A test could still be extremely useful even if you can’t test everybody. For instance, start by testing every member of the Galactica crew whose job gives them access to nukes or key life support systems. Then the rest of the officers. Then start testing any case where there’s circumstantial evidence against them, and in any lulls in that, work your way down a randomized list of enlisted Galactica crew. You might miss an embedded Cylon on one of the passenger liners, but you’d at least limit the damage they can do.
I don’t know how they trust Baltar at this point. It seems to be “he’s the genius, we have no choice” but they do. Again, jumps don’t seem to use much fuel. Jump into areas that aren’t mapped, find a planet, and start over. They can probably do more to restart their civilization on a planet than in space.
I know, I know, it puts them all in one place and no easy way to leave. That’s why I’m saying jump 25k light years across the galaxy. Heck, pick a questionable M-class (or is that a Star Trek term only?) planet that takes work and might be overlooked.
I mean, if Baltar is the only remaining scientist, how do they start over at any point? Put the scientists together working on things.
I’m only overthinking this because they are going for drama but also because we don’t know their resources and what they can do. Not sure they know, either.
Yes, that’s a Star Trek in world term. Which has been redefined a few times.
Based on the later episodes, as well as the water planet one, I believe we’re supposed to assume that habitable planets are darn rare. I also got the feeling that the jumps require a certain degree of calculation and navigation - a 25k light year jump is probably the equivalent of jumping blind - you have no way of knowing if you’re jumping into a black hole, a star, or what have you, although the odds are of course extremely in favor of empty space. Still, when you believe you’re the last of the species, taking that sort of risk is probably to be avoided.
Which ties into the end, where they do the blind jump with Starbuck’s coordinates - it’s still a desperate move.
But yeah, given the risks they faced from the Cylons repeatedly through the series, I think the math is good enough for taking the risk once to get the hell and away from the area, and then try a methodical search. But we all know the reason for that is that would have made for a very short series.
Was this the episode where Baltar tests Boomer and finds out she’s a Cylon? I remember that being one of my favorite scenes from this season - Baltar’s horror at realizing his MacGuyvered-together invention actually works, Head Six telling him what she might do if she knows he knows, his realizing that he’s in way over his head and deciding to lie to her.
I agree that this is not a good episode in most respects. I do think it does go to show the friendship between Adama and Saul and how he (Adama) can admit to mistakes and recognize when someone does a good job.
As to the Cylon raider, my contention is that it was injured, but eventually got better at which point it realized its position and went for a suicide run. How it got better, I don’t know but I can imagine it is kind of like blood clotting and you stop bleeding. I don’t think it was a deliberate ploy.
They did that at one point (a rather drab, rainy world), but it didn’t work out for some reason that I don’t recall any more. I think probably mostly because Baltar was President at the time, and anything with him in charge is bound to fail horribly.
I can’t remember how explicit this was in the series, but I understood it as: There’s some volume of space (bounded by the “Red Line”, I think they called it), where they know the astronomy of everything in that volume well enough that they can jump pretty much anywhere within there, at will. To go beyond that safely, they need to jump to somewhere near the edge, make a bunch of astronomical observations, and use those to update their charts for the space just beyond, to make the calculations for the next jump. Then when they get there, they make more observations to extend the charts further, and calculate again, and so on. How far you can go in each “beyond the line” jump depends both on how good your astronomy is, and how good your calculations are, and the Cylons are better than the humans at both of those.
Or, of course, you can just enter jump coordinates blindly, without doing the observations or calculations, but if you do that, you’re in God’s hands, and will probably just end up killing yourself, or maybe jump back in time or something crazy like that, unless God has plans otherwise. Especially if you’re foolhardy enough to do something like that from the close vicinity of a black hole, which surely throws everything about a jump all higgledy-piggledy.
I apologize for not being clear. I didn’t mean, although I can see how it reads that way, to make the 25k light year jump all at once. I meant for them to keep jumping until they are 25k light years away, however long that takes them. They don’t have to do a huge amount of observations, either. Here is how I see it vaguely going. Jump to the red line. Observe three systems within jump range, pick one, and go. If the system has resources, get them while doing observations. Pick one, and go. And keep doing that until you are quite a distance away. Then finally start taking time to pick a spot to settle.
Heck, find a system with water, as that seems to be most rare, stay on the ships, and now this generations job is to find a habitable planet. The next generation jumps there to colonize. maybe only some of them do, depending on how many people they have by that point.
