NBSG Qestion - The 6's

[Bilbo]

Okay, so we learn in the end that Head 6 is an angel sent to "motivate" Baltar.

Do we ever see again the 6 that seduced Baltar and planted the virus? She dies in the assault on Caprica. I assume when Baltar's house gets hit by the blastwave that she was killed when she pushed Baltar down but stayed standing. Does she ever appear later in the show in a new body? I know I missed some episodes so its possible she was around and I did not see it.

[Sarevok]

Of course we do. She is a key character. Without spoiling you all I can sat is she resurrects and becomes a major player in season 2.

[Sarevok]

Edit watch the season two episode "Downloaded". It is dedicated to her mission.

[JLTucker]

Edit watch the season two episode "Downloaded". It is dedicated to her mission.

She's also involved in seasons three and four; we see a great deal of her.

[Sarevok]

Well lets just say if you discount head six Caprica Six got far more screen time than any of the Sixes.

[Anguirus]

Caprica Six is a secondary character when all is said and done, but in my opinion she has a pretty awesome arc. Also, the moment in "Downloaded" when (spoiler alert for three years ago)...







...when you see that she sees Baltar in her head completely blows the doors off the show. It was a reasonable hypothesis until that moment that Baltar was under some Cylon influence, and that Caprica Six is the one talking to him. Everybody I've ever seen the show with remembers that moment as a "wow, holy fuck."

Also, blah blah the ending of the finale is crap, but I LOVE the moment in one of the last flashbacks when we SEE the moment when she falls in love with Baltar. Tricia Helfer plays it magnificently.

[Vympel]

Also, blah blah the ending of the finale is crap

Well, the end of the finale was crap, but it was fine until the Galactica jumped- although it still contained some questionable decisions*. Then everything went to shit

* Like why Starbuck wasn't in a Viper doing something cool and important (like Apollo was in Hand of God) since, you know, she's the best pilot but hasn't done any actual fucking piloting for most of Season 4.

[Anguirus]

* Like why Starbuck wasn't in a Viper doing something cool and important (like Apollo was in Hand of God) since, you know, she's the best pilot but hasn't done any actual fucking piloting for most of Season 4.

Agreed. The worst part was, she was in a Raptor that Athena was flying.

And remember how the one talent she has that could POSSIBLY justify her being out of a cockpit was her aim? Well, she sprays around bullets from an SMG for the whole fight. Fuck that.

[Sarevok]

She was an angel. Her powers were shielding the raptor and its crew. Hence she was not in a viper.

[Anguirus]

Maybe her angel powers conjured up the ammo clips since she used like a HUNDRED rounds for every Centurion. Baltar's shooting was more efficient.

[Sarevok]

Highly possible. Angels have matter transmutation powers already as seen when the Viper was created. Another possibility is that she used teleportation. Angels could teleport anywhere they like. Perhaps they can also teleport ammunition from storage areas.

[Anguirus]

Would it be a hijack to devote this thread to quantifying nBSG angelic powers? I bet I could stat one up as a D&D monster.

[Stofsk]

You can start with Starbuck's miraculous ability to survive her Viper exploding. Then teleporting all the way to (fake)earth. Whilst in the atmosphere of a planet several parsecs away. Somehow.

Goddamn I fucking hate season 4 of Battlestar. Were the writers drunk on whiskey when they wrote it or what?

(yes I am aware that the above incident occurred near the end of season 3. The point is season 4 never bothered to explain what the fuck happened.)

[Anguirus]

You can start with Starbuck's miraculous ability to survive her Viper exploding. Then teleporting all the way to (fake)earth. Whilst in the atmosphere of a planet several parsecs away. Somehow.

Hmm. I'm not sure this could be considered an "ability." Starbuck suicided into a gas giant and turned into an overcooked chicken finger. That's the "real" human Starbuck. Strictly speaking, all the "other angels" or "God" have to do is build a body and a ship for Angelbuck (who has Starbuck's memories), then deposit the crispy debris on Earth.

