COWBOY PETE HANDICAPS “BSG”

105 comments on “COWBOY PETE HANDICAPS “BSG””

1. How about good old Zak Adama? Been dead since before the series started. Former lover of Starbuck, and we’ve seen how she goes for the hidden Cylons. Also, didn’t Lee just do the scene with his Dad where he asked how they’d react if Zak came back, alive, but a Cylon?

2. Not Zak… if the comic books are to be treated as canonical, they kinda did that one already. On the other hand, they did establish the precedent, so…

3. My money has always been on Dirk Benedict showing up as the Cylon leader. It looks less likely, but I’m going to stick by it for now.

4. I actually did consider Zak, but decided to limit dead candidates to people who have actually been alive, at least for a while, since the series began.
   PAD

5. Couple points, Pete:
   1. Re: Gina Six shooting Cane, the 7 known Cylons seem to be unaware of who the others are, so Gina Six shooting her make sense.
   2. If Roslin was a Cylon she wouldn’t have had cancer in the first place. Plus, she’s prophesied to die before reaching Earth.
   3. If you look at the Last Supper pic the best approximation is that Lee is in the Judas position. Also, the webisodes before Razor ended with Dural (PR Cylon) telling Adama that he arranged for Lee to be there for the signing, which is a really weird way to end the webisodes unless that bit of info was really import.
   My money is on Lee being the last Cylon.

6. “TOM ZAREK—Odds: 1-1—FOR: It doesn’t get more metatextual than having the original Apollo, Richard Hatch, turn out to be the Number One Cylon. Prominent enough for everyone to go “Him?!?” And he’s missing from the big “Last Supper” picture, in which a chalice sitting next to an empty chair may symbolize that the missing Cylon isn’t represented in the portrait.”
   FWIW, Ron Moore has implied heavily that the final Cylon is someone not in that picture. If we believe him.

7. Number Six isn’t shielding Baltar from “a nuclear blast” she’s shielding him from the shattering windows in his house. We’ve been over this since the Miniseries years ago. Baltar’s house isn’t *near* the nuclear explosion, he’s miles away from the blast. People survived on the outskirts of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and such.

8. We don’t know that these final five Cylons have the same “plan” as the others. They might not want to cooperate with the other Cylons. The other Cylons don’t even know who the final five are! So some of the “doesn’t make sense because [Cylon] tried to kill them” doesn’t necessarily not make sense! Did that make sense?
   *rubs forehead*

9. Let’s just say I’m glad they dropped the “They have a plan” from the opening since it’s been increasingly clear that the Cylons have as much of a plan as a Robin Williams improv performance.
   Personally, I find BSG really frustrating. Individual eps, and the characters and acting are very good. But the universe setup and background just doesn’t make any sense, particularly the Cylons.
   They have exactly 12 humanoid models, which vary substantially in gender (btw, it’s also odd that there are either only 4 or 5 female models rather than 6 for parity) and physiotype. If you can produce 12 that different, you can produce any number of different models.
   But 7 of the models don’t even know what 5 of the models look like. Huh? And none of the 4/5 were in any sort of critical position; Tigh’s closest, but he was a washed-up XO on a about to be mothballed ship. Anders was a Pyramid star, but that doesn’t influence or learn policy or military info. The other two were low level out of the way grunts.
   And don’t even get me started on the Cylons needing “Wuv. Twue Wuv” to “reproduce”. Designing a racial model that can’t reproduce/manufacture new ones? That’s just stupid.

10. What if the remaining unrevealed cylon isn’t the leader? Suppose the leader is one we already know?

11. What if the remaining unrevealed cylon isn’t the leader? Suppose the leader is one we already know?

12. I was hoping that they’d do the stunt casting and use Jonathan Frakes as the “Number One” Cylon.

13. Tom Zarek was my number one choice too.
    But after reading your list.. Agathon my number one choice now! Lawless’s character was apologizing for the hëll they put him thru on Earth. Hera isn’t the miracle baby like everyone thought she was. The Chief’s baby is the miracle baby. And it would cover up the glitch you mentioned. Against.. he’s in the picture.

14. Wow!
    My money’s always been on Billy Keikeya being a Cyclon. Don’t know why, I just always thought it would be a good curve and a way to bring him back to the show.
    I’m still thinking the show jumped the shark a bit between the Saul Tigh, Chief, Sam Anders and Tory Foster being exposed as the four of the final five. That and the use of All Along the Watchtower in that particular episode really were low points in the series as well as the reappearance of Kara Thrace.
    The show hasn’t gone off the rails as badly as the 4400 did but, they really took a bad turn with those decisions.

15. Oh wait, I just realized who the final Cylon is… of course it’s f*#@in’ Locutus of Borg.

16. Its George Bush, but its not revealed until they reach Earth.

17. “ADMIRAL CANE — AGAINST: Why would Six murder her?”
    Probably because Cane let the crew rape and beat her repeatedly. A few months of that will put anyone in a murderin’ mood.

