25 Mar 07 Some Musings on the BSG Season Finale …

… and the “universe upset” it created.

Just watched the last “Battlestar Galactica” episode of season three. An interesting experience. I’m going to do the WordPress equivalent of a “cut tag” here, so that if you’ve not seen it, or not seen this season, you won’t read farther.

I’m amused. In the 53 minutes since the episode ended, the Battlestar Blog LiveJournal community has already swelled to about 220 comments.

The three massive plot twists I’ll address here. First, a two-at-once plot twist: Saul Tigh, the Chief, Tory (Billy’s replacement), and Anders all started hearing an actual Bob Dylan song. With Dylan lyrics they said, piecemeal, aloud. This led them to meet in a room, speak of a “switch flipping” in their heads making them realize that they are Cylons.

And, the second plot twist: Kara returns and tells Lee that she’s found Earth; the camera does a massive-scale pullback to show our Earth. I don’t know “when” it is (present-day, future, past), but at the very least, the continents were recognizable, meaning there has not been, it appears, any continental drift.

So, just to recap: Dylan/Earth existing, four ‘Cylons’, and Kara.

That doesn’t address Baltar being freed and then hidden by his newfound cult, or a simultaneous fleetwide loss of power, and the Cylons then showing up while the fleet’s recovering from the powerdown. (A minor S4E1 prediction: the Cylon fleet was depowered too by whatever that was. They’re not going to be ready to fight either.)

My predictions and thoughts at the moment, before I go to bed:

First, Earth is present-day Earth. RDM is doing a tip of the hat to Galactica 1980. What cemented it? They actually heard Dylan. I doubt RDM is going to put Dylan lyrics into the BSG universe and not put Dylan himself into the BSG universe (I don’t mean like a guest appearance: I mean that in the BSG reailty, those characters are quoting lyrics from a song called “All Along the Watchtower” by a songwriter named Bob Dylan, not lyrics from “The Crazy Chamalla Trip Song” by the Sagittaron Prophet Flippy Aderol.) That, combined with the shot of an Earth that, at the very least, hadn’t been significantly affected by continental drift, means that the BSG universe is at least close enough to the 20th or 21st century that Dylan’s lyrics are remembered by somebody. Personally, I think Dylan means that the Earth we saw is modern-day, too. (That Earth does look rather green, but it does look populated.) RDM’s not going to have a Dylan song from Earth associated with the season finale and then have them arrive in 1960s Earth or 2100s Earth … he’s too good a storyteller to not know that the audience would feel cheated from that. So, this means that in the Galactica mythos, 21st century Earthlings are the descendants of the 13th tribe. I wonder if there’s a Ronald D. Moore in their universe. Let’s get metafictional!

Second, none of the four revealed to be Cylons will actually be Cylons as we’ve defined them so far from the first three seasons — in other words, my prediction is that none of the four will be androids or gynoids with cybernetic aspects to their biology derived from the first-generation human-built metallic Cylons. Part of the basis of that is that at least one of those four Cylons directly contravenes all prior explanation of what makes a Cylon a Cylon: Tigh was a Colonial Army officer for 40 years, and android/gynoid Cylons are a recent development. Also, Chief Tyrol had a kid with Callie. Hmmm. Now that I’ve written that, is that really a problem? After all, Hera is a Athena-Agethon breeding. Still, I’ve heard people say that human-Cylon pairings result in fertility problems. Anders (Starbuck’s boytoy) and Tory (Roslin’s assistant) were ruled out, as well, by others, although it appears that the rationale these people used were based on the “rule them out as enemy agent Cylons” set of guidelines, which wouldn’t apply here, so maybe I’m just talking in circles at this point.

This sort of theory-shaking is part of what’s led to the massive 220+ comment swell: everyone’s trying to rewrite a major aspect of the entire BSG universe to fit these new facts. It’s useless, of course: RDM didn’t give us enough to go off of, and the fourth season’s season premiere hasn’t even been announced yet, but we know it won’t be before January 2008. That’s, at the very least, a good 281 days in which there will be absolutely no concrete answer. There are more useful things to do with that time.

My own take on it is that they represent a as-yet-only-hinted-at religious aspect of the series. Kara was represented by the goddess Aurora, signified by the masthead she gave Adama for his ship shortly before she died. The other four aren’t even known as “models” to the Cylons we’ve met already, and their appearance in dreams has been heavily cloaked in religious imagery of white light, robes, and rituals. We don’t know that aspect of the series yet, so we can’t adequately hypothesize about it, but if I had to say something, I’d say that these four may have been born human and lived most of their life unadulterated, but then at some point been exposed to Cylon consciousnesses that now reside with them. Or, to put it less esoterically, I think four of the “Final Five Cylons” essentially ‘possessed’ the characters. Kara may have been the fifth possessee. This would explain the biologically-based problems of Tigh’s 40-year stint in the military, Tyrol’s child, and so on.

I think, however, it’s very clear that the Tigh-Anders-Foster-Tyrol (Taft! Aha … it’ll be Galactica 1909!) faction … that the TAFT Cylon contingent is not going to be allied with “normal” Cylons. The dichotomy we’re used to has become a trichotomy: humans, Cylons, and a group that, for now, I’ll just call the Others: the religious otherworldly sorta-”Cylons” that we’ve mostly seen in dreams and hints since the beginning of the series. All we’ve learned now is that the TAFT four have just realized that they’re part of that Otherworld, and also realize that they don’t know a blasted thing about it. Yet. I imagine that Kara’s resurrection is what “activated” them. I wouldn’t be surprised if all the various “Head-” characters we’ve seen actually were Others: HeadLeoben (appearing to Kara), HeadSix (appearing to RealBaltar), HeadBaltar (appearing to RealSix), and HeadCarolanne (appearing to RealBillAdama), to name a few.

And that’s what I’ve got to say for now.

Edit 3/26: RDM weighed in with some stuff that, I think, may rule out some of the above theories. But we’ll see what he’s doing when Season 4 arrives.

Edit 3/27: Dylan doesn’t necessarily exist in BSG, so that’s another aspect of the theory shot. Show composer Bear McCreary: “I learned that the idea was not that Bob Dylan necessarily exists in the characters’ universe, but that an artist on one of the colonies may have recorded a song with the exact same melody and lyrics. Perhaps this unknown performer and Dylan pulled inspiration from a common, ethereal source. Therefore, I was told to make no musical references to any ‘Earthly’ versions, Hendrix, Dylan or any others. The arrangement needed to sound like a pop song that belonged in the Galactica universe, not our own.”