So really, it's a normal monster (human) who comes back by DM fiat into a more powerful monster (angel).

Stupid? Contrived? Sure, but that's what you get when you use Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who are fucking around with humanity and its descendants to see if they can get stable coexistence out of these bozos. It's not how I would have written the show, but it all becomes a bit more palatable when you remember that it's a sci-fi/fantasy series which is an adaptation of...a sci-fi/fantasy series.

(The best way to make sense of Angelbuck in my mind is to go with the hints dropped in Season 3 and the non-canon Final Five comic that she's Aurora. Remember, the Lords of Kobol are just as "real" as the Cylon God in the show.)

[Sarevok]

You can start with Starbuck's miraculous ability to survive her Viper exploding. Then teleporting all the way to (fake)earth. Whilst in the atmosphere of a planet several parsecs away. Somehow.

Goddamn I fucking hate season 4 of Battlestar. Were the writers drunk on whiskey when they wrote it or what?

(yes I am aware that the above incident occurred near the end of season 3. The point is season 4 never bothered to explain what the fuck happened.)

What ? Are you saying starbuck should have been a teleporting, regenerating angel with matter transmutation powers right from start ? Without any of the practice and development as a psyker she went through ? Did luke skywalker start out as a badass force user or did he get there after 3 movies and many books later ?

I mean take Roslin for instance. Her latent powers were very good. Even without proper psyker training she detected leoben and how he was going to die in a dream, without ever meeting him. Yet even with such high power levels it took her a long time to learn the crazy shit she did later. Like teleporting into an astral plane or slowing down time around her like the shrike. Starbuck may be a powerful psyker. But even she needed time and practice to master her skills. Without practice no one no matter how good can make wormholes or reform into a new body light years away after being blown up. It takes a long time to master such feats so starbuck doing all that in the first season or two would have been unbelievable and unrealistic.

[JLTucker]

You can start with Starbuck's miraculous ability to survive her Viper exploding. Then teleporting all the way to (fake)earth. Whilst in the atmosphere of a planet several parsecs away. Somehow.

Goddamn I fucking hate season 4 of Battlestar. Were the writers drunk on whiskey when they wrote it or what?

(yes I am aware that the above incident occurred near the end of season 3. The point is season 4 never bothered to explain what the fuck happened.)

Razor makes it known that she is an angel if you listen to what that hybrid says.

"The seven, now six, self-described machines who believe themselves without sin, but in time, it is sin that will consume them. They will know enmity, bitterness, the wrenching agony of the one splintering into the many, and then they will join the promised land, gathered on the wings of an angel. Not an end, but a beginning."

So, basically, "God did it."

[Stofsk]

You can start with Starbuck's miraculous ability to survive her Viper exploding. Then teleporting all the way to (fake)earth. Whilst in the atmosphere of a planet several parsecs away. Somehow.

Hmm. I'm not sure this could be considered an "ability." Starbuck suicided into a gas giant and turned into an overcooked chicken finger. That's the "real" human Starbuck. Strictly speaking, all the "other angels" or "God" have to do is build a body and a ship for Angelbuck (who has Starbuck's memories), then deposit the crispy debris on Earth.

So really, it's a normal monster (human) who comes back by DM fiat into a more powerful monster (angel).

Can't argue with your logic.

Ok, what about her extraordinary ability to discern a set of FTL coordinates to (real)earth from a song she heard? That was a pretty neat trick.

[Sarevok]

"
Ok, what about her extraordinary ability to discern a set of FTL coordinates to (real)earth from a song she heard? That was a pretty neat trick."

Duh, all BSG psykers can do that. They have access to a Force like entity which tells them information they should not know. Advanced psykers can cast spells that can give detailed information about past or future events.

[Anguirus]

Ok, what about her extraordinary ability to discern a set of FTL coordinates to (real)earth from a song she heard? That was a pretty neat trick.

