I thought of this too but Ron Moore, in the linked interview, says Ellen is #5.
If they have a Wilford Brimley model, I am cancelling my subscription to Sci Fi 
“… and you won’t ever die.” 
Okay - am I the only one that remembers that more than one Cylon model was boxed before 3? Or am I just imagining this . . . because the boxing had been done before
(all this has been done before . . .)
Also, as for Dee being killed. I do think it’s because it’s the final season and the actors have a choice - to go out big or hope there’s a movie deal and they get asked back. And someone with a Dee like character might choose the surprise death thing so that they stand out more and further their acting career.
That aside, I think the choice of killing Dee is important because she was a constant - whether she was on Galactica or Pegasus, she never stopped working for the fleet. She was a reliable cog in the wheel. She didn’t have overly-dramatic arcs - she was the cushion for the arcs. The one that kept things sane, kept things going. Even in this episode, she advised Lee in how to deal with the politicos and give them a reason to move on. When she didn’t have to because she was the ex. She didn’t make waves, she didn’t cause major problems. She even babysat your kids, forfrakksake. She was dependable old Dee.
And she couldn’t handle it. Just like hope of life on a new Earth, she was taken away from them. They were both part of what kept everyone else going. Hope and Dee.
Also, it allows Hoshi, a third level character recently elevated to at least secondary through the webisodes, to have a more visible presence and access to more information. Remember, Gaeta has a plan and a theory.
Oh, shit. He’s a Cylon, too?
I tend to fall in the camp that thinks the writing was good. The characters were doing out-of-character things in order to demonstrate how dire the situation is. If Roslin and Adama lose it completely, things have gotten about as bleak as they can get. And finding that Earth is frakked would truly do that to people - people with a lot of fortitude, who had weathered so much, but were holding on in hopes of finding Earth. They might even have been able to hold on indefinitely if the fleet never found Earth. But finally finding it, when it is destroyed, that would mess people up bigtime. And the writers wanted to convey that to us, sitting comfortably in our living rooms, knowing it’s just a show and things will probably work out OK. The only way to communicate that hopelessness and darkness was to use the nuclear option - kill a liked character in a shocking way, have Adama go off the deep end, and Roslin go catatonic. It’s powerful exactly because we would never expect these characters to act this way. (Though I agree Eddie Olmos went a leetle bit over the top. Which I can understand when I read that he was “psyching himself down” by telling himself the series was over, they’d never get to do another ep, all is lost.)
So maybe Starbuck crashed on Earth, and accidentally got caught up in whatever mechanism Ellen was referring to that allowed the 5 to be reborn? Still doesn’t explain the viper though. That argues for some Melvarrr-like being who deliberately sent her back.
OR, someone is mind-frakking her. It is significant that the corpse itself was not identifiable. Who knows, maybe Leoben’s sudden fear was a put-on. He’s certainly no stranger to messing with her psyche.
As for the history, I need that chart too. And are we all supposed to be Cylons? Who will in the near future build centurions, and be wiped out, only to have humans recreate centurions, who will recreate us? My head hurts.
If you follow the link to the Moore interview I posted a way up, you should find a link in there to an interview with the actress who played Dee.
She basically found out about it when they renegotiated her for 13 episodes, not the full 20. So it wasn’t her choice, although she says she understood why it happened. Moore also speaks to why Dee got killed in his interview.
Unauthorized Cinnamon, I think Ed Olmos was “psyching” everyone else down, not himself. He wanted them to be dejected and shellshocked, and so played mindgames to get them into that mood.
He’s apparently known for that. Personally, makes me glad acting never looked like a career I’d want.
Only the 3’s, sorry.
The sets and props are being auctioned off. No movie. Even the TV series had to fight for renewal every season - and that probably played a part in defining the story arc, which had to be capable of being cut short at any of a number of moments.
I agree with your reasoning about why Dee was chosen for the suicide scene.
I’m a bit ambivalent about the Dee suicide. I like it for all the reasons you mentioned but it seems too out of the blue for her character. Unless I’m forgetting something. Did we ever have any reason to believe in previous episodes that Dee was especially hinging her hopes on finding Earth, or that it was at least something she looked forward to more than others?
Perhaps her break-up with Lee devastated her more than she let on and made her put her entire being into the mission of finding Earth?
I would actually have expected more really dark suicides right at the beginning of the show, after the tremendous shock of the annihilation of the 12 Colonies and death of most (all) of the crew’s friends and family really began to sink in. I think it would have been really effective to show a ‘main’ character just off himself in the 5-6th episode, as well as tertiary characters at random points throughout the first season. The dashed expectations of Earth really have nothing on the destruction of everyone, everything, and every place you know and love.
Don’t assume that the sets/props being auctioned off have anything to do with it.
We don’t know how this ends yet. They might not need these particular sets/props afterwards . . .
And are they auctioning off everything? Or just things that don’t apply?
c’mon, let me dream a little.
It’s a throwaway detail, but in one of the first episodes of the series (after the mini), Roslin is getting an update on the population number, and trying to account for every loss; the person she’s talking to (Billy, IIRC) says a contributing factor is how people are “disappearing.” It’s not clearly explained, but it’s plausible to interpret this as a veiled reference to suicides: people airlocking themselves because they can’t cope.
