Battlestar Galactica -- Season Four

sometime in March apparently. i spoilered myself a little last night out of impatience.

so Lee isn't the final Cylon, then. hmm.

Season 3 isn't even out on DVD yet, is it?

http://triciahelfer.com/blog/?page_id=256

Tricia & Katee ride hogs thru wine country(w/ photos)

Tremendously boring photos.

Is it still going to be sometime in March???

New episodes start April 4th (here in the USA at least).

Ridiculous final cylon speculation begins here!

It's so gonna be that cat that belongs to Romo Lampkin (Baltar's lawyer).

the cast is on letterman this week, aren't they?

just the cat.

haa

i'm pretty excited abt battlestar new season i don't care what anyone says
i heard actors (starbuck & boomer) on the radio a few days ago and they were saying that things will wrap up, that there is an end and it is both surprising and satisfying. but who knows. and maybe this is old news. i haven't been paying attn :/

hope this is better than season 3

i hope they end it like the sopranos.

with Baltar as Tony...altho i guess whatever happens the very last shot will be a Starbuck zing

right after the big musical number

I just hope they wrap up everything in a way that makes sense with what's gone before. If they don't, then I hope they at least go as bunkers as possible (and as a result, there being dinosaurs). I definitely don't want it to end like the Matrix movies.

Somehow the final five cylons have to be tied in to Earth and Kobol. I'm guessing that the people of the colonies are actually a humanoid race evolved from the original cylons, which were created by humans on earth. After some big war or being exiled they left to settle on Kobol, and from there the colonies. Maybe the process has repeated many times as time has gone on, as the "this has happened before and it will happen again" line indicates.

bonkers as possible

i am going to make a bet that when the season is over everyone will hate it and i will play capn save a ho while secretly knowing that the ending sucked

yeah probably. has any show like this ever ended truly satisfactorily?

sopranos ended well. what other series has been like this tho, really.

space operas with a continuous storyline?

well every other series I can think of that meets that criteria (ST from TNG on, Babylon 5, Stargate, etc.) are all nigh unwatchable so I wouldn't know

(TNG is good - didn't mean to lump it in there really - but they "ended" on the bigscreen so I dunno if that counts)

lol

xp

the last TNG episode was pretty good, i think?

I honestly don't remember!

i'm still 50/50 on whether Sopranos end was really that satisfying

the last Buffy was probably OK

the lsat tng was pretty cool

the last buffy was so-so... the whole last season was pretty weak

<a href="http://io9.com/369909/why-battlestar-galactica-is-the-best-political-drama-on-tv";>new preview!</a>

Last TNG was grebt~ It had 2.5 Enterprises blowing up! and tvff nvts if that's a spoiler for you.

Also DS9 was much more space opera w/ continuous storyline -- run-up to finale was awesome but the finale itself = wtf.

god this show makes absolutely no sense anymore. what am i watching?

Got me. I got five minutes into the one from week prior and just reached a "fuck it" moment when callie started freaking out with baby; turned it off and removed from tivo queue.
Then put it back for girl... but now I think she's ready to dump this sucker as well.

No love for levitating Baltar, then, eh? Shame.

what doesn't make sense? do you mean leaps in logic, basic narrative coherence, editing or what?

i mean, regardless of what you think of the show's current quality, i don't see how anyone who's been paying attention couldn't follow what was going on. whether or not the show compels you to care to is another matter.

I dig Baltar's sexin' cult. I'm wondering exactly how specific they'll get with mentions to their monotheistic God. They've named Mithras and other greek pantheon members outright, so are they going to invoke Abraham's God more specifically, or are they just going to land on Kolob/"Kobol" and meet Dirk Benedict?

Where the hell is that baby and why can't it cure my President again??

No, I follow everything just fine; I've just really ceased to care.

i should have clarified that i was addressing cutty's post there

anyway, i am enjoying baltar's descent into narcissistic Oprah self-love shit. very sinister, like he's becoming a new age antichrist or something.

Self-love, but pushed by the "revelationss through pain of Toby and Six (who's also schooling Tighe, in her cell).

Episode needed more Starbuck doing her Captain Ahab shtick, but Tyrol's rant to Adama about how much he hated his wife made up for it.

The actor's wife in real life died recently, I believe. In which case - holy fuck.

