GWC Re-Watch Frak Party: Torn
It’s week thirty-five of our planned off-season re-watch of the entire “re-imagined” BSG canon, and after a little time off to watch Razor, it’s time to move on to the season three episode “Torn.” So why not join us here for the GWC online frak party? There’s room for everyone, though you’ll have to bring your own snacks…
Feel free to jump in at any point with your comments on this week’s episode as the re-watch is by definition spoiler free. We’ll be in and out, but we’ll definitely take a look at your comments before we start next week’s podcast.
Note: Though a lot of the frak party will likely take place in the GWC Forum — click [here] to enter and join the fun — we’re going to leave comments open here as well as some listeners and readers have asked us to do so. Enjoy!
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Okay, this has nothing to do with the re-watch. And you might have talked about all this already. But if Tigh is a cylon and Tigh fought in the original, forty years ago Cylon war, then the cylon making human-looking cylon models technology is a lot older than I thought. In Razor, you see them making human/cylon hybrids (having a lot of trouble with the arm, evidently, always keeping a reference arm handy in the goo), which I assume are bathtub-bound because they have an organic component, but are partially machine. But I got the impression that they were constructing Grandpa Goo when Adama found him the first time and they skedaddled. So, really, Tigh is older than that guy by like twenty years. Now the way I understand it, the first Cylon war was a revolution that ended when the cylons, who were slave workers, split. So the question becomes, was there a place where the cylons were isolated before the revolution where they could have time to experiment and invent themselves up a Tigh? It doesn’t quite feel like it’s Earth, but it could be. I feel like one of the teasers for Season IV said something like, “the cylons aren’t what you think.” Could Tigh be the lynchpin?
And how about this? How would the human models react to the old school centurions, who were, as far as I understand it, the original rebels, they were the guys who went into hiding forty years before the incarnation as we know it showed up. Would they respect each other? It seems like the current Centurions would really piss off the old centurions, but maybe not since, ultimately, it must’ve been the original centurions who came up with the social hierarchy.
Ignoring the fact that everything has happened before and will happen again, if “All Along the Watchtower” exists in the Gallactica universe, I feel like that must mean one of a couple of things: 1) that the original colonies left Earth sometime after the late ’60s when “Watchtower” was written. 2) An unbelievable coincidence. 3) some Jungian collective unconsciousness, which the Cylons sort of posses, although I think we’re supposed to think that they don’t necessarily project the same way. 4) A lot of other things, but those are the important ones and I’ve run out of steam on that idea. Now, as a sci fi fan, I’ve heard about Occum’s Razor so many times it’s kind of annoying, so I tend to think that it must be the future (although I originally thought that they were an ancient group who had somehow gotten into space because of the sort-of-Greek religion, not quite democracy, and iconography).
The thing I think about most is how the hell is Head Six in Baltar’s head. I really like your “wetworks” theory (that once Six got blown up and, presumably, bled all over Baltar, that she was now “inside” him as little nanites or what have you), except then how in the hell does Head Baltar get into Caprica Six?
And how did Baltar survive that first explosion? I don’t care if she was standing in front of him. He could be dead from that.
God help me, I don’t like the possibility of a collective unconsciousness, but that does seem to be where we’re heading. When Roslyn ended up with Six and a bunch of other people aware and in a dream, that seemed to be what Baltar and Head Six do. Maybe everyone can do it?
Or maybe Roslyn is the last cylon and she can project?
Hell, maybe the number 12 is wrong and Roslyn, Baltar, and Starbuck are cylons. Or Cylon hybrids or something.
On a related note, when my buddies and I watched it, we got in a little argument over whether Grandpa Goo was the cylon God. I said that he sort of obviously wasn’t, it just showed that cylons are desperate for some meaning in their life and the centurions revered him as God. He just doesn’t seem old enough to be their God. I sort of thought the Cylons worshipped the Christian God, but I don’t think there’s much evidence of that except for a very significant “one God” faith.
Anyway, I do have a point. Logically, I think that one of our assumptions must be wrong and I think it is probably about the humans. But this isn’t logical, but a huge leap, perhaps someone originally built the humans and the cylons sussed this out and figured out how to build more human looking machines, access the collective unconscious (they brought Roslyn AND Baltar in and that would be where “Watchtower” comes from), and decided that whoever built the humans was God– the divinity proven by knowledge from the collective unconscious (how else would Six know that she and Baltar would be the parents of the future?).
Good questions, all. I only have a comment on one – the whole head Six – head Baltar issue.
When I first started watching I thought that Head Six was just a fractured part of Baltar himself. Sometimes when people are traumatized – they split in two – because they just can’t handle what has happened. I thought that Baltar’s mind split and the alternate personality took on the form of Six because she was the cause of it.
But then we learned that Six has a head Baltar. So now I think that it must be some kind of outside force – because what are the chances that both Baltar and cylon model both have the same condition?
What are the chances that both Baltar and cylon model both have the same condition? A lot higher if they’re both cylon/s/z.
My impression was that at some point, the Cylons got hold of Tigh and replicated him somehow, killing off the real one….probably during that period after he and Adama were on that freighter and then Adama left to rejoin the Fleet…Tigh seemed to be at a pretty low point in his life as seen when the MP’s showed up at his place to tell him that he had been re-instated.
