Was I the only one thinking, “No! Please don’t let Mr. Eko and Saul Tigh die in the same week!”
Whew! Tigh is one of the best characters!
I actually took this weight loss as an indication that a fair amount of time has passed since the last episode, but it was hard to be sure. Were there any other clues about duration?
One thing I did like was seeing the potential for Gaeta to become the new resident genius. He always was a brainiac, but now that Baltar’s gone, looks like he’ll get a chance to stretch a little.
I continue to be awestruck by Michael Hogan’s performance. What he has done with this character so far this season just blows me away. It seems Tigh has nothing left to live for…or at least from his perspective he has nothing. How will he come back from the brink? I think Kara might have something to do with it.
I’m a little nervous about the “finding Earth” plotline. I keep thinking of Galactica 1980. ::shudder::
Nice touch to have Sharon’s call sign change to Athena. Did anybody catch some of the other names called out? MicroChip…Chrome Dome…
Adama knew exactly what to say to Kara to get her attention. When he pulled out the “daughter” card he hit her where it really hurts.
Yeah, kind of dumb to have Lee all cut again after just a couple eps. Is it easier to lose weight in outer space? I vote for Lee having a shirtless scene every week.
And the “To Be Continued…” is very redundant. Of course it will be continued!!!
Still wondering where Cervaise is…!
The missing Cervaise is the big mystery this week!
Tigh broke my heart when he told Adama “that man doesn’t exist anymore.” I agree that he’s one of the most interesting characters on the show (or, frankly, on television these days).
About the virus transmission… I think the cylons have the ability to “hook in” to some sort of central data stream. They don’t do it all the time (they’re not always connected), but Sharon did when she shoved the coax into her arm on Galactica last season, and the cylons on the basestar seemed to communicate with the hybrid and send their directions to her by putting their hands on those wierd orange panels covered with water. So maybe their like my traveling notebook: they work on their own a lot, but every now and then they find a wifi spot and get their emails and downloads. If so, it could be something similar to a computer virus. However, that doesn’t explain why they couldn’t even go to the infected basestar unless they don’t have a choice about whether to hook in to the datastream or not.
What was the point of the cylons projecting? Is it just RDM thinking “here’s a cool thing cylons can do?” or does it have some significance I haven’t thought of yet? I can see how it would be a neat trick if you’re bored, but why project when you’re walking around the ship? Wouldn’t you walk into walls or something?
I did like the contrast between the base star and Galactica. The base star was so clean and reminded me of 70’s and early 80’s scifi sets that always looked so shiney. Meanwhile, Galactica was gritty looking.
It’s clear that the Cylons must have human-like DNA coding in order to create their human form. The majority of human DNA is non-coding regions which seemingly have no purpose (most likely regulatory regions and left-over detrius aquired through evolution). I could see the Cylons slipping the coding for their DNA computers into these “intron” regions. Unless you knew specifically what to look for, it’s conceivable that such coding could go undetected, especially since such regions are highly variable between human individuals (and thus form the basis behind DNA fingerprinting techniques that allow an individual to be ID’d with 1 in 10 billion certainty). This theme of hidden coding coming to life and reprogramming a human was the basis behind Greg Bear’s books “Darwin’s Radio” and “Darwin’s Children”.
The whole point of having Baltar investigate the ship was a plot device to have him gain the trust of the Cylons (however, in an interesting twist, he ends up losing the trust of Six when she discovers he lied about the probe). Maybe the Cylons weren’t sure what the problem was and didn’t want to take the risk of exposure to the pathogen, even with an isolation suit. Perhaps when a Cylon dies out of range of a Resurrection ship, its damaged code can be sent to a nearby Cylon.
Also, if the Cylons use and manipulate DNA as the basis for their computing, this could explain how the baby’s blood cured Roslin’s cancer. Maybe the DNA code of Cylons is able to re-program itself on-the-fly, and DNA from the baby’s blood cells reprogrammed and fixed the damaged genes in Roslin’s own DNA (maybe via a retrovirus) that was causing her cancer.
It means that Tricia Helfer’s natural hair color is not blond, and it means that we have already seen a Six model who was not a blond – Gina was a brunette.
Well, it’s true that, based on dialog, the amount of time that passes between each episode (of the same season) seems to be variable.
Sometimes it’s just one week, as in real life, other times its a couple months.
But they do seem to consistantly agree that a season, in it’s entirety, is a year or less, as in real life.
