Oh, I understand why the writers put in the Mitochondrial Eve stuff. It’s just bad science – no real scientist would discover mitochondrial remains that match all living humans and proclaim this is Mitochondrial Eve.
Hell, Galatica was 40+ years old when the series started. She was ready to be decommed around that point as well. You can bet people were skimping on the maintenance a bit for a ship just about ready to be retired.
And that’s before the 2nd cylon war.
Well technically some mitochondria from the male makes it into the egg (from the sperm). It’s just that the majority is from the mother. So it’s possible that some of that human Helo mtDNA was needed to mix with Athena mtDNA to make the perfect human-human concoction. There could even possibly have been some recombination between the human and cylon mtDNA once in the zygote to share some genes.
But good point about calling Hera mitochondrial Eve, I didn’t think about that. They could only know a time frame, not a specific fossil, unless they somehow extracted some DNA from the bones.
Which is ridiculous, since they know of social development on numerous planets, and the development of cities is inevitable, and as we know, happened again. Of course it did. It makes sense for humans to congregate for safety and commerce. What doesn’t make sense is splitting up all over a planet, dividing your resources and knowledge base when most of your survivors have no idea how to live there.
The dispersal of the 38,000 almost guaranteed the loss of the good aspects of technology and culture, just as it almost guaranteed a huge die-off in the first few years. A city would have given them safety, as well a locus for the preservation of the positive aspects of their society. Splitting everyone up just seems like a colossally bad idea to me, at least in the early phases of their settlement. It would make more sense to spend some time exploring the planet (using technology, not on foot), finding the safest, richest areas, and establishing settlements there, preferably on the same continent. The goal is to ensure the longterm survival of the species, right? I don’t think Lee’s plan was the best plan if that was the goal.
That is a good point. I wonder if God/It lifted his reproductive curse on the Cylons so they could start making babies with humans too?
Sure, but when I heard one or another hybrid calling Starbuck “the harbinger of death” all those times, I certainly expected a hell of a lot more than the death of a few Cylon models. Didn’t you?
Sorry, no, I don’t remember that. Or are you talking about when Ellen, Tigh, Athena, and Galen (if that’s right) heard it in the bar in one of the recent episodes? I thought they, Starbuck, and the piano player were all in the same bar at the same time, and that’s when they recognized it again. Or are you talking about some other time Tigh heard it, such as in the nebula?
I was referring to the fact that “Watchtower” is the name of the Jehovah’s Witness official journal as well as being found in the title of “All Along the Watchtower”. But I may well have been over-reaching there. My thinking was that Moore/Bear et al. had any number of great tunes to choose from, and both Dylan (or was it Moore? I forget) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses garnered the word “watchtower” from the same biblical verse, so I’d thought it was chosen at least in part because of its religious reference.
Of course, that reference might well not have been on anyone’s mind when they chose the song. It might well have just been Moore’s or someone’s favorite song. It’s an awesome song whose lyrics are particularly open to diverse interpretations, certainly including some that I envision being apropos of one or more BSG themes (even though I can’t quite flesh any out very far; for example, who would be the Joker and who the Thief?). But I think it still qualifies as a religious reference even if it wasn’t deliberate.
Once we see Tigh and the others, the piano player has disappeared.
I just rewatched and I’m certain the blue & white magazine says ScienceNow.
BTW, I read the interviews linked to way up-thread and RDM said he’s kinda embarrassed he did that cameo. He didn’t think it would be so obvious and jarring.
Personally, I’m glad the very end changed so abruptly. It’s like a splash of cold water to snap you out of the mood they put you in. Had it ended with Adama staring off into the sunset, I might have had to OD on sleeping pills.
I don’t think long-term survival is the goal, actually.
Their hopes have been dashed so many times. New Caprica turned into a bloodbath. “Earth” turned out to be a radioactive cinder. The Galactica literally fell apart.
And their leadership has been dismal, from Tigh’s disastrous turn commanding the fleet to President Baltar to the mutiny to having to accept Cylons as part of the fleet.
So I think they want to find a quiet place to live out the rest of their lives. They want to join up in small settlements with their remaining family and friends and not have to worry about mutinies and suicide missions and emergency jumps. Will they regret it after two or three harsh winters? Possibly. But at this stage in their journey, I don’t have a hard time believing the survivors would say, “Frak it. If we can end the cycle of violence by going off into the wilderness and never again listening to Baltar’s broadcasts or forming a union under Tyrol or building a city that makes a nice conspicuous target, then sign me up.”
For those who are worried about Lee, I don’t think he’s going to go off exploring by himself. I picture him leading a band of explorers a la Lewis and Clark.
One thing that pleases me endlessly is that Moore didn’t try to explain everything with wormholes and cloning and implanted memories and who knows what else. There are drawbacks to using “God did it” and “Starbuck’s an angel” to cover all the loose ends, but it spared us painful exposition and pseudoscientific mumbo jumbo.
