You really nailed it here. A viewer has to make lots of completely unsupported assumptions to even begin to explain the randomness of the cylons. This is true of their technical capabilities, the “in the head” stuff, the philosopy of the cylons, the Helo on Caprica plotline, etc, etc.
I kept thinking that things would start to get tied together towards the end of the season. At some point, one would think that these unexplained things would start to make some sort of sense. Instead, the show got even worse. More and more of these inconsistencies kept popping up and the show ended without explaining any of them.
Funny, the inability to nail down the motivations of the Cylons is one of the things I really like about the series. There seems to have been a great deal of effort placed on creating the ideas behind the series, so I am assuming that the creators KNOW why the Cylons do what they do and that there is consistency in their actions. If you take the premise that the Cylons are not a Deus Ex Machina, but rather acting according to some over-arching plan, a view which is supported rather than refuted by the sheer oddity of some of their behavior as well as several hints in the series, then you are left, like the humans, on hte edge of your seat guessing at what will come next.
In fact, that is one of the problems I have with the series. The humans should recognize that certain things do not add up to Cylons just wanting to exterminate them. There should be more guessing at their real motives, though the pressure and internal conflicts the humans are under makes this a little more understandable.
I fear the main reason we don’t know more about the cylons is it will lock the writers in and expose some earlier problems. It’s much easier to keep their abilities a mystery. It’s like they can’t decide if they are a borg collective or just independant entities with a strong single purpose. A lot of there abilities are boarding on magic which hurts the whole gritty/realism of the show.
I thought this too, until towards the end of the season. I can actually tell you right where they lost me:
Helo and Boomer are on Caprica and constantly running from the Cylons. However, we the viewers know that Boomer is actually a Cylon, and she knows it. Further, the Cylons are actually just toying with them. They aren’t trying to capture them, they just want Helo to fall in love with Boomer. OK. I don’t know the reasoning, but I trust that it will eventually be explained to us.
Then, Boomer betrays her Cylon buddies and starts running away from them for real with Helo. As a result, we viewers are shown the Cylons being angry about this. They are no longer toying with them. They actually do want to capture them now and are really trying to.
Then the scene: Boomer and Helo are running in a long tube just a few feet under the ground. Meanwhile up above the tunnel the entire Cylon army is searching the city for them. My bullshit detector just couldn’t handle this. A simple heat detecting search device available with current technology here in the US would immediately find them. One lone cylon guard in the tunnel would have stopped them.
It seems as if the Cylons can be either omnipotent or dumb, indestructively powerful or weak, all depending on the needs of the plot in the short term. They just don’t make any sense.
As I said above, I recently watched the miniseries DVD’s commentary, and the creators mentioned a couple of things that might be hints along these lines. For example, they said that in thinking about the Cylons’ motivation, they looked to religious extremists like al-Qaida, who manage to do monstrously evil things in the delusional belief that they’re serving a greater good or greater power. They didn’t give any specific information about what the Cylons might be up to, but the way they talked about it, it’s clear that they’ve given it a whole lot of thought.
Although Debaser’s point about the sewer scene is a good one (I thought it was implausible as well, a storytelling fudge that’s hard to rationalize in retrospect), I for one am willing to wait a while for further hints as to the Cylons’ grand plan before making a decision about its believability and/or narrative and thematic interest.
I’m definitely a defender of the new BSG, but I’ll strongly agree with you on that. BSG is very good; Firefly is a classic, pure and simple. BSG has a long way to go before it deserves to be compared.