"..those dull vacant eyes and her stench of cabbage."

hahahaha yes that was totally wtf

i doubt anyone in the fleet is really smelling all that great though. aren't they subsisting mainly on a diet of processed algae?

can't understand why that episode would be the last straw for anyone

yeah. supposedly the last episode is gonna be 3 hours long!

Did D'Anna say that the fifth wasn't in the fleet, or just that it wasn't on Galactica? I thought the latter, but everyone online seems to have heard it was the former

fleet

Yeah, she said the fifth wasn't in the fleet. And oddly enough she only demanded four of the remaining final five, so she knows something about the fifth and its whereabouts, I'm assuming. And if the fifth isn't in the fleet, that leaves us with one of the previously dead people (Billy, Ellen Tight, Cally) somehow resurrecting in a location other than one of the communal bathtubs (maybe somewhere on Earth, since these last five seem to be something special somehow)...or it leaves us with some ridiculous choice like one of the spaceships.

Either that or it's Baltar (disappointing) or Roslin (also disappointing) and she only said that they weren't in the fleet because she already had them hostage on the base ship at that point.

It also could be one of the models (i.e. a "special Six") which I am beginning to think is the most likely possibility at this point.

For what it's worth, my money was on either Doc Coddle or Tom Zarek because of how either one of them could really cause serious shit to unfold from a dramatic perspective -- you gotta stretch this out ten more eps after all...but her comments about the fifth not being in the fleet seem to rule out both of them, too.

I dunno, I am thinking now it's probably gonna be Ellen Tigh. The trailer for season 4.5 seems to have Saul Tigh anguished about the fifth Cylon...and after noticing that the action figures for Number Six look a whole lot more like Ellen Tigh than Tricia Helfer, I think that clinches it. Ha.

@Alex - So maybe Ellen Tigh was the "special Six".

My friends theory was that it was Helo and the big revelation was that HERA was actually a Cylon-g on Cylon-g baby, but I think that theory is now blown.

Which is good cuz he would have been insufferable if he was right!

So now the question is: now that the Chief is outed as a Cylon, will the Cylons make as big a friggin' deal out of his baby as they did about Hera? Sure, Hera was in the vision, which would lend credence to her being something special I suppose (and just how DID Helo survive for so long on Caprica, huh?)

There are still plot holes that need to be patched up or woven into the story, obviously.

>and just how DID Helo survive for so long on Caprica, huh?

ding! ding! ding!

pretty much every marriage in the show has been human-on-cylon right?? except apollo & d?

...yessss...funny, that.

except apollo & d?

Ha, funny, the marriage thing seems so obvious now (well, uh if I was smart I would've seen it from last year's season finale), but I never made that connection.

kinda get the feeling it might be a coincidence.

yeah, seeing as Tyrol didn't become a cylon until the "reveal" episode was rewritten before shooting, there was def no grand plan from the beginning re marriages.

Wasn't it implied that the Six in captivity is pregnant as a result of sexual Tigh-jinks? Nobody has mentioned that, so maybe I'm misreading it. But it would be a pure cylon baby.

My other thought on the final five would be Adama's first son, what's-his-name, whose death was a much bigger deal in earlier seasons. It would make for some good emo EJO arc. Speaking of which, I thought the Tigh reveal to Adama scene was chopped all to hell in the broadcast. Looking forward to the extended scene when this is released on DVD.

Wasn't it implied that the Six in captivity is pregnant as a result of sexual Tigh-jinks? Nobody has mentioned that, so maybe I'm misreading it. But it would be a pure cylon baby.

Yeah, I saw that too and quickly came to the conclusion that it was someone else watching her who had done the deed, not Tigh. If it IS a pure Cylon baby, all bets are off as to the identity of the fifth.

i watched the 'episode 0' feature length pilot again last night for the second time - SO good (particularly amazing to compare the Chief then and now)

"why can't we use the starboard deck?"
"it's a gift shop now"
"frak me!"

After my initial excitement of season 1, I ended up being so bored by season 2 that i stopped watching before the last few episodes. and now i don't care.

i was hoping someone knew when this was back on :(((((((((

in retrospect the miniseries was the series high point... or maybe the first handful of episodes.

yeah, guess so

makes Lost seem more impressive in a way - how they started so high but then managed to match that further on

I still think the rebellion on New Caprica is the high mark so far.

ya lost is an example of a show that kinda fumbled it but got it back... rare

Was there anyone left alive on Caprica who could be the last of the Five? I will be *really* disappointed if Ellen Tighe is the last one. I hated her, and some kind of saintly resurrection is only going to make me hate her more. (Although her Judas behavior would fit in with the empty seat in the Last Supper photo.)

