For the second time, if you want to fight with me, kindly open a pit thread.
All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
You need to adjust your sensitivity-meter down several notches. I don’t want to fight with you, nor have I thrown out any “personal attacks”. I’d just like to make it through a BSG-related thread without your inevitable and predictable hijack.
When did we learn about this, what did the merchant fleet entail, and why did he re-enlist?
There was a BSG episode that had Adama flashing back to earlier days with his wife, and meeting Saul. It wasn’t much of an episode, but featured EJO sporting a whacky pornstache to youthen his appearance in the flashbacks. There were a few scenes of Bill and Saul in the merchant fleet, IIRC, that included the rationale behind how Bill got back into the service.
There was also a later episode that had Adama’s service record as a prop – which promptly got screencapped and posted online. So some of that may be in there, too. (I think that was the episode where Adama’s never-before-seen best friend escapes from the Cylons, almost kills him, then goes off to never-seen-again land.
Also, see the Battlestar wiki synopsis on him.
I’m starting to think Ron’s planning on retconning the origins of the Colonial Cylons. Instead of being robotic slaves that rebelled they’re going to turn out to be avatars of STO members. It’s not quite as crazy as it sounds. In BSG nobody had any idea that the Cylons had a religion; if anything that shocked people more than the humaniod models. So the STO creates a whole bunch of avatars, loads them into Cylon bodies, kills or upload/download/copies everyone who knows what they did, and everyone else assumes it’s some kind of slave uprising instead of a holy war.
I’ll be honest, I don’t watch this show and so I have no idea what y’all are talking about – but I’m getting reports from both sides that people are acting like jerks. Both sides, stop acting like jerks. Please keep the topic on what did or didn’t happen in the show. You may share your opinion about those points. Keep your opinions about people expressing opinions different from yours out of this particular discussion. Launch any personal attacks in the Pit.
This applies to everyone in this thread who is addressing personal remarks to another poster. I am not evaluating who’s at fault here, and I’m not issuing warnings … yet. Don’t make me pull this thread over.
Thank you.
twickster, Cafe Society moderator
In another thread I posted my speculation that the avatars will be of STO members who were [del]fed to the lions[/del] executed as “terrorists” in an anti-monotheistic persecution.
Do we have a return date for this show yet? I mean, “Fall” is a bit vague.
Love Caprica, hate Syfy.
There’s a pretty goodtimeline on the BSG wiki that might make things seem more sensical to you.
I think the situation was more like:
Regular Cylons are mass produced (seems like this happens in the very next episode from trailers). At some point they rebel, and there’s a big war, which young Adama fights in. The “Final Five” arrive and convince the Cylons to make peace with the humans in return for them revealing how to make human form Cylons. They do so but eventually #1 human Cylon has a shit fit and tricks the FF into new bodies with fake memories, and gets the Cylons to attack.
I’m pretty sure he didn’t become an Admiral until Roslin promoted him to make sure a random unexpected Admiral like Caine wouldn’t go for a power grab again.
Salient timeline points:
58—52 years BCH: Daniel Graystone creates the first Cylons of the Twelve Colonies to aid in hard labor and warfare.
52 years BCH:Cylon revolt starts the first Cylon War (Colonial Day).
42 years BCH: William Adama begins his service in the Colonial Fleet as a Viper pilot, near the end of the Cylon War
40 years BCH: Mechanical Cylons begin experiments constructing humanoid forms of Cylon. They succeed in creating the First Hybrid and subsequent Hybrids, but no fully humanoid forms. The Five meet the local Cylons and negotiate an end to the war. They will give the Cylons biological bodies complete with resurrection technology if the Cylons agree to end the war. Armistice ends the Cylon War. Cylons exile themselves from the Twelve Colonies (Miniseries).
William Adama musters out of the Colonial Fleet (“Scattered”, Adama’s dossier).
37 BCH: William Adama enlists as merchant marine and serves aboard inter-colony freighters (“Scattered”, Adama’s dossier).
37 to ca. 30 BCH:
The Cylons establish a secret base known as The Colony, built around and connected with the original ship of the Final Five. This is the place where research and development equipment belonging to the Final Five is stored.
The Final Five create John Cavil, the first of the new humanoid Cylons that are their “children,” and designate him model Number One. They raise him for some time.
John matures and assists the Final Five in the creation of seven other humanoid Cylon models. A resurrection system is built for the new models based on technology left over from the Thirteenth Tribe.
ca. 30 BCH:
Cavil murders model Number Seven, Daniel, out of jealousy by poisoning the amniotic fluid in which the Seven copies were maturing.
The Final Five are murdered by Cavil and their consciousnesses are boxed.
Cavil erases all knowledge of the Final Five and the missing model Number Seven from his fellow humanoid Cylon models and specifically programs them not to think about either.
Saul Tigh is resurrected and introduced to the colonies as a military officer with false history of fighting in the war.
Ellen Tigh is resurrected and introduced into Colonial society sometime thereafter.
23 years BCH: William Adama reinstated in the Colonial Fleet at the rank of Captain and is assigned to the battlestar Universal [8] (“Scattered” deleted scene, Adama’s dossier).
