I feel the need to share but the BSG wiki has no theories page, unlike Lostpedia.
There was a lot of flack about the red glowing spines during Cylon sex on BSG, I suppose because it was (or seemed to be) inconsistently used and should have been an obvious Cylon detection method.
But it happened in only two episodes - once between 6 and Baltar before the Nukes and once between Athena and Helo.
My fan wank is that the glowing spines actually represent the “love” quotient needed for Cylons to get pregnant. Note that Athena gets preggers right after her glowing spine session. Six is destroyed and resurrected, but it sure seems like she and Baltar are having an especially emotionally intimate moment.
I’m going to bet that they finally reached the threshhold of “love” needed to procreate, she was pregnant, and had the nukes not killed her, she would have had a baby.
The only counter is that we did not see a glowing spine prior to 6’s impregnating by Tigh. But perhaps we didn’t see her spine, or his nature as a five affected that.
It seems inconsistant because checking for LEDs in someone’s back should be an easy check for someone being a Cylon. OTOH, do we know for certain that humans in the BSG-verse don’t have spines that glow during sex? Maybe it’s a side effect of drinking ambrosia!
If you want the official Ron Moore answer it is that it was a visual cue intended only for the audience, to quickly cue in viewers that these two women are not human. He claims it was never intended as anything more and that is why it was quickly dropped.
I tend to believe him because an essential part of the storyline is that the cylons are synthetic humans so perfect in their replication that they can get pregnant by a human! In fact they even use “skinjob” which was from Bladerunner and concerned similar themes.
But there are also other things that dispute that like Athena plugging a ethernet cord into her arm and being able to network and communicate with the ship’s computers, she can also read binary code by eye.:dubious: The fact that the liquid computer interface in the cylon ships only works for cylons also says they are different.
WAG-they are identical to humans(aside from Baltar’s test) only because the Galactica lacked advanced MRI equipment and such. Galactica probably had in Earth terms 1970s era medical tech aboard, or a field medic’s inventory.