So while I admit that I was too sensitive on the matter (due to my own self conciousness), it still seems to show Apollo losing the weight in 2 - 3 months, tops.
With a trainer, working out 8 hours per day every day, and taking weight loss drugs (or appetite supressors), I suppose that is how the Hollywood types do it to get ready for an upcoming role. But yumpin yimmeny, that’s gotta be hard on the body…
For this DNA to have any substantial computational power, though, it would have to be incredibly dynamic, and either give rise to RNAs that are templates of the logical units of the DNA-encoded program to be run, or play a direct physical role in the processing itself. I imagine wide swaths of the Cylon genome would have to function like the variable regions encoding immunoglobulin chains for this programming to be adaptive, and, to maintain both variability and cohesion, would also require a very intelligent system of allelic exclusion to handle complex programs and avoid a cacophony of contradictory logical operations. I should think the Cylon genome would be littered with clues, making Baltar’s task of detection rather easy if that notion occurred to him, though, with his lab setup, the process might not be very high-throughput.
As it is, the “indistinguishable from human” claim has been sorely tested. The mere fact a skinjob cylon can shove a fiber optic cable into her arm and communicate in real-time with a computer even as modest as the one I’m composing this post on would require a radically different sort of nervous sytem than our own. How could human neurons, or any neuron we could imagine, handle that baud rate? The ability to restore the action potential to carry the next bit would be outstripped by a gigabit connection by many orders of magnitude, and would require a massively parallel source to achieve useful rates (and I don’t think the fiber optics of the Galactica are designed for that kind of interface). And mustn’t there be some sort of incredibly sensitive and rapidly resensitizing photoreceptor cells lurking in the cylon arm somewhere? What sort of natural cellular pigment and system of membrane repolarization could possibly keep up? Again, it seems to me that Cylons are made of some pretty different stuff than we are. I suppose some of that must be indicated by the “traces” of synthetic compounds one can detect in Cylon tissue samples. But the basic components of their cells, which I suppose could be built from the same stuff we are (amino acids, lipds, nucleic acids, etc.) must be very different at, say, the sequence level, and biological sequences can be read.
Ron Moore addresses that point in the podcast. He suggests that they are always aware of their true surroundings, so they wouldn’t bump into a wall/tree while projecting. I dont it mind as much as others seem to. It likes their own personal mobile holodeck. People personalize their workspaces - this is how Cylons do it.
I just dont want to see what Leoben projects.
I didn’t hear a reason why there was no Cavil this week though. Anyone else?
I wonder how long we have to wait to learn more about the other five models. There doesnt seem to be any particular pattern, such as the first five or last five models, since we have 3s and 8s running around. And I seriously hope the RDM has mapped all of that out and is just not making it up as he goes along the way he appears to with Cylon biology.
Overall, I give it three out five. I worked well as a bridge episode to get the plot moving again, but too much happened too fast for the time frame, which the writers didnt seem to be clear on either. I’ll take it over Black Market and the Dana Delaney episodes.
Question: Did the human models replace their creators? The non-human cylons that designed them? I want to see one of them, if any are still around.
And I thought Athena was a strange call sign for Sharon. She still believes in the Cylon god, right? So why would she take the name of one the ‘pagan’ gods? Bit sacreligious, ya think? (also why would a colonist have to explain who Athena is? “goddess of wisdom, goddess of victory” - isnt she part of their pantheon?
Since it’s pretty clear now that a Cylon will soon go bonkers, and their entire model will subsequently be boxed, my guess is the other models suffered the same problem. There was some inherent instability across the line that made keeping members of those models operational too much of a risk. They probably keep it a taboo subject because it reveals their potentially fatal flaws. Cylons think they’re the better children of God because they’re more closer to perfection than humanity. Maybe they’re not, in a big way.
Because it represents something cool and badass, even if it is imaginary as far as she is concerned. The colonist would have to explain it for OUR benefit (and possibly Sharons).
Athena was Apollos sister and a bridge officer in the old series.
I don’t want to speculate on Cylon technology, but the Hybrid was a bit too Minority Report meets H.R. Giger for me - a babbling amalgamation of a hot chick and biomechanical tubing soaking in a tub.
Personally I would like to see the Cylons as more of a bizarre imitation of human society with less of the random weirdness (except for the random naked chicks practicing tai chi in the hall)
I can understand why infiltrator Sixes might alter their hair but why would a Six stationed on a Basestar feel the need to express that sort of individuality? Is that normal Cylon behavior or is it somewhat unique to her model?