18. I didn’t have a problem with Starbuck coming back–even at the time I thought it was pretty heavily forecast that her death wouldn’t be permanent. I did think Tyrol and, especially, Tigh being Cylons was pretty iffy, though–what makes the characters so appealing is their frailty as human beings.
    The one thing I’m pretty certain of is that neither Baltar nor Starbuck will be the last Cylon (I also don’t think it’ll be an Adama, but if it’s Adama pere, I really think the show will have jumped the shark). On the other hand, I think either Baltar or Starbuck will be the “angel” that the Razor Hybrid prophesied would lead the Cylons to the promised land. Most likely Starbuck, since Leoben told her her destiny was to deliver his soul unto God, and since that would fit with the Hybrid’s other statement about Starbuck being the harbinger of the apocalypse.

19. Slightly off topic (only by an hour!), but did you see the Sarah Jane Adventures?

20. #15-dámņ, I had money on it taking less than 10 comments.

21. I like the Sarah Jane Adventures, but I do wonder at the wisdom of putting something that’s openly a kids’ show (as opposed to Doctor Who, which is a family show) on primetime Friday nights. Still, if Sci Fi is willing to give SJA that sort of prominence, I guess it means that the Who franchise is being pretty successful for them, which can only be a good thing.

22. “I like the Sarah Jane Adventures, but I do wonder at the wisdom of putting something that’s openly a kids’ show (as opposed to Doctor Who, which is a family show) on primetime Friday nights. Still, if Sci Fi is willing to give SJA that sort of prominence, I guess it means that the Who franchise is being pretty successful for them, which can only be a good thing.”
    It’s pretty obvious to me why Sci Fi put on Sara Jane- Someone realized how badly they missed the bus by not being the American outlet for TORCHWOOD. Seems like TORCHWOOD is a hit for BBC America. In case no one’s noticed, BBC America is
    running terrific genre shows like JEKYLL, HEX, and the coming 2nd season of ROBIN HOOD. You gotta love reruns of Doctor Who and The Avengers, too. All of this while the Sci Fi Channel shows
    an endless drone of poorly made movies about asteroids and giant squids. The SARA JANE ADVENTURES actually seem like harmless fun.
    Now if someone would just find a suitable home for BLOOD TIES, an entertaining Canadian vampire
    show based on Tanya Huff’s novels that no one saw on Lifetime. Think Moonlight, but more fun.
    As for the last Cylon, I just hope that BSG doesn’t beat us to death with whole The Truth Will Be Revealed crap. This show is just too good for that. There’s too many interesting things to be done with these characters.
    Now if I could just figure out where that frakking
    music is coming from….

23. I am leaning toward the unrevealed Cylon being the President. I do not think that she has any children.
    If not her, then Bob Dylan.

24. Here is my wacky out there theory:
    Cain:
    Why: Admiral of the fleet is a nice place to be if you want to help insure your invasion of Caprica goes smoothly.
    BUT you say we saw her get shot and her body blasted off into space.
    (in Luthor voice) WRONG!
    We saw an extreme close up of a gun being fired towards the camera and later A body being blasted off into space. The question of bodies and cylons in my opinion is academic.
    If I remember correctly in one of the recent quick previews of this last season we are shown a very brief scene of one of the 6 models aghast at some revelation of someone who means a lot to her.
    Moore has done the “What what what! but isn’t she dead” shtick before. Remember the Star Trek Next Gen Eps he wrote that had the return of Denise Crosby as Sela? Huh… a star fleet officer ‘comes back’ in a manner of speaking as one of the good guys main threats.
    Ultimately my money is on Roslin but I’ll just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Moore and folk pulled Cain out of their hats.

25. Here is my wacky out there theory:
    Cain:
    Why: Admiral of the fleet is a nice place to be if you want to help insure your invasion of Caprica goes smoothly.
    BUT you say we saw her get shot and her body blasted off into space.
    (in Luthor voice) WRONG!
    We saw an extreme close up of a gun being fired towards the camera and later A body being blasted off into space. The question of bodies and cylons in my opinion is academic.
    If I remember correctly in one of the recent quick previews of this last season we are shown a very brief scene of one of the 6 models aghast at some revelation of someone who means a lot to her.
    Moore has done the “What what what! but isn’t she dead” shtick before. Remember the Star Trek Next Gen Eps he wrote that had the return of Denise Crosby as Sela? Huh… a star fleet officer ‘comes back’ in a manner of speaking as one of the good guys main threats.
    Ultimately my money is on Roslin but I’ll just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Moore and folk pulled Cain out of their hats.

