That’s my working theory: Now that they’ve been “activated,” they have special status that affects the cylons in some way.
I took the eye-scan as a bit of dramatic license. It would make more sense to have the raider identify the “final five” cylon telepathically or something, but that’s hard to show on TV, especially since raiders don’t speak.
Right, the various skinjobs can tell each other apart. They all know which Six is Caprica Six. Sharon “Athena” Agathon - the one who bore a child - identified Sharon “Boomer” Valerii - the one who shot Adama.
My fan wank on that is that the Raiders always scan before shooting, it was important enough to the story that this time, we were shown it happening.
They’ve been shown shooting from behind, though, no? In the dog fight type encounters between Kara and the raiders, for example? That wouldn’t allow a scan.
Eh? Why not? We saw the scan this time, from Anders’ POV, but there’s no obvious reason we’ve seen that the scan requires “eye” contact.
:smack: Curse you, simple addition! My nemesis, since I had to learn calculus (only room for one math in this brain).
And I should’ve been clearer: the Centurions don’t seem able to tell the difference between different versions of the same model of skinjob, although they can recognize the difference between a skinjob and a human; the skinjobs seem to tell each other apart easily.
Didn’t surprise me at all. It’s 100% consistent with Roslin’s character.
Roslin, for all her finesse and savvy, is a dictator. She is, more accurately, a schoolteacher, and sees everyone below her (which, in her current position, means everyone) as her students. As a good, progressive teacher, she needs to be polite and listen when they say something, but when she disagrees she’s entitled to simply ignore it. “I’ll take it under advisement” and then doing whatever she wanted to do in the first place is the Roslin way of doing things. If that means cheating in an election, sedition, or assassination, then that’s the way it is, because she’s always right. She’ll make concessions to you only when she has clearly established her dominance and doesn’t beleive herself threatened.
The fact that someone else had an experience that can’t be rationally explained doesn’t have anything to do with Roslin’s having an experience that can’t be rationally explained, because in Laura Roslin’s view, she is right, and that’s that. Other people are misguided, or dishonest, or wrong, but not her. It’s perfectly within her character to dismiss Starbuck while believing herself.
Laura Roslin is a GREAT character, for this very reason. It would have been really easy to make her The Kindly Matriarchal Figure, but she’s not that at all. In one way she really is a leader who wants the best for her people, but she’s quietly arrogant, ethically suspect, and blind to her own weaknesses. They’ve had the smarts to create a character who’s ruthless and unethical, but also polite, kind, and genuinely trying to do the right thing. She’s the most realistic, nuanced, and intelligent depiction of a poltiican I have ever seen on screen.
Great post.
I’m still with the idea that its the other five which are leading the humans to earth. They are on the humans side and still have power over the mechanicals.
Theory: There were 12 models. They had a war on fate of the humans and split into pro and anti human. The pro human won, wiped knowledge of the others and sent them on their way and for some reason couldn’t stop the human hating.
To me the crux of this is the fact the seven group do not know their origins. They don’t know who the other five are. Because the five were their enemies?
The seven can’t seem to make any more of themselves (thats the reason of the hybrid experiments). The five can. The five can do more.
Why? Well, it Tigh confused the hell out of me… Right, so he’s a robot, so how comes Adama has known him from a very early age? He can’t have been 60 years old back then Adama was 30, right?
Theory: The five group of cylons can age. And reproduce/make more. With the gift of life (and death), the need to kill the fleshies perhaps stopped and it helped them.
Of course there are loads of holes in these theories, and I can barely remember the last season never mind where I picked up the hints as to this being the main storyline. However, the big thing is definitely the lack of self knowledge of origins of the seven… They appear to be as lost as the humans…
Running with your hypothesis, maybe it’s those secret Cylons (or the remaining twelfth Cylon, individually [if individually can refer to a population of a replicated model]) who “have a plan” as captioned during the opening of the first three seasons. Maybe the Cylons we know about, the ones who wiped out the Colonies and have been chasing the fleet ever since, originally had a plan but have been bumbling along improvisationally ever since; maybe our belief that “and they have a plan” referred to the First Seven was merely an unwarranted assumption. Maybe what you describe has been the plan all along, to drive both opposing parties into pursuing their conflict in order to fulfill some grand prophecy.
</fanwank>
I don’t know, that would be a pretty huge thing to skip for the last 3 seasons…
-Joe
It would be just one of many.
That was helpful, thanks.
-Joe
Not necessarily. The scan may normally take place in a split second. The camera work showed time being stretched to show details. Also, the scan may be triggered by anomalous behavior (like not firing at the raider, even though he was in perfect position to do so). Besides, it’s the first time one of the four has faced a raider directly - it would have been pretty pointless to make a big deal out of raider scans that ended with the raider firing anyway…
Cylons can die and resurrect light years away. The Four heard music no humans could. It’s not a stretch for me to believe there are weird, magical thought signals zapping around Raiders can tune into. I doubt that Raider had to optically scan Anders to know he was a non-target. It’s more likely the Raider paused to wait for a command, which it got, even if it was just a subconscious “don’t kill me.”
All we know of this “Raider scan” is this: the raider’s eye slit opened; the eye zoomed back and forth; this time, when it pinged Anders, it’s eye stopped.
We saw the Raiders do that in the damn miniseries, everything except recognizing Anders. Since, obviously, Anders wasn’t around there.
We saw them do that in the damn miniseries when they were hacking something, not when they were just looking around. We certainly didn’t see them do it before they decided whether or not to shoot at something.
-Joe
How else could they show that a raider is doing anything other than idling and burn 
ing up gas?
It’s entirely possible that the human-model Cylons were copied from real humans. Maybe they actually captured Saul Tigh, as well as people who looked like Lucy Lawless, Grace Park, Harry Dean Stanton, Tricia Helfer etc. etc. and used them as their baseline models. So the Saul Tigh we know and love is in fact a Cylon copy of an original Saul Tigh, who I guess got tossed into the garbage chute after they were done with him, and somewhere back when there were humans who looked like Sharon Valerii, #6, Brother Cavill et al. who’re now dead and gone and replaced with zillions of copies. For all we know, once there might have been a real Sharon Valerii, who was replaced with a Cylon copy shortly before the events in the show commence.
If the Cylons can give people memories and plant backstories (Anders is a famous pro athlete; planting him would be roughly equivalent to someone having planted Tom Brady amongst Earthlings) then you’d have to assume they could have given Saul Tigh’s memories, or a reasonable facsimile thereof, to the Cylon-Tigh.
Tigh, the Chief and Anders were in New Caprica. Whats-her-name was too, was she not? Must the models have existed before New Caprica?