I kind of like it. I have to think about some more but it lays a foundation for explaining some of the delusions walking around. I never liked that Head Six was only a delusion. Now I can imagine that Baltar’s highly intelligent “multitasking” mind intercepted a copy of Six’s consciousness when the original she died back on Caprica. That could be a potential phenomenon even the Cylons are unaware of.
It would also be cool if the unique nature of Baltar’s intelligence enabled him to eventually learn to tap into that Cylon data-stream panel thingie.
They showed a picture of him once. Probably RDM was already paying a lot of actors this episode.
“We never speak of them.” Hm. The last time I heard someone say something like that was… oh yeah, when Worf was retconning why Klingons used to look like humans earlier in Kirk’s career.
My guess is they were defective or Cylon civilization fractured into two camps early after the meat puppets evolved. Might make an interesting story-line later in the series and for now fans can just shut up about “why haven’t we seen the other moooooodels???”
Didn’t Six mention early on that there were still a few around and “they still have their uses.”
Anybody know what’s up with Battlestar Wiki? It’s been down since yesterday.
No idea but it’s frequently down or extremely slow. Sometimes it helps to google the info you’re looking for and select the cached version of the battlestarwiki page you want.
Heh, obviously I’m not the only one around here with a degree in biology who perhaps tries to think too deepy about these things. 
The whole thing with Sharon jamming the cable into her arm has always bugged me to no end, for the very reasons you pointed out, and expecially how it blows the undectability of the Cylons right out of the water. There had to be a better way for them to have done that.
However, tell me if I’m mis-remembering this, but didn’t Baltar actually succeed in making a Cylon detector that ID’d Sharon as a Cylon shortly before she shot Adama, but the Six in his head convinced him to keep his success a secret? Maybe he did detect these genetic anomalies scattered through their genome. I do recall him saying that it took an unbearbaly long amount of time to process the samples, but that may have been due to the limitations of his equipment (I don’t suppose they just happened to have a spare DNA sequencer laying about)
The reason why I like the DNA-computing angle is it’s the most elegant way of combining the biological aspects of the Cylons with an information-handling system of a mechanical computer. I don’t expect RDM to try to get into the exacting details we’re kicking around here to explain how something like this might work, just that it’d be a possible explanation that he might use . Heck, he could pull out all kinds of technobabble stuff like retrotransposons and RNAi’s to explain how this genetic coding could be dynamic and regulated. And actually, since you mentioned, maybe that cacophony of contradictory logical operations may be what we see happening to the Hybrid in the Tank. And to get even deeper…as it is, we don’t understand enough about how human memories are stored and what exactly is the biological basis of consciousness and emotions. Maybe the Cylons discovered the genetic basis behind memories and emotions and have programmed that info into the meatbags, with the thought that to better defeat your enemy you need to better know your enemy. Except, the one emotion that they couldn’t find the genetic code for is…LOVE! (Or maybe they purposely left it out so that they would be more ruthless and less apt to love thine enemy, however, we have seen that love will still find a waaaaayyy…)
OK, this is science fiction after-all, so maybe I shouldn’t try to dwell so deeply on making it science-fact. 
Saul will not drink himself to death. Next week, he’ll die in a true suicide mission to accomplish something very heroic, redeeming himself. Having him sit in his room drinking serves no plot point and having him back as XO wouldn’t work either.
Just my own WAG.
Nah. Having him bite it so soon after Helen robs the story arc of too much pathos. Better to keep him around for most of the season, causing trouble, seeking either an end or redemption, then dying for no reason when we least expect it. That’s what I would do if I was an Evil Producer. (Hi, Ron!)
Since Tigh is no longer XO and it appears he’s no longer “that man,” perhaps he’ll fall in with Zarek and get up to some sort of skullduggery. Or perhaps form his own subversive group of some kind.
I was really expecting him to get his own Ellen delusion telling him what to do.
It’s pretty clear Tigh in unfit to command the Fleet, it makes no sense for him to be only a hearbeat away from supreme command. As for Lee, sucks to be him. Demoted 2[ grades. Speaking of Zarek, did Roslin still go ahead and nominate him as VP?
I thought she was referring to the Centurions (the current models). Except now I’m wondering if the current Centurions have some biocomponents like the Raiders: HeadSix assured Baltar that he was unlikely to catch anything that a Centurion could catch; and we didn’t see any in the infected Basestar so whatever was going around, biological or technological, presumably knocked them out too.