Battlestar Galactica 1.7 — "Six Degrees of Separation" (spoilers ho)

Cafe Society
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New episode tonight.

Questions:

Will there be repercussions for Adama’s unilateral (and, I still think, legally questionable) decision to close the tribunal and end the investigation? Is Sgt Hadrian still confined to quarters?

Will Chief Tyrol’s conflicting loyalties (to Boomer vs duty) finish wrestling with one another? Will he tell anyone what he is clearly beginning to suspect?

Is Starbuck still being kept in the background in sickbay, after several weeks of being front and center?

Will they remember they have a captured Cylon raider, since they didn’t talk about it at all last week? Or has it been stuck in the same corner where Enterprise keeps its Suliban pod?

Why was it important for Boomer II back on Caprica to keep Helo alive and under observation?

Is anybody going to comment on Baltar’s odd behavior? (I halfway expect to see him in the corridor talking to his fist: “Daggit flavored kee-ses!”)

How’s the President’s New Age cancer treatment going?

And will her curly-haired aide get a line this week, after a couple of episodes in a row of standing around off to the side?

And from last week’s preview for this week’s show: Number Six is talking to Adama? What the hell? Okay, speculation ahead— either this is the actual human on which the Cylons based their Number Six design, just to mess with people; or this is another copy of the Number Six model; or there really is a chip in Baltar’s head and it can project realities into other people’s minds, not just his. The last is stupid and Star Trekky; I don’t know which of the first two I think is better. Either way, Baltar is fracked. :slight_smile:

Standard weekly questions: Who gets naked and screws? What will be the latest thing to be messed up by the overworked and undersupervised enlisteds?

Rumor line: Second season to start shooting next month, will air in the fall, will have 20 (!) episodes. Unconfirmed, but… —crosses fingers—

Also, I’ve been checking out some of the interviews online, and I had no idea that Jamie Bamber, the guy who plays Lee Adama (Apollo), is actually British. Seriously, check it out. Oh, and for another amusing interview, read this chat with Aaron Douglas, who plays Chief Tyrol, and find out how his unabashed love of the 70’s original made him severely skeptical of the remake idea.

—can’t wait, can’t wait, can’t wait—

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That was a pretty cool interview. You know, I didn’t really like Tyrol in the mini-series, although now I don’t even remember why. He & Helo are two of my favorite characters. They drive me crazy. I just want to grab them and shake them and demand, “what are you thinking??? She’s a Cylon! Please, please just say something, one thing, anything so I can go to sleep tonight not thinking you are a totally clueless moron!”

And to Helo: “Please, in the name of all that’s holy, LOOK UP! Just once, please frakin’ look uuuuuuup!!!”

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[SPOILER]
This is a good one even though it is a rip off of the Kevin Costner move No Way Out. They use the plot device of a photo being enhanced over a long period of time. This photo will show if Boltar is a traitor. The evidence was brought in by a real number six. This screws with Boltar’s head even more. It’s a Boltar episode and he is really good in it.

I wonder if they are going to use the ending from the movie No Way Out?[/SPOILER]

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Two things that cracked me up: her name being Shelly Godfrey, as in “god (will set you) free” and Baltar whistling the theme to the original series while sitting on the can.

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Some random thoughts:

Probably my second-favorite episode so far–after 33.

The guy who plays Baltar does indeed do an excellent job. He really looked like a man on the edge.

LOVED the restroom scene! “But you didn’t wash your hands!”

Tricia Helfer is great, as always. She has the most magnificent nose.

The religious aspect of the Cylons (or, at least, Number Six) is intriguiing–I’m sure they will continue to develop that storyline. Thankfully, it wasn’t overplayed in this episode.

Octagonal CD’s!

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I don’t know if this has been proposed yet, but I’m starting to wonder if 6’s “God” isn’t an abstract concept for the main cylon supercomputer somewhere.

If someone brought up this same point a couple weeks back, please tell me, because I can’t remember if I heard it somewhere or came to the conclusion on my own.

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Well, I believe I have an idea for a Cylon detector. Well, for detecting hot female Cylons, anyway. Dr. Baltar should quite like it, I think.

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Best come-back ever:

“No more Mr. Nice Gaius!”

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FWIW, we can infer that Baltar never did it with her doggy-style. For that matter, we haven’t seen him on top. BoomerBot was on top with Helo, too.

Small open issue with “Shelly’s” corporeality. She just disappeared when her work was done, leaving me the impression that the V-chip in Baltar’s head can broadcast mind-control rays to an entire ship. No explanation for the glasses Adama found, but she could have just grabbed them somewhere - so the V-chip has telekinetic powers too?

Still no clue what the Cylon detector will actually do, or who suspects BG Boomer of Cylonitude and why. HPL, I like your idea of a Cylon Master Control Program - maybe the series can end with a software crash?

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Some things that bugs me about the captured Cylon Raider.

Ok first off, nobody seems freaked by the idea that the insides are biological.

And the that the bio parts seem to be sustaining themselves without food.
But why, is there room for a person?

Could there have been a cylon in the raider that just wandered off?

Did the Cylons want it to be captured?

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I, too, am concerned that no one has given a thought to the care and feeding of the probably very hungry–and sore (it’s got people crawling inside it’s guts, for crying out loud!)–Cylon raider.

Here’s a question: Do the “vintage” Cylons we see stalking around on Caprica also have meaty insides? (Helo never stops to examine the scrap heaps after he shoots them.) Or are they the same boring robots that the Colonials built decades earlier?
And my favorite part of the episode: The Colonials’ Cylon-induced computerphobia means that a simple (well, nowadays … I remember running Photoshop 2.5 on a 68020-based Mac II …) Unsharp Mask Photoshop filter takes an entire day to render! I thought that was a nice touch.

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I missed the episode in which bthe Cylon was brought aboard, but as I watched this episode it occurred to me that they are all pretty unconcerned with the possible effects of cranking up a self-aware cylon weapon INSIDE the Galactica, particularly when the technique for doing so seems to be crawling around inside and yanking on things. If it were brought aboard my ship the metal parts would all be reduced to their component parts and the chunky insides would be a jars in a refrigerator in the brig.

Curate

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http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?p=5722534#post5722534

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PETA or PETC
More on the Glowing Spine of Passion (GSP ™):
That’s the only stupid thing in the series. I wonder if they will do anything else equally stupid.

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I was under the impression that starbuck scooped out a bit of brain material before she got in, but I could be wrong.

And if she did, it would make flying it tricky…

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Yeah, it looked like she was cleaning a giant catfish from below. There’s a picture of it in the dictionary when you look up “yuck”. :slight_smile:

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Have you seen the deleted scene at scifi.com?
WTH is the “unexpected function”?

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It looks like the raider took a crap! Too bad they didn’t leave that in for the humor value.

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What is the signifacance of the title?

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[QUOTE]
I, too, am concerned that no one has given a thought to the care and feeding of the probably very hungry–and sore (it’s got people crawling inside it’s guts, for crying out loud!)–Cylon raider.

[QUOTE]

I assumed the biological core of the Raider was running off the same power source as the mechanical components - perhaps the Raider is powered by a cold-fusion reactor, and one of its internal organs is engineered to process the electricity it produces into ATP.