I don’t know where you guys are getting this “sterilized” idea from. I sincerely think its just a nuked city-scape. Why would there be plants? There weren’t plants before when it was a city? At least not many.
Because it looks as though the devestation had happened a long time ago, and vegetation should have reclaimed the land by then. Even if the original nuclear strike had destroyed every plant in the tri-state area, new life would have creeped back in from outside the region withing a few decades.
If you notice, as the landing party is flying down to make planetfall, there are a couple scenes showing continents, cloud cover, and oceans, the borders of the continents are obscured, making identification difficult, but the landmass visible looks distinctly brown and barren…
yes, it could be that they’re flying over the Sahara desert, but the overall impression I got (and my first inkling of "things don’t seem right here…) was “dead planet”
after they’ve landed, the camera pans past some ruins which have some brown, dead vines clinging to them, there’s no grass visible, just dirt
But where were the cockroaches?
I dunno. Earth from space looked like the blue & white jewel it’s been for millennia. The Colonials seem to have a thing for finding the most Noir place to land. Look at New Caprica. They lived in a black & white cold muddy shit-hole but apparently a few hundred yards out of “town” there was sunshine and plentiful vegetation.
From a story standpoint, it’s more interesting if the whole planet is uninhabitable. If they can still settle on Earth somewhere, the primary problem of the series is resolved.
But they certainly could still take ten episodes to defend the planet from the “main” Cylons, or start battling the renegade Cylons, or even Earth survivors.
I always figured they didn’t want to find earth because it’s habitable, they wanted to find earth because hopefully their lost brothers and sisters had a fleet of Battlestar-type ships that could defend against Cylons. Cylons can scout out the whole galaxy and it seems inevitable they’d find earth.
But now they seem to be after something more metaphysical, and “ooh poor us, we’re disappointed with what we found.”
My theory, admittedly half-baked:
The Final Five are, in fact, the final five HUMANS, not Cylons. They’re the survivors of a devastated Earth (maybe found by the Centurions?). Everyone else is a Cylon, which would explain why it’s apparently impossible to distinguish a Cylon from a “Human”- nobody ever tried to compare a skinjob to, say, Tigh.
The interesting thing about this idea is that it would basically make the Centurions the good guys, as they’re trying to help the Final Five get back to, and repopulate, Earth.
You heard it here first, folks.
[SUB]Okay, it’s got more holes than a very holey thing with holes in it, but it’s my theory, frak it.[/SUB]
Even if it were true, their lost brothers and sisters would have been separated by 4000 years of no contact. Earthlings would have no more allegiance or connection to the Twelve Colonists or the Cylons as Americans have to Bronze Age Mesopotamians.
I can see how that conversation would go:
“So let me guess this straight: You guys say you are decendents from the original space colonists from this planet? You landed on some planet you call “Kobol” but fucked that up so you went off and found a dozen more planets? You built a race of robots, they went crazy, built their own humans, nuked your dozen planets, had their own robot civil war, and you assholes fought your way here? AND the only difference between Earth English and Caprican is that you say “frak” instead of “fuck”? So what the fraking fuck do you want here?”
It seems irrelevant to the story. It’s like nitpicking some road movie because it doesn’t cover every stop for gas. They are going from Point A to Point B and unless something of interest happens in between, it doesn’t really matter if it takes them 1 jump or 100.
I figure they find modern-day earth, and we’re totally pissed off the Colonials have Cylons on their tail and we’re totally fucked, because we don’t have the technology. But, there are so many things wrong with that.
So, I figure they arrive at a future earth which didn’t experience whatever technological set-backs the Colonies experienced after leaving Kobol and moving to the twelve colonies, and there’s an earth with a 4,000-year technological advantage. They’d still be pissed the Colonials brought their problem with them, but earth should be able to handle it anyway.
Ron Moore didn’t like either scenario, so we’ve got what we’ve got. Some Cylons come from earth, and are probably involved with this “all this has happened before” cycle, and earth isn’t a deus ex machina nor is it Galactica 1980. What else could he have done?
So I don’t necessarily think they were in New York. That comparison is convincing, but could easily be a coincidence.
On a possibly related note, Here is the map Lee was looking at at the beginning of the episode.
Someone keep an eye on Tory. She’s this ][ close to going Mad With Power, and when Cavil and the Caviliers show up, she won’t hesitate for a second to go heel. Earth has been found… is there a real use for D’Anna now?
Lee, get down off the fraking console.