This trick is actually "decoded" by Bear McCreary here: http://www.bearmccreary.com/blog/?p=1760

*** Generating Kara’s Coordinates ***

The music for the montage where Kara punches in the jump coordinates is important not just because the score sounds totally rockin’, but because it literally makes an important story point and culminates the arc set in motion by Crossroads, Pt. II and Kara’s piano epiphanies in Someone to Watch Over Me.

As I described in the my blog entry about that episode, I was intimately involved with David Weddle and Bradley Thompson’s script because it required some musical knowledge and understanding. However, when they were finished, my work was not yet complete.

While I was on set last May helping production shoot that episode, I got a phone call from Bradley where he informed me that the music I arranged would be the guide that ultimately leads to the fleet to Earth. I just about dropped the phone in shock. My score had become such an integral part of the series that the producers were looking to me, the series composer, to generate the coordinates for Earth. It would be difficult to overstate my surprise.

I realized that what they wanted would not be easy to deliver. The idea that Kara gets the coordinates from the music itself is easy to convey in images and we also knew that the dramatic tension would be more about whether Galactica would escape from the black hole before it enveloped them. We couldn’t slow down the narrative intensity for a music theory lesson.

(M.B.’s tabla became an integral part of the “Final Four Theme”)

My first step was to ask series science advisor Kevin Grazier what kind of coordinates we would need to generate from the music. He replied:

“When we specify coordinates in astronomy, it’s usually done with two angles – one that ranges 0 to 360 degrees, the other +90 to -90 degrees. Necessary also is the distance, but for astronomy the distance implied when we’re looking for stars is “infinity.” We’re collectively used to this. In geography, it’s latitude/longitude (distance implied – Earth’s radius). In astronomy it’s Right Ascension / Declination. In BSG, it’s XXXcaromYYY, distance ZZZ.

‘Now we’ve already established that one unit of measure used by Galactica is the SU, or Stellar Unit (“The Captain’s Hand”), similar to the Astronomical Unit used in our Solar System. It’s reasonable to assume that the Colonials use something similar to a light year as well – we’ll call this a CLY (Colonial Light Year)

‘There are 63495 Astronomical Units in one Light Year. Irrespective of the absolute sizes of the SU and CLY, the RATIO between those two is likely to be of the same order of magnitude as that of the AU/LY.

‘So as I see it, we will need from the music: XXX carom YYY dist ZZZZZZ”

I was tasked with generating 12 single-digit numbers out of “All Along the Watchtower.” Since The Final Four Theme had been firmly established as the piece of music Hera draws and the melody that Kara plays, it took a close look at the melody and tried to figure out how go about this unusual assignment:

I emailed everyone involved some possible solutions. This would be the first time in my television scoring career that the phrase “12-Tone Row” would be necessary in conversations with producers or writers.

(My original sketch for Hera’s dots)

“GRAPHIC INTERPRETATION

You could take this series of dots and plot it on a star chart and have it mean something. But, we’d have to get enough information out of the notes to derive the relative scale, direction and size of the note heads. It would be the simplest visually (Kara takes Hera’s drawing, slaps it on a star map and sees the way to Earth) but there are a million variables that could go wrong and it would be, frankly, pretty stupid.

12-TONE THEORY

Borrowing a bit from the post-WWII serialists, we can generate some numbers based on scale degrees. If you assign each chromatic scale degree in the C#m scale with a number, the melody would be written as such: 1 2 4 9 8 4 9 [8-9-8] 4 2 1. The parentheses represent the little triplet turnaround, which are the fastest of the notes. This series, though not a 12-tone row in the traditional sense, could still be inverted, retrograded and then have the inversion retrograded to give us four sets of related numbers:

PRIME: 1 2 4 9 8 4 9 [8-9-8] 4 2 1
RETROGRADE: 1 2 4 [8-9-8] 9 4 8 9 4 2 1
INVERSION: 12 11 9 4 5 9 4 [5-4-5] 9 11 12
RETROGRADE-INVERSION: 12 11 9 [5-4-5] 4 9 5 3 9 11 12

INTERVALIC DIFFERENCES

You can also generate numbers by looking at the spaces between the notes instead of the notes themselves. For example the space between C# and D is a single step, or “1.” That series of numbers could also be retrograded, although not inverted since the inversion would be the exact same numbers (‘1′ step up = ‘1′ step down):

PRIME: 1 2 5 1 4 5 1 1 1 4 2 1
RETROGRADE:1 2 4 1 1 1 5 4 1 5 2 1

Because the melody is mostly scalar, we see a lot of 1’s and 2’s. The bigger leaps become visually more apparent. The 4’s and 5’s seem to really stick out.”

This process became so complicated, I began to empathize with Kara as she maddeningly tried to crack the code in the music.

Series writer and producer Bradley Thompson felt that most of these techniques would be too complex to communicate effectively onscreen.

“These are good thoughts, all great for Kara to wonder about,” Thompson told me. “But, when Ron gets to her feeding the coordinates at the last second under the dire circumstances of Episode 21, we’ll probably want an “oh-yeah!” moment that comes as a flash of simplicity. The jump computer needs input1, input2, and input3 (angular vector1, vector 2 and distance / power). The computer accepts a certain number of digits for these, which Kara determines from the intervals from the tonic (1) in Watchtower’s melody. I’m sure Ron will have us in white-knuckle drama as the black hole sucks the decrepit Galactica into its hideous tidal stresses – so this won’t be a wonderful time to spend thinking it out.”

As Bradley made his case, I began to understand just little screen time we would have to communicate the abstract idea of Kara deriving coordinates from music.

“Remember, the gods have a hand in all this,” Bradley explained. “They took that into account with Kara and which way Galactica’s pointing for the starting point. Otherwise, we just have to add more digits from the tune as input0 (initial position and heading). We have only one ship jumping, so we don’t actually need to transmit these coordinates to anybody else. That, and the audience’s willing suspension of disbelief.”

Bradley’s words sunk in and I re-thought my approach, in search of the simplest solution possible. Using the 12-Tone method was too complex, and I decided to assign each note in the C# scale a number, excluding the chromatic notes between them. This is a diatonic approach instead of a chromatic one, (basically, I’m talking about the “Do-Re-Mi-Fa-So-La-Ti-Do” scale).


(Steve Bartek and Ira Ingber lay down baritone guitars on “Kara’s Coordinates”)

This approach had several advantages. It produces only single digit numbers. It is also the most intuitive solution that someone with Kara’s musical background would arrive at (in fact, my extensive musical training had me pursuing much more complicated ideas, missing the forest for the trees). “In basic ear training exercises they make you sing melodies with words or numbers corresponding to the notes,” I wrote back to Bradley. “So, someone like Kara who was taught by a professional musician as a youth could be familiar with thinking of the tonic as ‘1’, the second scale degree as ‘2’ and so forth. It’s believable that Kara might be humming the tune to herself as the numbers come to her mind.”

With this philosophy in mind, I took a second look at the Final Five Theme. The melody is either 11 or 13 notes (depending on if you count the little triplet ornament figure that does not consistently appear with the theme). The easiest way to arrive at 12 notes was to discount the triplet figure and then repeat the first note, which is technically the way the phrase is looped in my arrangement of “Watchtower” anyway. Assigning numbers based on the diatonic scale system I described earlier yielded the following:

This generated the coordinates: 112 carom 365 dist 365321.

I sent this number to production and they prepared it for the on-camera computer playback. When I saw the finished cut, I was thrilled to see that my coordinates led them to Earth!

