Study: “Implications of Residual Excreta of Canis firesignis Discovered Proximate to Roswell Crash Site: Did Dogs Fly Spaceships?”
(Sorry; inside ref) 
In the highlands, yes. Tanzania does have some temperate zones, similar to another tropical neighbor, Kenya, where British planters settled in the White Highlands. They grow peaches, plums, apples and pears in the southern highlands of Tanzania :).
Thanks! I did not know that. I’m guessing they spent some time doing research then.
Where could we set this so that we can claim they’re in Africa, but not have to actually fly out there?
That’s exactly what I thought when I heard him say that. Also, “Galen” -> “Gaelic”?
How exactly is Tyrol going to be the father of anything? Humanity still hasn’t left the African savannah. Hera (and her parents) is the sole character who has any living descendants. That’s what it means to be “Eve” – all the other potential lines died out.
No, it’s possible that everyone has surviving descendants; Hera is just the only one who is everyone’s common ancestor. There just has to be a lot of intermarriage in the next couple generations, which isn’t too hard to believe.
Regarding keeping tech, I’m not really sure if the could hold on to it in the long run. They’d have to build all their infrastructure and their power sources are built around a fuel that doesn’t exist on Earth. And there probably isn’t a whole lot of artisan level skills among the fleet, so they’d probably be reduces to hunter-gatherers shortly.
My understanding was that they moved the Raptors over there manually - as they did the reverse with the Vipers in the miniseries. Gives room for the working flight pod to be for actual flights, especially as the Raptors all did a micro-FTL jump after the ramming, if I saw that right.
So, it’s the Battlestar’s last battle, they don’t need it to stay spaceworthy for long, but keeping a landing bay for the jump out matters. Jumping the Raptors out of the museum will beat the shit out of that pod, but it doesn’t need to stay in good shape any more.
There are those who believe that life here began out there, far across the universe, with tribes of humans who may have been the forefathers of the Egyptians, or the Toltecs, or the Mayans. That they may have been the architects of the great pyramids, or the lost civilizations of Lemuria or Atlantis. Some believe that there may yet be brothers of man who even now fight to survive somewhere beyond the heavens…
I agree, but it still seemed to me too, that they were implying Tyrol would somehow influence future Celts and whatnot. Maybe Cylons do live indefinitely if not killed by something. Nah. 140,000 years? I’m thinking it was an in-joke or something.
Well, it’s RDM’s story and he can tell it how he feels the need to. If it were me though, I’d keep the fleet in orbit. As I understand it, some of those ships can run for years without refueling. Meantime, they’ve got Raptors to scout for tylium, they’ve got mining ships, processing ships, they can turn algae into food, booze, and who knows what else. They built a small city on New Caprica, I’m certain they could have done it again, this time on a planet that apparently is much richer than New Caprica was. With 39,000 people I don’t see why they had to lose their space-faring capability. Except for that damn Apollo and his stupid “let’s be cavemen” idea.
Ooh, let’s give them language but deny them technology. That will break the cycle of violence. No it won’t. Wouldn’t it be better to carefully introduce the natives to technology while teaching them the lessons humanity learned about war and such over the last however many millennia?
The only thing I could come up with was that any Cylons hunting for them would look for the fleet.
Okay, I finished reading the thread, and now I beg your indulgence while I go all “stream of consciousness-y” in this post, and that means I’m going to be jumping around a lot, time-line wise. I’m almost always much too late getting to a thread, so I’m gonna take advantage of getting in sooner than usual…
I’m grading the finale with a 5 out of 10. I can’t go higher.
I was pleasantly surprised and amused by the fact that, instead of choosing a single ending, they went with several of them. I don’t know about you, but several times I watched what I thought was “the” ending, only to be surprised by how early it still was into the time slot.
My main – make that overwhelming – problem with the whole “God/Higher Power did it” quasi-resolution is that “It” sure as hell picked some ridiculously contrived moments to act and bizarre methods to intervene (and please don’t give me that completely arbitrary “god works in mysterious ways” cop out). It’ll reify the Angel Kara (and only Angel Kara) as well as her Angelic Viper with its Angelic direction-finder, but won’t do so for Angel Six & Angel Baltar or any other physical beings/objects? We first see Starbuck-a’s Viper completely destroyed in an explosion proximate to the fleet (IIRC), so who and what crash on Earth1? That’s got to be the second reincarnation of Starbuck and her Viper (Kara-b and Viper-b), right? Then, months later, the reified Angel Kara-c and Angelic Viper-c show up? And leads the fleet to Earth2? Where she is de-reified? Jeebus!:smack:
How come the Angel Six and the Angel Baltar know they’re angels, but Angel Kara-c doesn’t? I grasp that this was necessary for the plot to work, but this and similar “Starbuck as Angel” plot holes stick out rather badly.
I also share the opinion of those who thought the whole “harbinger of death” thing petered out pretty pathetically. “Harbinger” yes, but not “harbinger of death” in any way I’d go along with.
How come Angel Kara needed to learn the Watchtower tune from a human piano player? (And for that matter, in earlier threads, people were talking about Philip Glass. Did he ever actually appear? I didn’t see him. Why was his name mentioned?) Kara-a had absorbed and frequently expressed the nebula meme from some mysterious background; why not the Watchtower meme as well? Can someone please explain the whole All Along the Watchtower meme for me? (It was more than just the tune, obviously, since some of the characters use parts of the lyrics as dialog.)
