I had an idea for a “homage to the original BG” scene based on this: Lee is in his father’s quarters aboard the Galactica, searching through some old personal belongings stored there. There he discovers his old long-lost Daggit™ doll, a miniature toy version of the one from the original show. It’s explained that after the first Cylon war, the Cybernetics Laws banned almost everything controlled by a computer chip- even something supposedly as harmless as a child’s toy; but Adama didn’t have the heart to throw it out.
Yeah, well, your post slipped in ahead of mine, so see that. The Big Question, of course, is What the frack is The Plan? I hope like frakking Hell there reallly is one. Based on what’s been stated explicitly, the Cylons are basically fundie fanatics. They want to follow God’s commandments, and one of those is to be fruitful. For some reason, they’ve got it in their heads that they need to reproduce sexually to accomplish this. Thus far, despite their rather spectacular biomechanical prowess, sexual reproduction has been a bust. Attempts to impregnate human females, captured after the destruction of the Colonies and kept as living incubators in “farms”, have also failed completely. The Cylons speculate that perhaps a love bond is required to achieve fertility, and set up poor Helo to fall for Boomer II on Caprica. I think the entire reason 6 was so disappointed with Baltar in the miniseries was because she also was trying to have a baby, and unfortunately Balter was a lecherous cad right up until the attack, and didn’t want to be tied down. During Baltar’s prescient vision on Kobol of Baby Toaster, six says something also about the perfection of both the Cylon and human species being accomplished by 6 and Baltar’s little adoptive love chile, but doesn’t elaborate.
So, is that it? Is the plan simply to make babies because God gets quite irate otherwise, and hence come up with the Skinjob Mark II? If so, they’ve already accomplished it, which they are well aware of, since they got the footage of the “documentary” that 3 (posing as a reporter) beamed them. I assume half the reason they didn’t just nuke New Caprica from orbit is because they can’t risk little B.T.'s life (I also assume they’re not privvy to the ruse that she died shortly after birth of pulmonary complications), and perhaps also they feel they have to keep some portion of humanity alive to produce more love children.
Beyond that, and assuming any of the above is correct, I have no idea.
I read this in some print article, literally while waiting in an office to get my teeth cleaned, and I don’t know what magazine it was. However, I’m quite certain that’s what I read: The original concept was for Helo so sacrifice his life to save Baltar’s, making his courageous act all the more poignant and ironic, blah blah blah. Then, prior to the go-ahead for Season 1, hoards of lusty fans demanded information about what happened to that poor studmuffin they left on Caprica, and the rest is history.
We’ll see, won’t we.
I think the Big Question is how the heck did Six and Boomer-the designation escapes me-go from smashing with chunks of masonry (No Jack Armstrongs, they) the heads of Toasters who were going to “come back” in something like 48 hours to rat on them and wind up running the show?
If indeed they did.
How many factions of Toasters may there possiblly be? Are there factions that want to whack ‘em, factions that want to breed them, factions that, I suppose will show up at the end of the series, Who Realize the Error of Their Ways and Want to Help the Humans ala’ Deux e Machicna or however you spell it? Are the factions working at odds with each other?
It’s not going to turn into V, nor will all the humans turn out to be Cylons.
Hell, this guy used to wrote for Trek. :eek:
Well whaddya know:
A google search for “Karl Agathon supposed to die on Caprica” yields, as its first hit, [Portal:Characters - Battlestar Wiki]this reference. The relevant quote, under “Did you know?”
OK, this scares the living crap out of me (though I’m grateful to have my memory jogged about the name Hera, since I’m tired of Baby Toaster). They didn’t have this figured out until ep. 5?? Don’t ask me what their sources are, I don’t know. I didn’t even know there was a special Wikipedia dedicated to BG, for crying out loud. Anyone who puts so much attention into it must know their shit, I assume.
Thanks, Loopy.
Why does that scare you? Whether he croaked or not is no big deal to the plot.
Having the alien kid around is a distrubing possibility, but I don’t see that connected to Helo.
It scares me because The all-imprtant Plan we speculate about feverishly involves making human-Cylon hybrids, and the writers didn’t even have this Plan in mind until the fifth episode of the 1st season. It involves Helo because keeping him on was the catalyst for The Plan. The Plan, you see, is rooted in “Tahmoh Penikett is teh hawt!!1!!11!” The BG story is clearly still developing radically and on the fly, so not only do we not know how it’s going to end, the creators don’t know how it’s going to end. See my statements on the X-Files above for further clarification of why that’s not a comforting thought.
Calm down.
I believe your thesis to be unsound. Starbuck wouldn’t know what that meant. 
I don’t see that Helo’s survival leads to the breeding of hybrids. Maybe someone else was to be the father. Maybe the kid will be a minor plot point. I hope so. I hate kids in tv shows.
I volunteer to go back and see if the hybrid concept came at the same time as Helo’s survival.
Anyway, the plot seems to have diverged for the time being.
Have a drink before you bust somethin’.
Beyond the virtues of serentiy, I’m having a hard time parsing your last post.
Thanks. I think…
I don’t see that saving Helo required him to be in the hybrid breeding buiness; they may have meant to have the hybrid concept in the story arc without Helo.
Did the ova factory require Starbuck? Besides, even the Cylons knew that Starbuck would make the best hybrid Mother! I don’t see that the hybrid plot required Helo.
“Hey, we have to save Helo. My Mother likes to oolge him!”
“Uh oh, better plan a hybrid breeding program for an excuse to keep him alive!”