However, all of this work was simply laying the groundwork for this complex sequence. The next task fell to the editors. Andy Seklir crafted a beautiful montage, inter-cutting the pulse-pounding events in the CIC with images from Someone to Watch Over Me and Kara’s other memories. He created the feeling that her father’s spirit was returning one last time to guide her along her path.


(John Avila plays fretless bass for the ethereal introduction to “Watchtower.” Yes, his strings are neon green. Sweet!)

In order to sell the idea that she was deriving the numbers from the notes her father had taught her to play, Andy inter-cut images of her fingers on the keypad with her fingers on the piano. He temped the sequence with layers of “Heeding the Call” and my arrangement of “Watchtower” from Season 3.

It was a brilliant narrative idea. But, it wasn’t quite working properly. Fingers were landing on beats in the temp score, but a coherent musical message was not coming across. When I wrote the score for this scene, I lay down the foundation of my Indian-Heavy-Metal feel from “Watchtower,” but put the Final Four Theme in Slick’s Piano and the orchestral strings. The piano and strings hit huge, confident notes, allowing the melody to soar over the ever-crescendoing rhythm section.

Unfortunately, the timing was not lining up exactly. I called editor Andy Seklir and co-producer Paul Leonard and asked them if we could change the cut to match my music. If you’re unfamiliar with the way TV and film scoring works, let me simply say this basically never happens. Composers are frequently subject to the picture changing while they’re working, but never in step with what they are doing. In fact, composers dream of a situation where they could write freely and make the editors change the cut so that the music could be exactly what they envisioned!

Paul and Andy agreed that my idea was the best approach. Shortly before the final mix deadline, I took my cue into the Editorial Department and sat in Andy’s cutting room, helping him re-cut the sequence. I showed him exactly where I envisioned each note to hit and where I thought the fingers should line up. Andy expertly tweaked the picture right before my eyes. The sequence was finally finished.


(Paul Cartwright is about to lay down a wicked electric violin solo!)

I’ve given all this technical detail and I have yet to touch upon the aesthetic beauty of this scene. This montage begins with surreal strings and harmonium, gently oscillating between C#m and Amajor. Then, Martin St. Pierre’s erhu sings the signature Starbuck Destiny Theme:

This theme represented her spiritual journey throughout Seasons Three and Four, but once I got to Someone to Watch Over Me, it was supplanted by the Final Four Theme. This moment in Daybreak is the first time that the two themes representing Kara’s ethereal path have been combined.

But, the erhu solo soon gives way to a building rock and roll backdrop. John Avila’s slippery electric bass sneaks in, and if that isn’t enough to tell audiences we’re going to “Watchtower,” then the entrance of the electric guitars must be.

(Nate Wood on the drums)

As the sequence reaches its climax, Nate Wood rips into a blistering drum fill and the whole rhythm section hits its stride, augmented with orchestral strings, ethnic soloists, taiko drums, tabla, dumbek and harmonium. My arrangement of “Watchtower” has been hinted at throughout Season Four, most overtly inSomeone to Watch Over Me, but this is the first time it’s ever sounded this big.

Kara jumps the ship as we hear the outro lick of my “Watchtower” arrangement. The last time we heard this was at the conclusion of Season Three, when we saw Earth for the first time. And this time, we are taken there once again.

In the aftermath of the jump, Roslin asks “Where have you taken us, Kara?” As she looks at her coordinates, the score quotes one last statement of the Final Four Theme, played on Slick’s Piano. This is the last time in the series you will hear either this theme or this instrument: the sound of her father’s spirit leaving them.

The score builds to a monumental crescendo as Earth is revealed.

[Sarevok]

Thanks for the info. I will have to add sorcery fueled byte decoders to Angel list of powers.

[Aeolus]

Okay, so we learn in the end that Head 6 is an angel sent to "motivate" Baltar.

Do we ever see again the 6 that seduced Baltar and planted the virus? She dies in the assault on Caprica. I assume when Baltar's house gets hit by the blastwave that she was killed when she pushed Baltar down but stayed standing. Does she ever appear later in the show in a new body? I know I missed some episodes so its possible she was around and I did not see it.