As others have said, though, then it’s a quick series.
That brings up a good point. Is this the top of the line officers? Or is it the Orville? At the very least, when a cylon raider enters a system, shouldn’t SOP be to jump soon? Assume that someone knew that cylon raider’s flight path and will investigate it when it doesn’t report back?
I mean, they may be getting more sleep than 33 minutes but they don’t seem to be much better off. They are still on edge because they are close enough that cylon raiders still appear from time to time. I would argue a blind jump 10k light years in a random direction to the empty part of space and then go from there is a better plan than what we see. There is only so long that humans can go under stress like we are seeing.
No, that one was a bit ago.
I get that we are simplifying things like scientist but he shouldn’t have accepted his first result. If anything, he shouldn’t have believed it and said he had to start over. Or he should have tested several more and then Boomer again.
This is what I mean where they choose drama over fitting into the world. There can be drama with Baltar as the scientist if they would have stopped to think about it.
I agree with you. From that perspective, it was a good episode. I wonder how he found out about Ellen as that seems like something the President would find out about a civilian before Commander Adama. Now to be DA.
While it did show Adama to be honest, I would argue this was a step too honest. Adama has shown he will put the fleet ahead of even himself. Adama thinks Ellen brings out the worst in Saul, his XO, and so he brings her to the Galactica when things are still bad. I could argue that he was surprised at the good call Saul made because Saul made it while he had been drinking and highly emotional due to Ellen’s return. However, it shows Saul is capable and worthy of XO. I don’t know if Adama would have risked it.
That’s me being DA. I did appreciate that story but it was a small part of a large mess.
More thoughts on Caprical cylons. Do they treat centurions as toasters or individuals? Are only the twelve worthy? In fact, it’s not twelve, so that is a lie. It’s seven and they know there are five out there hidden. Again, that’s an interesting thing to share with the viewer, that five unknown cylons, even to cylons, are embedded in the fleet and they don’t want to kill the cylons. Back to the centurions, what are they? Would they be thrown away as we see? Are they a collective or do they have to report back? So many questions that would be better spent with discussions by those cylons.
IIRC, when Starbuck leads the rescue mission to Caprica in season 2 the Raptors make the trip in one jump, and some of them wind up embedded in the planet’s crust as a result. I assume that the greater the distance of the jump, the more precise your math has to be to avoid disaster.
Hasn’t Roslyn already started having visions at this point? Finding a habitable planet isn’t the goal - they want to find Earth, the Promised Land, with its Thirteenth Tribe that will presumably be able to help protect them from the Cylons. (Not that it works out that way, of course.)
They were extremely war weary, and yes, Baltar was president, and they thought they’d left the Cylons behind. The Cylons located them, and instituted martial law over the new colony, which brought about an ugly resistance and reprisals. Horrible for all, which eventually contributed to the cylon civil war, and the colonials and “rebel” cylons working together until the end of the series.
And yeah, it would have worked better to keep fleeing, but not only is it a short story, but a big part of the story is that despite all these circumstances, trials, and the quite literal threats of extinction, humanity could NOT get it’s crap together, and pulled in dozens of directions at once. No one was willing to do the smart thing, because everyone had a different opinion of what the smart thing was!
For the colonials or the cylons?
We know the colonials (pre-Pegasus) are largely soon to be retired, should have retired, or troublemakers, along with plenty of people who were loyal to Adama, and probably a grab bag of the rest the military had to offer. And that’s just the military, everything else is a quite literal grab bag of whomever had access and the skills to minimally operate all the civilian vessels!
As for the Cylons, well, they hadn’t had an actual war either in a full generation, during which they’d evolved substantially, had the intervention (and then suppression of) the final five, and a distorted messianic drive to “fix” everything. I’m not sure creating or operating a distinct military strategy was even in their top 3 priorities!
Not to mention, the sentience and intellect of the non-humanoid cylons was strictly limited, as were their direct controllers, the hybrids. And later eliminated by one faction in the civil war. But yeah, they could have made MUCH better use of their capabilities, but there’s enough in universe excuses so I can handwave it away.
TBH, it’s like the modern American arrogance in assuming they can swat a poorly equipped enemy, and getting caught up in elaborate strategies and secondary missions “Win hearts and minds” to the point they missed every chance to (heartlessly) crush any opposition with overwhelming force and technological superiority.