26. Here is my wacky out there theory:
    Cain:
    Why: Admiral of the fleet is a nice place to be if you want to help insure your invasion of Caprica goes smoothly.
    BUT you say we saw her get shot and her body blasted off into space.
    (in Luthor voice) WRONG!
    We saw an extreme close up of a gun being fired towards the camera and later A body being blasted off into space. The question of bodies and cylons in my opinion is academic.
    If I remember correctly in one of the recent quick previews of this last season we are shown a very brief scene of one of the 6 models aghast at some revelation of someone who means a lot to her.
    Moore has done the “What what what! but isn’t she dead” shtick before. Remember the Star Trek Next Gen Eps he wrote that had the return of Denise Crosby as Sela? Huh… a star fleet officer ‘comes back’ in a manner of speaking as one of the good guys main threats.
    Ultimately my money is on Roslin but I’ll just say I wouldn’t be at all surprised if Moore and folk pulled Cain out of their hats.

27. My appologies for the multi posts. stupid fracking buggy comcast.. I blame both the cylons AND the Skrulls.

28. People who think Three’s apologizing to one of the final five was a clue… Could be the one she saw was Tigh. I’d say pulling out an eye is something to be sorry about.
    I thought it was interesting that the four known ones were involved with the resistance on New Caprica.
    And as for my guess… I’m going to have to go with Pactrick McGoohan. That would kick áršë. Ar maybe another Patrick… Macnee, anyone?

29. 1:50 – All of them. They’re all cylons. The only real human left is Starbuck, and the Cylons have hatched this elaborate plan solely to find Earth through her.

30. Loving the new season so far. I don’t think it will be Gaius/President/Adama, as if any of them are not human it hurts a lot of the human moral choices they had to make.
    I like the theory of it being Richard Hatch. I noticed this episode mentioned Zarek a few times. Of course the camera did all pan and linger on a photo of Zach Adama…
    On a slightly off topic note, was it just me or did the video and set quality seem slightly stepped down? The “texture” of the video seemed slightly like Dr. Who/ect

31. I just want the show to explain Baltar’s visions before it ends. If they explain it as him being the last Cylon, fine, if they explain it some other way, that’s fine too.
    But it can’t be left dangling. They’ve spent too many years dancing around whether he’s crazy, has a chip in his head, or God is talking to him. There has to be some kind of definitive answer or I’ll be very unsatisfied.

32. I’m a late-comer to the show. We watched the mini-series through Season 3 last summer. We knew just enough to know that some major characters were actually Cylon. We thought Baltar was one since the first episode because of the very reason you mention: no way that house comes down around his ears and still live. Plus, his “program” of #6 – and how of himself – would add up nicely.
    Zarek also makes sense to me, and we’ve wondered off and on. It’s just one of those disconnects that is hard to get around: the old Apollo a new Cylon? Would they really do that?
    Adama (take your pick of which one). Leobon (aka Number 2) whispered early on that Adama was a Cylon. Being portrayed as a victim, he never lied. It was actually one of the things I liked about the Cylons in the early part of the series. Having them always tell the truth when questioned gave them a certain high ground (of course, deceiving people about your identity kind of negates that). The question was always “Which Adama?” We generally discounted Bill Adama as being too old. Tigh’s revelation changed that, of course. Still, having Bill Adama being a Cylon would just be too much, I think. Lee? We doubted it, but always kept it in the back of our head. Why not make the hero a bridge between worlds? Still we saw it as highly unlikely. Zak? Honestly we had forgotten about him. I kinda like the idea. However, he’s been gone a while and I’m not sure it would pack the audience punch.
    I’m beginning to think it will be one of Baltar’s flunkies. They are guiding him towards “the one God”, and they are protecting him the same way Six did.

33. I’m not sure that coming back from the dead is likely for the final five cylons.
    So far it seems that these final five are different from the other cylons. I think there is only one of each model. Before last night that was just a general impression that I had, but I think last night’s episode nearly confirmed it. The regular models were talking about the possibility that the final five were in the human fleet. They seem to be talking about them as individuals, not as groups. If they were groups, then they could be in the fleet and still be somewhere else, so being in the fleet wouldn’t be such a big deal.
    Being singular models something would have to be different about how the final five resurrect. We’ve seen that the way the regular cylons do it is with a big resurrection ship. That ship has to be relatively close to the dying cylon, that’s why one was following the fleet around in the first season. So either the final five have their own ship that was not used for decades until Baltaar died (or Starbuck or Billy or whoever) or there are models of the final five waiting to be used on the resurrection ship and the regular cylons haven’t noticed them.
    Both of these things seem less than likely to me. I get the impression that the final five were created to be as human as possible. They think they’re human (without going crazy when they find out like Boomer did), they age normally, and they are each unique. That could imply that they have limited life spans and no resurrection.

