Nice. I like it.
Yah, I caught the “Starbuck” theme and was wondering about that.
At first I was just as stumped about the pigeon as most everyone else, but now I’m thinking it represents his feelings for Kara at that point because it’s something that just got in without him meaning it to. He’s trying to make the bird get out but just ends up breaking things in the process.
Best theory I have heard so far.
Related theory: Lee was drunk when he got back to his apartment, do you think he was responsible for the accident with Laura’s family?
I thot that also and posted it in the frak party thread. I was corrected by the hive mind. The police officer mentioned that the driver of the other vehicle was in stable condition, hence most likely in the hospital.
I like the birdy theory also.
It’s not a coincidence they used a bird here. Kara Thrace has been referred to as “the Harbinger of Death” throughout the past two seasons. I think that Ravens and Crows in mythology were also “Harbingers of Death” ? In “the Sandman” by author Neil Gaiman, the constant companion of Dream\Morpheus was always a raven or a crow. If I remember correctly he had twelve, all of them were at one time mortal men who upon their demise, chose to serve Morpheus. There was also a reference to birds being harbingers of death in a book by Stephen King called “The Dark Half”. Instead of crows or ravens it was sparrows’
I’m only early into the 'cast, but I’m loving the talk about accents, especially because earlier tonight I was at a party and said goodbye to everyone with a drawling “y’all” in a bit of self-conscious callback to the fact that I’m a dual-citizen (american/canadian) living in the Texas-of-Canada where everyone assumes you’re Canadian.
That being said, though, I disagree with Audra. I do think there’s a non-accent for English, at least to a degree; if you pay attention to, well, “newscaster English” as you might say, unlike nearly any other accent it enunciates everything and to the dictionary pronunciation. Furthermore, it seems to be the accent that people in the general population seem to be heading to it, or at least the more people interact with the wider world the more they talk like it. In that case, I’d argue that there’s a common-denominator-english, and it’s the rounding off and whittling away of accents.
On a completely different note,
No kidding!
Edit, as to Caprica’s baby-killing: It seems quite reasonable that Caprica might know and understand humanity but not feel any kind of human-style morality, no? I’ll chime in and say that I tended to believe the same thing as Chuck, that Caprica did it just out of curiosity.
I always interpreted Caprica 6 killing the baby as a twisted act of kindness, saving it from the imminent nuclear holocaust.
I just want to make a comment about the game that Chuck mentioned toward the end of the podcast when trying to differentiate human v. cylon. Biofeedback use to be a big thing. Basically you learn to get to sleep, to control, heart rate, tension and pain by getting some kind of feedback as in a visual (the game) or just beeps. It was first I think used to lower axiety.
Then it moved to help ADD, and migraine headaches.
Now it is used to help with prosthetic limbs. Some people are suggesting putting a wireless biofeedback chip in the body. Strange how human or cylon is a bit of a blur isn’t it.
Yep the pigeon must be Kara !
Pigeons are winged rats / lovable urban street fighters.
Kara describes her place as a rat hole.
He’s trying to get the ‘bird’ out of his house (the house of Adama) but it just sits there out of reach mocking him.
Very difficult to fit a love-at-first-sight sub plot into this episode with all the other back stories so had to do a quick metaphor.
I think this is the first time a big metaphor like this has been done in a non dream sequence so it really stood out.
It’s also interesting that in eastern cuture a bird in the house is good luck but in western culture it is bad luck.
The bird could also represent the Galactica or the military. Since Lee may have resented them both as a family business that he had no choice in.
↑ Actor James Callis, who normally speaks in his native British accent, adopted a northern English accent, similar to a Yorkshire accent, for when Baltar speaks in “native Aerilon.”
http://en.battlestarwiki.org/wiki/Aerelon
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNmKmkhF3Vo
Where is Aerilon ?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q1iqx-kjGFM
Learn to speak Aerilonian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gjKaXo21c0
Bible in Aerilonian
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u89rOI8z8Oc
This Aerilonian moved to Caprica (LA) but he kept it real
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ANgLn_DiVk
Aerilon Airlines
I agree that the singularity is going to open up somewhere but I am more curious as to the time it takes us to. The scenario seems to set us up for a time paradox. “It has all happened before and it will happen again”. The episode also had an appealing “…You have to be worthy of survival.” moment that set Baltar to one side of the line. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised if the surviving members of the Galactica were thrown into the past and became the Lords of Kobol. Thoughts to ponder.
