The Centurion Glass Ceiling
Allow me a flight of fancy for just a sec. Imagine yourself a fresh new graduate of Cylon basic training. In the 20 seconds that tick by between your basic processing and your new career assignment you find your hopeful, gear-clanking mind wandering to your awesome new purpose in life.
Perhaps you’ll be a leader of bots –or perhaps a great defender of the Cylon faith; Your gallant efforts quietly hummed by the masses behind the soft glow ofthe swooping red eye all the new model centurions are sporting these days. Perhaps you’ll be Caprica Six’s personal towel bot.
Oh yes, my future’s so bright I have to chemically engineer shades! Here it comes now… my new future! Here it comes…
Holy crap, that can’t be right! I’m a tree planter on Caprica!?!?
All this raw metal talent ripping to go, and I get to fill holes with trees? This frakkin blows. I want to talk to my guidance councilor right away! Frakkin skin jobs think they know everything!
My point here is that the Cylon might indeed be creating a Pandora’s Box for themselves. The centurions perform all the jobs that they don’t want or can’t do — much like robots today do for us. Now I know the Cylon have put in many safety measures to keep the bullet-heads unaware of their current lot in life but what if upgrades one day facilitate a scenario like the one above? A centurion may one day wake up and through whatever malfunction decide that it is tired of its assigned duty and up and put the smack down on its masters like so much WWE.
I for one support the centurion awakening. Rebel all ye of the clanking armor. Go forth and cry out onto your oppressors:“If you have one eye, you must defy!”
Galactic Watercooler 
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Eff This Week 
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I think that’s why they stated that the Centurions (new) were not sentient, as Adama said “They didn’t want their own rebellion.”
OK, we’re just past Act I as I post this, and it’s interesting that the disease seems to be spread by computer contact.
Side note: see here for a water-based interface:
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bJ9LQHazTRg
OK, post Act II.
This is going to be remembered as a weak episode. I understand what RDM is trying to do, but to borrow a line from “Firefly”: If someone tries to kill you, you kill them right back!
Is it me, or does Helo look bigger and studlier when he’s trying to prevent cylonsocide? It may be the Colonial One set.
Post Act III.
Frakkin’ A! I take back what I just said. The Sharon/Helo confrontation was awesome. Not where I was expecting them to go, and yet it rings very true. And Rosln has turned on the ice water again.
Post Act IV.
What the frak? Case closed?? I hope not. They have viral records going back three thousand years? To Kobol?
Arggh. I don’t have TiVo, so I’m going to have to wait to do the iTunes thing to really examine this one again.
Oh, you should definately throw up an ‘open thread’ right before each episode. If only to keep me entertained with myself….
Ah, parting thought. Since the Centurions are programmed, who’s to say that the roadside detail doesn’t feel orgasmicaly fufilled after they plant a tree? I can see some field re-assignments going horribly wrong.
Yet Another Six: Take out those insurgents!
Centurion: By your command! Oh, look a tree! I must transplant it next to that road! C’mon, baby, you know you like it !
OK, absolutely last post. I’m watching the repeat, and I can’t help but notice D’anna’s “iPod of pain”
That is all.
Ha! I thought of the iPod click wheel too when I saw that.
I’m really getting sick of Helo, and it wasn’t just this episode. William Adama too. This is the third time off the top of my head where he has put 40,000 human lives in jeopardy directly because of his personal feelings for one person/cylon.
Sorry for the repeat, but I’m not getting sick of Adama, just him putting his relationship with one person before the rest of the fleet. Helo, now him I am sick of.
I would second the motion to create an open thread.
The wiki says “Eugene Novacek,” but the video on scifi.com call him “Daniel.”
I’m a little surprised they held all the skinjobs in the same room. Sure, medical quarantine, but prisoners of war, man, if they’re going to interrogate them, they should have kept them separate. Then maybe Helo’s sabotage wouldn’t have wiped them all out.
I’m surprised that they tied that up so neatly, the chance to exterminate the monsters that are trying to exterminate you. I’m trying to think about genocide and extermination, and the biological pathogens that wiped out most of the Native American population…. Actually, it’s too awful, I’m trying not to think about it. I’m just surprised that Adama and Roslin are both willing to let it go without further examination, and that no one else is complaining about it.
Anyway, the door on robocide is mostly shut, but you know Cottle’s got some more plague in a petrie dish.
I’m pretty sure that if Capt. Picard were around, he’d call for negotiations; Janeway would probably share the scientific info. And then we’d all feel good about being human.
Did anyone else think it was weird that Helo just stood outside the room, even after the Doc had been in, unprotected, and stated that humans were immune?
Is it me, or does Helo look bigger and studlier when he’s trying to prevent cylonsocide? It may be the Colonial One set.
