Ha ha, that’s brilliant! Baltar playing solitaire and ranting to himself in the cargo hold of the Final Five Express for 2000 years is the best idea I’ve heard all day. And it would explain some things… I love it!
If you think about it, this would make him “Number Six” as well…! Crazy.
My guess was “a tumbler” (a glass) presumeably with whiskey in it.
Sounds right… at least give me a glass of whisky before you slice open my head…
LOL
That was awesome Avid
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that Ellen meant a circus gymnast to caper about while she has her head sliced open. You know, a tumbler.
thanks for the definition
No problem. I didn’t really get the point of this line, myself. Oh, joy, it’s French Revolutionary vocabulary day on the Basestar! Never mind that there isn’t such a thing as France on this show, much less a frakkin’ French Revolution, nor is there any reason whatsoever for Ellen to make a bizarre reference to being executed in a two-wheeled eighteenth-century cart rather than, say, an airlock – no, somebody in the writers’ room is very clever, and wants you to know just how cleverrific they can be! Assuming you keep a copy of the Oxford English Dictionary handy whilst watching television, of course.
Hey, Ellen! Try not to run into the fourth wall on your way to the Raptor! :rolleyes: Whoever left that line in the script ought to be spanked.
Wouldn’t it be interesting if that comment wasn’t a throw away line but an indication that somehow the French Revolution happened in the BSG universe as well - like Erf was our earth.
Now that I know the definition of tumbrel it makes sense. Cavil and crew were calling it a surgery, and Ellen was making the point that it wasn’t a surgery it was an execution. The " never mind" at the end shows that she didn’t expect Boomer to understand.
I’ve wondered before if BSG is a fictional future for our humanity, myself. We know Anders isn’t actually Bob Dylan (my favorite recent awkward silence on the 'cast), but it sure seems like there are enough elements of the show that tie to things we know about it that it could conceivably be the future of humanity from very real Earth as we know it.
I know I had butterflies when Season 3 ended and you saw our Earth, and I still feel that it’s merely a future thousands of years from where we are now.
With funny-shaped paper.
One of the things I think that falls into the realm of “Willful suspension of disbelief” is communication and language. When we look at it, we don’t question why the colonials use English, and we don’t really need to. To me, using the word tumbrel is as much like using the word “Adieu”, it’s not an English word, it’s not a common word even, but if we’re realistically looking at the show, these people probably shouldn’t even be speaking English. I imagine the writer’s just assumed everyone would know what that was. I didn’t, but then it’s not that big of a deal to me.
I tried to read thru all the posts before replying, because I didn’t want to post anything already stated…
That being said:
Cylons have to age. How else do you explain Saul? We’ve seen him as a younger man. He’s been friends with Adama for 30+ years. Unless that’s somehow all a memory implanted in Adama’s mind…
I’d appreciate some sort of clarification by the braintrust behind the series on Cylon aging, but I don’t think we’ll get it. I can only assume that FF Cylons age but were all fairly young when they alone fixed rez-tech, with those that are older now let loose at a younger age unless Cavil had them reborn as being younger.
I assume as well that the S7/8 do not age though we notice that the actors portraying them certainly do. Another component of Cavil’s frustration, no doubt. He certainly doesn’t look like a 6 or 8.
heh, and Bob Dylan, Ken Kesey, Milton, Emily Dickinson, and Sartre were totally roommates in Vancouverfer! 
Given the BSG writers’ total inability to sit still and quit trying to be too clever by half, my bet’s on this being a throwaway line. They love these kind of references, especially in season 4.5 (for example, half of Anders’ mystical blather in this episode is cribbed directly from Paradise Lost). I don’t think we’re meant to read too much into them, though, except for the obvious – “oh, look at that, Cavil is the devil”; “oh, look, this ‘surgery’ is really Ellen’s execution”.
It’s a reference that we’re supposed to get, because we live in a world where two-wheeled carts were used to bring people to the guillotine, and where Milton wrote a book about a guy with massive parental issues who rebelled rather than kneel to the orthodoxy. We’re supposed to go “aha!”, because these references belong to our world, but I don’t think that necessarily implies anything about the relationship between our world and the one the characters live in.
Other than maybe the writers’ refusal to allow the plot to develop naturally from those characters, instead of from the stuff that really, like, blew their minds in Lit 101. :rolleyes:
I see what you mean, but I guess I just have to imagine that in Ellen’s point of view he would never be happy or truly feel anything if he was the way he wants to be because happiness is meaningless without also being able to feel pain. It’s not entirely clear to me what Cavil actually wants - to keep the same human-like consciousness he has but have a metal body, or to have no human emotions at all and just be programmed? How can something that is essentially, unconflictedly a machine, an object, feel happy? Even the ways he wishes he could experience seeing a supernova to appreciate its beauty more comes from his very human inclinations and desires.
I agree with you that Ellen’s attempts to get him to see her way are probably pointless, and maybe she should just give him what he wants even if she thinks it will do no good and accept that her child might be beyond her help. Maybe you could compare her stubbornness to being like refusing to euthanize her child who is begging for relief from his suffering, because surely to her it would mean he wouldn’t be the same person. But you seem to be assuming that the only reason she isn’t completely accepting of him is because of how he feels about himself and her beliefs, not the things he’s done that he won’t own up to as I was talking about. He murdered her other child who she was very close to and put her and the other Four through hell, and she’s supposed to validate this by giving him approval anyway? Ellen is only “human,” too. I don’t know if anyone who’s been that directly hurt by someone’s lack of a conscience could really view the situation objectively enough to say “You’re right, I was wrong. If you think all human ideas of morality are absurd and my attachment to Daniel was too, then I can forgive you.” At the same time that he would say her resentment is based on ridiculous feelings that no Cylons should have to have, his actions that have hurt her were influenced not by his own objective attitude that everything is absurd but the fact that he’s human enough to hate her and enjoy her pain. She doesn’t have to take that lying down. I think he’s kind of like Gaeta and Zarek when they thought they were in the right to start the rebellion in that he has a point but he is using that point to excuse actions that are actually motivated by something different and more personal.
It just further illustrates his hypocrisy that he plays Boomer by selling her his…yeah, we’ll call it machineism (haha), because I would bet anything he’s actually the brains behind the whole idea of programming sleeper agents with fake memories and it’s his fault she’s so conflicted. It would be just like him to do it just to make someone see things his way just he did with the Five, but Ellen herself would never have wanted that done to her. I just think Cavil’s insistence that he and others like Boomer are only miserable because their dual identities as machines and organisms can’t be reconciled is BS. Having emotion means you inevitably will suffer no matter what, but we human beings just don’t get an excuse to whine about it or somebody to directly lay the blame on. (And we don’t even get resurrection or cool coping mechanisms like projection!)
Thanks for that. I love these references.
Welcome grey!
Well, trying to figure out who the “head-people” really are, has my brain in massive pain. In Season 2 “Home-Part 2”, Balter has a brain scan which shows no chip.
Now that’s devotion. Welcome to the Forum Lachiades!
Welcome to all the new posters! You can introduce yourself over at the Introduction Thread (not mandatory!)
RE CAVIL:
I cannot cut John Cavil any slack.
I don’t care about his hurt feelings, his frustrations, his angst, his self-pity, his disappointments, etc. He allowed himself to become twisted and corrupted into a being full of hate, rage and jealousy. He chose, and continues to choose the negative and that which diminishes him.
Who John Cavil is at his core is his assent to all his experiences. He has free will. He is responsible for himself.