I forget where I heard/saw/read it, but in a Callis interview, he said the producers initially wanted him to have a Michael Caine cockney accent. But he successfully vetoed it, pointing out that particular accent is totally urban-London.
This week’s EW has an oral history of the reimagined mini series. It’s here online, but it’s a total ass-pain where you need to click thru 33 different pages to read it. Anyhow, one tidbit is that the actors up for the Baltar role were Callis and John Cryer (2.5 Men, Pretty In Pink’s “Ducky”).
Duckie!!?!! Lest we forget Lenny Luthor. Holy Ferris look-a-like! To live in that alternate universe.
In a recent interview in TV Guide, Tricia Helfer herself says that she interpreted the act in that way, as a mercy killing.
Hey I like this idea.
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North, south, east and west are not capitalized if they refer to directions, only if they refer to regions.
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It’s interesting that Gaius’s father’s name is Julius. Do you think his grandfather’s name was Caesar? Then we’d have all of GJC’s three names in the family. Maybe the Baltars’ last name comes from a bastardization of Latin: blatero, “to talk too much”, or balatro, “jester” or balteus, “a swordbelt” or, less commonly, “a girdle”. (I think Juvenal turns balteus into a verb meaning “to hit someone with a sword belt”, in which case the verb might be “baltare”, but I can’t swear to that one.)
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Did you notice Roslin’s head double had stubble on her shaved head? I’ve seen chemotherapy patients, and they ain’t got stubble: the hair falls out roots and all.
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I think there’s something about grief and water that’s hugely connected in the human subconscious. When I suffered a devastating loss several years ago, I had an unavoidable compulsion to get into a full bathtub with all my clothes on.
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A bird flying in your house is apparently an omen of a death in the family, according to my grandmother and the book of superstitions I consulted. I had assumed Lee was drunk because his brother had just died.
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Was this the first time Bill Adama and Hot Dog (father and son) have been onscreen together?
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What’s the problem with a black hole accretion disk? Granted, close to the event horizon they give off X-Rays, but presumably the ships are shielded. As long as you don’t approach the even horizon, you’re fine. You can orbit a black hole like any gravitational body. Eventually all the matter will be sucked in as the black hole gains mass, but that takes a loooooong time.
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That gives me an idea. Perhaps the main characters will be sucked into the event horizon of the black hole, and their perception of time will stretch to infinity. Infinite life! Except it doesn’t feel that way, or look that way from the outside.
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The only other kind of singularity I’m familiar with is a cosmic string, a convex similarity as opposed to the concave black hole. I think when someone refers to a singularity in space, chances are they’re talking about a black hole; a cosmic string would be pretty useless as a hiding place. The universe before the Big Bang was a singularity too, but it’s unlikely Cavil is hiding there.
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Audra: “Uninterested” means not interested. “Disinterested” means not involved. I used to be a newspaper editor, and it was in my Top 10 things I had to correct. (Number one was the it’s, its and the nonexistent its’… you’d think professional journalists could wrap their heads around it.)
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“Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of Earth … and touched the face of God” are the first and last lines (even though everybody quotes them side by side) of “High Flight” by John Magee. I remember when Reagan read them after the Challenger disaster.
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I LOVED Disney’s The Black Hole! I even had a model of V.I.N.C.E.N.T. I painstakingly put together and, being young, got too much model glue on so that some parts melted.
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Sean: Clarke isn’t slow. Kubrick is. The books are way better.
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At the beginning of Kara’s math scene, she keeps tapping seven eighth notes with her pen. I can’t find anywhere in Watchtower that has that rhythm; that recurring guitar-sitar (“right-hand”) theme has eleven notes; you could leave off the the first three leading notes and have eight. I suppose it could be the last seven eighth notes of the left-hand rhythm, but it seems strange to take those out of context unless maybe Kara was at that moment analyzing those.
Her mathematical scribbles are thus:
This looks like b(1) of square root of c, which is meaningless to me. Are b and c variables or notes, perhaps their frequencies? Of course,the tune is in C# minor, so b would only occur descending and c (really b#) ascending as a leading tone.