Same with the Sixes and the Eights and the rest…at some point there was an originial human Sharon Valeri and the Cylons got her during the last few years of infiltration of the Colonies before the attack. They would have to do it that way so that they had someone with real human memories and mannerisms; it’d be hard to create that from scratch and have it be believable.
Remember in the mini-series when the first Six shows up at that annual meeting? Doesn’t she say, “Are you alive?” to the guy who is sitting there? That suggested to me that the cylons were similar to Jeff Bridges’s “Starman” — aliens, trying to figure out how people worked. Similarly Six is astonished when she sees a baby. Was that a sort of throw away device to make the cylons clearly different to the viewers? Or did cylons really not know that much about humans?
If they did not know that much about humans, then they must not have ever been real humans or they lost their memories.
I don’t think the cylons were ever humans. I’m saying that maybe the humans aren’t what we think. That first Six we see, I don’t have enough information about her to say if we ever see her again, but the deep cover Sixes are the ones that seem to know things about the future and be able to communicate telepathically. And how about when it seemed like Head Six showed up in physical form in Season I? What the hell is up with that?
Like maybe Starbuck is the avatar of the apocalypse (or whatever) because she is going to lead the humans and the cylons into a blending where they become neither human nor cylon, but a bunch of hybrids. I don’t think it’ll be anything as simple as she gets all the humans killed.
I didn’t think that the first mini-series Six was like Starman and knew nothing about humans. I thought she was equating, as Six seems to do, the idea of being alive with sexuality. When she asks him if he’s alive, I thought the other option was bored. But they do make a point of showing a picture of the man’s family on his desk. It could’ve been just to make us sad when he blew up. But I thought it was to show that the man had known love and reproduced, which is what Six wants. Then she kisses him. Then they blow up. I wonder if her spine was glowing when they blew up? Or if another cut, they were in a train and went into a tunnel?
I don’t think cylons and humans are the same thing, I’m just wondering if there is something we don’t know about humans that the cylons do that allows them to understand humanity better than we do.
For instance, I always thought that the spinoff idea Caprica sounded a little weird, Grandpa Adama in the court system? Perhaps even back then, the cylons were experimenting with humans.
I don’t think Baltar is the last cylon, but he could be. But again, Roslyn went into dreamtime place too.
I never felt like the cylons were copies of existing humans. It’s possible and they do call them “copies,” but I just never got the sense that they were trying to copy humans exactly. Sure, their human bodies were useful for infiltration, but I thought that the reason they have human bodies and, indeed, the reason they attacked Earth was because they wish to reproduce. Isn’t that the plan that is referred to in the “And they have a plan?” But i certainly don’t have any evidence that they aren’t copies of existing humans.
Maybe I was wrong to say earlier that I had a point, what I’m really trying to do is figure out what the frak is going on. Tigh really puzzles me. If he’s not a copy (which he sure could be), then that’s really weird that they were messing with this stuff back when they were still robot butlers.
Oooooo, sexy head-six laying out on Baltar’s head beach again trying to get Baltar to believe that she is an Angel sent by God to guide him. If Head-Six IS an Angel, does that make Head Baltar, Caprica’s Angel from God or does one have nothing to do with the other?
What kind of crazy strategy is it for the cylons, especially JUST after their stellar experience on New Caprica, to decide to relocate to the 13th colony, Earth?!? Do they think the colony is abandoned? Do they want to try Occupation 2.0? I doubt the Brother Cavil models are behind this plan, they always wanted to stop hijacking human goals and go their own way, like he stated when first revealed as a cylon in the brig.
Now that we’re in the rewatch, seeing Tigh hallucinate hearing Ellen’s voice in his quarters has a whole new meaning now that he’s been revealed as a cylon and the voice could just as well be part of a projection instead of him falling into madness.
This episode features a lot of new info and revelations. It marks the END of fat Lee, I bet Audra (and many others) are VERY happy about that. Gotta love the newfound modesty in Baltar when he stumbles across Naked Tai (Tigh?) Chi Boomer and manages to take another peek before averting his eyes! Also, the ep where Athena (at least her moniker) is born. Lots more firsts in this ep, like the intro of the hybrid and seeing the inner workings of a cylon bridge with water controls.
Hey, bonding between Starbuck and Tigh while arguing that the Galactica crew that was on ship during the entire New Caprica stint had no idea what sacrifice was during that time. It’s interesting comparing Starbuck and Tigh (two potential cylons) to Boomer and Caprica-Six (the two cylon war heroes whose words carried extra weight and unbalanced the scales of how much sway any particular cylon had) and how similar that sounds to Helo’s conversation with Adama in the admiral’s quarters.
The hybrid, in the midst of her rambling, states “end of line” which is a great Tron ref making for a nice connection to the DTA Tron rewatch. Interesting, how a hybrid’s reaction to FTL jumps seems rather orgasmic (whether the hybrid wants to jump or objects).
After being schooled by Adama and having him take away what was probably one of the most precious aspects of their relationship (their pseudo father-daughter status), Starbuck starts on the path of revising her ways and lops off her long golden locks in what looks like the most painful way possible, sawing it off with her ankle knife. Then heading toward the refugee area and visiting her own pseudo daughter (Casey), all while we see Saul plummet deeper into his stupor drinking and grieving over Ellen.
…on the note of why Roslyn was in ‘projected’ space…, she has Cylon nan-nites in her blood. Remember, Sharon’s blood was used to save her from her cancer. I personally don’t think she is a cylon.