I was thinking the same thing. Maybe one or two Raptors showing up wouldn’t be big enough bait to lure a Basestar and a Ressurrection ship to those coordinates. Rather, it would take Galactica itself to warrant the jumping of these capital ships to those coordinates
Man this show drives me batty… so much is so good, but so much is just stupid. Once again, it falls victim to “we have a fairly interesting moral choice we want to put someone through. So we’ll just randomly have plot elements happen and situations occur to bring up that choice. Then we’ll never speak of it again, nor think about the implications of what we learned. And we’ll imply that it’s totally analogous with similar-sounding situations in real life, when in fact it isn’t at all.”
For example, they now know what virus it is, and presumably have samples of it. They could culture them and go to random.occupied.planet and drop them in the air. $10 says the idea never is brought up again, ever.
And I wish we knew more about the total number of cylons. I suppose it’s possible that there aren’t very many cylons, they got massive force multiplication due to the element of surprise and Baltar-corruption in order to nuke all the worlds in the first place, and now they’re kind of a match for Galactica. But vastly more plausible is that the total sum of cylons WAY WAY WAY outnumber Galactica, and Galactica is desparate, and it’s nearly impossible to see how humanity could possibly survive at all, and everyone should realize that and it should color their actions and choices. For instance, wrt this “genocide”. Which it doesn’t seem to at all. Doo de doo.
Oh, and I’m SO SICK of Baltar and his visions and the cylon religion. I just. Don’t. Care.
And yet, on the balance, I still enjoy the show.
According to Battlestar Wiki:
So I think I heard correctly.
Anyhow, I have to shut my brain off from the outset if I’m going to come up with a way to transmit a natural viral pathogen via radio. How the frak is an organ virtually indistinguishable from a human brain down to the molecular level supposed to propgate a corrupted signal, receive such a signal, and synthesize a virus that can be transmitted physically? I mean, come the frak on. They couldn’t come up with anything better? Corrupted data causing serious glitches when accessing the data stream? Anything other than “brain as germ warfare lab”? I mean, maybe that could have just been a good counterattack, slow the Cylons down, race to Earth, just try to beat 'em there. No need go off on this whacked-out morality-of-genocide tangent. Just a setback for the Cylons, yet another part of the cat-and-mouse game. Oh well.
Actually, this makes me wonder: If I blow a Cylon’s head clean off, how does it resurrect? If the brain is somehow damaged, and this damage can somehow be propagated to the next body, what if you directly damage the brain to cause death? If I shoot Six between the eyes, that doesn’t cause trouble for the next Cylon?
Hey, howabout this? Anthena’s a Cylon, right? She knos the location of the Cylon Homeworld, RIGHT?? Use Athena’s mad FTL skillz to jump there, dump the virus, and, cause a massive disaster that perhaps wouldn’t have killed every last Cylon, but quite conceivably would have put the hunters in a state of terrible disarray for a while. No goofy genocide. There still could be some gravitas in the face of mass-killing and biological WMDs. No need for wifi-biohazard precautions (chalk the abandonment of the Basestar to hypervigilance in the face of an unknown pathogen). We’d get a glimpse of the Homeworld, even a good excuse to go there. Sigh.
I do too! How do they do it! 
Anyway, looking forward: Talk about bizarre love, uh, tetrahedron: Internal 6, Caprica 6, 3, and Gaius Baltar. I6 is really going the distance to preserve Baltar’s life, and sanity, for that matter. Perhaps GB was wise to keep her a secret (though I wonder what C6’s internal Baltar has been up to all this time). C6 obviously still carries a torch for GB. And now 3 is smitten? Is she intepreting this love as a worshipful one? Is her faith so egocentric that a little scientific skepticism is going to give her a self-negating God complex?
Sick baseship. I think they used to call the big Cylon ships basestars but lately they’ve been calling them baseships.
My wife and I paused the show and re-watched that scene twice before we got it. It’s a “sick base ship”, not a “sick bay ship”. Very clumsy dialogue. It also leads you to believe that the Galactica abandoned the probe, which was then picked up by the Cylons. What, was this a clever Colonial ploy after all? Nope, just painfully bad wording. :smack:
Yeah, we were scratching our heads over that one, too. The virus was documented so well that, 3000 years later, a military doctor is able to refer to it almost casually, on a war-weary and fleeing battlestar. Instantly accessed via magical index that knows the shape and effects of the virus. No complications with language. No degradation of information. No rotting CDs or paper to re-archive every 20 years. Are we to understand that the Colonials had all this high tech, continuously, for over 3000 years?
If so, then why the living frak in all that is holy are they still wearing sodding neckties?
But wait, there’s more: if humanity developed an immunity to this virus only 300 years ago, then either (a) there’s plenty of still-vulnurable non-immune people running about for the Cylons to have studied, or (b) the 40 billion or so Colonial population stems from an extremely limited* genetic pool. I vote (a) - the Cylons have studied humanity so well as to create full-sized adults without so much as sexual reproduction, and yet they never bothered to “upgrade the plumbing”. The Cylons know vastly more about human biology than Doc Cottle ever could.
- and recently extremely active sexually - w00t!