I had to paste this image together, because the camera pans across it.
We have a = [ square root of D]; what do the brackets mean?
In the table, I’m not sure what’s a P or a D (or a q?) or what the subscripts are.
I don’t think these rhythms occur in Watchtower. The bottom two don’t even make any sense, they’re written to equal a quarter note, but they add up to more than a quarter note; there are beams missing in the shorter notes to the right.
This looks like y^2 - Dy’ = 0. Is that a superscript one or a prime? Is the D a variable, a note or a differential (oddly capitalized, and mizing Newtonian and Liebniz notation).
Then the same thing = F3. Perhaps this is a pitch, with the 3 representing the octave, but the note doesn’t occur in C# minor or its conjugate E major (except possibly as a flat II or a German Sixth chord in E major, but that’s pretty unusual and I don’t hear them in Watchtower).
Actually, it doesn’t matter what F3, because of one of those properties like association or whatever, things being equal to the same thing being equal to each other, she’s just proved that F3 = 0.
Then ax^2+by^2=1, although that’s a pretty curvy 1. Maybe it’s a lower-case Greek letter iota?
Then ax^2+bxy+cy^2=0.
What does it all mean?
It’s funny Audra should mention Pythagoras; he described musical intervals as simple ratios of frequencies, whereas Western music (and Watchtower) has evolved to hear tempered tuning. If you listen to music played with simple, Pythagorian tuning it sounds out of tune, because our ears aren’t used to it.
I love the pigeon symbolize Kara theory… I had the pigeon symbolize Zack’s death idea, but you know, the Kara idea makes more sense.
And about English accent, a while ago I saw Jamie Oliver’s Pass It On Campaign, which is Jamie Oliver trying to get a northern England town called Rotherham to start sharing receipes and cook at home.
Anyway, the point is Rotherham isn’t Scottland, and it isn’t Wales, it is on the same line as Liverpool or Manchester, but yet it has such a facinating accent. I guess it isn’t exactly Scouse… which in itself is pretty tough to understand. But it does sound a bit like Baltar’s Aerilon accent.
Rotherham is the capital of Aerilon !
Basically Americans are confused by the accent but really it’s so very very simple.
When you hear Baltar speak in Aerilonese this is what you should be hearing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4xmiIsyUywE
When I first heard Baltar speak in his native way I was blown away ! Instantly you see that he is a fraud and everything you had assumed about him (i.e. he is from a rich posh Caprican family) was wrong.
You start to think that maybe he is the vain and self serving man he is because he had to fight his way up from the bottom.
Until maybe the mid 90s there is no way a reporter would be allowed to read the national news in London with a regional accent. I remember around 1995 when the BBC gave a Welsh man an anchor man job and it was very jarring. I couldn’t understand why he was making no ‘effort’ to speak ‘proper english’.
Anyway I remember listening to the podcast and being disappointed that they were so confused about Balter having and strange accent and why would he want to change it ?
That is interesting. It’s not too unlike feeling safe in the fetal position, since we all felt security as an embryo, floating around in the embryotic water/goo stuff. So when we grief, the sight/sense of water should comfort us in some ways.
I talked about this in the pigeon thread, but in eastern cultures, especially in buddhism, which holds a belief in reincarnation, a bird sometimes signify the reincarnation of a (dead) loved one (as a bird), which fits in with the time, if Lee was indeed drinking because of the loss of his brother. The bird motif is a big staple in literature, movies and tv here, so I just assumed that is the case here. Though, the Kara theories are interesting as well.
Cool, I never knew that about Pythagoras. Very interesting. But anyway, on the equations, they kind of resemble the model for quadratic equations we learn in high school, and then you can solve it by plugging in that b= something squareroot 4ac / 2a? or something like that. 
I’ve long forgotten my years and years of math.
But, I have a sneaky suspicion they might not mean anything at all, and are just random equations and musical notations, since they never did show us the whole piece of paper.
Oh, and I like Chuck’s idea of Six being curious about killing/babies/motherhood in that scene before The Fall as supposed to a mercy killing. It really makes a lot of sense when you look at her expressions. (Even though someone said already that the actress played it as a mercy killing. :D)