Battlestar Galactica 1.8 — "Flesh and Bone" (spoiler spoiler bo boiler)

Cafe Society
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New episode tonight. I’m all a-quiver.

Questions:

Is Boomer One going to come back to the flight deck and dry-hump the Cylon Raider again? Is Chief Tyrol gonna wake the hell up? Who wrote “Cylon” on Boomer’s mirror?

Re the Raider, will there be any further speculatin’ on why it’s got a gooey filling instead of wires and gears? Maybe the epithet “chrome toaster” needs to be changed to “shiny meatbox” or something. Or perhaps that’ll be the title of Christina Aguilera’s new CD. Anyway.

How’s Baltar’s Cylon detector coming? They must be getting close to either (1) a trial run of some kind or (2) the end of Adama’s patience.

And speaking of Baltar, did his religious conversion “stick,” so to speak?

Any further sign of the Amazing Vanishing Number Six, or any other Cylon agents running through the fleet? (There has to be, since last week’s preview shows Adama tasking Starbuck with the interrogation of a suspect. Knowing this show, it’s even money at this point whether their suspect is actually a Cylon or just a victim of paranoia.)

Is Master-at-Arms Hadrian still locked up?

Since Boomer Two boffed Helo, does that mean she gets to live inside his head now?

Any further developments with Zarek or anyone else on the prison ship?

Is President Roslin ever going to square with her public about her worsening condition?

Will that one doctor graduate from tobacco and painkillers and start shooting Space Smack during his exams?

The Cylons apparently have a plan; is it getting any clearer? (My early theory: They’re driving the humans, herding them basically, in hopes of discovering Kobol or whatever the original colony is, and then after that Earth, so they can wipe out every last human. The fleet isn’t in any real danger, because the Cylons need them to follow the bread crumbs, but they don’t know that yet.)

By the way, I noticed last week that Baltar got to deliver the “previously, on BSG” line for the recap at the beginning, and then we got a Baltar episode. I wonder if this holds true for all the eps: whoever is the focus of the show gets to introduce the recap. Hmmm.

Oh, and if anyone missed this at the end of the last thread: Season two starts shooting next month, it will have 20 episodes (up from first season’s 13), and it will premiere this summer. No word yet on whether the citrusey bastards in the UK will once again steal the privilege of initial eppy exposure from us supremely noble American viewers, who by all rights are much more deserving of the honor of the first viewing, neener neener.

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Banana fanna fo foiler.

–Cliffy

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This is one week where I have no clue what will happen (I had some guesses for previous episodes–all turned out wrong).

The only thing I know is that I’m going to be sitting on my couch with popcorn ready–and if my cable dares to go out as it did last night during The Apprentice, Comcast is going to meet my inner bitch!

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I just thought of something…

the cylon craft is a robot…

and Boomer says you have to treat it like a pet…

Are they going to start calling it Muffet? :smiley:

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me my mo moiler…
Can Cylons get pregnant? That would be interesting, I think. Or incredibly dumb.

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Of course they can. :slight_smile:

Just imagine the day when Boomer gives birth to a shiney new toaster.

Chief: “It doesn’t look anything like me”

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I love Leoben! The actor, Callum Rennie has got the greatest midwestern/Canook accent. He tries, but he can’t hide it. Makes me miss where I grew up.

And yeah, whoever’s featured in the episode gets to do the “previously on BSG” line.

Yup, more dry humping. “How’d you come up with that?” “I’m a Cylon.” “That’s not funny!”

Yes, Tyrol is still dumber’n a homemade radio.

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Oh, to be that raider…

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They can’t help it. They’re only foreigners.

The obvious parallel is to torturing Iraquis. I’m surprised someone wasn’t named Gonzales.

Why don’t they use the airlock as an air lock? Why throw away all that breathable atmosphere? Pump it out the airlock (you get to watch the bad guy suffocate) and open the airless airlock to the vacumn of space. That’s why the call it an airlock, you morons! Poetic license be damned.

What’s the G-d deal? Our Heroes are heathens and the Bad Guys are Monotheists? I’m confused.

I like the continuity of Starbucks injury.
Strange for her to “wimp out” and pray for the guy. Er, it.

Is her name Thrace? It says Kara in the TV Guide thingie, but I thought someone called her Thrace. The Winged Victory of Samthrace is a Greek statue of Nike. Nike was a US missile interceptor of the cold war.
I will not be led into digression.
How many “Cylons In The Head” is the series allowed?

Balthar’s Cyclon Detector ™ works. How did he know to build it, did he test Six?
I thought it was a ruse to get a Nuclear Device for Six.

Boomer on Carpithia or Karpas or Corinth (whatever) is going to be the Battlestar Ponderosa Good Bad guy?..Sorry. The concept of the Good/Bad guy from Bonanza.

I’d like to see some more of how they renew supplies.

I want for my answering machine, “Combat Command, Col. Teighe”.

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Answering from north of the Mason-Dixon:

Lt. Kara Thrace is Starbuck. Thrace is ancient Bulgaria.

I wonder if they wrote this with Abu Gharaib in mind?

Why is the President having premonitions?

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Where did they get the 8"x10" glossy of the cylon and why wasn’t it octagonal? First case of poor continuity I’ve noticed in the series so far.