Is this a joke?
Caprica was a major character for the last 2 seasons.

[Aeolus]

Also, blah blah the ending of the finale is crap, but I LOVE the moment in one of the last flashbacks when we SEE the moment when she falls in love with Baltar. Tricia Helfer plays it magnificently.

I will never understand all the whining about the finale. It was spectacular and anyone who didn't see the ending in general and the Starbuck reveal in particular really wasn't paying attention.

[Adrian McNair]

I will never understand all the whining about the finale. It was spectacular and anyone who didn't see the ending in general and the Starbuck reveal in particular really wasn't paying attention.

Spectacularly mediocre, perhaps. Having recently viewed the travesty that was the final it was, in my opinion, not the mystical bullshit that was the greatest dealbreaker (since that had been part and parcel of the series since the very beginning).

No, it was Lee Adama's positively boneheaded decision to turn back the clock, split everyone into groups and toss all trace of Colonial civilisation into the sun (How the fuck did he get to make that call, anyway? Romo Lampkin was President at the time! At the very least he should have been laughed off). And everyone decides to go along with it. Everyone. There's no talk of cannibalising the ships and converting them into dwellings or salvaging basic things (Like guns for the purposes of hunting). They don't even make the attempt to try to forge ahead. I can understand why they would abandon Galactica, but they should have placed it on the moon instead of guiding it into the sun. The other ships could still have been used for the purposes I described earlier.

What were they even fighting for, all those years ago? In one episode Adama tells Racetrack to keep some magazines that were about to be tossed out, so that there can be some record of what they lost. That's pointless now. That great speech Adama gave prior to the New Caprica rescue about their actions echoing for generations? Null and void! Lee saying Kara won't be forgotten right before her disappearing act? Pointless. No records= no record of Kara Thrace.

It felt like an awful case of RDM forcibly guiding the story to the conclusion he wanted not the one the show needed. At this point I think the Revelations cliffhanger would have been the better ending for the series (this would of course mean that the plot of episode ten and the structure of the fourth season would have to be completely different). It would have been horribly depressing, sure, but I feel that it would have been far more dramatic and fit the overall tone of the series.

Conveniently 150,000 years later this planet they settled on turns out to be our Earth. And if it's our Earth, that means that Lee is inadvertantly responsible for every atrocity that's ever been committed in ancient and modern history. Thanks for breaking 'the cycle of violence and suffering," Lee. It's hilarious that he honestly expected people to progress in their moral development while simultaneously regressing everything to a more primitive level. Talk about a bad case of shoehorning things into the plot. It really hurt the quality of the series and invalidated every accomplishment and sacrifice the Colonials had ever made.

[Anguirus]

Yeah, the finale was pants-wettingly awesome until the last forty minutes, and then everything that wasn't the Roslin send-off was a lot of "huh?"

If I were one of the writers I would have at least finagled it so that the fleet, with its new system of government and its new leaders, didn't continue on its way and perpetuate Colonial society, while Galactica herself and her crew ker-smashed onto New Earth and, having quite literally no other options, assimilated into the natives.

Or have them embark on an epic time paradox and populate Kobol.

Or, I dunno, those are fairly stupid ideas. What I thought was gonna really matter was that the people who assaulted the Colony wound up somewhere different, receiving some different reward for their sacrifice. I also was really hoping for some kind of bone thrown at viewers who wanted a mechanistic explanation for the Angels and for Starbuck.

I understand the desire to get the colonists on Earth, and have it be our Earth, and I actually really liked that the Opera House was the point in space-time at which the Song would take you to New Earth. But as nearly everyone says, the execution was clumsy and filled with various terrible implications. (Let's tell the handicapped guy to fly himself into the sun!)