6 years BCH: William Adama leads an aborted covert intelligence mission aboard Valkyrie. Adama and Tigh are subsequently assigned to Galactica (Adama’s dossier, “Hero”). [11]
0 BCH: Human form Cylons attack
Yep, until then he was just a *Commander * (which seems about equal to a captain or commodore on Earth) and he was in charge of the oldest, least important, battlestar in the Colonial Fleet and was being retired against his will. Cain was the rising star on the fast track (IRC Adama & Tigh already knew who she was and her being made Rear Admiral at her age was quite impressive). After she died Roslin promoted Adama to Admiral of the Fleet (or whatever the highest rank was) so he’d never be outranked again (except of course by herself).
One thing I don’t get is the FF ended the first war by promising to make human bodies for the Cylons, but they never did. They made the skinjobs sure, but all the other Cylons not only didn’t get human bodies but they got lobotomized and re-enslaved.
I think, in the current Caprica timeline, that Graystone Industries has already mass-produced Cylons – Daniel and assistant-guy mentioned it a few times. It’s just, only the Zoe-model actually works.
I’m not sure that the toaster-Cylons wanted human bodies for themselves – their early experiment with the First Hybrid did not seem intended as such.
Right. I think Graystone has pretty good manufacturing capabilities and he’s already got 100,000 bodies or something, and I think he also made copies of the stolen chip. It’s just none of them work except the one that temporarily housed Zoe’s sentient avatar program, and that one only works so long as the Zoe avatar, and the chip, and the same body are together.
That makes sense I guess.
Sadly I’ve not yet seen Caprica, except for the pilot episode which was a bit slow, but redeemed itself with the “by your command” at the end.
This thread has got me thinking about BSG in general.
If the 12 colonies all lived in peace why did the colonials need a fleet of battlestars and why did they need to build an army of Cylons?
Was there an external threat that we have not yet seen? Or was there a war or wars between the colonies in the past?
If it was the latter who won and how did they then persuade the losers to join the colonial fleet.
It seems from the pilot that Capricans are viewed with some distrust by the Taurons, but then it also seemed that all Taurons portrayed thus far are sicilian like mobsters. This seemed like one of those simplistic tools aften used in poor sci fi like whole planets of one subset of people, in reality no society like this could survive. Maybe I’m misreading it as well.
I’m looking forward to seeing this series though, but sadly no UK dvd release date seems to have been set as far as I can tell.
Well, I think saying the 12 colonies are at peace is a bit like saying Europe is at peace. It wasn’t always, and it’s probably still a bit premature to dismantle everyone’s military (nevermind the rest of the world, of course). I’m pretty sure they’ve alluded to past wars between colonies, and I think it’s fair to assume Caprica came out dominant.
Even if the 12 Colonial governments are “at peace” as you say each colony has I think at least a billion citizens, some colonies probably more (like Caprica I imagine) and I don’t think each colony’s society and culture is completely heterogeneous in their religious and political views. We have the one god movement on Gemenon for instance, and it’s exported terrorism to Caprica, but does that mean all Gemonese believe in the same one god? Do they all believe in terrorism? Probably not. But, you never know which faction on Gemenon might take power.
The Taurons seem like some Sicilian mob as you say, but are all Taurons like that? Is every Sicilian citizen today a mobster? I don’t know.
As for why they need Battlestars, have they built them yet? I think that’s mostly a Cylon War thing.
I suspect that Caprica is preparing for war with Geminon:
- Caprica needs lots of robot soldiers, quickly.
- Caprica is ratcheting up its rhetoric against STO… which is based on Geminon. And we’ve seen other signs of tense relations between Caprica-Geminon, such as increased security for travel.
And I think all of the Colonies are prejudiced against the others – we’ve seen that on both BSG and Caprica, with frequent stereotyping of the different colonies.
They didn’t unify officially until after the Cylon war, so they were considered essentially separate countries with their own governments until that point. Fighting the Cylons is what brought the colonies together. According to the wiki “each colony acts as a sovereign nation, complete with inter-colonial wars” until the Cylon war.
Well Joseph’s brother is a mob enforcement guy, so of course a lot of the Taurons we see will be in that group. As far as every Tauron being in the mafia, I don’t think we have seen that. What we have seen is that Taurons have very close families, and are probably used to a slightly corrupt government and large black market that is typical of a post civil war period.
I think in the BSG mini-series Doral mentions that Galactica was built at the start of the (First) Cylon War for/by Caprica. It was the oldest still in service, but that doesn’t mean it was the first. Clearly the all of the colonies are going to have some kind of space navy, probally only the major ones have battlestars. I wonder if battlestars pre-Cylon War were like aircraft carriers pre-WWII; they exist, but most navies are still focused more on battleships.
A lot of the questions you’ve raised have been touched on at Serge’s Twitter account. Geminon is known as “the most religious tolerant” colony - which is why the STO has found refuge there. There have been pretty heated wars between colonies (the Europe analogy is probably spot on), but are at peace. There have been battlestars, but nothing on the scale of what we’re familiar with.
I’m embarrassed I used “heterogeneous” wrong. Oh, well.
I check out Serge’s Twitter. Is that official?