Yes, it is in character, but you have to go back to Season 1 for the backstory. She talked to Billy about the loss of her family in the destruction of the Colonies. She had the thing with Billy for a while, but dumped him and then he got killed. Then her husband (got fat, then) cheated on her, and they broke up. Earth being blotto was just the last thing she could take.
As mentioned, and linked already, Moore talks about why they choose Dee here (scroll down some)
And Kandyse McClure talks about it here
Both give good explanations of why Dee was chosen and why it made sense for the character.
Well, they are stronger, more agile and have greater endurance than humans, but not superhumanly so. More like a well trained athlete on PCP.
They seem more resistant to radiation (but less resistant to Ragnor Anchorage radiation).
And their spines glow when you stick your schlong in them.
Actually, it wasn’t burned. At least not completely. It was decomposed. And it was wearing a protective flight suit.
I think individual Cylons were boxed before, but the 3s were the first time an entire line of Cylons was boxed.
IIRC her death scene was a hallucination/dream/something equally unreliable - though in the BGC universe they tend to be significant. But I agree her scene was very much a classic religious one.
Yes. Everything we know about it indicates that the Cylon god is the typical Abrahamic (unknowable, single/thou-shalt-have-no-other-gods-before-me) god.
It isn’t - it’s a wagon train to the stars 
It’s the first WTTTS series I know that that just completely ignores space clothes and lasers in favor of standard 20th century business suits and curly-wired phones, though.
Anyway, I like the religious overtones in this series, especially given the way the show messes with the audiences’ expectations in that regard (and it has since the first season).
SONG of Ice and Fire.
Here’s a wild theory, what if the Final Five really are humans just like the Earthlings. The difference between Earthlings and Colonials being that Earthlings possess an immortal soul while Colonials do not. The other seven Cylons’ downloading abilites are an attempt to duplicate reincarnation with technology. This has some strange implications. The Colonials, lacking souls, don’t have an afterlife, while the Five and the people of Earth (eg us) do. The fallen Lord of Kobol really is Yahweh and he granted his followers eternal life while the Lords of Kobol are the false gods. Baltar really is a prophet and his Six is an angel (or god himself). The Colonials will embrace Cylonism.
I’m on board with this and have been trying to articulate it for a couple days now: the phrasing Ellen used referred to being “reborn”, which to me pretty explicitly underlines the distinction between being resurrected and being reincarnated. My hunch is the five are special in that they can reincarnate, retaining a ton of “genetic memory” and popping up again and again over time, and independent of the technology of resurrection ships. The mainstream Cylons apparently strive toward this, given their interest in colonial reproductive research… and the shtick where Cylons can’t breed/interbreed without love might be another gesture toward the “soulful” nature of the five.
Just thinking aloud, I’m toying with some possible relationship between the pop tart babies and the five.
Hera: daughter of Helo and Sharon eight, she gets all the press.
Nicky: son of Cally and Chief, why doesn’t he get nearly the attention that Hera does, anyway? Where did he get that pacifier?
Unborn child of Caprica Six and Tigh: 100% toaster!
Did I miss any?
Eh, that line of thought isn’t going anywhere. And I’m still totally perplexed about Starbuck, of course.
OK, another crazy thought, which probably overlaps what a lot of others are thinking. It has been said before that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. Bearing that in mind:
The Cylons want to be more “human”- to be able to reproduce/reincarnate/reinvent themselves, not as clones falling out of a juice-box, but essentially in the mode of their makers, by giving birth to beings with souls. Suppose they were to succeed? Suppose they already have?
Perhaps the Cycle that is so frequently invoked refers to this process in which that which is created reinvents it’s own maker again and again? Perhaps the “Lords of Kobol” revered by the colonials are/were in fact Cylons themselves, but whose transcendent achievement was finally perfecting the technology of birth and rebirth, inventing a human race in the process? And then something cataclysmic happens and the Cylon race is lost or mostly lost, and the details are lost in memory, but the neohumans thrive and eventually those humans decide to develop some robots, who develop/evolve into some neohumans…
Riffing with the notion that the God of the Cylons is a fallen thirteenth Lord of Kobol, maybe that recurring role falls to one who hates the creators, resists evolution, and causes the big rift/cataclysm/diaspora, while the others parent the new humanity. Cavill’s kind of the high priest of this mindset in the current cycle, and possibly headed into that role for the next: indeed if we can assume that he kicked off the KILL ALL HUMANS agenda, then he’s sort of already triggered the new diaspora- ironically he is atheist. That there are twelve Lords of Kobol (and one possible additional in the Cylon god) and twelve known Cylon models (and what is Kara Trace, anyway?) is a pretty strong coincidence.
Looking for an explanation of the distinction between the final five and the other seven new Cylons… perhaps the numbering scheme is a lead after all: one through six as well as eight all reproduce/reincarnate mechanically… Ron Moore claims that the Final Five don’t have model numbers, but I’m going to ignore that for the sake of my pet theories 
Why else would the Cylons themselves refer to them as the “Final Five”, unless merely for dramatic effect?
Apparently Eight can also reproduce sexually, so my hunch of the moment goes that 1-6 are mechanical only, 7-8 span both, and 9-13(!) are all about the soul-love exclusively, for better or worse. Where is lucky number 7?
Caprica 6 is pregnant right now, so apparently they can reproduce sexually as well…