Here’s my take on the Cylons thing.
The Cylons advanced from toasters to infiltration-ready meatbags within 40 years. That’s a bit much to swallow, isn’t it? It’s like going from steam engines to commercial nuclear power in 40 years. It’s possible, I suppose, but highly unlikely.
We don’t know what the Cylons were doing in those 40 years. They could have been doing anything. It’s possible that they were disciplined and insightful enough to steer their understanding of genetics and biology and whatnot in order to mass-produce meatbags in less than half a century. If this were the case, however, why only 12 models, and where is the detrius of 40 years of research? And why spend 40 years developing infiltration tools when a basestar full of nukes is so much more effective?
We do know that the Cylons are highly advanced in terms of spaceflight. It’s much easier for me to accept that the Cylons spent much of the 40 years perfecting their FTL drives, since travel capability has direct military and industrial benefits.
We also know that the Cylons knew where Kobol was. They were there, waiting for the Colonials. The Cylons at least knew that the Colonials were headed in that direction. (I bet that Kobol was relatively abandoned, but still being watched by the Cylons, when Boomer and Crashdown tripped over it.)
We also know that the number 12 is highly significant to Colonial religion, a faith scoffed at by the Cylons. If it weren’t for the 12 Cylon models, there would be no significance to the Cylons of the number 12.
Lastly, the Cylon meatbag models are so close in design to normal Colonial bodies as to be indistinguishable. This suggests that, at the gross and cellular levels, most of the weird stuff we see in Cylons are also present (though latent) in Colonial humans.
My theory is this: the Cylons discovered Kobol some time ago, perhaps in the past 40 years, maybe even before then. Having discovered a planet ripe for the expansion of their enemies, the Cylons made a priority of checking it out, and in the process came across technology left behind by the Lords of Kobol. Most of the really advanced stuff that Cylons have - cloning, designer pets, near-instantaneous long range FTL communications, hive mind-style telepathy - is merely copied from stuff that the Lords of Kobol abandoned on or near the planet after the the Blaze.
My hunch is that, in the dim dark past, the Lords of Kobol established a society where sexual reproduction was eventually replaced by mechanical duplication of themselves. (Parallels of the Colonials developing the Cylons, I suppose.) After time, 12 of the “genetically” strongest clone lines had established authority over the others, and called themselves gods. Then, Kobol society suffered a schism when someone figured out sexual reproduction all over again - there was sudden population pressure, and increased diversity, and shifting centers of power, and a jealous god, and conflict, and a Blaze, and everyone left Kobol in a big galleon.
Which leave the Colonials as the descendents of the same genetic material that makes up the Cylon meatbags. The one god whom the Cylons worship is likely the jealous god of Kobol, the one who struggled to maintain a rigid and mechanical society in the face of surprising diversity.
It’s also my hunch that the Cylons are not at all telepathic, but the remaining Lords of Kobol are, by benefit of their technology. Batlar’s inner Six is neither imagined nor Cylon, but rather the projection of a Kobolian being - a.k.a. a “being of light” - who thinks (or pretends) she’s a Cylon. Ditto for Caprica Six’s inner Baltar, Starbuck’s inner Leoben, and who knows, maybe the snakes in Roslyn’s visions as well as the Admiral’s dead wife.
Another hunch: the Cylons we find in the end of the season’s last episode are not Cylons, neither are the four Bob Dylan fans on the Galactica, but rather more Kobolians.
Lastly, Starbuck was killed when her Viper imploded on the gas giant, but her inner Leoben was instrumental in “beaming” her conciousness, a la Cylon resurrection, into another body. This part was essential in molding her psyche for some unknown goal, since it’s easier to change someone’s mind when you’re holding it on a hard drive.
I think that Ron has managed to pull a George Lucas here, in regards to the Cylons. At first, the Jedi were to be technological knights, and the Sith were some alien froglike race. As Lucas fleshed out his backstory, the Jedi and the Sith became more and more like each other, until finally they differed only in point of view. Going further, he borrowed from Arthur C. Clarke and explained the magic of the Force as merely sufficiently advanced technology. I think that we’re going to discover that the only real differences between the Colonials and the Cylons (at least the meatbags) lie in their points of view, and that the seemingly mystical features of the Cylons and the Lords of Kobol can be dismissed as sufficiently advanced technology.
Of course, one enormous assumption I’m making is that Ron had something planned out before he started filming. I’m not completely convinced he did, not yet.