Whatever he came up with would inevitably have invited nitpicking and groans of “Oh, come on!”
It did sound like Lee was talking about leaving all technology behind, but it’s fairly clear that’s not what happened. Bill flew his old Viper out of Galactica right before Anders took the fleet toward the Sun. (Did anyone else expect to see him jump away at the last second?) He had his Raptor as well after that. So clearly the smaller vessels stayed on the planet. The plan with the maps was after Lee’s suggestion was approved, so they weren’t sending people out to walk the (new) Earth alone, they were settling in a number of small villages, which might not be the worst plan for survival, especially with transport ships and communications devices to keep them connected at first. The people setting off on foot with a backpack or a duffel bag weren’t walking to Europe and Asia, but presumably to the local settlement over where Lampkin had suggested a city where supplies and materials had presumably already been set up.
Galen, of course, was an exception: He was committing suicide, and he knew it. He wasn’t the kind to just say “Frak!” and eat a gun like Cavil, but several people had commented in the last few threads that he seemed to be drifting, going along with whatever was asked of him, but without any real sense of meaning or commitment. (Fix the ship? Sure, you got it! Abandon the fleet and try to form Cylontopia? Yeah, cool, whatever!) It was pretty clear especially after what happened with Boomer and then the revelation about Cally that he just wanted off this ride called life. Alternately brooding in isolation and fighting hopelessly for survival in a harsh and unforgiving environment was exactly the way for him to go. In a sense, it’s what he’s done all along.
[ETA: I don’t think “He’s not coming back” meant that Lee would never see his father again, just that his father was going off to live his own life and let Lee live his. He wasn’t gong to play “Daddy” anymore, as he’d done in Lee’s life well past the point where Lee should have become an adult.]
As far as Mitochondrial Eve, first of all realize what that is. As the article in the show said, it is the most recent common ancestor through the female line of all living people. Galen could have fathered a tribe that survived in Scotland (if there were anyone there at the time to do it with) as long as his descendants eventually interbred with female descendants of Hera. Secondly, although it is correct that having scientists find fossils that could be identified as Mitochondrial Eve is indeed bad science, it’s exactly the sort of bad science that the media report every day (though not usually Nat. Geo., I think). All it would take is one scientist musing that these recently found fossils are of the right age and location to possibly be Mitochondrial Eve for all we know, and I guarantee that’s the exact report that you’d read in the paper the next day. So in that sense it’s perfectly believable.
I don’t see how that’s possible. Lee and the audience saw her and her Viper completely destroyed several months before Angel Kara-C magically returned. I can’t see any alternative than that a new Kara, Kara-B, was magically “resurrected” (by God, I guess) off screen, who then crashed on Earth1 (for no adequately explored reason I can think of except as a necessary but nevertheless highly contrived plot point.
As I wrote previously, the necrotic blood from that body was obtained on Earth1. In my Thrace Theory, that body had to belong to the second Kara, Kara-B.
I’d written that I thought that Baltar compared the dog tag blood with Kara-A’s blood, thinking that it would still be on file. But now I’m considering the possibility that the dog tag blood was compared to that of Angel Kara-C (as opposed to Kara-A). Unlike all the other angels, Angel Kara-C was fully physical (no matter what else she might have been). So if Kara-C had DNA at all – something I’d previously rejected because of her angelic nature – why not the same DNA as that of Kara-A and Kara-B?
Interesting! Thanks for elaborating on that.
I’ve been preparing this post off and on while multi-tasking like crazy, so I don’t know if this has been brought out yet, but I’d like to ask you and the other posters if they would elaborate their views regarding the ontology of angels in the BSG universe. For example, can they switch from Head Angels into Physical Angels at will? If so, why is Angel Kara-C the only one who was demonstrably physical? (Well, now I guess that’s not the case, if Lightray’s Shelley Godfrey hypothesis is true; how intriguing!)
I find this issue to be an interesting sub-plot/sub-thread. Perhaps it was the Ontology of Angels issue that Moore thought would consume so much Internet bandwidth?
there is no evidence at all that they simply arrived and jumped off their ships and started hiking, it would take time to offload that many people, slave all those ships to Galatica and all the other stuff that had to go on,
so why does everyone assume they didnt at least find out what kind of edible plants were around and go over basic survival with everyone? it wouldnt take much and yeah I know its a bit of a fanwank but its not a stretch.
also Hera was essentially the mother of us all but that doesnt mean there arent other descendants around (as has been pointed out) it just means that anyone whos kids didnt hook up with Heras kids at some point down the line died out.
personally I liked it, the final battle was sweet, and while they didnt need to rescue Hera to find the new earth it was her “map” that led them there, and it was only after the rescue that Kara was put in the place to try it out as a jump coordinate.
