Post-strike television re-addiction
During the screenwriters' strike, I practically stopped watching TV, since every show I liked was playing reruns.
Or so I thought.
When the strike was finally settled, I went to check out the olde DVR, and got a bit of a shock: Apparently, "Stargate: Atlantis" had already had a season "in the can" (already filmed) before the strike, and I was behind in my watching by almost the entire season!
Discouraged by the prospect of having to watch some 10 or so episodes posthaste, I actually seriously considered whether I should take advantage of having gone nearly "cold turkey" from television and give it up altogether, except for the news. I decided against it because, I reasoned, my interests are so esoteric as it is--really, how many folk dance lovers are there, anyway?--that I need something more mainstream to talk about.
Well, no sooner had I decided to watch an episode of Stargate: Atlantis just about every Monday-Wednesday evening until I caught up when our cable connection decided to malfunction, leaving us completely tv-free for almost two weeks. It didn't help, of course, that that bum from the cable company first showed up two and a half hours later than scheduled and I refused to press the buzzer to let him enter the building because it was already well into Shabbat/Sabbath. It was just my luck, naturally, that the season finale occurred while our cable was on the fritz and was, therefore, not recorded by our DVR. !#$%^&*!!!!!!!!!! The seasons's third- and second-to-last episodes were getting quite interesting, since the writers had decided to write one of the actor's pregnancies into, rather than out of, the series: The last time I saw Teyla, she'd been kidnapped by someone seeking access to her still-unborn baby's unique genetic heritage. Talk about "stay tuned"!
Anyone who's not already bored by this post and/or isn't a Battlestar Galactica fan is cautioned that this might be a good time to stop reading and go directly to my next post. :)
My theory is that there are two wild cards (unpredictable factors) on this show:
1) Athena, whom we met originally as a "sleeper" Cylon named Sharon (code name Boomer) who'd been programmed to believe that she was human, then met in another version (most Cylons having many copies of the same model) who knew that she was a Cylon, has switched loyalties and gone over to the human camp, pairing off with the human Karl Agathon (code name Helo) and having a baby with him. She has already attempted to murder a Cylon (one of the Sixes) whom she has good reason to believe will eventually try to kidnap their daughter, Hera.
2) Tory Foster, another sleeper Cylon, just learned, at the end of last season, that she was a Cylon. Tory has since killed a human to prevent her from exposing the formerly-sleeper Cylons among the Galactica crew and government, and has become not only Baltar's lover, but a believer in the monotheistic religion that Balter is preaching (despite the humans' usual belief in something resembling the ancient Greek pantheon of gods)--the One God being, probably unbeknownst to Baltar's followers, the god worshipped by the Cylons. When she finally chose to "come out" as a Cylon, she told her former boss, President Laura Roslin, "I don't take orders from you anymore."
Which of these Cylons poses a greater threat to the fragile truce between humans and Cylons? If I were a gambler, my money would be on Tory. Unlike her kind-hearted predecessor as the president's press secretary (now deceased), Tory has always struck me as a calculating individual who'll do whatever it takes to accomplish her goals.
Or so I thought.
When the strike was finally settled, I went to check out the olde DVR, and got a bit of a shock: Apparently, "Stargate: Atlantis" had already had a season "in the can" (already filmed) before the strike, and I was behind in my watching by almost the entire season!
Discouraged by the prospect of having to watch some 10 or so episodes posthaste, I actually seriously considered whether I should take advantage of having gone nearly "cold turkey" from television and give it up altogether, except for the news. I decided against it because, I reasoned, my interests are so esoteric as it is--really, how many folk dance lovers are there, anyway?--that I need something more mainstream to talk about.
Well, no sooner had I decided to watch an episode of Stargate: Atlantis just about every Monday-Wednesday evening until I caught up when our cable connection decided to malfunction, leaving us completely tv-free for almost two weeks. It didn't help, of course, that that bum from the cable company first showed up two and a half hours later than scheduled and I refused to press the buzzer to let him enter the building because it was already well into Shabbat/Sabbath. It was just my luck, naturally, that the season finale occurred while our cable was on the fritz and was, therefore, not recorded by our DVR. !#$%^&*!!!!!!!!!! The seasons's third- and second-to-last episodes were getting quite interesting, since the writers had decided to write one of the actor's pregnancies into, rather than out of, the series: The last time I saw Teyla, she'd been kidnapped by someone seeking access to her still-unborn baby's unique genetic heritage. Talk about "stay tuned"!
Anyone who's not already bored by this post and/or isn't a Battlestar Galactica fan is cautioned that this might be a good time to stop reading and go directly to my next post. :)
My theory is that there are two wild cards (unpredictable factors) on this show:
1) Athena, whom we met originally as a "sleeper" Cylon named Sharon (code name Boomer) who'd been programmed to believe that she was human, then met in another version (most Cylons having many copies of the same model) who knew that she was a Cylon, has switched loyalties and gone over to the human camp, pairing off with the human Karl Agathon (code name Helo) and having a baby with him. She has already attempted to murder a Cylon (one of the Sixes) whom she has good reason to believe will eventually try to kidnap their daughter, Hera.
