BSGwatch: The Road to the Final Five
SPOILER ALERT: If you haven't watched Battlestar Galactica yet, stop. I will not talk falsely now; the hour is getting late.
SCI FI Channel Photo: Carole Segal
So that was kind of a big one, yes? The makers of BSG had promised that the end of this season would be shocking and would entirely change the direction of the show, which on the one hand is true and on the other hand not at all so. Certainly turning four characters into Cylons and bringing Earth into our sights is a big deal. On the other hand--a change in direction? Most of the season has focused on getting ever closer to Earth and to the revelation of the Final Five, so maybe the bigger shock would have been if none of it had happened. And didn't you start suspecting the Cylon reveal once Tigh, Anders, Tyrol and Foster started picking up those signals from what, apparently, was Bob Dylan's XM show? (Also, seriously: who thought Kara was dead, like totally, never-appearing-on-the-show-again dead? Did you think Grey's Anatomy was going to kill off Meredith, too?)
I have to give the producers credit for going for the bold ending, in a way that courted risibility, and often got it. I mean, I'm sorry, when you have a character look at herself in the mirror and seriously intone "I can't get no relief," that's going to be hilarious even if the destruction of the human race is at stake. But I'll still be eagerly looking forward to season 4, and I'm sure plenty of BSG fans will spend the rest of the year anxiously parsing "All Along the Watchtower"'s lyrics.
Does the use of the Dylan song mean, incidentally, that if the fleet locates Earth, it will definitely be in the modern era? I still have hopes of them landing during the Dark Ages, or finding some future postapocalyptic planet ruled by the cockroaches. I have a hard time seeing how the characters of BSG encountering, real, identifiable, modern-day Earth won't be unbelievably silly, but the writers are tied to this course, and good for them for sticking with it. If they want to go entirely old-school, it'll be 1980 when the fleet arrives. And how many Cylons will they bring with them?
Of course it's worth noting that while Tigh, Anders, Foster and Tyrol all assumed that they must be Cylons, we don't actually know that as fact. If they are, though, there remains one member of the Cylon Final Five unaccounted for.
Which leaves--Bob Dylan! So that's why he was always so hard to understand.
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First of all--nice writeup. And thanks for the spoiler alert.
I must admit--when I first heard a character say, "There must be some way outta here" earlier in the episode, I just thought--huh: A line from Dylan or just a coincidence? (Same thought last week--when Helo says, "A storm is coming," was he just saying "A storm is coming" or was he giving props to Sarah Connor from The Terminator, another humans vs. robots story? Discuss.)
I agree that the direction of the show didn't change as much as last year's season finale (the one-year-ahead jump on New Caprica), but still--I wasn't disappointed. The courtroom scenes alone were worth the price of cable. And many questions remain unanswered--are Tyrol, Tori, etc. actually Cylons? Is Starbuck some kind of spirit creature? Where did Lee get that fabulous suit he wore in the courtroom?
Wait, I correct myself--I was disappointed to hear that new episodes will not return until 2008. SciFi Channel--are YOU the last Cylon, sent to break my heart?
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Little surprise there, really... Common sense would have it that Baltar would be acquitted of treason (since, after all, to this day his most serious crime still would appear to be that of being a complete and utter prat). And as for the four newly discovered cylons, well, they could have fooled me (but didn't) with Tigh, but for the rest it was mostly a case of picking characters who were visible but either had been running out of their raison d'etre (Sam Anders once Starbuck was temporarily taken out of the picture), never had much of one to begin with (Foster, a character whose name I in fact was unaware of before today, and which had mostly managed to be even more staggeringly irrelevant to the show than its predecessor "Billy"), or had already been flagged as a cylon (Tyrol, retroactively making the relevant scenes in the episode introducing Cylon # 7 seem a lot less contrieved).
Now, if we are lucky, the Galactica's stay on Earth will not be all too dissimilar to that of the Lexx
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3
If we assume a theory that the new 4 cylons are picking up radio broadcasts from Earth of "All Along the Watchtower," doesn't that basically mean that the further the Galactica is from Earth, the further Earth is from 1967?
Or to put it another way, if when they get to Earth it's 2007, that means that they are currently 40 light years from Earth, since radio waves travel at the speed of light in a vacuum. (More accurately, they were 40 LY from Earth when Tigh etc first started picking up the signal; presumably they are closer now.)
However, based on a quick trolling of The Google, it seems that the closest nebula to Earth is the Helix Nebula, at 450 LY. So even if the Ionian Nebula from BSG were to be what we call the Helix Nebula, that would mean that, were the fleet to arrive at Earth tomorrow, it would be in the neighborhood of 2417...
Of course, that assuming that they're picking up radio waves...
David
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Come on now, who doesn't want to see Reagan vs. the Cylons?
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