Except they have mentioned several times that the death/reincarnation process is traumatic for the Cylons. So they may not be so keen on just trading up.
I guess having a single resurection hub is fine, since we know nothing about their technology anyway. How do they download anyway? Some sort of broadband wifi? And if so, why cant the signal be jammed?
IMHO, it’s always better not to delve too deeply into the magic technology.
Just thought I’d add that the need for the cables was that the Vipers could not use any form of thrust at all lest they be detected. So they needed to be accelerated to the proper speed then released. That’s all that was done. Don’t know why anyone thought it was somehow different.
Oh, to the guy above, check out scifi.com for the preview trailer. I don’t know if they’ll let you watch it from Norway though. Sometimes they’ll block foreign IPs though…
We have only seen them resurrect after they die by violence, though the process itself seems painful (the boxed D’Anna in the ep said she was promised she’d never have to resurrect again, for instance). Perhaps a peaceful, voluntary death and willing resurrection is not as painful, at least emotionally. Getting old also messes one up quite a bit and most people would avoid it if they could (and would suffer quite a bit of pain to do so).
Why do you say this?
If their bodies are undistinguishable from humans’, and they didn’t die involuntarily, then some of them would have aged, no? Yet they all seem to be the same age.
Yours is as much of a wild guess/speculation/wank as mine, as I see it. It also doesn’t really make sense to me.
In 40 years they haven’t had to deal with aging? I can’t imagine how, since they had 40 years of peace and yet, they all look the same age.
They have had to deal with reproduction, realized their limitations, and set plans in motion to deal with it. I’m sure they did the same with aging.
Interesting idea… do we know how long Ellen and Saul were married?
I would imagine the Cylons set themselves up based on the mythology.
(Oh, hang it, it’s getting too fussy to quote. Just look up page.)
While D’Anna was on her visionquest for the Final Five, she killed herself over and over again. If they had the means for “a peaceful, voluntary death and willing resurrection” she would have taken it, rather than being headshot by a Centurion.
I say that the Cylons just discovered how traumatic resurrection is because the recent disillusionment of the Two-Six-Eight faction seems to have been based, in part, on that (as evidenced by the meltdown of the skinjob that Natalie had to kill on the Basestar).
I’m speculating that the skinjobs are new because we know from “Razor” that the first hybrid experiments were at the end of the Cylon War. We know they haven’t been around for 40 years.
How long have they been around? Well, first we see of them (not including the Final Five, of course) is Caprica Six on Caprica, and Boomer Eight on Galactica. Up to a few years before the Cylon attack. The simplest explanation would be that the skinjobs didn’t exist until before the Cylon attack.
IIRC, Saul and Ellen hooked up in Saul’s drunken stupor between meeting Adama after the war, and Adama getting Saul recommissioned later.
About 20-30 years. Which means if Ellen was an old Six then she still looked like Six when she and Tigh met. :dubious:
When did they ever say there were twelve Lords of Kobol? In fact, didn’t someone quote a sacred text something to the effect of “the Lords of Kobol were as many and varied as men”?
It is all Internet speculation by people assuming that the Lords of Kobol = twelve Olypians of Greek myth.
Generally glossed over are the facts that (1) they haven’t actually named all the Lords of Kobol yet AFAIK, and (2) the skinjobs aren’t evenly distributed among the genders as the 12 Olypians were. (unless they’re counting before Hestia stepped down for Dionysos, and assuming the final Cylon is male).
She was in a rush, clearly. Think about it. Humans have the means for a peaceful, voluntary death. Why wouldn’t Cylons? D’Anna chose quick and dirty to get as many glimpses of the FF as quickly as possible. Of course, if they were choosing to get a new body due to age or injury (and even 10 years would make a difference in appearance, but we see none), they’d probably have ways to handle it with minimized trauma. I can’t even believe we’re arguing about this because it seems like an obvious use for resurrection, even relatively painful resurrection, that most humans would definitely use, so why wouldn’t Cylons?
I think they have had to discover how traumatic it is to be murdered and then resurrected with that memory. They obviously didn’t understand that because, before this war, they didn’t have to deal with dying by murder. I find it hard to believe that they didn’t understand how traumatic resurrection was, if it is indeed inherently traumatic and that trauma has nothing to do with the circumstances surrounding the death. My personal understanding is that dying painfully or in an emotionally negative situation leads to pain and psychological trauma upon resurrection. The Six’s problems seem to indicate that. However, that proves my point, which is that it is the circumstances of the death (circumstances they’ve never had to experience before, which are new to them now that they are dying by violence) that make resurrection more painful, something they are just learning. They apparently never have to go through that again, but it does give them newfound empathy with humans that they lacked when their deaths were relatively meaningless and by choice.
If Saul Tigh has always been a Cylon and wasn’t replaced at some point (a pretty big question), and he served in both Cylon Wars with documented service history… then they HAVE been around at least 40 years. This fact stands in apparent contradiction to the hybridization project depicted in Razor, so… I don’t know what to think.
Just because that’s when we first see them doesn’t mean that’s how long they’ve been around.
Yeah, she’s not a Six. Too bad, because that was a fun theory.
Because “all this has happened before and all this will happen again”. The toasters were trying to go to ‘the next step’ (meatbags). And they did and created the Seven. There are, however, leftovers from the last time through the cycle - The Five.