The whole episode felt rushed. This could’ve easily been a 90 minute episode. Huge events happened, followed by a quick “move on,” with the exception of Tigh coming out to the Old Man. Tory comes out to Roslin and Roslin’s like, “Oh, hey cool. So can you go talk to D’Anna?”
What’s the deal with Tyrol? He almost seems amused by the whole thing. I can see him standing with Tory. Then again, does anyone yet know that Tory airlocked Cally?
Kara’s whole hey-remember-when-I-got-blown-the-fuck-up is still very much unresolved. As is the whole harbinger-of-death thing.
Tory’s Watchtower trigger is this ep looked a bit like Roslin’s reaction when the power went out before the original Watchtower trigger. Then again, Tory puked that time, so maybe she always happens to get triggered on an empty stomach.
He can’t help it…he thinks he’s Bobby Flay. 
Because I’m not a nitpicking whiner? I assume that people on Galactica take shits, too. But I’ve never seen them. OMG they’re all Cylons! And they eat but don’t excrete so RDM can’t even get his science straight. They should all be exploding from all the food that’s been crammed into them!
Or, to put it another way, “pointless nitpicking”.
I think it’s more of a matter of him being past the point of caring. Kind of a “thank god they found me out so I can just stop pretending” kind of thing. That, and everyone in the Four seems to be going through stages of mourning. I think Tyrol has moved on to acceptance.
-Joe
Yeah I think the “in contact with” was a reference to her making eye contact with all of them so she knows they know she knows, and she knows they can hear what she is saying.
OMG, Kara Thrace appeared from a wormhole in Earth’s orbit. Her appearance triggered all the nuclear powers to think they were all being attacked and to nuke each other. They all died. Later, BSG showed up to a nuked planet Earth. Kara was the Harbinger of Death who destroyed Earth!
What, it’s no more hairbrained than Dualla being a Cylon, frack it. 
On seeing the rerun tonight, I agree. My initial post was just plain stupid.
I blame it on age. 
Hasn’t happened to me yet – knock wood.
Come in!
Which is why, the more I think about it, this new development, the early arrival at their destination, is such a genius storytelling move. Given the overall arc of the show (the search for Earth), there’s only a couple of different ways this can turn out.
-
They never find Earth at all. Lame.
-
They get to Earth, and…
A. It’s our past.
[indent]i. Recent past, geologically speaking. Star-Trekky story about Napoleon or Rome or something. Lame.
ii. Ancient past: dinosaurs etc. Serlingesque story about Cylon and Human acting as Adam and Eve. Lame.
B. It’s our present. That is, Galactica 1980. Supremely lame.
[/indent]Which leaves…
C. It’s our future.
[indent]i. Powerful high-technology future. Our heroes are largely irrelevant in such a world. Potentially interesting, but probably unsatisfying.
ii. Post apocalyptic. Isolated tribes, or no survivors. Potentially interesting, but a major anticlimax and letdown for a series finale.[/indent]
As levdrakon asks: What else could they have done? I don’t really see any other plausible outcomes for their quest. It’s not exactly predictable, because we don’t know which item will be picked, but it’s multiple choice, so it’s not unpredictable either. And as the series neared its conclusion, speculation about this mystery would have become enormously distracting. We know they’re going to get to Earth, so what do they find? Everything else becomes secondary, merely filler and padding to delay the inevitable.
Which is why this current twist is so genius. Pay it off early. Answer the question now, before we’re expecting it, and change up the rules. The point of the show is no longer “which Earth do they find,” but “what are the ramifications of their arrival.” We now have several months to stew, asking ourselves “what happens next.”
Admittedly, this isn’t a perfect move. As Troy McClure says, they rushed past a whole lot of stuff. Consider, for just one example, all the dramatic meat that could have been chewed when the rest of the fleet discovered that the military man who has been in charge of everything, not just once but twice (and, his first time up, supervised the massacre of angry protesters), is a Cylon. And then Acting President Adama decides to roll over and join forces with them. By all rights, this should have seriously fractured the fleet. How many ships arrived at their destination? How many said “aw, frak this” and bailed out? And that’s hardly the only thing that got glossed over by putting the story on fast forward.
The more you think about the details of what happened, the more these annoying little holes appear; but at the same time, like I said above, the more I think about it, the more impressed I am, from a big-picture point of view, with the storytelling choice. For a show that thrives on being unpredictable, short-circuiting the central (and potentially distracting) mystery of the story arc is pretty goddamn brilliant, because now we’re back in the delicious place of not having any idea what happens next. Very, very smart.
I was thinking that she was the harbinger of true death to the cylons, since they are now mere mortals.
You will be laughing out of the other side of your toaster when the flying motorcycles show up, Pal.