If the Cylons are able to index and encode their memories as some kind of digital and transmittable RNA, and
If this can be done quickly enough that 18 permajillion bits of information can be encoded and transmitted FTL between the event inducing death and actual brain death of the Cylon, and
If this encoding process isn’t smart enough to filter out non-indigenous (and non-Cylon) viral data such as RNA from a mild case of viral encephalitis, and
If they use some form of assembly line chemistry to entirely re-encode the dead Cylon’s above-mentioned RNA on the resurrection ship, which also lacks the above filtering capability, and
If the Cylons are unable to stop the resurrection ship’s Cylon Memory Receivers™ from picking up transmissions from suspect sources, then
I have no problem with it. But yeah, I have some problems with accepting those conditions, myself. The Cylons don’t use firewalls on their networks? Bleh.
This episode has solidified a feeling I’ve had all along (assuming it’s not shitcanned by RDM and not shown again in syndication): Centurions have meat in there somewhere. It may not be as intelligent as the higher models, but if they’re affected by this virus, even in digital form, then there must be meat in those cans.
As the previous episode then this one progressed, at various times I expected:
[ul]
[li]The basestar would be taken over by unaffected Cylons, perhaps Centurions[/li][li]Athena would be puking sick before they got back to Galactica[/li][li]The Colonials would go into the basestar in spacesuits, at the very least concerned about breathable atmosphere in a starship with potential structural issues[/li][li]The meatbags, thought dead but now lurching like zombies, would break into Michael Jackson’s “Thriller” routine[/li][li]Athena wasn’t immune, but is now dependent upon regular injections for the rest of her life[/li][li]The Colonials would carry out their genocide plan, with some partial success[/li][li]Athena would shoot Helo in the head during that weird creepy hug[/li][li]Adama Sr. would have some concern about an insubordinate officer contramanding a direct order from President Roslyn[/li][/ul]
Alas, not a single one happened. Any one of these would’ve added bunches of credibility to the show.
Don’t need the PopTart for miracle cures anymore. Athena has Magic Baby Blood corpuscles herself now, ready for transfusion whenever needed.
Moore’s trying my patience lately. Even with Lucy Lawless’ “WTF?” look when torturing Baltar making this ep worthwhile.
It’s so hard for me to complain about this show, I guess I’m in the minority that enjoyed this episode. I get so caught up in the moment watching it that I really don’t nitpick all the nitpickable things. I was and always have been the same way about Star Trek. I just lose myself in the moment and pretend things are just different in the universe of the show.
Did anyone miss Starbuck in this episode? It was a nice change of pace to have her as a secondary presence.
I did miss Tigh, though. Looks like he will be back next week. I’ve got a soft spot for the old crabby guy.
Aw, man, Felix cut his hair!! I want the dreamy sideburned and curly locked Gaeta back!
The whole Baltar thing was wearing on me…until this episode. I was totally enthralled with what would happen and was absolutely not expecting the scene to end up the way it did. So Baltar thinks that his vision of Six is “God”…at least that’s what I got out of it.
LOVED the looks on all of their faces on BSG when Simon told them that Baltar was with the Cylons. Helo: “What did you just say??”
I don’t think Helo having an opinion about wiping out all the Cylons makes him a traitor. It took real guts to stand in there and be the ONLY one voicing opposition to the “foolproof” plan. But when he mentioned New Caprica he lost any momentum his argument may have been receiving; that was the wrong card for him to play.
Next week looks like a weird ep…but remember last season we slogged through some stand alone ep’s and look at where we ended up! Who knows what RDM has in store for use the rest of the season. I for one am enjoying the ride!
A friend of mine has my tape, so I can’t look back to check - Did D’anna call 6 “Caprica”, or did I just hear it wrong?
[D’Anna] I am so not going out with this guy. [/D’Anna]
She did.
Another question comes to mind: Baltar knows his future with the Cylons is shaky at best, and returning to the fleet is really not an option. He volunteered to go investigate the sick basestar to get brownie points. Why would he then hold back information from the Cylons, particularly when the information was something he photographed, and has to know will be discovered? If he wants to live as bad as has been indicated, wouldn’t he be kissing as much Cylon ass as possible?
And since I’m on a role, Rosilyn has not withdrawn her authorization to use bio weapons. The colonials still have the virus. Why aren’t they planning on making other weapons? Everything from virus-tipped bullets to air-burst weapons suitable for planet busting? All the really lost will Helo’s treachery was a convenient delivery sytem. At the very least, the should be working to develop a “Get off me bitch” type weapon, usable whenever the Cylons get too close…
Yes.
AAARRRGGHHH. I’m on a ROLL. Frakin typos…
There’s a problem with that plan, though. They needed a resurrection ship to jump into range, and resurrection ships only jump in when they’re escorting battlestars. You don’t need a battlestar to take out a raptor - you jump in a few raiders to deal with it.
The next time there’s a plausible and comprehensible explanation for Baltar’s behavior, other than immediate self-preservation, will be the first.
So jump a raptor to Caprica and do it there. There’s an entire Cylon society there, and thus (one assumes) constant rez-ship presence.
I gotta go with the majority with this one. It totally sucked Baltar’s balls.
I would have loved an ending where they offed the Cylons in resurrection range, and the plan didn’t work. That the Cylons were wrong about the virus transmitting - and I dont understand why they thought it would in the first place. (I know about the technobabble Simon was spouting, but I aint buying it.)
Also, exactly why did the sick basestar blow up, and the weird glances between Athena and Apollo when it did? The whole opening I was thinking that the Colonials had just found a shitload of spare parts, and then… WTF? Self-destruct my ass…
Please bring in J. Michael Straczynski to map out the plot - I’m seeing to much flying by the seat of the pants in that department, but I still love the acting and the action sequences.
And Helo better stay the hell away from Tigh for the rest of the series if Tigh ever finds out what happened.