Lots of holes in the theory, but I haven’t seen anyone come up with anything better.
-Joe
The point is repeatedly made that Tigh served in the first Cylon war and therefore the skinjobs or at least the FF must have been around before then, but how do we know that he did? It’s not entirely clear when Tigh and Adama met, for all we know it was after the war, so even if Tigh said “I fought in the first war” that could just be his memories which could be false (just as Tyrol’s memories of rebelling against his religious parents must be false - he didn’t have any parents if he’s a Cylon).
I think given what was seen in Razor it’s more likely that the toaster model Cylons created the skinjobs. Whilst 40 years seems like very little time to achieve this, the Cylons had the benefit of having pretty much nothing else to occupy themselves with (no need for government, healthcare, farming, economics) so if they focussed pretty much exlcusively on R&D for 40 years solidly starting from the fairly advanced point they were already at there’s no reason they couldn’t have managed it.
I guess I don’t see how a death as a result of murder would be any more or less traumatic than another kind of violent or painful death. There’s lots of equally meaningless and unpleasant deaths the meatbags could have suffered before they launched the war and started getting murdered by humans.
(“We were being reassigned to a new location, and the heavy raider being used to transport us had a total power failure, so we ended up drifting in space, unable to call for help, dying a long, slow, agonizing death from suffocation. Yeah, that definitely sucked. Don’t want to do that again.”)
The show hasn’t really made clear where the trauma is; if there’s some existential reason “love” is necessary for making babies, then maybe there’s a similar emotional thing about getting murdered, as opposed to just, y’know, dying accidentally, slipping on a staircase or whatever.
Maybe dying because you put a knife in a toaster is different if you’re a toaster who gets a knife put in you. 
Thing is, the show hasn’t really made that suggestion, and hasn’t asked us as viewers to accept that there’s a distinction between kinds of deaths beyond their physical circumstances. If that happens, fine, but until then, I have to be skeptical. If there’s anything to the Cylon realization about the trauma of death, it seems to me that it’s simply a matter of its frequency: that the sort of accidental scenario I mentioned above simply doesn’t happen very often, that disease isn’t common, and that old age isn’t really a factor yet.
Moreover, just as Boomer had memories of being raised on a mining colony by her parents, and of being the only survivor of a disaster there. She’s one of the other seven Cylons, and it is established that she didn’t have any parents, and that she was not raised on a mining colony, yet everyone accepted her backstory.
… Just as everyone accepted Tigh’s and Tyrol’s and Anders’. (I’m not really sure if Tori has a backstory).
As for Cylon resurrection schemes, let us note that the Twos, Sixes, and Eights all voted to utterly destroy their resurrection process, because they thought it was a Bad Thing. Despite any possibility that they might use it to fight wrinkles. Yes, there were other reasons for them doing so, but we saw no one suggest that they keep the option around in case someone wanted a happy death.
How about instead of getting shot or blown up she got drowned in a frakking sewage treatment plant?
Drowning is pretty scary - I made it about 98% of the way when I was a wee one.
-Joe
Ditto here, when I was eleven. A last-second rescue is the only reason I’m still around.
And that Six isn’t the only one who has talked about the difficulty of resurrection. One of the Cavils went on at some length about it in the first few episodes of season three.
But Leoben’s been killed, what, 8 times? (That we know of, anyway.) He doesn’t seem to be any crazier than when we first met him…
Of course, he was pretty crazy to start with.
That’s as good a theory as any, I guess. Saul Tigh and Bill Adama have known each other for 20 years or so (I gleaned this from the ep “Scattered” where they talk about re-upping together), so unless your theory is correct, there have been skinjobs at least that long, and they age.
The Six killed by Anders and Natalie was clearly traumatized by her murder by drowning. I think the resurrection is physically painful, but violent, malicious death seems to be even more traumatic, on a psychological level. They hadn’t experienced deliberate, malicious death before the second Cylon War, and it seems to have colored their worldview to a great extent. Natalie alludes to this when she addresses the Quorum and tells them why the Cylons are willing to give up resurrection.
Well, obviously it’s not about fighting wrinkles, way to miss my point completely. Cylon society was all about uniformity and conformity before the 2nd Cylon War. They didn’t really start to individuate until they became immersed in human society and started experiencing what humans experience, including love and murder, two perennial favorites. Natalie implies that their lives (and deaths) were not meaningful before and cannot be meaningful as long as they don’t die. In order for them to be unique individuals, and in order for them to ever live in peace with humans, they have to embrace permanent death, and aging, and being physically and psychologically imperfect for the rest of their lives.
Leoben’s mulitple murders may have influenced his decision to side with the rebels and get rid of resurrection. It’s also implied that his obsession with Starbuck grew after his many deaths, so yeah, I think he’s crazier, if that’s possible.
Same again here. Pulled off the bottom of a pool and resusitated when I was 5 or 6. Those deep sea submersibles tend to set off a vague “claustrophobia” like reaction in me, not from the idea of being in them, but the idea of being surrounded on all sides by water and darkness.
So I have no problems with Cylons gaining on-going psychological trauma from being killed in unpleasant ways.
I agree with you Rubystreak.
This type of discussion always reminds me of that scene from Six Feet Under, where the sister asks the brother why people have to die. He says, “Because it makes life important.” The Cylons are seemingly beginning to understand this.
One would think they would figure out the reproduction thing first. 