Roslyn did have a vision about the cylon that told her Adama was a cylon. I don’t think it was much more than that.
That is a good point. They do want to find Earth. Okay, I went slightly down the rabbit hole to read up on BSG. The best I can figure, they are in another cycle, not the first one, and Earth is a myth that was probably one of the colony planets years ago but changed over time. I may have to put that into the back of my head because that causes so many problems. I will do what I can to enjoy the ride.
All good points. Not sure if it was commentary on society at the time, specific to the US, or not but it works.
As said above, this created tension or at least the humans not being able to agree on one course of action. Having to make do with what they have and figure out a plan.
I’m confused by the timeline, not yours but the shows, even with looking it up. It seems as if all cylons have been around at this point because this is another in the cycle not the first one. I say that because several of the Final Five were involved in the civil war of forty years ago.
I would also argue that, sadly, evolution happens best with conflict as there is something to adapt to. It would make more sense, to me, if the cylons had been fighting the whole time between the first cylon war and now, upgrading themselves, and the winners were the ones who decide what to do with humanity. Attack it, in this case.
That is fair as well. My disappointment is lack of dialog to back up these ideas!
I’ll try to untangle to the best of my understanding, which may be wrong. Of the cycles we know about in-series (and there’s the possibility of more further back) the last big cycle was on Kobol an inconsistent number of years ago (there are problems in the timeline), but probably around 4k years ago.
The humans of Kobol create mechanical, artificial life and intellect, eventually a war breaks out, and the planet is ruined. Neither side is destroyed, and 12 tribes of “humans” leave the wreckage to form the colonies, with the 13th tribe being actually “cylons” which may or may not have already begun the process of adapting biological variants. These beings settle on “Earth”, the ruined world discovered by the BSG team later in the series, and continue to evolve, successfully becoming fully biological and reproducing by what we humans would consider “normal” means, abandoning their prior artificial reproduction and the Resurrection System.
The people of “Earth”, now having forgotten the past, create their own new system of mechanical life to serve, and conflict grows. Meanwhile, a few researchers were recovering the old Resurrection system, are the only survivors when both sides are wiped out via MAD with nuclear weapons approximately 2000 years prior to the BSG series. The “human” survivors, again biological entities that are descendants of Kobolian mechanical life, decide to head back to the “homelands” to protect the cycle from carrying out yet AGAIN, but due to the speed of the ships, take two thousand years to make the trip, and use the resurrection system to survive, only to arrive during the Cylon war of Adama’s generation.
Horrified that the cycle is completing again, they intervene and convince the (still mechanical) Cylons of the colonies to broker the truce, and in exchange offer the RS (rezz system, tired of typing it) and their skills in helping them evolve, which is accepted. A generation or so later, we have the “significant seven” as the evolved “local” cylons, and the “final five” of the original biological cylons who have also added the artificial monotheism to the local variants in an effort to create empathy and prevent the renewal of the cycle. However, one of the new models feels that humanity should still be destroyed (and is a functional and cynical athiest) and wipes the final five and leaves them among humanity to cause them to despair when the colonies are destroyed, and initiates the final war.
For the record, the reason the Kobolian mechanical life preserved much/most of their history, while the colonies theoretically lost most of theirs due to computer/mechanical errors in their exodus, only preserving some in an oral/religious tradition.
And of course, the end of the series has the descendants of the colonial humans, interbred with the “sympathetic” biological cylons, ready to repeat the mechanical vs. biological war on “our” earth thousands of years later.
As for the possible “angels” of Baltar, Six, and Starbuck, don’t ask me. Hell if I know.
My WAG, taking a page from the pseudo-Mormonism of the original series, is that they’re ascended mortals from a previous cycle, and that Starbuck becomes one of them.
Eh, probably for the best. The further the series went, the less I was willing (during the first watch) to excuse the twists for twists sake, the chaos, and the unanswered questions.
As I said earlier, I’m reasonably happy doing a periodic (say every 3-4 years) rewatch on the miniseries, but watching the full series rather than individual episodes or highlights (even though I have the DVDs) is too much. For example, I pretty much always FF through anything from the “meanwhile on Caprica” segments.