Well, the quote I provided states quite clearly that the program of Cylon-human hybrids was developed circa the 5th episode, and became “a major plotline for the entire series.” Unless this article is simply wrong, I don’t see how it could be more obvious that the issues around Cylon breeding were a development that grew out of keeping Helo alive on Caprica. Had Helo died during the final stages of the Cylon holocaust, as originally planned, Starbuck never would have been in the Farm. The Farms wouldn’t have been invented.
I don’t remember how she got into that. Where were the survivors, her main squeeze and the arrow found?
I don’t read Wikki, I could make it up. I don’t know who to trust about a TV show; not TV Guide or ET!
I hope neither of us is dissapointed.
Sorry, I was musing over this on the way home, but the satellite modem had crapped out when I got home. I had to beat it with a larger hammer.
I have confidence in Ronald D. Moore. Remember, he used to work in Trek. I’m not sure he was there when they killed off Tasha Yar, but he would have known about the famous incident. He would have heard the story of how angry fans crowded around the writer outside a Star Trek Convention, how they dragged him down onto the oily, dank cold ground in the alley behind the convention center and how they ripped his throat out with their teeth.
No my friends, Ron Moore will not let us down.
He dare not.
Well, there is evidence from Moore himself that he is making this up as he goes along.
Go listen to the podcast for the last episode of season 1. (I’m pretty sure that’s it; one of the late-season podcasts anyway.) He is talking about the sequence where they have crashed on Kobol and Six has led Baltar off somewhere.
He admits that they really had no idea what they wanted Baltar to find. The original idea (so he says) is that Six would lead Baltar to a tunnel and tell him to go through it, saying that she wasn’t allowed to enter herself. Baltar would enter and hear some music, which we would recognize as Jimi Hendrix. He would eventually find himself in some living quarters and meet Dirk Benedict, who would identify himself as God. (No, really.) This was to be the ending of the first season.
Supposedly there was a lot of discussion among the writing staff as to if this was a good idea or not and someone finally comes up with the idea of letting Baltar find a cradle. Moore jumps on this and says he thought it was a great idea because it would let them tie together the storyline back on Caprica with the fleet storyline.
So, until that point, they had no idea where they were going!
Assuming this is true, I think that so far they have done an amazing job of “winging it”, but I wonder if the house of cards is going to collapse on them at some point.
I’ll try to listen to the podcast again when I get a chance and see if I can get a more exact quote (assuming I didn’t imagine all of that somehow).
I’ll do that, and I hope he refreshes his memory of the Tasha Yar Writer in the mean time.
I will! Erm…where?
WTF?
Dirk Benedict. The Face Man. As God. Was he high when he came up with that? It would explain the Hendrix, anyway.
I imagine the conversation when something like “Ron. I love you. No, I do, you’re like a father to me. But if you do this…I’ll kill you. I will kill you. And then I’ll quit. M’kay?”
Well, there’s that. It’s also sinking in that trying to figure out what The Plan is is a waste of time if the people writing the show have no idea. Kinda takes some of the fun out of it. I hope with a full season ahead of them they’ve fleshed out the far future a bit more, so there’s actually something that can be figured out.
I’m actually going to have to agree with Loopydude here that if they don’t have a brief outline/idea of what the driving “plan” is for the Cylons this show is eventually going to peter out as fans begin to get increasingly irritated that there’s really no point at all. Kind of like, as he said, it did for X-files. That’s the thing about serialised narratives-it gives you an enormous amount of flexibility to adjust but if you don’t have an underlying outline that gives people a sense of where you’re going, people tend to get bored and drift off.
Although, at the risk of whetting Loopydude’s ire, I am glad they brought Helo back because he’s pretty easy on the eyes and I’m a :wally
I have absolutely no problem with keeping Helo on. In fact, I’m kind of surprised they opted to kill that character off in the beginning, because I actually think that Mr. Penikett is a very likable presence, not a bad actor, and if lovers of hunky men everywhere find him appealing for that reason alone, who am I to complain? I don’t mind ogling some of the BG ladies myself, and have no trouble admitting I’m a little shallow that way.
It’s not the marketing angle that bothers me, it’s the fact that the marketing angle has obviously had a major impact on the story arc, for the simple reason that apparently there’s no advance concept of what that arc is going to be. Helo’s expanded role is an example of that butterfly effect that can ruin an arc-driven serial. I know full well that creators of epic storylines change course wildly when developing a story, but those course changes are usually most successful when preserved only as drafts, kept by the creators to mine for odd ideas when fleshing out the narrative. If the series itself is a work in progress, with the drafts preserved as extant episodes which cannot be rescinded or redacted later to maintain consistency with better, more mature ideas, the whole vehicle can get very creaky very fast. Again, the X-Files is an excellent example.
I think Helo is great! Bully for Helo! They should have kept him alive in the first place, and the Caprica storyline was wonderful. You are quite correct to point out that they’re winging it brilliantly, and I think these episodic fantasies usually can in the beginning with good minds behind them. But do the often end well, following that model? Not that I can see.
OK, anyone who wants to listen to the podcast themselves you can find it here. The podcast in question is the one for episode 113 - Kobol’s Last Gleaming, Part 2.
But, to save you listening to 45 minutes of podcast for the relevant 3 minutes, I have transcribed it here.
So, you can see that there were quite a few ideas bouncing around. Moore admits that he didn’t know where things were going and it actually took someone else’s suggestion to bring some of the plot threads together. He claims that’s what he wants, but I dunno if he knows how he’s going to get there.
As I said earlier, he seems to be doing pretty well at making it up as he goes along so far but I don’t think we’ll ever be able to tell where he’s going because I don’t think even he knows yet.
Holy crap. Thanks for the hard work transcribing!