Personally, my Season 4.5 would have been the characters trying to colonize Old Earth and discovering that they were in the far future of "our Earth." There is easily a season's worth of storylines in defending the new colony from Cavil, especially because the mutiny story and the Hera-snatching still work just fine.

Which isn't to say that I don't generally like Galactica, as I do. It's just that I do have to qualify my love for the finale, focusing on things like Roslin's death as opposed to Lee's Brilliant Plan.

[Vympel]

^ Well said (both of you). It was a fundamental betrayal of the premise of the series, in my view.

There's this famous rant from the Ron Posts thread of the SyFy forums:-

Link

(this was also turned into a hilarious youtube exchange, except with RDM's response simply a riff on 'its about grity and dark characters')

And I will NOT tolerate luddism. Especially not a voluntary and final gesture of all encompassing luddism that brings an end to a civilization. The bombs on Caprica have finally done their job and the only irony in it is that they not only did their job on the 12 tribes but also on the 13th.

What was the reward for the 13 for choosing peace over war and trust over fear? What was there reward? They get to keep the flesh of their precious few as ses, the 13th gets to die in its entirety while the 12 forget everything, the lose EVERY FRAKKING LAST THING that made them what they are, all their thoughts, their dreams, their knowledge, their art, their science, everything.

Evidently, the reward for living justly and being worthy of survival is oblivion.
All people die whether they die in the glittering cities of the Colonies or they die in a **** ty little mud cabin in Tanzania...the lives of these people mean very little save for what they could/can/should have contributed to the climb toward transcendance and singularity...the climb toward god-hood. Or, if you're not into all that secular-humanist progressive fantasy, then it gets a bit more simple: wisdom accumulates, it's as easy as that. But they don't do that. They choose ignorance and the most primitive brutalities over humankind's only real journey. The romantics had it wrong. James Fenimore Cooper had it wrong. Wordsworth and Geothe had it frakking WRONG. Barbarism is not frakking beautiful and it's not romantic and it's not motherfrakking enlightening. It is beyond stupid that these people after all of this fighting and hoping for their lives would just dump it all in all in the crapper. I can't believe the romantic 19th century anti-age-of-reason bulls hit. My jaw drops and my eyes weep.

What lessons can they teach these stone throwing sharpened stick primitives of "Earth" when they themselves will speedily forget everything? How are we seriously supposed to break the cycle (except through dumb luck) when we can not learn from our forebearers? In the end, all that is left is th stupidist of myths. The 13 gave us what? What was their gift they sacrificed everything for? It was a bunch of lecherous, quarrelsome, violent, and petty gods on ridiculous little mountaintop.

*

Now, in the end, the show becomes a cautionary tale and the message changes from "worthiness" to Adama's "You cannot play God, then wash your hands of the things you've created." This is what we are to take from Galactica. It is our job to love the life that we will soon create or it will blow us up with nukes and the cycle will continue.

This is, to be fair, an awe-filling and exceedingly important message.

It's very relevant. Just to make sure that we, the audience get it, we now know that are illustrious and civilized forebearers lost everything to deliver this message to us...to give us a chance. The people of the last cycle lost everything...everything and all things that mean anything at all. Even their lives mean little compared to what they've lost. My room mate Ryan reminds me that in keeping their sentience, in keeping the measly flesh of their as ses, they have the potential to rebuild and regain everything...but then again, he doesn't know that Earth is already populated by humans and that the human race is not and never was in danger of extinction. The lives of the 13 tribes mean nothing because their human-ness is evidently not uncommon in the universe. Their metabolic processes...their physical lives, mean nothing next to their achievements...achievements now forgotten and cast aside as so much dross. In any case, they obviously didn't teach us sh it, not one frakking thing.

This sucked beyond belief. And the flashbacks were pointless pieces of a life that obviously nobody cared about anyway. Instead, they've chosen to care more about log cabins! All that the flashbacks showed us was just how beautiful Caprica City was. Oohh...my stomach turns....