My theory is that Ellen Tigh is a cylon, but an older version of six, not a seperate model.

oh there's no way Ellen is a cylon. that would make Tigh's hallucinations/conflations "supernatural" (aka super dumb and superficial), instead of them suggesting (understandable, complicated) psychological trauma. i am v certain it will not be thus.

my money would be on the "last" cylon being a new actor.

nope

SciFi Channel's Mark Stern describes the reveal of the Final Cylon as "organic and satisfying. It won't be some day player from Season 1." From TV Guide

uh, that still means it could be a new actor.

between the "won't be some day player from Season 1" and "isn't someone in the fleet" comments, there aren't very many people left. Billy/Adama's dead son/etc don't exactly seem "organic and satisfying".

when she said said they weren't in the fleet she could have meant on the baseship with all those hostages.

I'm trying to recall now if there was any clear explanation as to the origin of the "skin jobs" -- surely they weren't created by the toasters. I've just started watching the series again, and even after the first episode it seems there were strong strong indications that the new faux-human Cylons were created by the humans before the Cylons declared war.

One thought that just came to me is that the final Cylon has to have some difference between it an the other four -- it's the first prototype maybe. And while there's certainly a lot to be said for Ellen Tigh as the first, and as an older version of Number 6, I'm now thinking that maybe, just maybe, the remaining Cylon model is a replica of its creator, ala Data resembling Noonian Singh in the the Star Trek series, or the Emergency Medical Hologram being patterned after its creator. (Creators are vain, egotistical creatures, after all, and they all have themselves as face models.)

This is pushing me back to thinking that the final Cylon is Doc Coddle -- he's a doctor/scientist. So he definitely could have been reponsible for the creation of this new life.

Then again, using that logic, maybe the original creator was the template for the Simon Cylon. So who the hell knows.

http://battlestarrevealed.wordpress.com/

^^^some people need to get out more

the final cylon is Baltar and I collect my five dollars

even after the first episode it seems there were strong strong indications that the new faux-human Cylons were created by the humans before the Cylons declared war.

Please explain. This doesn't make any sense to me - so much of the series is premised on the humans being surprised by the fact that Cylons could walk among them. Surely after what - 50 years? of war, at least among high-ranking fleet and government officials people would know about the existence of skin jobs.

(This doesn't necessarily answer the question of the origin of the skin jobs.)

As far as I understand, Moore said at some point that the final Cylon will definitely be someone that we've known since Season 1. That doesn't preclude the dead people, obviously but it is a further strike against the "new actor" theory.

I'm trying to recall now if there was any clear explanation as to the origin of the "skin jobs" -- surely they weren't created by the toasters. I've just started watching the series again, and even after the first episode it seems there were strong strong indications that the new faux-human Cylons were created by the humans before the Cylons declared war.

in Razor they made it clear the skin jobs were created by reverse engineering their own humanoids based on what they learned from the humans they captured and experimented upon. the first hybrids were the result.

!! guess I should watch Razor.

that doesn't explain how skinjobs made it to the top of the cylon hierarchy tho, while Toasters remain mindless slaves...?

I mean what kind of mindless robot can create a master race to boss it around that is also a) smarter and b) completely different from itself

i hope billy comes back. he was so cute

Did anyone else see those spoiler photos of (what is supposedly) the crew shooting the finale episode?

I want one of those Men In Black mind wipes. GAAAAH.

seriously, tigh's wrinkly cylon wang is the last thing my eyes needed

Trailer for Caprica!
http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/showtracker/2008/07/tca-caprica-the.html

caprica is starting to seem somewhat more interesting.

that doesn't explain how skinjobs made it to the top of the cylon hierarchy tho, while Toasters remain mindless slaves...?

children are destined to surpass their parents, the next generation is supposed to rise up and rule, this is how progress happens, etc

i will watch caprica
i hope it has at least some sense of humour somewhere in it tho...
lol eric stoltz!

Did anyone else see those spoiler photos of (what is supposedly) the crew shooting the finale episode?

Um, since this season is over and they probably haven't even written the episodes that will start airing in 2009, I'm not what this is all about.

According to this, it's all shot now, and in post-production. So, uh, yeah, everything is written, the finale is shot, and we gotta wait a while to see how it turns out.

Polly Walker in Caprica! I wasn't excited about it until now.