Which means…what? Lots of folks want to watch?
Cool.
Tell them to bring their DVDs.
Obviously, I missed something simple. Why is Ellen Tigh firmly established as the Final Cylon?
Please be gentle.
Hrmmm… Ellen, maybe?
Tigh shouts it out at the end of the episode? And then Eick or Moore went and confirmed it in an interview.
Regarding Dee: I could have sworn a blue clothed arm not her own fired the gun. Am I hallucinating? I can’t bring myself to go back and rewatch that part because it was so gruesome.
Is the show supposed to take place in our universe or some alternate universe with an Earth in it? I always assumed the latter, because it’s pretty clear we didn’t emigrate here thousands of years ago 
How are Cylons different, physically?
Whatever happened to Baltar’s imaginary friend?
I watched it twice.
Did anyone else get the impression that Tigh was actually humored/bemused/happy that she was a Cylon?
He didn’t seem shocked or depressed about it.
And I was freaking out at the end when i thought Tigh was going to do what it looked like he was going to do!
I love that crusty old curmudeon too much
Well perhaps Tigh was hoping that Ellen being a Cylon meant that she was downloaded when she died, and thus may make a reappearance in Saul’s crusty old life.
It was not a blue clothed arm. She decisively leans into her locker to grab something, then suddently you see a bare hand and wrist holding the gun to her head.
From the director’s commentary it seems certain enough that she took her own life and there’s no more plot mining to be done there. But I agree with you that there’s something odd about that shot. I had to roll it back myself to be sure. The way the hand rotates, it looks like an elbow being extended, not being flexed. What you never see is the gun in Dee’s hand until the last second. I think they wanted to make absolutely sure you didn’t see the gun coming, and they used another hand double to frame the shot just the way they want. As a result it looks ambiguous whether it was an execution or suicide (probably not what they intended, but the confusion sure got me more invested in the scene).
We’re told that they respond differently to radiation, apparently they have fiber-optic ports in their wrists, and their spines glow red when it’s sexytime.
Not to belabor this fanwank, but I just had a new thought on this. Ellen Tigh could definitely have been downloaded (or uploaded, to be more precise) when she died on New Craprica. Uploading is an automated data-only operation, it would seem, and there’s no requirement that a body be available. So she might just be a very large file sitting on the hard drive of a resurrection ship. And definitely an obscure piece of data storage is something that could easily escape the attention of the other Cylons (or not, but we never see for certain how much they know about the inner workings of resurrection).
Their dead bodies also give off methane and hydrogen sulfide, apparently.
That’s a fact, but I think that’s a commonality rather than a difference.
I could see that. My current operating theory is that this has all happened before and this will all happen again.
The Final Five got to the Colonies from Earth, and it took their software 2000 years to get there. They were reborn through some as-yet unrevealed mechanism.
We’ll see.
-Joe
He doesn’t say it was a random choice – he says that it was a choice they were leaving open to change should they find a different option they liked better. That seems to be they way they’ve written the entire series – loosely planned, with occasionaly whacky ideas thrown in that may (or may not) work.
Apparently, Ellen made a lot of sense to be the final Cylon based on where they wanted to go with things, so she got the nod. It wasn’t random, and it is too early to judge if it makes any dramatic or logical sense whatsoever.
On TWoP someone posited that Ellen Tigh might be an aged Six model.
You know, it’d be awesome if they put Ellen’s mind and memories into, say, a Cavil model. Think of the ensuing hijinks!
While I love Dean Stockwell, the thought of him running naked through a base star, chasing a Simon model, with a bottle of booze is a little…unsettling.
-Joe
Can’t touch this.
Yeah, there’s a lot of “speculation” that Ellen is an older version of a Cylon model Six or Starbuck.
Apparently in the theory that, hey, they’re all blond, right?
However, Saul met Ellen not long after the Cylon War – when she would have been around Six’s or Starbuck’s current age. This is quite a thing not to notice, or comment on – that this blond chick causing you all sorts of problems looks exactly like your fracked-up wife?
Furthermore, Bill Adama knew Ellen from back then, too. So he’d have to be that oblivious, too.
All the lube in the world won’t stop that fanwank from chafing.