For all her talk of ignoring the cylons’ attempts at sowing mistrust, Madame Pres. sure looked suspicious of Adama at the end there!

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Might be related to that weird vibe she was giving off right at the end there. Anybody else get that? Like she was having sort of a… vision or a Messanaic revelation or something. Connected to her cancer?

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I get the impression that Our Heroes are polytheists. I distinctly remember hearing a reference to “the gods of Cobol” in this episode. (No, I don’t know what the proper spelling is.) So I don’t see Starbuck’s praying as “wimping out”…she was praying to her gods, not his god.

Her name is Kara Thrace.

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Wow. I never thought that Baltar’s cylon detector would actually work! I wonder what he’s going to do now that he knows Boomer is a cylon but is too afraid to let on. I don’t know why he didn’t just tell her she passed the test then call security the minute she left. Then again, he’s Baltar–he’s not supposed to make sense.

I’m beginning to think there’s some real animosity between the Boomer model and the Six model. Both GalacticaSix and CapricaSix were acting pretty hostile towards their respective Boomers.

What was with the whole “standing by the stream” thing. I couldn’t figure out what the guy was talking about. Is he describing what it’s like to wake up in different bodies and be immortal, or is there something more?

At first I thought the president’s visions were caused (at least partially) by some of the meds she’s taking for her cancer. After her first vision, she said some to Billy about having side effects. And she was looking at her pill bottle right after waking up. However, the scene with the cylon getting blown out of the air lock was the same as shown in her dream. So there may more to them than just med-induced hallucinations.

The torture part was interesting. I got the obvious Abu Grahib analogy, but I think there was more to it. The humans are still struggling to figure out how to think of the human-looking cylons. Are they human enough to be treated as such or are they just machines in human form? Is torturing something that looks human and appears to feel pain (though you don’t know if he/it actually does) still wrong?

If Adama is a cylon, I’m going to be one upset fan! I, for one, don’t believe it. It’s probably just a ruse to throw suspicion around. I know Adama said earlier that this model doesn’t outright lie, but the whole bomb thing was pretty much just that.

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another thing about the Adama debate…

[spoiler]in the miniseries opening, the deck crew give him a photo of him and his younger sons, Zack and Lee, standing in front of his Mk. 2 Viper, and since Lee is still alive, it’s clear he and his wife had kids, at this point, we’re not sure if Cylons are capable of biological reproduction, and if they are, if they’re compatible with humans

yes, the photo could be a fake, yes Lee and Cmr. Adama could be sleeper models with faked memories, but does that mean that Zack was also a sleeper model, Adama, Lee, and Kara all remember him…

the same Viper is revealed later in the show, same I.D. letters and pilot name below the cockpit, yes all Vipers look the same, and they could have easily repainted another one, or slapped the engine panels from Adama’s on another Mk. 2…
[/spoiler]
as it stands right now, there’s too much evidence that the Commander is a lowly meatbag like the rest of us, i think the cylon was trying to plant disinformation

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Overall, the most thematically interesting, and downright disturbing, episode I’ve seen yet, and another example of the high overall quality of the acting performances papering over most of the plotting implausibilities (a fighter pilot assigned to carry out an interrogation? They haven’t got a single qualified intelligence officer on board?)

Anyway, a remarkably (and unflinchingly) brutal treatment of the torturer’s mindset, in which the most horrifying behavior is perfectly justified because regardless of outward appearances the victim is simply not human. I was especially creeped out by the President’s choice of how to deal with the Cylon, which smacked quite a lot of her actually enjoying watching him die at her command. After all the effort the series has expended on showing her moral agonizing over the choices she’s had to make, it was shocking, even if not totally unexpected, that she’d get off on having such absolute and summary power.

Well, there’s a dead Cylon laying around the BSG morgue. Maybe he used that one to set the detection parameters, whatever they may be.

BTW, yet another classic bit of character business by Adama, as he briefly appears about to lose it completely and start beating the dead Cylon with the telephone receiver he’s holding, then visibly forces himself to regain his composure. Once again, Olmos is The Man.

As for not turning in the Boomerbot, despite his many eccentricities Baltar is nothing if not quick on the uptake, and probably realized immediately that she is not an immediate threat, and that his knowledge of Boomer’s true state could provide some useful leverage somewhere further down the road.

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Well, it does kind of look like her. :slight_smile:

http://www.artchive.com/artchive/G/greek/winged_victory.jpg.html
I wonder of their descendents will start the religion of the Greeks, or if Earth will truly be a failed colony of theirs.

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Thanks, good point, although I still think said parameters should be an octagonal blue video and someone with an IQ greater than 50 to watch the GSP™.
:slight_smile:

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That was my thought as well. I consider the idea a couple weeks back and came to the same conclusion. He has kids, he’s been in the fleet since the original war, and his face is fairly famous.

Sounds very doubtful to me. I immediaty thought “Yeah, you also said there was a nuke in the fleet”.

Also, for some reason, the toture of the cylon vaguly reminded me of what I’ve read about the early christian matryrs. People who were often tortured by the polytheistic majority and went to their death confident of their place in heaven.

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Oh yeah. That was great.

Interesting bit of reading: executive producer Ron Moore’s 2/19 blog.

Lots more there. Fascinating stuff.