tanstaafl2 wrote:Obviously no way Adama gets flushed out the airlock (unless a raptor is there to scoop him up immediately and zip him off to the basestar). If Saul decides to jump on the grenade to save Adama (one speculated option for the cliffhanger to be resolved tonight) then that is one of the five secret toasters out of the mix. Will that finally bring Ellen, the long awaited fifth cylon, back to the show? Not many episodes left to get it wrapped up.
Unless they plan to leave us hanging off the cliff again and try to go the Stargate route with straight to DVD movies to drag the story out further. Now that would be more annoying than a surprise skin job showing up!
There will be one Razor-style DVD follow-up, called "The Plan". It doesn't follow on from the end of the series - it's more Cylon backstory from before/after the attack on the Colonies. Nothing else is planned. Many of the actors and writers associated with BSG are raving about the ending of the series, and how it is a natural conclusion.
SSS wrote:When Tigh and the other cylons were on "earth," they seemed to have a collective flashback where they remembered where they were when the big one hit years earlier. Obviously, those older versions of themselves got vaporized, but that would make me believe that Tigh (if he really does get fried this week) will turn up again in some regenerated form. Perhaps the key for these other cylons is that they wind up regenerating as babies and not as full grown adults who are all the same age. Certainly Tigh would have had to have grown older over the years, since Adama and he go back 30 years or so. And maybe the difference between the other four and Ellen is that there's only one of her at a time but she regenerates fully grown?
My money's on an alternative Earth-origin regeneration system. I love BSG, but one of the big holes for me is the idea of the Hub. Why don't the Cylons have a backup regeneration plan or build another? One possible answer is the Hub (and resurrection) technology was discovered rather than created by the (Colonial-origin) Cylons. Or someone intervened in Cylon development to create the resurrection ability.
tanstaafl2 wrote:Yeah, the whole earth thing still puzzles me a bit. The cylons have only been around for 50 some years as I understand it and were still fairly rudimentary at the beginning. Obviously the adapted quickly to get Tigh with Adama so early on (unless there was a real Tigh before and the current skin job simply took the real Tigh's place right before the attacks, which to me seems more plausible. In as much as any of this is plausible...). Were the ones on earth a different breed of cylons from the one the colonists made or has it been less than 50 years since the earth was nuked?
I had thought that series of net based shorts associated with Razor, and featuring a younger William Adama, were in some way showing the development of the skin jobs. But none of that storyline has ever been brought up again as far as I can tell.
If the regeneration capacity is gone can Tigh regenerate at all? Presuming he in fact dies as you note. Ellen "died" when the regeneration ship still existed so there might still be a spare copy of her lying about. Of course as you say since these are "special" skin jobs the past rules may not apply to them at all.
And it also remains to be seen if they are going to risk wandering back into the minefield of the "gods" versus the "one true god" before the series comes to a close as they have dabbled with in the past.
Based on the various references on the show, I'm convinced the Earth we see is set somewhere in the years 6500-7000. From this season's (4.5) first episode, 2000 years have passed since Earth was nuked. I've been thinking since the season 3 finale (Revelations) that Earth was dead. It was clear that it was Earth from the view of North America, but there were no lights.
If I remember right, after analyzing what they found on Earth, the Galactica crew and their Cylon allies believed that the 13th tribe that fled Kobol were Cylons. Perhaps they overran the indigenous humans (us). Or perhaps Earth developed its own Cylons that overran them.
In any case, I think the Colonials developed their own Cylons, which then developed their own skinjobs as shown in Razor. The question as I see it is how (and perhaps from where) did the resurrection technology appear. Perhaps that's where the fates of the final five and significant seven Cylons intersected. And that would be a convenient place to examine the one/many god(s) story.
I know we'll be seeing Kate Vernon (Ellen Tigh) somewhere along the line in the rest of the series. I'm hoping it's not just in flashbacks. If Tigh is actually "killed", I'm sure we'll start to learn more about the origins of the final five Cylons.