Wow, it’s funny how Sean and I can see things completely differently. I know we’ve differed on the issue of the Head People for quite a while, but when I saw Head Baltar show up in Baltar’s head I saw it as absolute PROOF that the Head Characters (Six, Baltar, Leoben) are real characters separate from their respective hosts. While it is possible for three people (Baltar, Carprica Six and Starbuck) to share the same psychosis, I find it improbable that they would manifest themselves in creating the exact same character down to identical suits, especially given the fact that none appear to have ever confessed to the fact that they interact with Head Beings. Audra does make a good point about Laura, Athena, Caprica Six and Hera have shared the same visions. But given the fact that Baltar doesn’t share in the Opera House vision, I consider those to be separate from the Heads Phenomenon.
Anyway, to each his own, but I now see the Heads Six, Baltar and Leoben as representing a third party therefore may well be angels of god as Head Six claims.
It’s interesting to see how Tigh, Tyrol, Anders and Tory really scared to come out as Cylons when the whole (or a good part) of the fleet has learned to trust Athena as an ally. Surely by now all four of them have earned the same kind of respect. On the other hand seeing as how the President and Adama are handling the “Starbuck being a cylon” thing, I can understand them.
The most moving scene for me in this episode was Lee’s departing Galactica. For the first time there is a real sense that nothing will never be the same, that we’ll never see again Starbuck and Apollo flying side by side in their vipers.
But the most important notion of the whole episode was the mention of the “original programmers”. Who are they? Are they the cylon God? the head Six/Baltar/Leoben? The Final Five? Bill Gates and Steve Jobs?
I also have to comment on Lee being easily manipulated. While Lee has been manipulated by Romo Lampkin and his father, I see those are special cases. First off, Lampkin is a master manipulator; he managed to manipulated a Six for frak sakes! There is no one he hasn’t been able to manipulate. Second, regarding Bill, if a father can’t manage to manipulate is son then there is something really wrong with their relationship. When it comes to Zarak, I don’t think he manipulated Lee at all. In Bastille Day I think it was the opposite. Lee was familiar with Zarak’s writings and managed to get into his head and sussed out that all Zarak really wanted was to die a martyr’s death and cause political disruption in the fleet. Also, when the fleet was divided in Season 2 Lee was the constant voice of opposition to Zarak when it came to counseling Roslin. At one point Zarak suggested that Lee would be a good voice to rally the fleet around Laura, but Lee made his own decision not to work directly to undermine his father’s authority but that he would only work to protect Laura’s presidency.
If anything I think Lee has been more of a rock in his beliefs and Zarak reaching out to him for a role in the government says more about how Zarak has changed.
The Opera House is tricky. While I’m definitely leaning toward the Head-characters as not just manifestations of psychoses, too, I don’t think we can rule out the Heads as being something separate from the Opera House.
We’ve seen people in the Opera House in three different contexts:
Gaius Baltar with Head Six finding a crib with their “daughter” (apparently as-yet unborn Hera?) in “Kobol’s Last Gleaming”
D’Anna finding the Final Five in the first half of Season 3
Caprica Six, Hera, Roslin, Athena, and some sort of Baltar (Head Baltar? the “real” Baltar, whom we just didn’t see having the vision at the time? [which I find unlikely]), with Roslin and Athena trying to get hold of Hera and Hera, Caprica Six, and ? Baltar finding the Final Five.
So a Head character has been in an Opera House vision at least once (Head Six), if not twice (Head Baltar). But, if the Opera House is linked to the place between life and death, I would think it would make sense for “angels of God/z” or a similar unknown third party to be there or to accompany the humans and Cylons there.
On a somewhat related note: the Final Five are “there” in the Opera House for D’Anna’s and Roslin/Athena/Cap6/?Baltar/Hera’s visions, but do we know if they’re in some way “present” in those visions, the way Roslin/Athena/Cap6 appear to be, or is the Opera House somehow just creating a visual representation of them? None of the Four ever mention anything about a visual hallucination like that, so it seems they’re not “present” in these visions, at least not on a conscious level, but I have no clue what that means.
[On a somewhat related note - I’m still not over seeing the scene in The Tudors of Henry VIII whacking off with all and his manservant there with a bowl. It’s all academic until it’s not…then it’s just gross.]
Semi-related note - this issue is somewhat dealt with in the book The Time Traveler’s Wife. When the main character visits himself when he’s a teenager, he does indeed get it on with himself. Thankfully, it’s just an implied thing, and the gooey details are left to our own imagination. Having not grown up with any men in my household, I have no idea what’s normal for growing boys or Baltars.
The new Raptors did show up in Exodus Part II they were part of the group sent in to launch the decoys attempting to draw the Basestars away from New Caprica:
One thing I noticed after multiple rewatches of the Tigh nightmare was that Helo was the only person to show any action after Tigh shoots Adama. You can see him standing over Tigh’s right shoulder. While every one else reacts in horror and are basically frozen you can see Helo run across and off to the right side of the screen, I imagine to pounce on Tigh and take him out. Now I realize that’s it was only a vision, but I guess it was how Tigh thought it would really happen.
Please Don’t Read If You Don’t Want One Or Two Possible “Caprica” Pilot Spoilers…
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Okay, let’s see if I can spell out my wildest, crazy theories on how this season will play out. First, who’s the Final Cylon? I’m going to take a poke at this one and say it’s none other than Romo Lampkin. My reasoning on this one is that I truly believe it when he says he knows Adama’s father Joe, and worked for him, but I don’t see how it’s possible with the character being the age that he appears to be (i.e. mid-40’s). It might be a casting thing, and the character is supposed to be older than Mark Shepard is, but figuring that Joe Adama was mid 40’s (according to the Caprica spoilers) in the initial lead up to the creation of the Cylons (probably well over 50 years before the destruction of the Colonies, taking into consideration that the First Cylon War was about a decade long, and the armistice was 40 years before the mini-series), Romo wouldn’t have been born when the Cylon creation was happening, and Joe would have been in his 70’s-80’s by the time Romo is claiming to have been a clerk for him (assuming it was in Romo’s 20’-30’s). Obviously the math can be fudged to make the story fit if you want it, but for me it seems deliberately out of place, and even though Romo lies about everything else, I do believe him when he says he worked for GrampAdama.
