You can’t tell the difference between Six and a human, but one of Mrs. Plant’s High School English students (forgive me if any of you fit in this category; I mean that they are inexperienced in the cruel ways of the world, honest and overly trusting of brigands like myself) could look at the HTB™ and remark, "Dude! She’s like, got wires sticking out of her ass!
Hot Tub Babe
I probably agree with you, but explain yourself:
Will have Centurions sent after him or will have his own Centurions killed?
But I thought the silica pathways, whatever the heck those may be, are what made Cylons vulnerable to the radiation pervading the environment of Ragnar Anchorage.
Athena isn’t just the daughter of Zeus, she sprung fully grown from his forehead. That implies two things:
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She has no mother, only a father. The original daddy’s girl.
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She was not conceived by any normal means, nor did she have a childhood. She just appeared one day, an adult.
A pretty apt name, all in all.
Hrm. Seems my silica pathways are deteriorating. To clarify:
It would be the former.
Unless you are a Cylon, in which case it would be the latter, and you’d have to get your toast done some other way.
Looks like it’s covered in gunk. Share and Enjoy. Yeah, it’s a little pixellated, sorry 'bout that.
WAG: We don’t know yet why exactly the tribes had to leave Kobol. Could it be that whatever threat chased them from their homeworld was similar to the Cylons that drove the Colonists from theirs?
Hot damn! Thanks!
Could be. This has all happened before, so they say, so maybe if the makers of the probe/beacon/thing engineered a virus to kill some unnamed adversary, that virus could be, uh, recycled and put to “new” uses.
Why have the Cylons decided to own Earth? Are they being chased from their home world as well? Is it something the 5 other models did?
Something to do with “Kill All Humans”? 
I have two very young nephews. If I give the younger one a shiny new toy, but he sees his older brother playing with a different toy, he wants the toy his older brother has and throws away his shiny new toy.
If his older brother then picks up the shiny new toy because he gave up the other toy after his little brother’s tantrum, then my younger nephew wants the shiny new toy back, and throws away the other toy.
Earth is also humanity’s last stand, so to speak, and as such seems to have been played up a bit in the imagination of all involved. The humans think finding Earth is their salvation. Now, if Earth is indeed our Earth, I think these guys are going to be sorely disappointed once they get here. They think they’re going to be reuinted with their long-lost brethren and a bright new day in their “new home” will dawn. Hah! They’ll be lucky if their presence doesn’t cause worldwide panic and a massive nuclear response directed straight at them. That’s for the future, though.
Right now, in the Colonial mind, Earth must be a place worth finding, a kind of promised-land where humanity will regroup. Maybe the Cylons buy into that as well. They’ve got two reasons to want to find Earth, at least: If humanity recovers, the Cylons believe it is inevitable (a belief strongly reinforced by the New Caprica debacle) they will seek total revenge on the Cylon race . Also, Earth does sound awfully nice. Once you get rid of the pesky human infestation, it would make a sweet place to hang your hat. So it’s a win-win: Beat humanity to their last outpost, wipe them out once and for all, and settle in the Land of Milk and Honey.
It’s been a while, but didn’t Adama actually refer to the silica pathways “or whatever it is you use to think with” (very rough paraphrase from memory)? In other words, he was speculating why the radiation caused Leoben problems. The “silica pathways” were just conjecture.
I took the hybrid to be a hybrid of a human-form model and a primarily mechanical approach. Other cylons we’ve seen clearly favor either the organic or the mechanical (at least outwardly), whereas she’s a more ambiguous blend.
As to the probe, it seems to me the most reasonable explanation is that it was left behind by the 13th tribe on their way out from Kobol, as Merijeek suggested. The virus is most likely accidental – some kind of cosmic detritus that just coincidentally is lethal to cylons. Or maybe something in its programming inadvertently corrupted Cylon programming when they tried to interface with it, causing the software that controls their autonomous systems to crash. If that’s the case, it would explain how it could be transmitted via resurrection, and why other cylons would be hesistant to go near their infected comrades even in a suit. Perhaps the probe was programmed to have a limited self-awareness, but that programming was incompatible with the cylons’ flavor of AI.
I think he said “pretend to think with”, but the idea that all Cylons are, to an extent, a hybrid of a human-derived genetic bluebprint with something synthetic is supported not only by Adama’s conjecture (made rather strong, I think, by the fact that organic life seems to be completely immune to whatever the radiation is around Ragnar), and the fact that Baltar specifically stated that the samples taken from the Leoben Adama killed had traces of “synthetic” compounds in them. If I recall correctly, these compounds were detected from a spectral analysis of some cremated tissue. It’s a purely chemical finding, and would seem to indicate the humanoid Cylons contain materials other than the stuff we’re made of. Given that Baltar’s Cylon detector appears to be based on a relatively simple chemical analysis of blood that gives the maximum throughput he could manage with such poor facilities, it also supports the notion that humanoid Cylons must have something other than different genes to distinguish them from us. It means they’re not just made of the same chemicals we are rearranged a little. They’re made of, in addition to those components, something else.
It’s one of several possibilities I’ve already considered explicitly, but I would find the latter half of your statement especially dissatisfying, so I hope that’s incorrect. Talk about convenient coincidences. Sci-fi cliches like that are one of the biggest reasons I can’t stand most of the genre. Random super-significant shit can just come out of nowhere and completely change everything, right in the nick of time. It’s “creative” in only the most rudimentary sense, and actually winds up being an incredibly lazy way to get writers out of various continuity dilemmas they’ve created for themselves. Those sci-fi crutches are part-and-parcel of the phenomenon known as “nerfing”, among other ills.
Is it just me, or did Racetrack say “fuck” rather than “frack” in the last scene?
Presuming they get here at some approximate value of “now,” rather than, as is at least vaguely suggested by the discovery of the probe, at some point in our distant future.
That’s what I mean by “our Earth”, and why I qualified my statement. If it’s the Earth of the way-distant future, or some sort of completely fictionalized Earth where humans have FTL technology, for instance, it’s not “our Earth”.
Granted, certainly. I brought it up because people seem to be getting fixated on the term “silica pathways” as if it were supposed to be a scientifically precise description of what’s going on. It’s not – it’s a hand-waving term used by a soldier who does not understand the scientific details but who can observe certain traits about his enemy.
Personally, I would find it more believable for the virus to be an accident than for it to be a trap set by humans for the cylons long before the cylons ever existed. Strange, accidental occurrences to happen in real life. Foreknowledge doesn’t. Even in the Galactica universe, where prophecy does work, I have a hard time believing it would work well enough for someone to design a virus against an as-yet nonexistent enemy.