Speaking of Watchtower, it was kind of fun to spot all the references to various real religions throughout the whole series. Besides the Jehovah’s Witness ref there and the Greco-Roman traditions (including the very name of Cylon), there were further polytheistic references to Mormonism (e.g., Kobol-Kolob), Judaism (Cylon monotheism), and even Scientology (the magazine rack in New York featured many copies of a magazine with the name “Scientology” emblazoned on it. I wonder if Moore et al have Scientology linkages?) Did anyone see any other religions referenced or hinted at?
Like others, I was also extremely disappointed in the whole Hera plot line and denouement. I mean, the “Hera’s special blood (semi-) cures Laura’s cancer” plot line meets the “Hera is mitochondrial Eve” plot line doesn’t pan out very well in my opinion (mostly because the “Hera is mitochondrial Eve” resolution was so weak in my eyes).
The idea of the newly merged race opting out of high technology works for me, but it is simply inconceivable that humans wouldn’t retain or very quickly re-invent basic low- to mid- tech (think indoor plumbing and sanitation and the germ theory of disease and so forth). And giving up the written and printed word? Ridiculous! Yet the plot necessitates that, since Earth2 history (i.e., the written recording of history) doesn’t begin until 140,000 years had passed.
One thing that occurred to me while I watched is that they might have been suggesting that the race that killed-off or otherwise superseded the Neanderthals was the human/cylon hybrid race. But I’m not sure the timing would be right for that in real human evolution.
Finally, I enjoyed the spot-the-reference game throughout the series and in the finale. I didn’t see some of the refs other posters in this thread observed, so thanks for bringing them out! One that struck me as an homage to Babylon 5 was the “shadow vessel” shape of the Cylon colony. Anyone see other references or homages?
Which manages to work in the TOS references as well 
The other ships were breaking down, too, not just Galactica. We learn that when the New Quorum is calling dibs on scrapping Galactica for parts – air purifiers, among other things, are failing. The fleet didn’t have the resources to maintain their ships.
They also had limited fuel. And to get that fuel, people had to be slaving away on the tyllium ship – as seen in Tyrol’s “union organizer” episode in Season 3. And the tyllium ship was the one with the failing air purifiers.
So, the ships are falling apart even now, while they’re still being maintained. And they have limited fuel. Their option was, bascally, mothball the ships in orbit and hope they don’t drop down on their heads some day. Since there won’t be time enough to maintain them while trying to build new lives on New Earth. And in a generation, no one will know how, anyway. (and then they’ll drop down on their heads.)
So they stripped them of everything they could (we see everyone schlepping stuff all about, and see several of their well-stocked camps), and took along what vessels they could land in (we see Raptors, and hear they’re being used to ferry people to settlement sites).
They did NOT abandon their technology. They abandoned their SHIPS. No one ever said anything about abandoning technology – Lee said they wouldn’t build a city (because we’d seen how that went on New Caprica), and there was some talk of needing to be as spiritually advanced as their technology.
In 150,000 years, there was plenty of time for them to have built a pleasantly pastoral civilization that vanished without trace in whatever population bottleneck left Hera as Mitochondrial Eve.
ambushed, Kara didn’t realize she was an angel until right at the very end. When she told Lee she wasn’t coming back, she’d realized what she was – and then she was gone. Presumably the other angels – Head Six, Head Baltar, that sibyl who talked to D’Anna on New Caprica, Maelstrom Leoben, Head Elosha, Dreilide Thrace, etc. – had been going about their business a while longer than Kara had.
One imagines the hazing rituals for newbie angels would’ve been interesting to see…
When I saw that, I briefly wondered if the writers were going to give us an enormous (and incredible, as in non-credible) surprise by showing us the pens going crazy when Adama denied he was a Cylon. That was a nice scare, though.
Has Shelly Godfrey, the Six manifestation that faux-exposed Baltar in season one, then mysteriously disappeared without a trace, been brought up in the thread yet?
She may serve as a ( not doubt unwitting for the writers ) foreshadowing for both physical angel phenomenon and possibly the unwitting angelic agent as well.
nuh uh. From: Star Trek II
Although way back when Shelley Godfrey appeared, I would have been annoyed had she turned out not to have been another disposable, number Six… I think now it is clear that she was Head Six, manifesting for all to see. Since Baltar did not see Head Six while Shelley was around, but once Shelley was gone Head Six came back.
However, I don’t think that was two different angels; I think that was Head Six, playing the part of Shelley Godfrey. And having a joke by tormenting Baltar at the same time – seems to fit her personality.
Dude. There may have been a slight amount of humor in that post.
I can’t recall if anyone said it, but I contend it was very strongly implied. Recall, for example, the long line of people carrying nothing but backpacks at most. I also don’t recall anyone with any tech greater than Coddle’s binoculars (well, Adama’s raptor, too. I guess they didn’t abandon *all *their ships)
Well, I suppose that’s “reasonable”, but only inasmuch as very little makes much sense in that universe surrounding Starbuck. Consider just one of the sets of difficulties I brought out in my long post above: Kara-A is physical, then she and her ship are totally destroyed while Lee watches. But later, Angel Kara (Kara-C) “shows up” (whatever that means in context), and she leads the fleet to Earth1, whereupon she discovers physical Kara-B and physical Viper-B (we know Kara-B is physical because, for one thing, RealBaltar matches Kara-B’s DNA to Kara-A’s).
I mean: Holy WTF??
Sorry. Clueless as always, I guess…
Would you and/or Tamerlane explain your thinking in regards to Shelley Godfrey and HeadSix/AngelSix? (Picture me in suspenders and wading boots bashing myself with bricks…)