34. Well, after last night’s episode I can heartily say it seems they took a step back from the abyss. If only because the story had the characters acting true to their established behavior and then letting the story take shape around that.
    Jason brings a good point that always seemed to stick with me as well – namely, the ‘original programmers’ as it were did too good a job with the original five models.
    The original five models were programmed too closely to mimic human behavior warts and all. After witnessing what they had wrought, the programmers decided to pull back a little for preservation and the betterment of the species.
    The thrust of the show has always been that the Cylons are the inheritors of man, without man’s flaws of character.
    The episode last night went a long way towards reinforcing that very point as we begin to see deeper cracks forming among the Cylon society.
    In a way, the Cavil model is mimicking the Cylons human creators in his actions against the Raiders. Well, we’re on a roller-coaster ride to the finish so I imagine it will all come out in a few weeks.

35. How about the attorney character introduced last season, Lampkin? I don’t see what it adds the show per see, but he does like to study human nature, and he is notable enough to be a suspect.

36. So here is my theory (I expect someone somewhere has said this before, but it is original as far as I know).
    As has been indicated many times, they are in a universe where history is repeating (“All this has happened before”). I believe that the final five are the Cylons that had survived and evolved from the previous round, millenniums earlier (explaining how Ty could have been a Cylon, even if he was a human during the ‘first’ Cylon war, and also explaining how the Cylon’s from this incarnation evolved so quickly).
    So when the Zarek is revealed as the last of the final five, he will explain how he modeled himself after (or actually was) the Starbuck from the previous round, thus making the original series both canon and prequel to the current series.
    Would that not be cool?

37. Nick,
    It is my impression that things repeat themselves, but not all that exactly. My take on it is that the repetition is more thematic than literal. Different people in different roles, but the same (general) plot exploring the same themes. Personally, I think that we’re seeing a re-telling of a war amongst the gods of Kobal from several thousand years ago.
    Another thought: We now know that the model number of the seven cylons in the “main” cylon group: 1 (Cavil) , 2 (Lioben), 3 (D’anna), 4 (Simon), 5 (Doral), 6 (Caprica), & 8 (Sharon). This means that the Final Five are 7, 9, 10, 11, & 12. It argues against them being a leftover from long-ago cylon race. At least, it argues against the Final Five being that and the Significant Seven being new. If they were ancient, I’d say they all had to be ancient, but I think it’s clear that the Seven don’t have any memery of events before the First Cylon war forty-odd years ago (at the earliest). If they were older, then their entire memories would have had to have been wiped.
    Final thought: having looked at last night’s episode, I’m now certain that Cavil know a s***load about the Final Five that he’s not telling anyone and is desparite to conceal. He engineered the boxing of the 3s to keep that secret and now he’s trying to wipe out any representives of the Final Five in the Fleet. I’d like to hear what he’d say if he was hooked up to that weird pain inducer they used on Baltar.

38. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

39. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

40. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

41. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

42. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

43. I’m guessing Tigh is Starbuck’s real father, making her the first hybrid, whick sort of explains the dreams.

44. I think a big flaw in a lot of this speculation (as much as I enjoy it) is the assumption that the Final Five have the same Kill All Humans agenda as the Nuke Caprica crowd.
    I don’t think they do, and I think that’s the reason for the “I’m Sorry…”

45. I agree with Keith. I think that the original programmers had a plan, but it’s not what the Seven think it is.
    Perhaps the programmers decided after the first war that they needed to reset the humans, so they made the seven to destroy them and the final five to drive them back to Earth. Once that is completed, maybe the Cylons will have all fulfilled their function and have to go away somehow.
    It may also be that the 1s have some inkling of this plan, but liked their version of “God’s will” better.

46. I can see it now: After all the fuss & commotion, the scene finally comes up to introduce the last of the Final Five Cylons, David Hasselhoff walks on screen and a resounding cracking noise is heard around the world as the minds of BSG fans shatter.

47. Here’s a theory I’m surprised I haven’t seen floated before:
    Could someone be born human, and then become a Cylon?
    Maybe the resurrection technology can work on humans by transplanting them into cylon bodies. That might also explain the hybrids (hybrids of what?) that control the base stars.

48. “David Hasselhoff walks on screen and a resounding cracking noise is heard around the world as the minds of BSG fans shatter.”
    Worse. The final cylon is Britney Spears.

49. Just another random thought: It’s highly unlikely that Anders fought on Caprica for so long without a Centurion getting at least as good of a glimpse of him as they got when he was in the cockpit. So someone had to flip to switch and turn on the music and make things change.
    So, depending on how mystical we end up getting, the person best in the position to flip that switch so that everyone on the same ship hears it, and who isn’t in The Last Supper photo, is Dualla. There’s a distince matriarchal turn in the Cylons during the last episode as well.

50. Zarek and Lee, same cylon aged by years.

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