Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been...

I'm gonna talk about last night's Battlestar Galactica and speculate wildly about what's to come.

Brad and I are so glued to the screen when it's on, we have to squeeze the business of catching up into the breaks. We have other rituals, like changing channels after the teaser to avoid the quick clips of the show you are about to watch. So we had absolutely no idea they'd stopped doing it this year, and we missed the revamped titles and new music too. D'oh!

They have a neat new trick of tallying how many people remain in the Rag-Tag Fleet during the opening. It changes each week. If no-one gets killed pre-credits next week, it should say 47,861. I assume this doesn't count Helo on Caprica because no-one in the R.T.F. knows he survived, or however many colonials are Cylon sleeper agents because that's an unknown quantity. Discounting look-alikes and twins, it can only be seven or eight. There are only twelve cylon models and they already know what five of them look like: Doral, Leoben, Valerii, "Number Six" and the regular cylon soldier.



Why doesn't Number Six have a name? The other models are referred to by the human names they were using when they were "outed". Baltar worked with Six for two years on Caprica prior to the attacks yet he never calls her by name. Shouldn't we at least call her Godfrey, after the model that tried to seduce Adama last year? Possibly it's a nod to the Number 6 in The Prisoner, another show about individual freedoms vs. state controls.

Unlike 24, which doesn't so much answer as rephrase its questions each week, I have faith that Ronald Moore will deliver. The constant crises and slow passing of time here, as on 24, are useful in keeping objective facts about the world of the show at bay. The more we know, the more characters we can rule out as impostors. The whole there-are-terrorists-living-among-us angle is the main reason I watch, personally. Whether and when they'll find Earth would seem to depend on how long the show runs!

How long have Cylons had the ability to look like us? Do they ever abduct and replace real people? Leoben said Adama is a Cylon, but he and Tigh have a backstory together in the miltary during the first Cylon conflict. If time is a factor, this could put Adama in the clear.

Can Cylons reproduce with humans, by natural or artificial means? Adama fathered two sons, which would seem to further eliminate him from suspicion. That Godfrey Woman keeps telling Baltar his destiny is to act as a protector to their offspring, but how metaphorically is she speaking? She didn't get pregnant in the two years she was sleeping with him on Caprica. If she means any child of human and Cylon parents, then the game just got bigger. One of the Boomers says she's having Helo's baby, but we only have her word for that. Baltar and Starbuck hooked up, but that makes no sense unless one of them is... well, now. It would certainly explain how Baltar is in constant mental contact with a Cylon if he had a simple Cylon transmitter in his simple Cylon head.

(Talking of babies, Brad has a theory that Billy and Dualla's relationship will be the positive counterpoint to the fleet's struggle for survival. Their eventual baby will be the Virginia Dare of the new colony. I like it, but the sooner Dualla gets a first name the more plausible it will seem.)

My top candidates for recurring characters being Cylons are: Ellen Tigh, thus restoring my faith in humanity because she's a horrible manipulative person; Lt. Gaeta, because he's a little too keen to network the computers and imagine if he, of all people, is not one of "us"; and Baltar, because we already know he's a machine in bed and it would explain a lot of other potential inconsistencies in one swoop.

Not knowing is simultaneously frustrating and the whole damn point. Most of all, I want to know that we WILL know the things we want to know. Then I can safely invest this much thought into the best TV show in years and relax about the speed at which it happens.