way back to Caprica? Doesn’t that mean the Cylons, by now, have been pretty much everywhere, and if there were an Earth, wouldn’t they have already found it? Why did Boomer say, when she and Crashdown first jumped into the Kobol system, “this isn’t Earth, it’s more important than that?” Maybe the Cylons have already found Earth somewhere, and it’s a burnt-out husk?

Have to agree with Kaboodle. What in the Gods name makes them think they can land on a planet and start over when the Cylons are everywhere? I wouldn’t even think about settling on a planet until I was on the far side of the galaxy and hadn’t seen a Cylon in years.

#14

Space’s a big place. Given enough time, maybe the Cylons would stumble upon Earth but that just hasn’t happened yet. Also, we’re assuming that Earth is in the same galaxy…has there been any assertion that this is the case? If Earth’s not in the same galaxy (or even if it’s way on the other side of the same one), then that makes the Cylon’s likelihood of finding it on their own even more remote, and makes them more reliant upon the human’s interpretation of religious theology to find it for them.

Adama’s saying that they should colonize this newly discovered planet isn’t unreasonable because he doesn’t believe that Earth exists, and by what’s known to them, this may be the only habitable planet they’ll ever find. What gets me is that we’re only 50 days out from Caprica and they’re finding Kobol for the first time in 2000 years? Somehow, the Cylons have led the humans to find Kobol on purpose (to let the humans solve the riddle of Earth’s location for them?), but the process by which this occurred is the real mystery. To believe Pres. Roslin, it’s because the prophecies says it should happen and it’s the will of the Gods. I think the answer is more sinister…who or what told Adama to send the fleet and its scouts to that place in space where Kobol is vs. another place where it isn’t?

Anyone else that’s a reader of Robert Jordan’s “Wheel of Time” series get an uneasy feeling over the mention of a “cycle of time” in BSG? :stuck_out_tongue:

#15

OK, upon reflection, I’m a dolt. Galactica-Boomerbot is the one that discovered Kobol for the humans. But still, the question remains, what role did the prophesies play in this? Did the Cylons read the prophecies and are forcing them to come true? To what ends?

#16

Actually, I kept thinking of the “Cycles of Time” in another Sci-fi Series “Lexx”. In that, there was a bit of talk of a prophecy, divined by a time prophet who predicted the future by looking into the old cycles of time to make things go right in this one.

“Time begins and then time ends. And then time begins once again. It has happened before, it is happening now, it will surely happen again”. All the same way, each time.

#17

The references to “This has all happened before, and it will all happen again” make me think of The Matrix movies and Neo’s conversation with the Architect about the destruction and rebuilding of Zion over and over.

#18

Yup, they played “Pyramid.”

More of the rules found near the bottom of this page.

Heh, I get to repeat a comment from last week’s thread:

Having seen last night’s ep, I’m going to revise my thoughts a bit. I think that the feelings are mutual, but with Apollo being so uptight all the time generally and with the ghost of Zack hanging overhead, Starbuck may have never really thought she had a chance. Seeing Apollo so ticked off about Baltar she knows now, maybe too late, that he does care for her personally on some level. Her failure to read his interest is then just one more way in which she’s managed to be a screw-up.

#19

Well, to be fair, they have been making FTL jumps pretty consistently even after the initial 230-something jumps, have they not? This at a not insignificant cost of fuel, too. They could have traveled much further than anyone else from the colonies ever tried, especially given that they are not worrying about having enough fuel for a trip back home.

Something just occurred to me - while the realization that a single Cylon Raider could jump so far might be pretty depressing on one hand (i.e., Cylon technology is considerably more advanced), it might also be encouraging. If all Cylon ships are so adept at getting around, then there could be fewer Cylons in total - they wouldn’t need really large numbers just to control space.

Idle speculation: I wonder if Starbuck manages to find Helo and rescue him. Then he can blow the whistle on Galactica-Boomer, if she doesn’t manage to get herself killed trying to rescue Chief Tyrol.

#20

More of the same: I think that Helo may believe that the Boomer-Bots on Caprica are clones of the original ‘human’ on Galactica.