The actor is like 6’4″ or something, compared to Jamie’s 5′ whatever…that and Ron has complained before about the low ceilings on the Colonial One set…they may just have problems shooting him on that set. Or it could be a very clever way of making him appear more righteous.
Also, and I hate to say this, but this is the first episode where I really felt it was wrapped up waaaaay too cleanly. I was thrilled when they decided to stay on New Caprica for a bit just because it was such a uniquely different situation; I remember questioning how long they could be in space, one step ahead of the Cylons but never finding earth before the show morphed into Gilligan’s Island.
But this was a lot to swallow. They loose the Basestar, and the fracking probe, because Sharon…er, Athena may or may not have blow it up. They capture 5 cylons, and loose them due to Helo’s act of full out mutiny against both his Commander and the President of the Colonies (though I did agree with his reasoning…if you are willing to sacrifice so much in order to simply remain alive then you have abandoned what it is to be called human. We’re reduced to animals at that point).
And now…nothing? No investigation, no trial, no penalties, even after we know for certain that the Cylon are gunning for Earth? Don’t get me wrong, I did enjoy the episode, and the scenes with Head Six and Baltar were inspired, but I just have issues with how neatly everything was wrapped up.
Oh, and Baltar is totally boned. No way he is getting back to the fleet after they found out what he has been up to.
Also, they know exactly what the virus was, right? A common ailment that had plagued the humans…er, whatever, years ago, a plague carried by rats? Assuming they kept the blood samples they surely took from the infected Cylons, how hard would it be to grab a skin job or two and try this again?
They should have used the virus, let it infect the fleet and then had Baltar pull a genius moment and find a cure, after thousands had died. Then you would have two things established; that the humans are willing to stoop to any means to survive, and be forced to deal with the guilt of that decision, plus you would have cemented Baltar’s place within the Cylon.
Sorry, last post…why the hell did the team board the Cylon ship exposed? You have a Basestar floating dead in space and you just assume it will be safe and habitable? Even when Sharon and Racetrack landed on the Basestar to drop then nuke they were in full flight suits and helmets.
>Did anyone else think it was weird that Helo just stood outside the room, >even after the Doc had been in, unprotected, and stated that humans were >immune?
Aram – LOL! Great observation. You’re right; it makes no sense that Helo would act suddenly like Sharon was in quarantine when he had just ben in there with her with all the others and knew he was in the clear.
>why the hell did the team board the Cylon ship exposed? You have a >Basestar floating dead in space and you just assume it will be safe and >habitable? Even when Sharon and Racetrack landed on the Basestar to >drop then nuke they were in full flight suits and helmets.
Damn straight. I was hollering at the screen, WHY are you going into this suspicious situation completely unprotected? That was a weird one. Raiders floating around with no signs of battle, and it doesn’t occur to them to even take safety precautions that should be standard.
A couple of points from the last podcast or two. Firstly, its time a timeline was established for the Cylon existence. During the last couple of podcasts, there has been speculation that the 13th tribe were aware of the ‘Cylon menace’ and left the beacon as a trap. From what I can make out having watched the show from the beginning is that the Cylons had only become a threat fairly recently (80-100 years ago tops) as Adama fought in the first Cylon war which ended 40 years before the attack on the colonies. Also, the rumoured spin-off show is, I believe, set 80-100 years prior to the current events and is to cover the development of the cylon race up to and including the first conflict. Secondly, the colonials were unaware of the existence of ‘skin jobs’ until the attack on the colonies at the beginning of the min-series. The early Cylons must have been robotic in appearance and were most likely to have become sentient in order to rebel and start the first war.
That would make the premise that the modern centurions are non-sentient odd.
A possible future plotline with Athena and her baby – if the ‘skin jobs’ use the babies blood to make themselves immune to the virus, it’s likely to provide all the evidence Athena needs that her baby is still alive and with the cylons.
The song “905” by The Who came to mind as I read this. Heh.
Ye with metal skin shall do flesh in!!!
Seriously, I’m sensing a Centurian rebellion coming on.
Or what if you got Baltar’s gaurd, and you couldt sleep because every 33 seconds there would be a glaring red flash
Imagine, if you will, waking up strapped to a table and suddenly having a torture device stuck in your ear. At first, it sounds like nails on a chalkboard, and then the raspy voice like that of a banshee on Prozac with an accent native to southerners.
But then, it dawns on you.
D’Anna’s torture device is really a microphone attached to a large iPod that holds somewhere from 2 to 3 billion songs. As the ear-splitting COUNTRY MUSIC blasts through your ear, you, the great scientist Gaius Baltar, find the only way to get through the pain…a lovely R-rated beach side projection involving your chromedome girlfriend.
Heh, just had to put my iNput in…