Glad to see the thread show up occasionally. I watched all of BSG in the last year on Peacock, but I wanted to see Caprica again. For some reason I didn’t get the chance to see BSG when it was first shown, but I had watched Caprica when it first aired. That meant I saw Caprica before seeing any of BSG (I’m weird like that; I saw Terminator 2 before the original Terminator; boy that was confusing.)
Anyway, checking if I can see Caprica again, I see it is now available on Peacock. Yay!
And I’m not sure if I will give Ron Moore the benefit of the doubt with all of the issues I have with BSG as I have others.
I appreciate that I am hearing what Ronald Moore made BSG 2004 about. I appreciate that he thought about the original series, what he wanted to do, and how he wanted to do some of it. For example, in rewatching the original mini-series, he realized after the attack, the show is about Apollo and Starbuck, not Adama. He saw Starbuck as the hottest pilot in the fleet and a cigar smoking womanizer. Apollo is the good son of the commander. (He was only hired to write the mini series and his partner had to keep reminding Ron of that because Ron kept writing it as a series pilot. He writes Starbuck jogging around to introduce us to her world, how she sees things. He then has to be reminded to setup the cylons coming back.) He realized he has seen the two guy leads so many times, so what if Starbuck was a woman? (He also talks about modern context, that it was firmly in post 9/11 and woman as pilots were “new.”) It was new territory for a woman to be the cigar smoking, throw the first punch, gambling, and best pilot. Equally, he didn’t want them romantically involved so had her be family through Apollo’s brother.
However.
The first question he is asked by Sackhoff is “what is Starbuck?” He doesn’t have an answer. They discussed it in the writing room but didn’t have a good real world analog. She’s not an angel, she’s not a cylon, she’s not a god, yet she has qualities of many of those things and more. Here’s where I have the issue. Instead of making up what she is within the mythos, they decide not to explain it and have things happen for the drama of it. Starbuck shows back up because she’s needed, no explaining it. She just disappears at the end because it’s dramatic.
Why am I not giving him points for this? Simple. He has doubts. He is not convinced, years later, that’s how he should have done it. He should have found a way to explain what she is. He doesn’t say this but I think what happened is that he’s trying to make a parallel to many real world things at that time. A tragedy felt by a nation. Civilian v military. How to keep going. It’s then ruined because all people can ask about is What is Starbuck? I think he thinks some of his other messages and societal commentary are lost because he didn’t explain Starbuck.
In a moment. I’m not the biggest Blade Runner fan. I appreciate what it was and what it did, especially as someone who likes the cyberpunk/shadowrun genre. It was all EJO who suggested to Ridley Scott that the LA of the Blade Runner future should have that Japanese influence. Wow.
I’m still watching it so I might edit this or add more here. I see that Katee interviewed EJO a while back so plan to catch up on that.
My view on the “modern” Starbuck is simultaneously more and less judgmental. It’s lazy writing. Need to move your plot in a specific direction? Starbuck. Need to insert otherwise unknown information? Starbuck. Need to add more drama? Disappear/Kill Starbuck and return her.
It serves a point to allow the hand of God (or, rather, in this case, of author) to point the story along when it gets stuck. And that may or may not be a worthwhile technique (and of course, it happened in the original series in a much more explicit manner, so, not going to scream about it) - but they tried to have their cake and eat it too by not confirming any of it. It’s like countless other series where they state (or at least imply) that there’s a reason for everything, and that one day it will all come together. And it doesn’t, or did so in a confusing way, or the series got canceled without it.
By never answering the question of Starbuck, Moore dodged the bullet, but if the review is accurate, the truth was there the whole time - they weren’t sure, they didn’t know, and leaned on the crutch, possibly hoping for divine inspiration (snerk!) would one day come up with a conceit that would be clever enough to keep the fans happy.
Of course, that’s 100% my Opinion. But it seems consistent with the commonalities in TV series programming, especially in genre offerings.
I always felt bsg would have been stronger if they’d leaned into the Greek mythology side of it.
I did think Starbuck only worked as well as she did because the actress did a fantadtic job. Few women, I think, could pull off the cigar chomping pilot, but Sackoff did.
Yes, gods are real, but also capricious. Starbuck could have been a demi god or similar entity from mythology. Powerful but also flawed.
moment. I’m not the biggest Blade Runner fan. I appreciate what it was and what it did, especially as someone who likes the cyberpunk/shadowrun genre. It was all EJO who suggested to Ridley Scott that the LA of the Blade Runner future should have that Japanese influence. Wow.