2) Tory Foster, another sleeper Cylon, just learned, at the end of last season, that she was a Cylon. Tory has since killed a human to prevent her from exposing the formerly-sleeper Cylons among the Galactica crew and government, and has become not only Baltar's lover, but a believer in the monotheistic religion that Balter is preaching (despite the humans' usual belief in something resembling the ancient Greek pantheon of gods)--the One God being, probably unbeknownst to Baltar's followers, the god worshipped by the Cylons. When she finally chose to "come out" as a Cylon, she told her former boss, President Laura Roslin, "I don't take orders from you anymore."
Which of these Cylons poses a greater threat to the fragile truce between humans and Cylons? If I were a gambler, my money would be on Tory. Unlike her kind-hearted predecessor as the president's press secretary (now deceased), Tory has always struck me as a calculating individual who'll do whatever it takes to accomplish her goals.
posted by Shira Salamone at 12:41 PM
7 Comments:
Spoiler?
Here's my prediction for the series:
Earth isn't the destination of some long lost 13th colony. It's the origin of Man, and the 12 colonies came from Earth. the story line takes place in our future.
At least it accounts for Bob Dylan.
That is all.
Mark, sure, *we, the viewers* know that "Earth isn't the destination of some long lost 13th colony. It's the origin of Man, and the 12 colonies came from Earth." That's not the question. The question is this: Who, or what, has manipulated both the Cylons and the humans into going to an Earth enveloped in nuclear winter and no longer habitable, and why? And, for that matter, how? How can Balter, a human, have been having visions/delusions/whatever or years, and how can Roslin be literally sharing dreams with Cylons (raising the interesting question of whether she's one of the Final Five Cylons)?
Balter's been have visions *for* years--sorry about the typo.
Again, what, exactly, does the "controlling entity," for lack of a better description, wish to accomplish?
If Rosylin is a Cylon, then why would having the cylon baby blood infused cure her cancer?
And if Tigh is a Cyclon, how did Adam know him during the first Cylon war?
Good question about Roslin. I haven't a clue.
Good question about Col. Tigh, too. Is it possible that the Cylons were actually working on "skin jobs" (Cylons that are so close in appearance to humans, even on the molecular level, that they actually pass medical scans) even before the Cylon first war?
My money's on Kara Thrace ( code name Starbuck) being the last of the Final Five. If she's *not* a Cylon, how did she come have to a life-long obsession with a heavenly object that so closely resembled the now-destroyed Resurrection Ship (for resurrecting dead Cylons) that she identified that ship as being what she'd been drawing since childhood the minute she first laid eyes on the actual ship?
For me, the most interesting question is who, or what, has been manipulating both humans and Cylons, how, and why?
Okay, time to let an expert in the room. Hi, Garnel Ironheart, fanatic and obsessive viewer of the show.
(By the way, you'd probably also like the new Doctor Who series)
Here's what we know:
It's the future and Earth has been nuked.
But we don't know:
Who nuked 'em? Did the other Cylons make it to Earth first? Did we do it to ourselves? Is that really Charlton Heston over there on the ground next to the remains of the Statue of Liberty? Damn dirty apes!
Here's what we know:
The final Cylon is someone Xena, I mean, Three, I mean Deanna respects. In "Eye of Jupiter" she was embarrassed with herself to meet him/her, apologizing for not knowing. And right now Deanne doesn't seem to show anyone respect so it could be any of the main characters she saw.
Here's what we don't know:
First of all, Adama meet Tigh 10 years after the war. In other words, he's known him a long time but not as far back as the original Cylons before they disappeaed after the truce. But Tigh seems to way predate all the known skinjobs. So who made him and the other four secret Cylons?
Here's what we know:
Somehow, almost every major plot device from the original series has reappeared in the new series with two significant exceptions:
1) Three episodes in the original series deal with the planet Terra which was colonized by the 13th tribe on their way to Earth and eventually left behind. There has been no surprise colony of humans in this series.
2) The Ship of Light - in 2 different stories, Galactica pilots encounter a large, glowing ship piloted by strange beings wearing white burka with mysterious, undetailed powers. One thing is made clear - the Ship of Light people are interested in helping the Galactica reach Earth and have secret ways of doing so.
What we don't know:
I'm pretty sure the whole Terra angle will not happen in the new series. But what about the Ship of Light? Starbuck has been having visions that seem to put her in a category all her own. So she's not the 5th Cylon.
Someone brought her and her viper back to life after they exploded, the someone she thought was a vision of Leoben at first but then figured out wasn't but a yet unidentified intelligence. Do they appear and reveal they've been manipulating events in the final 10 episodes?
Hmmm, is it possible that Tigh was one of the earliest skinjobs, and is aging because he's actually defective by Cylon standards? If so, he may have been allowed to survive for a reason. Stay tuned.
So you think the Ship-of-Light people will turn out to be the controlling entities, and that they're the ones manipulating Starbuck's brain? That's an intriguing thought. Is it possible that the One God of the Cylons is actually aboard the Ship of Light?
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