February 21, 2009
GWC Podcast #152: BSG 4.5 Deadlock
Let’s take a vote! (Kidding.) We dive into this week’s BSG 4.5 episode, Deadlock. Highlights: we love how Ellen is still Ellen (and still hates Bill Adama), explore the emotional issues that arise from Ellen’s barren womb, enjoy Six’s “guns — bigger guns!” moment, chat about Paula’s issues, dish on the new white Six dress (and talk naked vs. skimpy), comment on Adama’s continuing drinking problem, contemplate the function of death in humanity, look forward to the Chief discovering what Tory did to Cally, wonder why high heels are “meh” but quarian reversed knees are h-o-t (and look similar), and analyze the new Mass Effect 2 teaser trailer.
Galactic Watercooler 
Modern Geek 
Save Eureka 
Eff This Week 
FitSmart
You guys keep talking like the Final Five spent two thousand years traveling from Erf back to the colonies, but according to Anders they were traveling at relativistic speed. I take this to mean that it was close to the speed of light. At 99.9% the 2000 yrs on the colonies would have only been 4 years for the Final Five. Of course it could have been longer but I also assume that they could have placed themselves in suspended animation (a sort of self-boxing) for most of the trip so they really wouldn’t have had to live together on a ship for all that time.
I came to write what Wildvector already covered, dangit, but I have something else to add. You accept that it’s Anders that’s going to wake up. I think that the super sensitive nurse was right when she said “He’s not in there anymore” to the grieving Starbuck. What if the brainwaves we’re seeing aren’t Anders, and are instead someone/something else?
Also, I’m going to go on record predicting that the One True God of the Cylons is something that’s going to quickly become very important. Ellen took pains to explain that the Centurions already had that when the final five showed up last episode. What if the One True God == The Head Six == Where Starbuck came from == The reason behind the cycle of create cylons/rebel/plan/etc. The head six seemed a bit bloodthirsty, maybe Baltars Babes and their Super Action Funtime Assault Squad are part of the ‘chip critter’s cycle of violence.
After all, Battlestar Galactica hasn’t had a Jack the Ripper episode yet…
@wildvector: You point is well taken, but as research and discussion on the forum points out that if they reduced that speed to even 99.8% that travel time starts to increase very quickly. Consider that in most discussions “relativistic velocity” can be interpreted as a speed that represents a significant percentage of the speed of light — like even .5C or .8C — and we could be looking at many, many hundreds of years or more. Don’t forget to account for acceleration and deceleration as well. While I’m not going to pore though the math, it’s easy to see that even if they reached .8C they’d likely spend little time at that speed — again indicating a hell of a travel time.
And even ten years represents a lot of card games. How many years before things get a bit weird? 🙂