Not quite as good as the Final of the Shield but still a damn good series ender in my book. I do agree we kinda got a happy ending to a very dark series but I will live.
That whole issue has got lots of red meat in it. One major role of science fiction – arguably its most important one – has historically been to provide cautionary tales concerning technology and society. This aspect is very much at the heart of science fiction. H.G. Wells anticipated nuclear weapons and warned against their use, for just one noteworthy example, and of course there’s no end to the influence of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. Moore, et al. made Battlestar Galactica’s cautionary moral particularly explicit.
But I’m exceptionally skeptical that A.I. is anywhere on the horizon as far as we can see. As a software engineer, I’ve followed that field (albeit from a non-expert perspective), and I consider the very recent prediction that we’ll see Turing-level A.I. within 5 years to be utterly ridiculous. Just like commercial fusion, A.I. has been promised to be “just around the corner” every five or ten years, virtually throughout their respective histories.
That’s one reason I find Vernor Vinge’s notion of the “Age of Failed Dreams” so deeply compelling. In that period in Vinge’s universe, set well into our future, mankind’s dreams originating in the late 20’th century of A.I., commercial fusion, and extensive nanotechnology have all failed to materialize. Thermonuclear weapons remain humanity’s most powerful and deadly technology, with all the same enormous risks attending it.
Nevertheless, with the exception of Well’s cautionary tale of nuclear war, it seems to me that humanity has done a fine job of heeding science fiction’s warnings (and arguably going too far into excessive caution at times). For example, loud alarms were recently raised about the poor containment capabilities surrounding nanotech work. And I don’t imagine any society will allow full human cloning. It seems to me that society has hearkened well to most of science fiction’s well-known warnings, and if (or when) A.I. does become a reality, we can all see that the ordinary person is going to demand something like Asimov’s 3 (and ideally his zero’th) laws of robotics.
Depends what we mean by horizon. We’ve already got robots, and we’re working on AI. But in BSG, AIs and Centurions don’t get created until people have a comfortable presence in space. We’re a ways away from that too. But when we get to the point where an average person can board a space liner for a nice leisurely trip to Mars, then get back to me on that AI/robot thing. 
I don’t think it matters how far off AI is: it wasn’t the point of the montage to show that we’re on the verge of creating Cylons. In fact, the montage showed the opposite; it showed how far we have to go. The point was that we’re driven, beyond all concern for practicality (robots that dance? play musical instruments? look seductive? What on earth for?), to create images of ourselves. Creating new human-like life is a dream that far, far, predates the science that may someday make it possible, and it is worth wondering - no matter how distant the goal - what makes that dream so compelling. What is it that drives us in that direction: curiosity? hubris? vanity? benevolence? What is our true goal? What makes us worthy of being imitated, of reproducing ourselves as a species and giving our form, our intelligence, our flaws to another order of being? And will they thank us for creating them in our image?
I’m sorry to mar such a thoughtful and eloquent post (which very much deserves replies in kind) with the following banal observations, but I’m too sleepy at the moment for any attempt at profundity…
With one exception, I’ve never understood any desire to “create images of ourselves”, at least in the form of artificially intelligent, fully functional humaniform robots. Asimov himself had difficulty justifying humaniform robots, although, of course, nearly all of his robots were merely humanoid rather than humaniform. But even he – and he was always quite prudish in his novels (however otherwise in real life) – latched on to the main and possibly only reason we will most definitely try to create them, which is the same as the exception I spoke of: To serve as always-willing sexual partners. Partners who will have to speak and react in a very human-like manner lest they be seen by our various cultures as mere advanced blow-up dolls (making the possession of such a thing far too socially embarrassing to justify their presumably enormous price tags).
Are you certain of that? That doesn’t jibe with my own memory. In my recollection, Saul, Ellen, Tory, and Galen are in the same bar when they hear the piano player & Angel Kara-C play a duo of the Watchtower theme after they’ve incorporated Hera’s drawing into the score. It seems to me Saul says something like “it’s that same frakkin’ song!”. I seem to also recall seeing them at the piano looking at the score in wonder, but it’s certainly possible that by the time they reach the piano, Kara-C and the pianist have departed the room.
However, there’s no question that my memory for such details is fuzzy, so I’ll take your word for it, at least until I can review that episode (anyone remember the title of that ep?)
You see Kara and the piano player getting all googly eyed, then Tigh’s hand reaching for Kara’s shoulder. The camera the shifts so both are in frame, and both the piano player and his score are gone. The only things left are Kara and Hera’s drawing of the notes.
Starbuck is there, but the piano player isn’t. That’s my recollection. Only Starbuck ever saw the piano player.
I also seem to recall an earlier scene in which Starbuck asks the barkeep when they got a piano player and he gives her a “WTF?” look.
Lemmie refresh your memory: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WalRgIjHjas
All fanwanking about how could Kara play with three hands aside. 