On that same note, according to the Caprica spoilers (if they are to be believed), the Cylon technology that is developed is “stolen” by Joe Adama and this other rich guy…what if it’s stolen from the actual Cylons? And what if Romo facilitates that theft, being an ageless (or semi-ageless) Cylon, Final Five, Lord of Kobol, Robot-Overlord from the Twelfth Dimension!?!?!? There’s something tricky to these Final Five, something eternal, and I wouldn’t be surprised if we see some of the overarching mythology of the current Galactica be shadowed in the Caprica series.
My last theory is that what our RTF will find when they reach Earth is that Earth is actually…the Cylon homeworld that we’ve only heard about but never seen. But the trick is that it was green and beautiful and rosy when Starbuck (or Starbuck’s clone or whatever) reached it, but when the fleet eventually arrives it will be engaged in a brutal civil war between the Cylon Factions, the division of the races having spread all the way back to Earth, which will draw down to the final devastating conclusion of the series, with the humans and Cylons and hybrids and Final Five repopulating a devastated world and starting the cycle all over again. Whoof, that’s a mouthful (that’s what she said…sorry, too much “Office” for me). Okay, it doesn’t explain diddly about why the spacebound Cylons are jacking around and what the stupid “plan” is, but I think that would be a total mind-frak.
Anyways, let me know what you think and what everyone’s personal “Endgame” theories are….oh, and is “Iron Man” going to be the sweetest movie of the summer, or what?
You are correct regarding inheriting a particular Cylon, human or both copies of a particular gene. However, given that the chromosomes segregate and crossover during meiosis, the chance of any member of the second generation having 100% of their genome being human or cylon in infinitesimally small.
I was thinking it had to do with the fact that Boomer had been programmed earlier in the series; perhaps Cavil put in a few extra lines of code:
Line 110 - Ignore the skeevie old man in the corner while doing naked Tai-Chi
Line 120 - Vote with the oneses
I know it can be dangerous to actually listen to what Ron Moore says, but in some of his podcast commentaries, when he’s talked about Head Six and Head Baltar, he talked about how amazing it is for two people to be so affected by one another that they are constantly experiencing manifestations about that important person. This came up especially after we started seeing Head Baltar appear once we got to Downloaded and it wasn’t just that Baltar was crazy, that it could be something more than that.
All of the characters in the show that have experienced these head manifestations were all deeply effected by those in their head and it might just be that Baltar’s ego is SOOOO strong that he/god/godz may feel that he’s made enough impact on his own life that these messages that Head Baltar will deliver needed to take the form that reminds him of himself.
Just remember, it wasn’t a cakewalk for the Sharon model after it was revealed that she was a cylon. After Boomer shot Adama, she was “Jack Ruby’d” by Cally, then when Athena made her appearance and Helo found out she was a cylon… he shot her! Then when the two of them found Starbuck after her knock-down, drag-out with a Six, Kara tries to shoot her. They eventually make it back to Galactica and Lee almost shoots her (noticing a pattern?).
At this point, she is put into a makeshift cage, since they don’t trust a regular brig would be good enough to hold her. She then spends quite a bit of time locked up and shackled. Just about the time when she’s about to have her baby, she has to give up some baby’s blood to try and save Roslyn’s life from her cancer, while not really being thanked for it. Then when she finally does give birth, her baby is stolen and hidden away by the President, while Sharon is told that Hera was dead!
Oh, let’s not forget about the Pegasus crew! They went in to “interrogate” Sharon and in the process, may or may not have brutally raped her (whether it was rape or attempted rape was never made abundantly clear) until Helo and the Chief rushed in to stop what was happening.
Then she gets all buddy buddy with Adama while everyone is on New Caprica and turns into his confidant/sounding board/councilor and eventually is offered a position in the Colonial Fleet. Even at this point though, she isn’t fully trusted, since she doesn’t find out the truth about her baby, until Boomer makes it onboard Galactica and tells her that Hera is sick. NOW, it’s Athena that WANTS to get shot by Helo… so she can resurrect and get her daughter back.
The only time she’s really treated well by any human (I would have added the Chief to this list, but he turned out to be a Tighlon) who didn’t attain the rank of Helo, was during The Woman King, when the civilian doc didn’t harm her and treated Hera for her illness without hesitation.
After the final four watched all these Sharon events unfold (mainly Tigh and the Chief got to see all this), it’s no wonder that they want to remain hidden
When Cavil was watching Sharon’s topless Tai-Chi-lon performance, are we to assume he was watching a random Sharon or was he specifically watching Boomer?
After Caprica Six and Boomer got close while both were back on Caprica, they seemed to be heading on the same path together, especially when they saw D’anna as an enemy to them both. As the series has unfolded though, Caprica has shown a lot more sympathy for humans (especially since she was able to get back with Baltar), while Boomer has drifted farther and farther back towards the views of a staunch conservative machinist (Brother Cavil’s view that they’re machines and need to never forget that). Could part of that drift be partially caused by Boomer getting closer and closer with Cavil over time?
Good question! I hadn’t thought about it, but it must be Boomer. They’re sharing a sort-of intimate moment (OK, who knows what eights consider intimate. Or what they don’t.) Next thing we know, Boomer votes against her model, which is unprecedented.
